Even then, your objective should be to build your own presence, content, subscriber list and customer list even though you are still referring sales to someone else's product in return for a commission on each sale.

So how should you get started?

I figured I could start a few Clickbank sites and add a few articles per week, just incase my main site i'm doing doesn't take off.

Ok, I've read every thread on article syndication, list building and choosing the right product etc. In fact, I kinda know what to do but i'm not 100% sure, so if anyone could tell me this is right i'd be very grateful.

1 - Pick your niche and product.  A simple way to pick your market for information products (we'll talk about setting up affiliate sites for retail items like Amazon in a future post), is to head over to Clickbank.com and seek out a product that is listed among the first few pages of any category (the products are ordered by popularity) You will find niches as varied as hemroids, yeast infection treatments to overcoming fear of public speaking and stress management. 

2. Keyword research.  Any way you slice it, keyword research is important – do it early whether SEO, advertising or syndication. The reason is that certain keywords that draw people to your content pre-dispose them to buying what you have to offer versus other keywords that they may enjoy reading about but do not directly bring in people related to your product.

For example, if you have an ebook about Bluegrass music, you write an article about music in general that gets tons of synidication and reviews may bring you next to no traffic and make you no sales because of how tight your niche is.

One of the most important things that we must learn as part of IM is how to match a product's positioning/USP with keywords that attract those people who have a high desire for your product and not just to read the article.   We have a full video course on keyword research and how to apply it to your business inside InfoMarketer'sZone

3. Get your domain.  You ideally want a keyword rich (or at least related) domain name which will serve as a website for your blog/landing pages

4. Install and setup your Wordpress blog which you will use to both generate and display content as well as your landing pages that will serve to collect opt-in's as well as convert readers to clicks through to the sales page for the product you are promoting.  We have several shortcuts and optimizations that will make a big difference to the success of your blogs and webpages inside InfoMarketer'sZone for those of you who want to seriously ramp up your online marketing.

5. Begin daily blog posts around your keyword to start getting some initial SEO attention and traffic.  You can make some of these posts quick 3-4 paragraph tips, personal experiences, opinions or even reference to other news or articles online where other posts you want to make a little longer and more informative. 

6. Produce or package information into a 5-10 page report, 4-7 part email course or short video (choose the format that is simplest for you) to give away as an incentive to opt-ing in to your list…this will be the basis for your list building efforts and allow you to market the ebook via email.  In order to do this you also want to setup your autoresponder account - you will find the autoresponder service we have been using for nearly 6-years as well as our other most-trusted services here. 

7. You want to write up two specific landing pages for your blog (these will be entered as Pages rather than blog Posts as the intent is to have them static landing pages to convert your readers into subscribers and customers

a) Landing page 1 is the page you send your traffic to for opt-in – here you offer them the incentive discussed in step 6 using an opt-in form from your autoresponder to collect their email information and deliver (via email) where they can download their incentive

b) Landing page 2 is the page where you pre-sell the ebook you are referring.  This can be a review page, a short benefits page, a testimonial page or an article with your affiliate link back to the product page for the ebook so you get credited with sales as your customers click through. 

From here, your main activity is around ongoing content generation – you can add articles, guest blog posts, forum posting and social network posts to further expand both your syndication potential as well as create backlinks for SEO purposes which will all result in more traffic, more action and more profits.

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We get calls from MANY consultants, service professionals and people with jobs that have figured out that exchanging their time for money not only puts a ceiling on their income, but is also exhausting and is not without risk in the case where something happens to them or their partners – what then? 

First, I'm not a big fan of the term "passive" income…it sounds too unreal, has been mis-used so much that most of us pass it off as pure hype. 

I prefer the word "leveraged income" which means you leverage initial effort into long-term sales where the ongoing effort is MUCH less than the original effort taken to get the business off the ground.  How can that be done?

3 Ways To Leverage Initial Effort Into Higher Income Online:

1. Build a Platform (Mailing List or Social Networking Brand)  - The idea here is that over several months of working like a mad-man to get people to notice you, watch you, and like you – the result is a bond built onloyalt.  Once you have that bond with a good portion of your market you can maintain (leverage) that effort by putting in a  few hours work each week (producing useful, valuable content) you bank leverage that you can tap into once or twice each month with promotions.   Now, when you have something to promote, your loyal audience responds, you make good profit and you continue to maintain your followers over time. 

2. Create your own infoproducts – this is my favorite. We have products that we created in 2000 and 2001 that are still selling 4-5 figures a month today…all we really do is continue to generate some backlinks (through content development), manage affiliates and update those products once or twice a year. This is by far our biggest source of leverage

3. Membership sites – Another spin on information products, membership sites can be significant effort to setup and do require some ongoing effort to maintain current – but the accumulation of valuable information over time means less work in the future (if you design it correctly)

Nothing really beats content creation (paid or otherwise) when it comes to leverage online.  With content comes eyeballs, and done correctly, you turn those eyeballs into champions for your online business.  When you have champions, you have an extremely strong, leveraged income base from which to grow. 

Over the last 10 years of doing business online, I have yet to find a better way to leverage my time than creating information products (ebooks, books, courses, membership sites).  When you factor in a couple of weeks time and then calculate the return over years of selling those products, you can't come close to finding a better way to make money on the internet…hands down, infoproduct creation and marketing is the #1 source of leveraged (or passive) income.  Take a look at InfoMarketer'sZone and see how others are buidling their passive income one word at a time.

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Here's a quick video sharing 4 of the top methods for making money with writing…pick your's and get started.

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Are you happy with your life?

We all spend more time on our jobs than anything else in our lives and insanely, more than 3/4 of us are  unhappy with what we are doing.

Can you think of any worse living HELL than to be sentenced to 40 years or more of working at something you hate with people you don't respect, producing products or services that, at best, you could give a shit about and, oh yes, you are totally controlled by someone else who is interested in only one thing…themselves!

I know, there are the bills, the kids, the mortgage, the car payments, etc…and yes you do get a decent paycheck, but can you honestly say that the 50-60 hours of work you must do to earn that paycheck doesn't have an impact on…

• your mood and attitude
• your relationships
• your own health and wellness
• how others perceive you
• how far you go in life
• your energy and passion
• your own self confidence and self perception
• your ability to handle stress and be happy in life

Even the luckiest people I know that have jobs experience temporary happiness only…after many years of trying, they may find themselves at a point where they really do like their work, their product, their co-workers – but because all of their eggs are in someone else's basket, that positive experience can turn negative in a big hurry.

The last economic downturn tossed many happy workers out on their ass, and guess where they were forced to start?  Back at the beginning…working their way up to where they were will take years/decades – IF they are lucky.

So, what alternatives do you have?

Since e-commerce is increasingly moving online, that is the first place to look.

Second, e-commerce is really just in its infancy, but is already going through a massive revolution – discontinuities are always great places to look for opportunities since brand new techniques and business models emerge with everyone having an equal chance of dominating coming out of the disruption.

The latest disruption is the move from Ad-based, Push marketing to socially driven, relationship oriented search and buying online.

Direct To Consumer – Your Opportunity To Break Out!

Entire industries including Advertising, Media (TV, Radio, Newspaper), Content (Writers, Musicians, Publishers, Content Owners) are completely being re-written and guess who is taking the beating?

The middleman is having a hard time justifying his existence as a controller of content and messages in a medium where there is no longer a cap on control.

Content shared on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Ustream and directly on websites has as good (arguably even better) chance of reaching the consumer and convincing them to take action than any large-scale ad campaign, content publishing platform or other "controlled" distribution.

Your opportunity is TOTALLY direct to consumer.

Where do you start?

Here is the path that is already showing istself to be incredibly powerful driving individual success across many industries:

1. It starts with PASSION – if you don't completely and totally love what you are doing, then STOP and find something you DO totally enjoy

2. Content And Market Interaction: You love your market, you love your customers, and you love the topic – so share content with your market that will help them and you will be building the FUTURE of online e-commerce and wealth

3. Build In Interaction. Don't be afraid to engage and interact with your marketplace.  Why?  Two HUGE reasons:

- Engagement and participation creates lots more content…if you ever wondered what a dream content generation campaign is, it would be a content piece you create in 20-minutes that goes on to generate weeks, months and years worth of additional content through comments, chat, contribution, argument, discussion, etc… We have blog posts that were written a year ago that still generate daily comments and activity – all strengthening our web position, our traffic, our brand and ultimately, our sales

- Interaction results in a closer relationship, increased trust and reduced obstacle to taking action.  In short, people who not only read and watch your content, but that get involved are 10X more likely to become buyers, subscribers and champions of you and your products

4. Convert your passion, love for your market and hard work adding value into BIG money.  Look at it this way, your marketplace already spends Millions or Billions of dollars, if you are willing to work as hard or harder than big companies harness your passion and help your customers, why SHOULDN'T you get rich?  It's not like you are asking your customers to spend more of their hard-earned money, it is simply a matter of you letting them know that you will bust your ass to help them more than your competition and so you DESERVE their faith, interest, and dollars.

There is a huge opportunity happening right now in the marketplace where direct to consumer is the best thing that will ever happen to your customer…the question is, will you be a part of it?

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What happens is that when you seek out opportunities to start your own business online, you come across hundreds of others who ARE marketing to YOU…using money making ebooks, books, courses and consulting.

So naturally, you begin to believe that the vast majority of web businesses actually make their profit from selling "maike-money" type products and services.

But is that really the case? 

The Online Money Flow

The reality is that there is far more money made selling produts and services in fields other than "make-money".  This is NOT to say that the business information market is a bad one, in fact, it is quite good – but is very competitive and quite small overall. 

We only entered the marketing niche when people started asking for information on how we ran our other businesses. 

In fact, I get requests each week to help one  business or another (either offline to online, or to improve existing online businesses) that I turn down because my other businesses would suffer. 

So what other opportunities for seling your own, or marketing products in other niche markets?

There are so many opportunities out there…

• Information products in the personal development, health, hobby, relationship niches which contain thousands of sub-niches each.  We have products across some of the niches and do extremely well with them.  We outline those systems on finding and turning a profit with proudcts in these niches inside InfoMarketer'sZone
• Affiliate marketing for nearly any product you can think of that is in-demand, become an expert at finding demand and matching that with valueable front-end websites to earn a portion of the sale putting yourself between the demand and suppliers.  You can move information products from Clickbank or physical products from Amazon, Commission Junction, or other online retail outlets and build a full-time income based on affiliate marketing without ever touching the "make money" niche
• Take an offline business online – guys like Gary Vaynerchuck who took his Wine Retail Store online and is building a fortune from his own web business.  You can either take an offline business you have and expand it online or help others in your area do the same taking up-front payment and/or a portion of their profits going forward in exchange. 
• E-commerce where you sell wholesale or your own licensed products to a hungry market.  Think exercise equipment, yoga supplies, train parts, remote-control models, etc…  We have a couple of sites that were started as affiliate marketing for physical goods that we have morphed into e-commerce sites selling wholesale, drop-ship items where our profit margins are nearly triple what we would get paid as affiliates. 

When SHOULD You Market To The Make-Money Niche?

To me, the only people that should be marketing IM, internet marketing or business training are those that have or are currently gathering first-hand experience and share that through their "make-money" products.

Say you develop a $5,000/month online business selling affiliate products from Amazon, then sure, you can share that with others in your own "make money" niche because you have DONE it and have valuable tips to share with others who want to follow the same path.

Our site InfoMarketer'sZone was setup years after our initial success online mainly because we had so many requests from people about our systems, techniques, strategies and tools we used to achieve our success online.  Instead of answering every question that came in or only offering $250/hour consulting, we came up with a method of sharing our information weekly at a very low cost to our customers and that would scale to hundreds of people which helps our customers and scales for us. 

So don't be scared about entering NON money-making niche markets online, you will often find they hold more profit and are less competitive in the long-term.

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The answer…generate content targeting commercially relevant keyword phrases on a daily basis with NO exceptions!

You may have a website setup to capture opt-in's that you later turn into loyal subscribers, followers and then customers, or…

You may have a landing page that either directly sells your own proudct or pre-sells an affiliate product where you make back-end commissions, or…

You may have a heavy content site that targets advertising opportunities (PPC text, banners, space advertising or CPA offers…)

Whatever the method of monetization and market you have chosen, the secret to turning that into a thriving, high growth, profit center is to become efficient at growing traffic to your money sites. 

DON"T BELIEVE ME?  TAKE A LOOK AT THIS!

Head to Google and enter Unique Value Proposition – as I write this we are #1 for that keyword phrase – this is the page that is currently ranking #1 - "How Do You Develop A Unique Value Proposition?"  and get this…there are over 4 Million pages competing! This is NOT some obscure keyword phrase with low demand and little competition this is a primary keyword phrase that has Millions and Millions of pages competing. 

This page was written with the reader in mind FIRST, then making sure we included relevant keywords including Unique Value Proposition – there are a few backlinks, but nothing extraordinary, just great content that is relevant to the website offering good information with some optimization around the keyword.  We get tons of traffic from this page alone…and there are many others like it – all FREE!

YOUR DAILY ROUTINE

I often get asked, "What activity do you make sure gets completed each and every day you work on your business?"

What a great question, because in our busy lives it is WAY too easy to get sidetracked and waste what time we may have sending email, cleaning our workspace, being sucked into looking at the latest hyped system or program, or being totally distracted and doing something comletely different. 

When I start each morning, my very first activty is either keyword research OR genreating content in line with the researched keywords.

Keyword research is incredibly important.  You may have 1000's of potential keyword combinations that are in some way relevant to your market and product, but what we consistently find is that 10-20 end up producing 75% or more of the sales at any given time. 

So, what you want to do is make sure that you are…

• Ucovering all of the potential keyword phrases people will use when they look for products such as yours
• Know how to quickly pick out the most commercially viable keyword phrases to test first
• Have a systematic, fast and inexpensive way of testing these keywords to quickly eliminate the non-productive ones and finding the Golden Nuggets that will feed you profit
• Understand how to optimze content in a way that is both natural, targets the reader and also will rank highly on those all-important, profit pulling keywords you have identified

I like to take a new cut at my keyword lists at the beginning of each week, choosing at least 20 (sometimes more…this will depend on your budget and time) to test that week.

Typically we run some paid PPC ads to get a quick read on our keywords, finding the ones that convert best and pulling those into our daily content generation routine.  (The complete SEO testing procedure for finding high profit keywords is available within InfoMarketer'sZone)

Then, we go about matching customer interest with our keyword combinations. 

Here are some highly effective ways we come up with daily content ideas:

• Look for questions and posts on forums, topics with the most interest often pop up on these forums
• Look at related products on Amazon and search the comments for more ideas
• Check Google news around our keyword combination looking for news, research, current events, etc…that we can share with our audience
• Blog directories such as Technorati are great for finding ideas to write about (in your own words) that have already ranked highly for interest on these directories
• Feedback from your own customers.and subscribers..we run surveys, polls and sometimes Q&A sessions with our subscribers which will often gain us dozens (if not hundreds) of questions that we can answer one-by-one daily as a method of generating meaningful helpful content – we will then match these with keyword phrases we wish to optimize for so that this content is ranked highly

Now, you may wonder what content am I talking about?

• Articles posted on your own site
• Articles sent to authority article sites
• Blog posts
• Press releases
• Guest posts on other blogs
• Videos uploaded to Youtube with descriptions optimized around the keyword phrases
• Social networking posts
• Facebook Fan pages

We share all of our latest systems for growing high-income internet businesses inside the popular InfoMarketer'sZone - hundreds of hours of video tutorials, time-saving tools, proven tips, techniques and strategies updated weekly and a private mentorship forum where you can get immediate feedback and assistance as you grow your business without spending a fortune on personal mentoring. 

Come up with your own content generation plan, then stick to it for 1-month and watch your internet business profits skyrocket!

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The answer is YES…and I don't say that lightly – - this is how I started out myself so I KNOW that it can be done. 

The critical success factors are

1. You clearly understand your market and what they want badly enough to pay for it
2. You know how you will monetize the opportunity (your own product, selling affiliate products, advertising, etc…)
3. You have clearly identified the key money-making tasks that are most important to generating income in your business AND stick to them
4. Outline first and fill in the blanks second — this allows you to start and stop without having to spend an hour figuring out where you left off last time making the most productive use of your time
5. You test – everything you do should be tested so that you know when something is not working and can make a change without wasting weeks, you can make changes quickly and get to profits quicker

All of this is working smarter…follow this advice and you could be far more productive in just 2-hours than most internet marketers are in 8.

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• Go with your interests
• Do keyword reserach
• Read magazines
• Use your own experience
• Blah..Blah…Blah!

Look, we've started 4 highly profitable online businesses and helped hundreds of others start their own full-time, money-making internet businesses through InfoMarketer'sZone and let me be totally CLEAR!!

The ONLY steps you need to take to find markets, ideas, customers and buisness concepts that will make you money on the internet are:

1. Find a problem or desire people are passionately trying to solve/fulfill
2. Find out how to reach the people that want it
3. Match that with a product that helps them get what they want (could be an affiliate product, but my preference is always to eventually have my own)
4. Get good at marketing to your market (understand the elements of what must be in place for people to buy – trust, credibility, proof, urgency…)
5. Build a relationship with your customers so you always have a funnel of great (and higher profitability) ideas – notice this takes you back to #1

The universal mistake that people who fail in business make is ignoring rule #1…they don't begin with an urgent, passionate desire to do, have or be something – a tangible result.

Behind every non-fiction, informational ebook, training program, manual, home study course, membership site, consulting engagement or other information product is a deep-seeded desire to achieve a specific result or outcome.

Find out what that burning question, challenge or desire is and you have yourself the most important element to a money-making venture online. 

Week's 1 and 2 of The InfoProfit Success Formula go through video training to help you uncover and test for this demand followed by an additional 4-weeks of training that helps you roll out a complete profit-producing internet business built on the strength of high demand. 

That's the basis of successful business, so many people fail for the simple reason that they ignore or mess up these 5 basic steps.  Don't be fooled…stick to these fundamentals and watch your income soar.

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Is it reasonable to think we might make $100/week within the first few months?  

How about making $1000/week, when could we expect to make those types of sales and profits from our internet business? 

Of course, there are no guarantees, but we can share a system that we have personally used across 12 different products, dozens of websites and 4 major niche online businesses…and they have all been started and grown using the same 45-Day Information Profits Formula. 

Wondering what the formula looks like?  Even better, in this video we share the 4 key pillars of the 45-Day Formula used by hundreds of our coaching clients…and it can work for your internet business profits too:

Now wasn't that cool?

The same 4 steps have been used by one internet business entrepreneur after another to launch their very own 6-figure and 7-figure online ventures…do you have questions, post them as a comment and we promise to give you an honest and realistic answer.

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We've helped these burnt out people turn their valuable services, consulting, speaking platforms from time for dollars into passive income vehicles such as ebooks, home study courses, manuals, audio and video programs giving them an entirely leveraged line of income where they work once and earn ongoing profits. 

2 POWERFUL WAYS TO TURN A SERVICE INTO PASSIVE INCOME

1. Organize and systemetize your service…two ways to do this…

a) Franchise your service to where you are focusing on the premium end of your market and outsource the work to freelancers or employees.  For example, if you have a successful personal training business, but you are working 14-hour days and can't fit another client into your schedule, think about hiring a freelancer that will help expand your business while you focus your efforts on designing a program for your top 20% customer base – you can charge more and free up some of your own time

b) Help teach others to do what you do…so you end up running a train-the-trainer program that you sell as a program and turn into a product so you leverage your time. I aim to have every client service designed to support or to be turned into a product so I work once and sell it often.   This way – you actually create a training program to help others personal train. 

2. Package your service and knowledge into passive income information products. What you really want to do here is to create a 'home study' version or 'packaged training program' or 'private members version' of what you are delivering on a client-by-client basis – in this model you offer the service once and package it for many. 

Packaging your knowledge into infoproducts for ongoing, passive income is a powerful method of making more money with less time and stress.  Whether you help customers at a bank, counsel people on relationships, help technically train or do business consulting – your service can be packaged into ebooks, courses, videos, or membership sites and you can continue to sell that product again and again.

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