Archive | Product Creation

Why You Should Be Using Clickbank

Written by Wayne Lambert | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Product Creation

If you’re in the Internet Marketing space and haven’t heard of Clickbank, where have you been?

Clickbank is the world’s largest online digital marketplace which enables you to pick as many products from over 12,000 products to promote.

Clickbank makes it extremely easy for you to promote a product as an affiliate, although there are certain practices and etiquette you should observe, although these are not necessarily commonly observed.

Using Clickbank as an Affiliate

You can simply sign up as an affiliate, look for a suitable product to promote to your lists, create a hoplink and use the hoplink to promote the products to others.

Sure, actually making sales is tougher. In the modern times of affiliate marketing, you need to add value to the original product by offering an incentive to purchase through your affiliate link. The days of disguising an affiliate link with an HTML or PHP redirect are gone – at least in the Internet Marketing niche where people have become almost immune to this strategy.

As well as this, some people have hang ups about buying products through someone else’s affiliate link. They would rather go direct to the product owner, or even purchase through their own affiliate link to effectively give themself a discount. Clickbank doesn’t allow this but people can usually work around it by buying things from other people’s links in an exchange scenario.

The question you need to have in your mind is, “how can I add more value to the purchase than the affiliate commission paid out?” If you can add more value, people will buy through your affiliate link. Offering additional bonuses for your customers to purchase their products through your affiliate link also helps the product owner keep their refund rates down.

You can approach a product owner and ask them, “Can I help you sell more of your stuff and reduce your refund rate at the same time?” Most product owners are only going to be too happy to accommodate you when you approach them from this angle.

Using Clickbank as a Merchant

Clickbank makes it easy for you to host your own information products by providing you with a merchant account which you only need to pay for each time you sell one of your information products. Clickbank also gives you the opportunity to place your product in the Clickbank marketplace where over 100,000 affiliates are hanging out looking for products to promote and to make money with.

If you’ve ever wanted to expand your traffic reach and pay salespeople on a commission only basis, then listing your product on the Clickbank marketplace is the solution for you.

The first merchant account you register with Clickbank will cost you $50 and every account thereafter will cost you $30. You can have multiple products on one account, although many people choose to host one product on each account.

Clickbank’s Popularity

Clickbank’s popularity is rising rapidly right now which is reflected by its popularity. Look at the graph below which is an excerpt from Alexa.com taken on 26th October, 2010 which shows its daily traffic rank over the last six months.

Whether you decide to locate or create Clickbank products in whatever market you choose to get involved with, there are products to promote and people to promote your products. Get involved, take action and make things happen!

To Your Online Success,

The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)

Is Creating Information Products Really That Hard?

Written by Wayne Lambert | Posted in Product Creation

Time and again at Internet Marketing seminars, forums and blogs, I see people who aren’t creating information products because they believe that creating information products is simply too hard.

There really is nothing to fear in creating your own products. There are enough tools and resources to help you with creating information products at a ridiculously low cost and even for free. Here’s a few ideas to help you get started making your own information products. Trust me, you know something that many other people want to know and are willing to splash their cash to find out.

Many people feel as though they have to do affiliate marketing because they haven’t got the resources or the skills to create their own information products. You may have heard me discuss in a previous post how I believe that there are changes in affiliate marketing which are better for the customer and the marketplace.

It’s now important to create products just to be able to do affiliate marketing. Customers can now shop for bonuses when they are going to purchase a product, so they can extract even more value from their purchase. In many cases, bonuses being offered are even more valuable than the product itself.

Creating Information Products

Ebooks

The most obvious type of media to consider when creating information products is an eBook. An eBook is usually a PDF document that contains valuable information that solves a specific problem for its target market. The eBook should be formatted in a specific way to provide optimum value to the customer. The eBook works best when it provides a solution to a real problem that requires a quick solution. People don’t want to be searching for solutions all night on different websites and are willing to a pay a premium for quick quality content.

When people have to pay for information, the perception is that the information is more useful and valuable, therefore much more likely to solve their problem. eBooks especially tend to work well for problems which require some immediate attention. For example, what must you do to keep your girlfriend, or how to get rid of acne (or other embarrassing health problems), repossession, property foreclosures or saving a marriage.

To create an eBook, simply type a document using software such as Microsoft Word or iWork on a subject that you have plenty of knowledge about. Alternatively, you could research the solutions and bundle it together in easily understandable format.

You can then ask someone on a site like Fiverr.com to design an eBook cover for you, so you can use it on the front page of the eBook and the sales/opt in page.

Fiverr

Audio Book

The next type of media to consider for creating information products is audio. This can simply be a case of reading your book in an entertaining way. You can use some free software such as Audacity which is free software included with Windows.

If you want to spend a little more money and want more options with your audio editing, a product such as WavePad can really help you edit audio easily. Simply plug in your headset to your computer and read your work.

If Podcasting and audio downloads are what you’re going to use to create your blog, it’s worth buying a decent microphone headset or a lapel microphone with good quality audio capture.

Wavepad

If you know your content really well, you can talk freestyle like a disc jockey.

Videos

The next type requires a bit of a change in mindset. It feels weird at first to sit in front of the camera and speak into it. You feel kind of weird and a bit like a freak because you’re not actually talking to anyone. You’ve got to remember that you’re talking with people.

Jim Carrey One cool trick a good friend of mine taught me was to put a photo of someone with a funny face just behind the camera.

This made me feel like I was actually talking to a person as I had to maintain eye contact with the face behind the camera. The funny face also helps you to take yourself less seriously.

My chosen funny face was Jim Carey because I’ll always associate Jim Carrey with comedies like Dumb & Dumber, Ace Ventura and The Mask.

Screen Capture Videos

Screen capture videos have a higher perceived value than face on videos.

I use a basic rule of thumb when deciding whether I want to do face on video or screen capture video. Face on videos are better for connecting with your tribe and enables you to explain conceptual ideas and build relationships better. Concepts are massively important in Internet Marketing although most don’t see the value. The value lies behind you being able to apply the concepts to other areas. This means that you can grasp a concept once and benefit from the learning again and again without ever consciously knowing that.

Screen capture tutorials have a higher perceived value because they are more concrete in nature. Most people into Internet Marketing think that it’s all about the ‘how to’ and it does make a massive difference.

I, myself, am a massive believer in getting clear on the ‘why’ first and the ‘how’ will reveal itself along the way. You will not start your Internet mission with a totally clear vision. Martin Luthur King Jr. said it best:

You don’t have to see the whole staircase, you just have to take the first step.

Screen capture tutorials are as simple as using software such as CamStudio for Windows or Camtasia if you’re willing to invest in your product creation. If you’re using a Mac, then Screenflow is the equivalent. You simply work through your content on the screen and explain what you’re doing as you go along. Remember to explain what, why and how so different learning styles don’t feel isolated. If you feel strange doing this, you just need to keep doing it until that weirdness subsides – we’ve all been there and it’s simply a case of making that internal mindset shift.

Books

Your opportunity to become a published author has never been so good as it has been today. You can even sell your eBooks to a captive audience on Amazon nowadays. The credibility, authority and traffic that results from publishing a book is tremendous so you shouldn’t be quick to dismiss it. Sites like Lulu.com can help get you started as a self publisher very quickly.

Skype Calls

You can even play a game of interviewing the expert. Would you want to listen in on Frank Kern’s mate asking him for some insider advice while Frank’s in the bar having a few beers being very liberal with information? Well, you can! Maybe not Frank Kern, but still you can.

One person can take on the role of the interviewer (the friend in the bar) and the other can be the expert (Frank). Who wouldn’t want to get their claws on this type of valuable information? You may even know the type of valuable information that you can get as an Internet Marketer if you’ve ever had masterminding sessions with fellow Internet Marketers. If you have a focused session, you can often get so much from it that it is definitely worth the time.

Webinars

These are so popular nowadays and they have a high perceived value. They’re like screen capture tutorials except they are interactive in nature. You can actually ask questions whilst the content is being delivered. Does anyone want a seminar from their own living room? Of course! Webinars are becoming increasingly popular for delivering high quality content.

Information Webinar

Seminars

If you’ve already got a name for yourself, you could even hold your own seminar. The beauty of a seminar is that you can possibly make four products from it. Firstly, the seminar in itself is an information product. Secondly, you could record the seminar and produce the entire seminar on a DVD set. You could then strip out the audio using something like WavePad and sell it. Finally, you could transcribe the product, so you have a written version of the product.

The Leverage In Creating Information Products

Unlike physical products, the margin on digital products is huge. I hope you can take away from this post just how easy it is creating information products. Simply uncover an unmet or poorly met need, create a high end information product around solving that need and market it with complete conviction and belief.

Creating information products enables you to break the relationship between time and money. You can do this by leveraging the multi-billion dollar distibution infrastructure that is the world wide web. Amazing times we live in, don’t you think?

Let us know what cool strategies and tips you have for creating quality information products that really deliver and stun your market.

To Your Online Success,

The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)

Are You Going to Locate or Create?

Written by Wayne Lambert | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Product Creation

One of the main decisions you’ll take when starting an internet business, or even developing an internet business is:

Should I locate or create?

What do I mean?

When I refer to locate, I am referring to locating a valuable product to offer to your market as an affiliate. When I refer to create, I am referring to the creative process of product creation. This is where you create a product of value and market to the people that want your product with the assistance of affiliates and JV partners.

Affiliate Marketing

The process of locating other people’s products and matching them to highly qualified traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s easily possible to locate products that are suitable for your market, offer them and make a full time income from the commissions alone.

The process of affiliate marketing involves starting out with doing some niche research. This involves finding a group of people that are willing to spend money on whatever it is you’re going to offer. The group of people should have a good level of disposable income and the market for your offers should ideally be expanding rather than declining so you can build a business with a high degree of sustainability and longevity.

Once you’ve decided on your target niche, you’ll want to find out where they ‘hang out’. What forums do they visit? What are their favourite websites? Whose email lists are they on? These sort of questions will enable you to put together a customer profile of the people you are serving. From this point, what are their desires, their fears, their needs, their wants.

Once you put together a customer profile of a typical customer in your niche, then you’ll need to uncover what solutions they are looking for to solve their problems. This is not always the same as the solutions that you consider they need for you to resolve their problems. People will often pay money for things they want rather than for things that they actually need.

Once you understand your customer well including their entire psychology, you’ll be able to market more effectively to them. You’ll understand the things you need to communicate for your customers to take the action you want them to take. This persuasion should always come from a place of service rather than a place of manipulation.

Now you need to look for a valuable product that you would like to offer to your customers to help them in their own quest for online success. The acid test you should use when assessing whether or not you should promote a product is to ask yourself the following 3 questions:

Do I personally use and benefit from the product?

Would I put my own name on that product?

Does it deliver value in excess of its asking price?

If the answer to these questions are “yes”, then you can consider that it’s OK for you to refer it to the people on your list.

The next stage is to move qualified prospects from one place on the Internet to your affiliate offer.

Traffic

Most affiliate offers are sales pages where the desired action for the product owner and affiliate is for the prospect to order the product which of course results in a sale and a commission for the affiliate.

Nowadays, CPA marketing is gaining some momentum with Internet Marketing newcomers and seasoned professionals alike being drawn to it. The attraction is it offers the opportunity to earn lots of small sales because the action attached to the commission is usually something much smaller for a payment to be released. These desired actions from the CPA networks are often capturing leads through the submission of email addresses, registering an account, completing surveys or other suchlike actions that can be easily measured and monitored with online tools. The advertisers are willing to pay per lead because they understand the lifetime values of their customers.

The next stage of affiliate marketing is traffic. There are literally hundreds of ways of driving traffic which is beyond the scope of this post, however you should bear in mind the questions to ask yourself that I shared earlier. Where do my prospective customers hang out? This is where you need to be building relationships and posting your links.

Product Creation

This process is much more difficult than affiliate marketing but is also much more rewarding. I guess that could be a matter of opinion depending on what you want from an internet business and the level of effort that you want to put in for your business. If you enjoy being creative and teaching or training others how to do things, you’ll love this process.

The process of product creation requires you to:

Uncover a need in the marketplace which you can solve, and crucially, which other people consider you to be able to solve.
Plan the product creation in exacting detail. This will make you accountable and the quality of the product will be infinitely better.

Product Creation Gantt Chart

Create a digital product that is a solution to the problem that you’re solving.

Contrary to popular belief, you’ll be marketing a solution NOT marketing a product. There is a huge difference and if you can grasp the fact that you’re marketing solutions and not just products, then you’ll be way ahead of the high majority of people out there doing internet marketing.

When you market solutions, you will want to communicate the benefits of the solution, the pleasure that the solution will provide and the pain that the solution will spare your market from. This may take the form of:

an eBook which is usually a simple PDF document containing valuable textual information.
a series of audio recordings which can be a spoken version of an eBook or report. It could also be recordings of interviews, etc. Using a tool like Pamela with Skype is a popular choice.
screen capture recordings which can be easily produced using video screen capture software like Camtasia Studio.
a membership site that provides time sensitive and high quality information that serves your market continually. A membership site can easily be produced using WordPress with a plugin called WishList Member.

Create a minisite with web graphics, excellent sales copy, powerful testimonials and a rock solid money back guarantee.
Create an affiliates area complete with promotional tools to make it as easy and inviting for the affiliate to promote your product. You should remember that you are positioning your offering alongside other product owners for your affiliates’ attention, and therefore their traffic sources. The more tools and training you provide, the easier you make it for your affiliates and the more likely they’ll be to promote your product.
Go through a pre-launch sequence for both the sale of the product and for the recruitment of affiliates. This process involves building awareness and anticipation for the product as well as finding people that wish to partner with you for a share of the profits from the product’s sales.
Find JV partners in your own network to promote your product.
Set up a customer service system for returns and possible customer queries.

OK, even after that little list of things to do during the product creation process and launch phase, there are still other things that must be done. The starting point for you to to consider is whether you actually want to go through the process of creating your own product.

Do I Locate Or Create Then?

Affiliate marketing can be lucrative enough if you can master the art of driving traffic. Product creation is usually more lucrative when you have a list of JV partners, some credibility for your product, an army of affiliates helping and you’ve gone through the launch sequence properly.

Whichever strategy you choose, make sure you have the fundamentals in place. Does the market have disposable income they’re willing to spend on the solution you’re offering? Is the market growing with a promising long term future outlook?

I wish you every success and feel free to get in touch if you have any queries.

To Your Online Success,

The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)