As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m going to share the new plan I’ve been working on for my business. It’s not anything new and groundbreaking though, it’s pretty fundamental actually. I’m just now getting it started as I’ve noticed some joy in doing something different and working on things of value.

The experience I’ve gained and lessons I’ve learned over the past 6 or so years in affiliate marketing are very valuable, and I’m pretty financially stable thanks to it, but I feel I could have done so much more. Oh well, there’s always plenty of time to work

Becoming Discouraged with My Affiliate Marketing

I started trying to come up with a new business direction after feeling very discouraged with affiliate marketing. For one, I was at the mercy of Google because it was such an abundant traffic source that I was good at taking advantage of. The problem with this, however, is that recently (as you most likely know) they will not let affiliates play on AdWords easily like they used to.

I just couldn’t bring myself to spend the time and money building a marketing campaign for AdWords (looking back, that was a stupid thing to do, build it just for AdWords) when I had been there five times before and, like clockwork, they all got slapped with low quality scores and traffic came to a halt.

So I got to thinking, “okay, I’ll diversify my traffic sources and make something of real quality so that I can still run it on Google.” But then I thought, “well, affiliate marketing and quality is pretty much an oxymoron, and the legitimate niches just aren’t as easy.”

There have been a few affiliate programs that I’m proud to have worked with. I’ve gladly used them myself and recommended them to friends and family. They consist of various physical goods, online game rentals, online movie rentals, web hosting, internet faxing, online dating, and VoIP, to name a few.

But the thing is, of all the offers I have promoted, most of them were, in my opinion, not worth their cost (to the consumer). Here are a few of my old niches and how I feel about them:

• Free downloads: Smileys, cursors, screensavers, games, layouts, etc… The user is subjected to Ad-ware.
• Mobile subscriptions: Ringtones, mobile dating, horoscopes, etc… The user gets “hidden” charges on their monthly bill.
• Email and zip submits: Best case, they get spam email. Worst case, the user is stupid enough to try out all the offers and they have one hell of a time cancelling them after getting charged for things they didn’t realize.
• Paid software: P2P downloading, driver updaters, registry cleaners, anti-virus, etc… seriously, these programs aren’t that good, there are much better, free alternatives.

I have never promoted any of the rebill offers, and I’m not saying I would be above it, but come on, most of them undoubtedly offer negative value to the user. I’m not here to protect consumers, I enjoy making money off of general stupidity and I’ve done it plenty, I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s possible to build a long term business on something that isn’t offering a win-win situation.

If I’m convincing my visitors to purchase or sign up for shitty products, they aren’t going to be happy with me and aren’t going to want to build a relationship. So that makes each and every promotion very short term. Granted, you can make enough money short term to last for years to come, but that eventually gets boring (for me anyways).

What to Promote Then?

One type of affiliate offer that I left out of the that list was information products. Aside from offers like the legitimate ones mentioned above, I like promoting these because even though the information that they contain is available elsewhere, it isn’t available as conveniently. I am very good at researching and learning what I want to on my own and even I have been happy with more than a handful of information products that I’ve purchased.

I used to bring in quite a bit of revenues promoting these things with the standard single offer presell or multiple offer review page (all fake of course). But then the FTC started hating on these types of promotions and AdWords pretty much slapped all of them. So then how are we supposed to promote information products?

We could make a website around that topic! But wait… the information that is for sale isn’t really that great, so how do we publish a good website without giving away what is in the product? We can’t.

And this is where I started to go in circles, moving back to promoting shady offers wherever they were allowed and/or continually trying things that I knew didn’t work anymore. But I thought there had to be a way to make it legit, and then I realized something so universally known and so simple…

People Love to Pay for Convenience.

You already knew that though, right? So did I, but I didn’t apply it correctly to my business. I was trying to market with low quality content in fear that I would give away the secret and my visitors wouldn’t want to pay for anything. My new plan is to simply give away great value for free, but also great value and convenience, from a trusted source, for a price.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can get started in a niche without spending the time to create your own product. Eventually, you should create your own products and have your own affiliates, but it is much easier to learn a market by selling preexisting things.

So what I am now doing, in the following order, is this:

1. Choose a Niche

This absolutely must be something you are interested in. When doing bullshit affiliate marketing, you can enter as many niches as you want because you are just making things up. To provide real value though, you must either have a lot of cash to pay other people who are interested in the topic, or be interested in it yourself.

Deciding if the demand/competition level is acceptable is a matter of personal preference. I am currently only interested in very high demand markets. I don’t want to spend my time on something unless it has the potential to eventually bring in over $1000 per day profit. Those new to the game might feel more comfortable starting in a less competitive market.

Unless you have already succeeded more than once, have a process developed, and are doing some serious outsourcing, you have to stick to one niche at a time here.

2. Register a Brandable Domain Name

Forget about putting keywords in your domain name, you want something that is brandable and professional. A really good name will appear much more trustworthy and open up plenty of areas for expansion.

3. Write Extremely Valuable Free Content

The purpose of this is to build your brand’s image, get visitors to come back for more, and attract massive amounts of free traffic. Oh, and of course to provide tons of real value to your readers.

Don’t worry about giving away the “secret” that is in what you are trying to sell. Remember that people will still buy your products even if they have read the information for free, you just need to find a way to sell the convenience (I’ll make another article in the future about ways I’ve come up with).

Create a blog (or whatever publishing medium you choose) with awesome content that will get spread around, linked to, and picked up on social media. Make the content extraordinary and have an angle that is unique from your competitors.

4. Create a Very Valuable Free Product

This is what you are going to “sell” to your paid visitors. It must really be something good though. For the first of these sites I’m making, I put together a huge audio course. I could easily charge for it by todays ClickBank standards, but I’m going to give it away for free.

It was so easy to make too. I recorded the entire thing on my iPhone while driving. Not an entire driving session, but if I had to run to the store, I would make a new section to my course. Then I spent a couple hours editing it with Audacity to make it more professional.

Now that I have everything in audio form (which has more perceived value than text), I can turn it into a bonus eBook and include additional points (or notes, or whatever) to have an even more valuable product.

I’m currently working on a few different landing pages to sell this free product. One for anything goes advertising that is a very hard sell and one that should (in combination with the blog) appease picky advertising platforms like AdWords… more on this in a future post.

5. Build a Client List

How many times have you heard the value in having subscribers? Email marketing, RSS readers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans… that’s where the money and longevity is at.

You’re client list is going to consist of all these services that help you stay connected to people. And you are going to collect them in one of two ways:

1. Providing amazing content that they do not want to miss
2. Selling your valuable free product for the low low price of their permission for you to contact them

Once you have an audience (no matter how big or small) that you may contact at will, you can start making some money…

6. Sell Products as an Affiliate

There’s no point in spending thousands of dollars and countless hours creating the best products (yes, you should want to make the best, remember we are offering true value) in your niche before you really learn it’s inner workings. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in.

Do some research and you will be surprised at how many different affiliate programs are either directly related to your niche or that most of your audience would also be interested in. Then promote them to your existing audience (also for a future article will be how to do this, it’s too much to add into this little section)

7. Develop Your Own Products

Here’s where the serious money is made. Be sure that you’re offering a ton of value. You can sell anything from a $7 eBook, to an $80 audio course, to a $200 DVD course, to a $500 online boot camp, to a $2000 live seminar. You can create physical products, software products, paid memberships. You can have your own affiliate program. The possibilities are endless, and it’s totally up to you.

One of the best things about being able to contact your subscribers is that you can ask them what it is they want (maybe not so directly though), and then deliver just that.

How’s That Sound?

So there you have it. That’s basically my new online business strategy for 2010. It really goes back to the basics and away from making a quick buck while still implementing much of affiliate marketing’s unique ability to make that quick buck. It’s a mix up of  true website development, affiliate marketing, email marketing, branding, and product creation.

Let me know what you think of these ideas, any questions you have, and especially any feedback. I’m going to use everything written here as a main source of informational posts on this blog, I’ll go deeper into many of my ideas and provide real case studies and insights as my current projects progress.

As you can see, my last post was July 28th about trying Twitter (and the last post before that was from 2007)… well two things I’d like to say about that post…

First of all, I’m still not really feeling Twitter. I have the account for following other people but don’t post on it. I just don’t see the value in updating everyone with my current status. Any advice or suggestions that could help me see how to enjoy it?

Second, something terrible happened just a couple days after making that post, I was one of 3 passengers in a car accident and one of my closest friends passed away. The rest of us are all healed up now, but needless to say, it had an effect on my view of life and my desire to work (which was already low to begin with).

Lately I’ve been feeling like I want to get back into marketing though, but do bigger things besides just being an affiliate. I’m beginning to make businesses that actually have tangible value (products, customer lists, branding, etc). I’m experimenting with more fundamental marketing tactics and with diverse traffic sources. The case studies that I posted on here before were fun, so I’m gonna do more write ups of what I’m doing now.

This blog is also gonna get slightly more personal with added randomness to the topics… and there will be no posting schedule.

Oh, I also have a pretty bad ass tracking software that I’ve been programming and using in-house since April ‘08. Every time I fire it up to make marketing decisions, it gets me pumped to start more campaigns. I’m probably going to be releasing it free as open source, but it’s no where near polished for public use yet. Anyone interested in beta testing?

So that’s about it for my “coming out of retirement” post. Sometime this week I’m going to put a post up talking about my current business plan. It uses a lot of fundamentally sound marketing techniques, mixes in affiliate marketing, has it’s own products, has future plans, and best of all, has real value.

Leave me a comment and let me know you’re still reading

Yeah, I quit blogging. I found myself spending way too much time coming up with article ideas and then actually writing them. Instead, I chose to do things that I enjoyed such as making more money through marketing and building a much more entertaining social life.

I use my iPhone a lot though when I am driving around or sitting around the house (I bought a nice, large foreclosure a few months ago; maybe I’ll post pictures when I’m done with the remodeling). So, as of yesterday, I have decided to try out Twitter since I can make short status updates whenever I am bored. I’m using it purely for entertainment, for the purpose of getting into conversations with people.

If you want to follow me, here is my profile: http://www.twitter.com/derekbeau

I don’t know the perception of all my readers, but I’ve received many compliments that my writing style is easy to read, understand, and digest. Throughout grade school and high school, I never really had the impeccable writing skills of a novelist, they were just slightly above average. This, however, turned out to be a good thing when I started learning about business writing.

Using long paragraphs and big words doesn’t really work in business conversation, and the same can be said for blogging. Most of your readers aren’t sitting down next to a fireplace with a cup of coffee to read your words as if they were a novel. Instead, they are trying to extract the usable information from what you have to say.

Writing and developing a reader friendly blog does not need to be a painful task. In fact, the guidelines are simple and actually make blogging easier than most other formats of writing if they’re just practiced. Unfortunately, sometimes we all get carried away and forget how simple it should be. This article will give you some tips to get back in touch with the secrets of a reader friendly blog.

1. Create Catchy Headlines – The first thing a reader sees, often even before they make the decision to click that mouse button and proceed to your blog, is the headline. Write them descriptively, but keep them just alluring enough to draw the reader’s curiosity and the click that follows.
2. Explain Above the Fold – Tell your readers right upfront what you plan to elaborate upon in the rest of the post. Don’t make them have to scroll down just to figure out what they’re going to read.
3. Save The Eyes – Our eyes are sensitive, especially when reading from an electronic screen. Keep your blog eye friendly by using a large enough font (or at least one that the reader can scale up), proper contrast, and lots of white space – no more than 4 brief sentences per paragraph.
4. Establish Scannablity – Help guide readers to what they really want to see. Use bold headlines to break up a post at the transition points throughout. Think of this tactic like an ongoing table of contents.
5. Paint the Picture – I don’t mean you have to actually use your own artwork (even though it’d be cool if you’re good at it), but sometimes illustrations help the reader understand what’s going on. A picture might not always be worth a thousand words, but I bet it’s usually worth at least half of that!
6. Chat Up Your Readers – Whether writing for a blog or the web in general, it’s accepted practice to write in a chatty, friendly, and conversational tone. When writing, just picture your target audience and begin talking to them through your keyboard. Blogging shouldn’t be stuffy.
7. Don’t Create Distractions – If there is just one caveat to the tactic above, it would be that it is easy to get carried away while ignoring traditional rules of grammar. Use your blogging liberty where you’d like, but try to revert back to what you learned in school the rest of the time.
8. Spell It Out – And for goodness sakes, with spell check and a quick proofreading, there’s just no excuse for incorrect spelling unless it’s for expressive purposes. And even that’s a stretch…
9. Break It Up With Bullets – Use bullet points and lists whenever possible. A blog reader is much more likely to finish an article that cuts straight to the point and just presents the meat rather than struggling through paragraphs upon paragraphs of fluff.
10. Use Even More Whitespace – When in doubt, space it out! If you’re using bullets or a numeric list style format, make sure there’s enough space between the lines so it doesn’t all just blur together in the viewer’s browser. Plus, it makes it easier to read between the lines. Also, try increasing your line height to increase the space between each line of text.
11. Let Your Readers Share – There’s nothing worse as a reader than reading to the completion of a great blog post and wanting to share a few thoughts, then finding out that the blog doesn’t allow comments. Let the reader share their piece!
12. Punctuate For Readers – Don’t be afraid of the … or the — They help web readers understand tone that is usually lost when translating spoken word to written text. Also, put some emphasis on your words with question marks and exclamation points… using nothing but periods can get boring.

Writing your blog for your readers is more than just telling them what they want to hear. It’s also about writing so they can read it easily!

If you’re reading this blog, or a number of other blogs about making money online, with the hopes that they will tell you exactly how to do it, you’re looking for something that isn’t there. There’s nothing wrong with reading blogs, forums, and ebooks for entertainment, to keep up with the latest news, or to get some ideas, but relying on it alone will not help you to make money online. You just need to get out there and do it.

I’m sure you have heard the saying “success breeds success,” but you probably aren’t taking advantage of it. If you commit to doing something towards making money online, and really take action, even the smallest successes will give you a boost in confidence. This, in turn, will lead to more ideas, more trials and errors, and more successes. You will eventually get to the point where you know what you are doing and are able to adapt on your own to the rapidly changing internet.

And being able to adapt and form your own conclusions is one of the biggest advantages you can have. Many people aren’t going to be sharing what is working for them right now. They might be sharing principles that are tried and true or exact strategies that worked in the past, but to really get an advantage, you need to have the ability to think for yourself.

Now, when I say get out there and do it, I’m not just talking about affiliate marketing. It’s ridiculous how many things you can do on the internet to make money. Some of them might be beyond your skill set, but what is stopping you from learning those new skills and applying them to multiple areas of your internet business? So here is what I propose that you do today to ensure that you are making money online in the immediate future.

1. Choose One or Two Strategies

You don’t want to spread yourself too thin by working on too many ventures at once. You can always automate and outsource them once you get them up and running, but for the crucial times when they need your attention, you must stay focused. However, just choosing one may not be enough for some people. There will usually be periods of waiting or burnout, so being able to concentrate on two ventures will add some variety.

Some viable online business strategies would be blogging (obviously), PPC affiliate marketing, user-generated content sites, free service-based sites, paid service-based sites, resources sites, communities/forums, e-commerce stores, paid membership sites, product development (ebooks or software), freelancing (writing, design, programming, etc), eBay selling, consulting, and probably many more.

Choose one or two strategies that seem appealing to you and commit yourself to making them work. Depending on your own motivational factors, you could set high goals that are just beyond reach to really push yourself or you could set small goals that are constantly achieved to boost confidence.

2. Get Something Up and Running

Even if you don’t quite know what you are doing yet, it is important to just get started. Think of it as a learning process. One of the great things about the internet is that the cost of business is extremely low and everything is very flexible. There is nothing stopping your from rapidly changing your business plans and structure.

If the task at hand is too far beyond your skills, you could hire someone to do it for you, or you could consider taking on a partner that compliments your skills. Whatever you do, you can’t let anything stop you from moving forward. Make sure you are always making progress, even if that progress is simply learning new skills.

3. Always Continue Your Education

We focused on getting something started before learning how to do it because education can paralyze you. Books, training courses, and classes are great for gaining new knowledge and learning how to do new things, but they themselves do not help you make any money. I have seen countless people get stuck in the trap of learning, learning, learning, and while they are gaining a ton of knowledge, they aren’t making any real world progress.

But, you should always be learning, just do it as a supplement to the things that grow your business. If there are particular tasks within your ventures that you are having trouble with, spend a lot of time on, or have to outsource, consider learning them yourself. You will gain a better understand of the requirements, which will help you when delegating the task, and you might even gain the ability to do it faster.

Outsourcing is great, but it takes time. You have to submit a project, get bids, choose a bid, communicate, wait for delivery, go over revisions, and repeat those last two step. It can be much faster if you or a partner can do the work on your own. I only outsource things that I don’t have the time to do or simply don’t want to do, I never outsource something that I can do quickly and effectively for myself.

4. Monitor What Works and Keep Doing It

Continuing with “success breeds success,” when you have an online venture in progress, you are continually trying new things and getting your own feedback on what you did right and what you did wrong. Use this information to train yourself how to be successful. This concept is very simply but is often ignored. When something does not work, ask yourself why it didn’t work and figure out how to adjust it. When something does work, ask yourself why it worked and figure out how to repeat and apply to other avenues.

This is where the real learning occurs. This type of learning is on a very personal level because you are analyzing tings that you yourself have done, not things that other people are saying they have done. With enough experiences, you will develop a very strong sense for success and will be able to explode your growth. You can’t properly tell other people (contractors and employees) what to do until you know exactly what works. If you don’t know for yourself what works, and are spending money based on what you have heard, there is a good chance you won’t recover your costs.

5. Never Stop Working Hard

This last step is the most important but is also the most difficult. It is way too easy to start a business on the internet. These days, with software like Wordpress, anyone can have a new business (website) online in 15-30 minutes. The hard part is sticking with it for the long run.

As you probably know, the beginning growth stages are usually very slow and mentally tough. This applies to all of the make money online strategies above. It takes time to build brand awareness, authority, market confidence, contacts, traffic, and ultimately, revenue. However, if you consistently work hard on your business, you will see incremental results in the beginning which snowball into exponential results with time.

Start Now, Don’t Stop, and Keep Reading

I know I said in the opening paragraph that you shouldn’t be reading blogs, forums, and ebooks with the hopes of learning exactly how to make money online. I didn’t meant stop reading them all together. Getting inspiration from the experience of others is extremely valuable, it just isn’t as valuable as actually taking action and making your own experiences.

When reading tips and advice online, take them as just that, tips and advice. Don’t keep searching for a step by step strategy that will guarantee your online success because your are the only element that can guarantee that success. Read the words of others to gain ideas, strategies, and inspiration for your own, existing ventures. To do this, you must already have an existing venture in place, otherwise you are just wasting your time.