Pay Per Product – Make Your Own or Affiliatise
I thought I would be ending the mini-series on additional ways to make money from your site or blog with Pay Per Link, however I have realised that there is another way to earn, and one which is used by many internet masters and millionaires. As well as Writing Articles and Posting in Forums for cash, you can sell your own products or recommend other peoples products or services – and it is this which I will be reviewing in this article.
Now this is probably the hardest way to make another stream of income, especially if you have a virtually new site with little other information. Most bloggers I’ve seen concentrate mainly on content as their primary monetization plan. Others, which have become more evident as I’ve been hanging around the blogosphere, sell informational products, e-courses, seminars and advice or consultancy online.
1) Sell Your Own Product
In general, you have to be pretty knowledgeable in a lot of fields to be able to pull this one off. With so many choices of ebooks available today, its very hard to get recognised unless you’ve already got a name or reputation or if you’ve just got a phenomenally good item to sell. Examples of people who do this are Aaron Wall who has a book on Search Engine Optimisation and offers consulting, and Joel Comm who is an Adsense Pro selling ebooks to help others. Darren Rowse and Andy Wibbels also put together 6 Figure Blogging (an e-course) to help new bloggers to reach the Problogger stages of achievement.
Making these products can be a bit of a chore. Ask anyone who has started writing an ebook from scratch and they will tell you that delays are imminent and things hardly ever run according to plan. In terms of software, I’ve heard that Microsoft Word is the simplest program to use, so once you’ve finished typing the information out, you can easily upload it to the internet.
But once you’ve made your product – how do you sell it? There are a number of different ways to do this, but the easiest is probably by doing this:
- Buy a domain name and point it at your host
- Make a webpage with a picture of your product and all the information it contains – this will involve writing a good sales copy
- Using Your Paypal account, create the code for your product (which will include setting a price, a good name, and shipping) and add it to your webpage
- Wait for the orders to roll in
Now in reality, this rarely works. The most obvious reason being that your new website will not have any traffic and so will lack the opportunity to sell to visitors. Marketing is the way round this, but can involve a large amount of money. WOM (word of mouth) is not only free however, but tends to spread virally; people just need to find something to talk about.
In terms of income from selling your own ebook or masterclass, potential can be enormous. I’ve seen some that sell info. products for $39 each (and remember electronic items are unlimited so you can never run out of stock) and some amazing e-courses that sell for upto $1000. And with few startup costs most of this can be pure and utter profit. You just have to create something worthwhile that people want – and then make a bit of hype.
2) Become An Affiliate
Of course, people rarely have the time or the necessary skills needed to create their own virtual or real product. Therefore they affiliatise:
An e-commerce affiliate is a website which links back to an e-commerce site such as Amazon. When the readers of the website click on the link, they are connected to the e-tailer and if they purchase something the affiliate receives a small payment (depending upon the e-commerce site policies), usually a percentage of the money the customer spends.
This is the easy option, especially for internet goers who have large mailing lists or have high trafficked websites who have loyal gathering of people. If this is you, then you could persuade your visitors to buy the recommended product through your affiliate link whilst reaping a generous reward and cut for doing so. And if the product they buy is worth $1000, then some affiliate programs could be paying you $500 for each sale.
Again, being an affiliate isn’t as easy as it sounds. You need authority. If your visitors see you posting affiliate links left, right and centre, you’re not going to look very trustworthy as you’ll be always after the money. As a result, your followers will leave you, and your reputation will be destroyed. The number 1 rule of affiliatising, is to always buy the product you are recommending. How can you sing praises about the ebook if you havn’t read it yourself? Along with this, you also need to have persuasive writing skills and patience – as it may take a few weeks to a few years before you start seeing your commission rolling in. For more information on Affiliate Schemes please read this article which I wrote a few months back.
As I’ve said a few times, making money on the internet isn’t a stroll in the park. But hopefully with these additional ways to earn cheques in the post every month, you’ll see a boost in your earnings, and hopefully this will help you to earn some nice active or passive income.