Archive for March, 2008
Many bloggers are earning a pittance by just selling other people’s products via AdSense, private ad sales and affiliate marketing and I suggested that we package our knowledge into our own products that we sell directly.
By opening up our product sales to affiliates we can then harness the power of other bloggers thus massively extending our reach way beyond our individual blogs. In this post, I’m going to go full circle and suggest that as a product owner you can now start making a lot more money with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Is Very Broad
Last week I wrote a review of a $27 ebook about ClickBank. That is what I consider a ‘money post’. It’s not going to change the lives of my readers and it’s only real purpose is to make me money as an affiliate for that product. Will I get rich doing this? Well it would help if I inserted my affiliate links properly but even on the days when I do check my posts before publishing, selling the odd copy of a $27 product from a one-off review on my blog will not allow me to retire any time soon.
However, $27 is the low end of the market, especially in this particular niche. You may have heard some buzz last week over something called the Product Launch Formula 2.0 by Jeff Walker. This product was priced at $1997 and gave affiliates a 50% commission. That is a whole new ball game…
Selling High Priced Items
Readers who have been with me a while may remember my high paying niche experiment. I was trying to find a product such as PLF that would give me a $1000 commission to see if it would be harder to sell than a product with a $10 product, or somewhere in between. The experiment failed but the experience I have learned since then tells me that I don’t even need to conduct an experiment such as that because you don’t sell $27 ebooks in the same way that you sell $2000 courses.
Just about every big name in the Internet Marketing industry promoted PLF and none of them wrote a review of it on their blog! They wouldn’t have been able to because the product was available for all of 24 hours before being pulled off the market. They had to promote it without seeing it and they had to try to get an edge over every other affiliate out there who was promoting it at exactly the same time.
Your Own Product Is Your Edge
If you’ve ever bought a product in the Internet Marketing industry you will probably be familiar with the concept of a ‘bonus’. “Buy this product from me and I’ll throw in X, Y & Z as a bonus.” This is how the promotion of PLF worked. As a consumer, when you are about to spend two thousand dollars you want to get the most bang for your buck and pick the affiliate with the most appealing bonus package.
I was one of those consumers (or at least I tried, they have still not managed to process my credit card, looks like I have missed out) and one thing I found particularly useful was a blog that was put together by Dr Mani. He showcased all of the bonuses that PLF affiliates were offering.
What struck me as I looked through these is that almost every single bonus took the form of the knowledge of the affiliate. They threw in ebooks, courses, seminars, skype time, personal mentoring and coaching. Every one of those affiliates offered up their own knowledge in the form of their products as bonuses for people who bought PLF through their affiliate link.
Of course, those with the best products could put together better bonus packages than those with weaker products.
How Do You Compete With the Big Guys?
The second thing that struck me was that even if I was an affiliate for PLF or some similar product in the future, that I would never be able to compete with those guys. What product do I have? Well none yet but soon I’ll have my course on StumbleUpon.
However, what I remembered here was that I was looking at an extremely high priced product in just about the most competitive industry that there is. These guys, names like Ed Dale, Rich Shefren, Mike Filsaime, John Reese etc are the “big name guru’s” of the industry and have all had years and years of experience and have used that time to create unique and outstanding products.
I don’t have to compete with those guys and neither do you. For starters, the Internet Marketing industry is a tough one and there are plenty of other niches out there that don’t have gurus like that to compete with. I’m still hoping to set up a niche site this year that will be nothing to do with IM or making money online but in that niche I want to create my own product and make some decent money.
We All Start At The Beginning
Whatever niche we are in, we don’t have to compete at the top level and even if that is our ultimate aim we all have to start somewhere. Blogging in particular is a tough venture to excel at simply because it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to get a new blog off the ground.
But its also easy to forget that everybody starts out at the bottom and so we can forget those guys at the top and start out by chasing the commission on that $27 ebook. Maybe next time it will be a $97 ebook or a $297 course and so on. My StumbleUpon course seems trivial to me when I compare it to the kinds of bonuses that were being offered for PLF but it doesn’t matter because it’s a start.
Every success story, online or offline has to start somewhere. Most of the great successes have a string of failures and minor successes behind them. Sure there are those people that seem to burst onto a scene out of nowhere, like the winners of reality TV shows for example, but most of us can get where we want to be by taking that first step and just getting started.
Recapping The Strategy
There’s lots of ways to make money blogging, and many of them revolve around selling other people’s products. However, when we create our own products we create something that is exclusive to us. We have at our disposal a product that nobody else can offer. When we wish to step beyond simple affiliate links embedded in review posts we can use our own products as leverage to give us an edge over competitors in our niche.
Only 6 links this week but there is some seriously meaty content in this lot!
The Poor Man’s Product Launch Formula - For those of you who follow the ‘bigger’ guys out there, you will know that Jeff Walker launched version 2.0 of his famous Product Launch Formula this week. I tried to buy it and had issues with their order form which they are still trying to resolve for me. In the meantime, Dr Mani has put together a ‘poor mans’ version as a blog post. Great stuff and essential reading for those who don’t have a spare $2k to spend on Jeff’s version.
25 Paths To An Insanely Popular Blog - Skellie sure likes to put together some killer resource posts and this is a superb one. Many of us like to blog for popularity (me included) and not just for money. Skellie shows us 25 different ways in which we can become popular, including models such as being talkative! Guess who she showcased for that model? Ahem, yes I know I talk to much… keeping it to 6 links this week ok! :-)
This Is One Virus You NEED To Catch - Viral videos that is… Ryan Shamus has put together a wonderfully informative post about what viral videos are, how they can help you, and how to make them, share them and market them. I’m just starting to experiment with video, I shall be returning to this post a lot in the coming weeks.
Should I Change My Website Into a Blog? - Darren Rowse is the expert on blogging so he is certainly fit to answer this question. In my opinion too many people start blogs. I have talked about the benefits of static sites over blogs many times, especially for small niches that you want to monetize simply. This post is a great way to evaluate whether or not a blog is right for your project.
New Blogging Experiment Owner Lays It Out There - It came as a big shock to me earlier this week when Ben Cook of Blogging Experiment announced that he was selling up before his year was over. However I really like the new owner Max Davis and this blog is staying in my feed reader. This is his introductory post.
200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter - You ARE on Twitter right? If you’re still having doubts about Twitter then read my guide on it and then hop on over to this post from Marketing Pilgrim and start following some of the big names in the Internet Marketing world. And of course, you’re following me right? :-)
I’ve developed a home study course on the usage of StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website. This project is the account of my progress in developing and marketing that course. The course is now LIVE, is called Stumble Rush and you can enroll right now at http://www.stumblerush.com/.
Content Development Under Way
Last week I chose the name for the course, Stumble Rush and I registered the domain name and decided to use HTML pages to deliver the content. For the moment I am using WordPress to write the lessons as its easy to edit and very easy to insert links and graphics etc.
So far I have written the first two parts of the basic course. If you want to keep track of where I am with the content then have a look at the project page. I added the curriculum to it and I am striking through the lessons as they are done.
I’ve also made my first video! Well three actually… I’m on a roll now :) I’m finding it really handy to be able to knock up a quick video to explain certain things rather than try to use text and static graphics. Video allows me to show you how to do something, rather than just tell you.
Website Coming Soon
If you go to the site now all you will see is a default WordPress site and that’s all. I have finally signed up to Aweber so one of the first things I shall be doing is getting an opt-in form on the site to start capturing email addresses of anyone who may be interested. Obviously I won’t start promoting it until the site is finished but I may as well get used to managing the list. I’ll be blogging about my experiences with that.
I’ve ordered some graphics from Linda from eCoverSource who did the lovely cover for my WordPress ebook. She’s sent me some concept art, here’s a sneak peek:
Rather lovely I think :)
Steven Aitchison runs a nice blog about personal development which is just one of his online ventures. Another is making money from ClickBank as an affiliate marketer. Steven emailed me recently and asked me to review his ebook Your First ClickBank Sale.
As he sent me a free review copy, this was a no-brainer :)
The Core Concept of the Book
There are a great many ebooks and other products about making money, especially with affiliate marketing but many of these products make such big promises that they can be off putting for a newcomer who has yet to make any money at all. This book is aimed at somebody who wants to get started with affiliate marketing but hasn’t quite managed to get going yet.
Steven’s philosophy is to work on only one project at a time, work on it for a week and then move onto another one either keeping or dumping the previous one. Once the first sale has been made, it becomes a lot easier to make the next and the next…
The Packaging
This is a 76 page ebook which is also accompanied by 10 short videos. It sells for $27. It also comes with a few unannounced bonuses - there are two ebooks about Copyrighting and an ebook about using Google Adwords.
One negative thing that struck me straight away was the terrible formatting used in the book. I have no idea what tools Steven used to create this but it looks bloody awful! There is hardly any margin on the pages, the table of contents is extremely difficult to read, there are only two bookmarks (so few writers put bookmarks into their PDF’s!), and its just a bit garish when you first open it up.
However all that is cosmetic and not really important. One touch I really liked were the videos - these really enhanced the content and made it seem much better value for money than an ebook on its own. I really should have done that for my WordPress ebook.
Click Here to Buy Your First ClickBank Sale
Delving Under the Covers
After some introductory material there are four main chapters:
- The Psychology of Wealth
- Getting Organised
- Tools for your First Campaign
- Your First Sale
The Psychology of Wealth
This is actually something I want to discuss in an up-coming blog post. Some people believe that in order to make money you must first believe that you can - that your mindset matters just as much as the technicalities of the actions you take. I am one of those people.
This chapter talks about how to change your mindset to open yourself up to the possibility of earning much more than you currently are and yet this is an ebook about making your first sale. I felt this chapter was out of place in this ebook. It would make a great mini report on its own but it just didn’t seem to fit here.
Getting Organised
This chapter felt like fluff to be honest. I can sum it up pretty briefly - focus your efforts on one project at a time and stop checking your email every five minutes! This is useful information but it is isn’t directly going to help you get a sale from ClickBank.
Tools For Your First Campaign
Okay now we’re talking. For me, this was the most useful chapter. The process that Steven teaches is to choose a product to promote, create a landing page for it and then drive traffic to that landing page via Pay Per Click and then repeat.
This chapter gives you a downloadable template for a landing page and has some videos on just how to edit it. A ClickBank campaign such as this is not in my list of things to do right now but the information about landing pages in this chapter would be useful for anybody who is building a landing page for something - including my email course!
This chapter also goes into some detail about finding keywords to use for your PPC campaign and this is also backed up with some videos. One area that I thought was lacking was that of niche selection. He gives a few resources for spotting trends but there is no information here about how to determine if a particular niche will be profitable.
Your First Sale
This chapter goes into more technicalities about building and customising your landing page. If you are put off affiliate marketing because of your lack of technical knowledge then these last two chapters will prove very useful.
Steven finishes with a 24 hour action plan and gives some additional resources at the end.
Would I Recommend This Book?
It depends… When I released my ebook about building niche sites with WordPress, many people were surprised at the lack of information about the money making aspect. I designed it as more of a technical book. This ebook about ClickBank feels rather like that. I felt as though not enough attention was given to the money making aspect of it but it serves as an excellent technical guide to setting up a landing page and conducting a PPC campaign.
My efforts with affiliate marketing so far have all been contained within this blog. This very post is example - if you buy Steven’s ebook with my link I get a commission. For me, that is a comfortable way of doing affiliate marketing. I don’t have to build any websites, or spend money on PPC traffic. The idea of doing that stuff scares me a little and yet that is how many of the big affiliate marketers make their money.
If you are like me and are feeling apprehensive about the idea of just launching a website just to sell an affiliate product then this ebook will be useful to you. If you have already been doing that and are looking for ways to increase your revenue then I don’t think you’ll find anything of use in this ebook.
Click Here to Buy Your First ClickBank Sale
Most people who try to make money blogging do it by selling (directly or indirectly) other people’s knowledge and this often leads to a very poor return on the time and effort invested into the blog. I made over $2000 last month and none of that income would have been possible without this blog but the majority of that income came from my own knowledge, not somebody else’s.
Photo by Gaping Void
Why Do People Start Blogs?
I’ve been in this Internet Marketing game for six months now and I started the blog just to keep a record of my progress. It was never intended to be a money maker - I always have other projects for that. What surprises me is how often I see advice given to newcomers to start a blog. Personally I think starting a blog is a very bad way to start making money online.
Why? Two reasons. Firstly it takes a long time to get the momentum going with a brand new blog and secondly, the monetization models chosen by most people rely on having lots of readers and traffic which makes the whole process rather slow and painful.
Popular Blog Monetization Models
First I want to mention what most people do and highlight how they are usually proportional to the amount of traffic or subscribers that the blog has. Also, have a read of what Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak and Josh Spaulding recommend.
- Advertising (needs traffic) - this includes all sorts of on page advertising such as AdSense as well as direct ads.
- Affiliate Programs (needs subscribers) - this can take several forms but usually the best way to make money as an affiliate is to do a good review of an affiliate product or share your experiences with using it. I would class affiliate banners as another form of advertising.
- Sponsored Posts (needs subscribers) - these kinds of posts pay out in proportion to the popularity of your blog. It is difficult to make money with them as a new blog and once you start to get popular you can lose credibility with them. You won’t catch me doing one any time soon (ever).
There are all sorts of variations of the above but the most common forms of monetization used by the vast majority of bloggers falls into these categories. There is certainly potential to make money with these techniques but you tend to have to keep working at it month after month. An advertiser can stop advertising at any moment, and you always have to keep finding new affiliate programs to promote or your blog audience will get bored.
Now if you have a hugely popular blog then you probably won’t have any difficulty finding advertisers but if you’ve managed to get that far then I would argue that you could still be making a lot more money by selling your own knowledge.
Selling Your Own Knowledge
What do I mean by “selling your own knowledge”? I mean putting together some kind of product based around the topic of your blog. That product might be an ebook, a course, a tutorial video, a membership site or maybe even some kind of physical product. I have been looking at a lot of blogs lately and I am surprised at just how few of them do this. Those that do seem to be the ones who are making money!
When starting a blog a popular piece of advice is to “pick a topic that you know about”. After all, how can you expect to write on a regular basis on a topic you know nothing about? Okay this blog is kind of an exception to that rule as I knew nothing about making money online when I started. However, the key thing is - I do now! And now that I do, I can cultivate that knowledge into a form that I can package and sell to others.
Blogging is a time consuming activity. The vast majority of blogs that are doing well are filled with value-laden posts that have been carefully crafted and researched. This takes time. It also takes a huge amount of time to get out into the blogosphere and promote that content so that the blog actually draws in new readers. Why do all this work if all you are ever going to do is display ads for other people’s products and be an affiliate for other people’s products?
Analyzing the ROI
Advertising seems to fall into two camps. One is the on-page ad programs such as AdSense. These only bring in pennies per click so you need a LOT of traffic to make any significant income from them. The other is direct advertising such as those 125×125 ads you see on many blogs including this one. The more popular your blog becomes the more potential you have to earn from these but there is always a ceiling here due to the limitations of screen real estate. John Chow recently discussed this problem on his blog when a reader suggested he could extend his income from his blog to $300k a month.
The other popular method is selling products; either your own or other people’s as an affiliate. When you sell your own product you own 100% of the profits. Of course if you bring affiliates in to sell your product for you then you pay them a cut but any income generated by affiliates is income earned that is totally outside of your blog - and that’s another one of the advantages.
You can use your blog as leverage - to get your brand out there, to build credibility, to develop relationships in your niche and this allows you to extend your revenue earning potential far beyond the reaches of your individual blog.
When you make money as an affiliate for somebody else’s product you can only earn as much as the sales that you can directly produce from your own blog. Sure there are programs with several tiers but each tier earns less thus reducing that ROI further. When you sell your own product, your own blog is just the starting point, not the end point.
Look at the following diagram:
What I am trying to show here is that when you only sell other people’s knowledge you are confined to the reach of your own blog and thus you are entirely dependent on how much traffic and how many subscribers you can directly attract to your blog. When you sell your own knowledge in the form of a product that other people will want to help you promote, you open up the field and now have access to the reach of all those other bloggers combined.
Analyzing My Own Income
I’ve had two months where the income has significantly jumped and the reason for that jump is largely due to affiliate revenue of the BlueHost hosting package that I promoted in my free ebook about WordPress. Notice that I haven’t even had to actually sell anything here. My ebook was free but the principle is the same. I had some knowledge which I packaged up and monetized, and I then harnessed the power of other bloggers to extend the reach of that ebook far beyond what I could have achieved from my blog alone.
5 Steps To Selling Your Knowledge
Step 1 - Establish Credibility About Your Topic
Your blog is your platform to allow you to show off your writing ability and your knowledge about the topics you choose to cover. The first product that I am going to actually sell will be my course on StumbleUpon but I have already started to establish a certain amount of credibility by blogging about StumbleUpon in the past. Not only that but as this is a social media site I can demonstrate social proof by publicly displaying my profile so that other people can see how many sites I have rated, how many fans I have and so on.
If you try to launch a product cold with no prior mention of it you have to work extra hard to convince people that you know what you are talking about. Having a blog is a wonderful pre-selling tool. You can talk about a subject long before you even give people any idea that you might be developing a product around it.
Step 2 - Develop & Package The Knowledge
I didn’t have much knowledge when I started this blog but now I’m starting to learn things. I know a lot about Twitter, WordPress, StumbleUpon and I also know a thing or two about building a reasonably popular blog in a fairly short time. Look to your own blog, delve into your posts and see which topics you could expand upon.
I never thought about producing a product about StumbleUpon until somebody else did the same thing. I feel somewhat guilty that I kinda stole his idea but once I started to write down what I knew about StumbleUpon I realised it was a huge amount of information. What do you know a lot about?
You don’t have to know everything right now. Look to the future, what are you learning about that you might be able to teach later on? I have a strong interest in developing niche sites that make money. I haven’t succeeded yet but if and when I do, I might be able to teach other people how to do it. You don’t have to be an expert right now. People seem to like my posts where I show how I fail at things!
Step 3 - Allow People To Get To Know You
When you create a product, it usually needs to be professional, to the point and free of personal anecdotes and any fluff. That is not the same when it comes to your blog. Feel free to talk about your personal experiences on your blog. Be a bit more informal. Stick a picture of your ugly mug on your home page, write an about page, include a way to contact you and over time people will get to know you.
People buy products from people. If they like you they are more likely to buy from you! Of course not everybody will like you, that is just human nature but if you never reveal anything of yourself on your blog then people don’t even get a chance to know you and decide whether they like you or not.
Step 4 - Get To Know Other People In Your Niche
In order to extend your reach as I showed in the diagram above, you have to get yourself out into the big wide blogosphere and network! There are many ways to connect with people in your niche - you can even use StumbleUpon to network in some niches!
I’m no expert in product launches (I’m still hoping somebody’s gonna buy me Jeff’s new Product Launch Formula!!) but from my own experience I have found that one of the best ways of promoting something is to email people who already know you about the product. Sure you can email a bunch of strangers, and I did do that when marketing my Twitter guide, WordPress ebook and most recently my Easter Egg Hunt but the majority of the people who promoted those things for me were people I already knew from our chats / emails / comments exchanged over the last few months.
Step 5 - Putting It Together and Launching
I don’t have the answers to this last step as I have only scratched the surface myself but I know that my readers are getting to know me, I am getting to know other people in my niche and I’m starting to formulate ideas for products that I can create in the coming months.
I’m going to buy that Product Launch Formula that everybody and his dog is promoting at the moment and hopefully I can apply it and then perhaps in the future I can come back to this point and expand on the launch process itself.
Conclusion
Making money blogging is a popular way to start making money online but the common monetization models bring in very little revenue for the amount of work needed to really get the blog off the ground. If you are going to bother building a popular blog then don’t just give away all your knowledge for free and rely on selling other people’s knowledge. Sell your own!
