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.