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One of my greatest recommendations to make money on the Internet is to create your own product - it’s one of the best ways to make money. Payments are instant (unlike Adsense or affiliate programs), you’re in complete control (one of the most important reasons!) and it’s easier to build a reputation with your viewers if you’re known for producing top notch content. I wrote a post about this a while ago with more reasons why you should use your own products to make money.

A lot of you, however may find creating a ‘product’ difficult… what do you put in it, how do you format it, what do you price it at? For the latter two, I recommend Open Office for formatting (it’s free…) and $1/page to sell at when you start out (so a ten page report would sell for $10), which you can increase as your reputation grows.

If you can’t think up what to do to create your own product, here’s some ideas…

Outsource. I outsource EVERYTHING I don’t like in online business (so that’s about 95% of the work ). Seriously though, you can often find writers for pretty cheap on the various webmaster forums.

At $0.01/word (which is the standard rate for those starting out - I don’t like that it’s so low, but there you go) you can get a huge (4,000 - 5,000 word) report written for $50 or so. If you wanted to sell it at $10, you’d just need five sales. And if you wanted a smaller report, it would cost you less than $20.

For me, a good size for a low value product (less than $20) is around 1,000 - 2,000 words. People get bored reading much more than that.

Forums. The thing about forums is that they turn people lazy, myself included. People find a good forum they like (in any niche…) they start using it instead of Google, and posting all questions there without searching for the answers.

This is where you take advantage. Google ‘niche forum’ and take a few minutes analysing the threads.

Take any questions you find, Google them, create a report and rewrite the answer in your own words.

For example… ‘How Do I Get My Cat To Not Scratch The Furniture’ is a topic that could make a decent report. Add some stock images, bullet points, bam - you’ve got a report.

Use experts. A great website is Guru.com… you can find experts on various niches there.

What you can do, is find a few questions you think would do well in the niche (or use SEOBook’s tool to see what people are searching for). Get the expert to answer them in a Skype call, pay them something like $50 - $100.

Outsource a short report for less than $20 with that, and maybe even create a video or two - you now have a complete product you can sell for $50 or more. You won’t realise how easy it is until you’ve tried it.

Private Label Rights. Buy a PLR product cheap from somewhere like the Warrior Forum, slap on your name and resell it.

Free Content. Grab articles from the likes of Ezine Articles, take the best 5-10 and create a report (with sources properly attributed at the end). This is not for a report to sell, but one that you could give away (to build a list).

The first, and last two will take you ten minutes or less of work if you’re slightly clued into the IM game

How do you promote?

Now, you could concentrate on the one time sale, but that’s not the best way to go.

What you want to do is build up a following in the niche - build a list, and provide them with good information. If you provide them with top quality stuff week after week, your conversion rates will shoot through the roof (I’ve seen more than 60% buy a product after just 4-5 emails).

Use a program like Aweber, and setup a simple landing page. A few paragraphs of text, offer a free report (which you can create yourself using one of the ways above) and drive traffic to it in various ways (see below). An example landing page is mine at Earners Guide - check it out for ideas.

The BEST way to promote a list is through niche forums. You do not have to spend a dime to build a list, nor do things like article marketing which can be short term and arduous.

Of course, you’ll need to do some Googling. You’re looking for niche forums with less than 100,000 members - it’s easier to establish yourself on there. Just search for “keyword forum” (you can add in + powered by vBulletin if you want).

You want a catchy signature. For example:

>>>> CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT HOW I LOST 20 LBS LAST WEEK, FREE <<<<

You get the idea. People are interested in that kind of thing - you want them to click through. You can also outsource posts (you’ll start to notice a common trend in this post…) you can get posts at around $0.1/post, so 250 posts for $25 (or $20, negotiate a little ). A little posting activity, and you’re not just building links and increasing exposure to your squeeze page, but also becoming more trustable in the eyes of the community.

As long as your posts are good, you will get visits, and signups. Getting ideas for emails is easy too - use the same ways mentioned above.

You can promote affiliate products through your list, but my recommendation is always your own products… however, you need to make sure there is a want.

The easiest way to do this is to ask what your customers want (although most might say they would be unwilling to pay, if they think they had a choice; but pay if you promoted to them without the choice), or you could just have the product created yourself.

A good list number to start promoting products is 500. At least five emails before you mention them parting with money. If your emails are good quality, and your prospects targeted (check x 2 in our case) you will generally see a conversion of at least 10%. So that’s 50 buyers of your $27+ product - decent amount, don’t you think?

Good luck - as always, feel free to ask any questions. I’ve also been asked by a few about products I recommend - there will be a post tomorrow on one of them

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