This is part 2 of a 5 part series on how to create a profitable online store. Finding products to sell online is where many people get stuck when trying to start an online business. There are 3 main issues to deal with. For starters, you have to decide what you want to sell. Do you want to sell physical products? Do you want to sell software or informational goods?

Unfortunately, no one can answer that question except for you. If you need help in coming up with ideas however, you may want to check out a previous article I wrote on How to Find a Niche Market for Your Online Store.

In general though, I would recommend picking items to sell that meet the following critieria

• The product should not be fragile and easy to ship
• The product should not take up much physical space
• The product’s inherent value should be ambiguous. For example, I would never sell electronics because there is a set value for your goods that everyone is aware of. On the contrary, keepsakes and informational goods are much harder to place a price tag on.
• The product should be timeless. Once again, I would never sell electronics because they lose value the longer they stay on the shelves

Can You Make Money?
The second problem is determining whether you can actually make money selling your product. The key is to not get too hung up on any given idea because if the target market is not big enough, your product may not be worth selling.

Personally, I use a quick and dirty way to determine if my online store idea is viable. If you are interested, please check out my article on How To Determine If Your Online Business Idea Even Has a Chance.

Finally, the biggest problem is that even if you manage to choose a product or a set of products you want to sell, where the heck are you going to source your products from? How and where do you contact the manufacturer so you can get wholesale pricing? Before I tell you the best way to find your vendors, there are several things to consider right off the bat.

Do you want to deal with only domestic (United States) vendors?
Dealing with vendors in the US is much easier because everything is familiar to you. It is much easier to contact your vendors because they are in a similar time zone and they speak the same language. However, because the manufacturing costs are much higher in the US, you will end up paying more money for your products which will negatively affect your profit margins. The main advantage is that shipping arrangements can be easily made and it’s generally easier to obtain the products you want to sell.

Do you want the absolute lowest cost for your products?
If you want the absolute best deal for your products, then you might want to consider looking in Asia to source your items. These days, you’ll find that most things are made and sourced from Asia. Why? It’s because they offer the best prices. However, it can be a major hassle to import items into your home country. If you do manage to get the process down however, the profit margins are unbeatable. If you want to learn more about sourcing your products from overseas, you may want to read the following articles.

• How To Import Goods From Overseas For Your Online Store
• Product Sourcing: What To Expect When Dealing With Overseas Vendors

Do you want to carry inventory or dropship?
Dropshipping is great since you don’t have to carry inventory, but you are still responsible for making sure that your customer is happy and satisfied with the purchase. As a result, you have to make sure that the vendors you choose are absolutely reliable. If you choose to drop ship, handling returns can be a major hassle. Even worse, you’ll sometimes have to deal with irate customers even though you were not at fault. Deciding to drop ship also limits your choice of vendors.

How Do I Find My Vendors?

Now that you are aware of your product sourcing options, the best way to find vendors is to attend wholesale tradeshows. For example, if you are interested in importing products from China, you can check out the China Import And Export Fair Website. If you are interested in wholesale fairs in the US, you can check out various tradeshow websites such as Wholesale Central.

Going to tradeshows is ideal because

• All of the vendors are aggregated in one location. You can set up appointments to meet multiple vendors in a single day
• They will have samples of their merchandise available for you to see. This is especially important when dealing with overseas vendors because obtaining samples can sometimes take months.

Why Not Do All Of My Research Online?
You might think that you can do all of your vendor research online, but wholesale vendors that you find on the web can be extremely sketchy. In fact, there are many vendors online that are middlemen who pretend to be wholesale vendors just to get your business. It is because of these deceptive practices that I recommend finding vendors at trade shows rather than purely online. For more information on buying wholesale, please checkout my article on Why Buying Wholesale Can Be Misleading.

Wholesale Vendor Services

Going to tradeshows and contacting vendors you find online can be extremely time consuming and expensive. Fortunately, there are many web based services that aggregate and screen out wholesale vendors for you to choose from. Today, if my wife and I were to start all over again, we would probably use these services exclusively over travelling and screening vendors by hand, especially since we now have kids. If you are not convinced, here’s an example of how a company like WorldWideBrands.com can save you time.

WorldWide Brands offers the following services at a very reasonable price:

• They provide a list of pre-verified drop-ship wholesalers, light bulk wholesalers (orders under $500), high volume wholesalers, liquidation wholesalers and import wholesalers. The best part is that Worldwide Brands has a screening process to make sure that you are dealing with legit companies.
• They provide information estimating how well your product will sell
• They provide information on how many people are searching the Internet for your products
• They provide information on how many other people are selling your products.
• They tell you who your competitors are so you can see whether the market is saturated.

From experience, I can tell you that it can be very difficult to locate wholesale vendors just by doing random web searches. Why waste your time when there are many services out there that aggregate the data for you already?

Keep in mind though, that these services won’t do the heavy lifting for you. You still have to take the time to contact each and every vendor and create your own business relationships. Finding good vendors and establishing trust is the key to good product sourcing.

Next Up – Select A Free Shopping Cart To Run Your Storefront…Stay Tuned

What is Affiliate Marketing?

It seems that more readers are asking this question than I previously thought.

In a recent poll here on ProBlogger I asked readers whether they’d done any affiliate marketing on their blogs. The results revealed that:

• 29% of readers regularly do it
• 24% occasionally do it
• 27% have never done affiliate marketing on their blogs
• 6% used to do it but don’t any more
• 14% don’t know what affiliate marketing is

There’s some interesting results there but it was the last category (of bloggers not knowing what affiliate marketing is) that I wanted to write this post for with the hope of answering the question. It’s pretty basic and quite beginner focused but for the 14% of you who don’t know what affiliate marketing is – here’s a brief introduction.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Perhaps the simplest way to explain affiliate marketing is that it is a way of making money online whereby you as a publisher are rewarded for helping a business by promoting their product, service or site.

There are a number of forms of these types of promotions but in most cases they involve you as a publisher earning a commission when someone follows a link on your blog to another site where they then buy something.

Other variations on this are where you earn an amount for referring a visitor who takes some kind of action – for example when they sign up for something and give an email address, where they complete a survey, where they leave a name and address etc.

Commissions are often a percentage of a sale but can also be a fixed amount per conversion.

Conversions are generally tracked when the publisher (you) uses a link with a code only being used by you embedded into it that enables the advertiser to track where conversions come from (usually by cookies). Other times an advertiser might give a publisher a ‘coupon code’ for their readers to use that helps to track conversions.

For example:  when I recently released my 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook I also give people an opportunity to promote the workbook with an affiliate program whereby they could earn a 40% commission for each sale. When you sign up to become an affiliate you are given a special code unique to you that enables you to promote the workbook and make $7.98 per sale. The top affiliates earned over $2000 in the first few weeks after launch through these commissions.

• Advertisers often prefer affiliate marketing as a way to promote their products because they know they’ll only need to pay for the advertising when there’s a conversion. I knew when I started this affiliate program that while I’d earn less for each sale that having a network of affiliates promoting it would almost certainly increase overall sales levels.
• Publishers often prefer affiliate marketing because if they find a product that is relevant to their niche that earnings can go well in excess of any cost per click or cost per impression advertising campaign.

Why Affiliate Marketing Can Work Well on Blogs

Affiliate marketing isn’t the only way to make money from blogs and it won’t suit every blog/blogger (more on this below) but there are a few reasons why it can be profitable in our medium. Perhaps the biggest of these reasons is that affiliate marketing seems to work best when there’s a relationship with trust between the publisher and their readership.

I’ve found that as this trust deepens that readers are more likely to follow the recommendations that a blogger makes.

Of course this can also be a negative with affiliate marketing – promote the wrong product and trust can be broken (more on this below).

Affiliate Marketing – Easy Money?

While affiliate marketing can be incredibly lucrative it is important to know that affiliate marketing is not easy money. Most people who try it make very little as it relies upon numerous factors including:

• traffic (high traffic helps a lot)
• finding relevant products
• finding quality products
• building trust with your readers
• having a readership who is in a ‘buying mood’
• you being able to write good sales copy (and more)

There’s also some risk associated with affiliate marketing in that if you push too hard or promote products of a low quality you can actually burn readers and hurt your reputation and brand.

It’s also worth noting that affiliate marketing doesn’t work on all blogs. Some blogs are on topics where it is hard to find products to promote – other blogs attract audiences who are not in a buying frame of mind and for other blogs it just doesn’t fit with the blogger’s style or approach.

Tomorrow I want to continue the focus upon affiliate marketing with another post – this one on how to find affiliate products to promote.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

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15 years ago or so as I was doing research for blackjack strategies I came across a video from Telly Savalas. Its titled “Telly Savalas: The ABCs of Winning Blackjack“. The video touched on a bit for the total blackjack newbie (hit on < 17 if dealer has < 7 showing) stuff but the big takeaways I got from it was the betting strategies.

A little definitions for non gamblers:

Unit = the amount of money you are betting. Generally on blackjack tables it is the table minimum. So a 5$ minimum table 1 unit would be 5$)
House = the person you are playing against, in this case refers to the Casino.

The basic rules were this:

1 – Make your initial 1 unit bet and continue to bet 1 unit until you win ($5).

2 – After each win continue to bet 2 units ($10).

Basically after the first win you are risking 1 unit and playing with 1 unit that you won from the house. Then each win in a row after that you are risking 0 but winning 2 units at a time.

Now this is all based on analyzing billions of hands of blackjack and learning that winning and loosing streaks come in 3 or more on average. I have used this strategy for many years and its worked out pretty well for me. Most of the time when I play in casino’s its for entertainment value but my friends are always surprised at how well the strategy works over the long haul.

How it applies to making money online:

The making money online industry is very strange. You have people of all ages going from 0 to thousands or more per day when they find their groove. Most of the time these people do exactly what they shouldn’t. They buy cars, houses, take vacations… then when their niche dries up they are not only broke again but now have a ton more loans.

The best thing to do is play with the houses money. In the last 6 years I have been playing with the houses money. I never have to get a loan, or seek funding for a new venture because I have saved money from our past successes. AND while my income has significantly gone up year after year my spending has not. Thus I can continue to play with the houses money.

Everyone in this industry if they keep at it long enough will find some niche or angle to make money that will be very lucrative…. but the odds it will last are not very good. If you want to survive you have to always look to parlay your winnings into your next thing.

If you start spending money like water and stop looking for new opportunities your screwed. And this is exactly what happens to MOST people in this industry.

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

Playing With The Houses Money

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

What’s Your Signature Response to Problems?

I’ve written often that one of the ways to create goodwill, positive buzz and happy customers is to exceed expectations. Responding proactively to problems offers, in my opinion, one of the easiest ways to exceed expectations available.

Problems happen, that’s a fact, and you can choose to respond to customer challenges, problems, let downs, screw-ups and mistakes in one of two ways. You can ignore them and create the kind of friction that drags your trust into the ground or you can respond in such an over the top, out of control, nobody does that kind of way that can turn problems into gold mines. If you want to exceed expectation, choose the latter!

Most everyone is familiar with the Nordstrom’s policy of refund – no time limit, no receipt, no questions asked. It’s an example given whenever someone talks about customer service, but it’s really a signature response to a customer problem and it’s become something that creates incredible word of mouth for them.

Creating what I call your signature response to problem solving takes a little thought, planning, implementation and even training, but it can become a very valuable tool for your organization.

Invite and reward feedback

The first step to making problem solving a core marketing system is to encourage customers to tell you when something’s not right. This may seem like a simple thing but there is plenty of research that suggests somewhere near 90% of your customers experiencing an issue will simply go away quietly unhappy.

You should clearly state in all your marketing copy that you welcome feedback and won’t rest until your customer is thrilled. Spell out guarantees, return policies and make it very obvious how to contact you via phone, mail, web, or email. You should also build satisfaction surveys, results reviews and even random phone follow-ups into your standard operating procedures.

Of course, it’s not enough to just ask for feedback and then send it down a black hole; you’ve got to respond.

Create a response

In order to get the full impact with this idea you need to design the manner in which you will automatically respond in order to solve a customer problem. Some of this can and should be handled through clearly spelled out, no strings attached, guarantees and return policies, but you need to add some flair as well.

Adding some creativity in this step is how you turn a response into a signature response. For example, does the CEO show-up with a bouquet of flowers, does the customer immediately receive a month of service free and a dedicated service rep to help guide them through the challenge, do you do whatever it takes to make it right?

The key here is to do something that gets the customer the result they are after but also offers a little wow that they can’t help notice, because it was unexpected.

Occasionally we receive notes from customers who have purchased one of our products, but feel it isn’t what they thought it would and want to return it. We cheerfully refund their purchase price, but instead of asking them to return it, we ask that they make it a gift to another business owner. It’s a pretty simple thing on our part, but it really creates a warm response each time we offer it.

Empower the team

Another really important piece of the problem solving puzzle is blame. When you make a mistake, admit it and move to fixing it. When your customer makes a mistake, well, move to fixing it. There’s no gain in getting the customer to admit they were wrong, even when they are. One of my favorite business expressions, said to my staff in my best dad voice is: Fix the problem, not the blame.

The way to make sure that your signature response to problems is actually delivered as designed is to empower your staff to fix the problem, not the blame!

Let them know that while you have a set of policies designed to make their life simple and your business profitable, they can do what it takes to make the customer happy. Now, if that makes you more than a little nervous that you will be taken advantage of then perhaps you need to refine whom you are attracting as customers. There will always be people who try to take advantage of your willingness to please, but the key lies in setting the proper expectations up front in all of your marketing messages.

Saving a deal gone bad by reacting in a way that is generally unexpected is how you create positive buzz and customers for life.

Image credit: pixeljones

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A couple weeks ago, I reviewed Tatto Media, a quickly growing affiliate marketing network with a simple and easy-to-use interface. If you like Tatto’s platform and always wanted to create your own affiliate network, then I have great news for you.

HasOffers, a sister company of Tatto Media, is an affiliate network solution that gives you access to the same exact platform used by Tatto. Now you can white label the technology, customize and brand it however you want, and get all of the unique features of the system.

There are a lot of different barriers to entry for starting up an affiliate marketing network. You need good connections with potential advertisers, a unique business model that offers value to customers, and start up capital to hire employees and implement a platform. Up until now, networks had to either create their own platform (very expensive) or use the industry standard, DirectTrack (which still costs $10k). HasOffers has come along and shaken things up a bit. Not only is it good, it’s also free – which means the technology barrier to entry no longer exists. Anyone can set up an affiliate network in a matter of days.

How HasOffers Works

As I mentioned, HasOffers is a hosted solution that allows you to set up your own affiliate network, completely customized to your own brand. All you need to do to get started is fill out the registration form with your information, network name, and network id. The system by default gives you a URL off of a subdomain of hasoffers.com, but you can also get your own domain for your new site as well.

Once you get your account set up, it’s really just a matter of getting advertisers and affiliates on board – the hard part. HasOffers gives you all of the tools you need, but it’s up to you to effectively run your business and distinguish your site as a valuable affiliate network. A widely available platform like HasOffers will only bring on more competition so this becomes increasingly important.

Features

As for the admin panel of HasOffers, you can pretty much do everything you need to run your network. You can easily add advertisers and offers, manage affiliates and pay them, and get reports on all kinds of statistics.

HasOffers is constantly looking to improve and has recently added the following new features:

• New look and feel for the stat reports. Much more user friendly
• Advertisers have the ability to manage their own offers
• Option to allow offers to convert multiple times
• Customizable questions for affiliate sign-ups
• Lead caps can now be disabled

Take a look inside by using the demo account here: demo.hasoffers.com (login: demo@hasoffers.com, password: demo)

The only thing that seems to be missing is a way to supply affiliates with marketing materials such as banner ads and email templates. Hopefully this will be added soon.

Another limitation is the way in which you can customize the HasOffers platform. You can change any style, color, or logo, but the format and template remains the same. This is expected of a hosted solution but if you wanted to create something completely different, you won’t be able to through HasOffers.

Other than that, HasOffers is a very flexible solution that offers a ton of features for you to work with. Once you hit it big, you can always invest in a custom platform, but this is a good one to get started on and grow with.

Pricing

So how much does this all cost? Nothing. It’s free as long as you stay under 250,000 clicks per month (which is more than what most people need starting out). You can also upgrade to Pro ($99/month) or Enterprise ($799/month) which offer more clicks and better features. Below is a comparison chart.

Final Verdict

If you’re interested in running your own affiliate offer (e.g. selling an ebook through your own affiliate program) or going big and starting up a network, HasOffers is a great platform to use. Not only is it free to use, it offers features and flexibility that rival those of Direct Track ($10k). Shoemoney uses HasOffers to run his affiliate network, Shoemoney Offers, and has had a great experience with it.

Sign up for a free account with HasOffers and try it out.

Internet Marketing Blog – Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.

HasOffers Review – Start Your Own Affiliate Marketing Network for Free

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For most fellow young entrepreneurs, one of the most common challenges faced is finding a way to manage work for our business with work from school. At times it can get overwhelming. From papers and exams to study for to sales calls and marketing campaigns to run, it can all get very hectic and stressful.

Yet managing both is definitely possible and I have found that my success in doing so is highly contingent on one and only one factor: time management. To be a successful student entrepreneur, you must be able to manage your time wisely so that you can balance school work and business work without losing your sanity and giving up every second of spare time you have.

This may sound obvious and it is, but time management is easier said then done. I have struggled and failed countless times with it over the past five years. However, recently I have found that through the effective use of detailed charts and schedules, I have been able to make a plan and stick to it.

Before I had a list of things I had to get done in my head and “managed my time” without actually writing it down. This was a mistake. In order to properly manage my time I had to write down everything so it was spelled out in front of me allowing me to make a “plan of action” and sticking to it. This may be because I am more of a visual learner, but making a physical list held me accountable for completing all tasks on my “plan of action” in a timely fashion.

I recently wrote a post for ProBlogger on the subject of balancing school work and entrepreneurial activity where I showed exactly how I do it. I think it is definitely worth a read. An excerpt from the post is below.

“The key to managing my business work and my school work is time management and planning ahead. It is absolutely vital that you do not procrastinate, because all procrastination does is lead to a great increase in personal stress and a great decrease in work output quality.

Throughout the course of my high school education and now in college, I maintain two separate calendars, one for school work and one for business. In my school work calendar I plot out all assignments that have been assigned and when they are due. Typically, I have as much as three weeks lead time for major papers and projects and know of testing dates at the beginning of the semester. Once I have established my calendar, I plan out my time so that I have a final product completed, whether it is an edited version of my essay or completely developed and analyzed study guide for a midterm, one week in advance.”

ProBlogger

Teaching how to “make money online” is one of the most lucrative niches to be in as an Internet marketer, however most people who attempt to profit from this niche do not.

Some people consider making money by teaching how to make money essentially a scam. I mean if you know a system of how to make money, why not just use that system rather than sell it? That smells fishy right? Umm, no, I find that logic quite silly. Why not make money using your system AND teaching it.

So, why can a small minority of people earn big in the Internet marketing industry and the majority fail miserably? Is the make money online niche only full of scammers or those who just got lucky?

As someone who has been making money in this niche for years – and I’ve certainly climbed the ladder over time – I’m in a pretty good position to explain the subtle elements that people new to Internet marketing won’t see.

Where Most People Go Wrong

Let’s start with some common mistakes that people make when attempting to profit from teaching others how to make money…

1. You sell people products about and attempt to teach how to make money when you’ve never made money yourself.

This might seem obvious, but for those people who can only see the dollar signs and not reality, understand that credibility is a big part in converting a sale.

You don’t go to a doctor who just decided one day to open a surgery having never studied or practiced medicine, so why do you think people will give you money to learn something from you that you’ve never done or have very limited success in?

There are a few people out there, especially affiliate marketers who’ve never done anything but promote how to make money products, who can enter the make money online niche and do well, but that’s because they have a skill (traffic generation and conversion), which can be applied across any market.

It’s very likely that anyone today who has made good money in the Internet marketing niche has earned money in other niches before or still do. If you’re currently running a blog that just promotes how to make money products and that’s your strategy for striking it rich, it’s time to face reality and try a different angle.

2. You’re planning on chronicling your journey to make money through blogging and thus profit from the audience you build.

I’m certainly partially to blame for people following this path, as are guys like John Chow, who rose to fame using the phrase “I make money online by telling people how I make money online“.

I’ve had numerous people go through my blog training programs and begin the with the idea of starting a blog on how to make money. The thought process usually goes something like this…

“I want to make money online, but I don’t know what niche to run with”.

“I know, I’ll start by experimenting, and write down my results to my blog and build an audience that way”.

“As a worst case scenario, I’ll be able make money from my blog”.

That theory looks good on paper but most people have a fatal flaw in their execution.

They key to making money by writing about your journey to make money is that you absolutely must take action and try different systems and methods to make money, and then report back real results to your audience.

For example, try Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) to sell affiliate products and hopefully make at least a few hundred dollars in sales, so then you have a great little case study to report back to your blog. People want to know how to make a couple of hundred dollars from PPC, so explaining how you do it is valuable content.

What usually happens is people realize how hard it is just to do the experiments. Reaching the point where you profit from the experiments is tough enough. Adding a commitment to write about the experience as well for little to no immediate return – that’s beyond most people.

The fact is, unless you already have experience actually profiting from a business it will be very hard to build an audience by talking about how to make money on a blog. That’s why my blog, and the few similar blogs to my own will likely remain at the top. Many contenders have come and gone, and most come to the realization they just don’t have the energy to run their business AND write about it too.

3. Believing that if you make enough blog posts promoting affiliate products eventually you have to strike it rich.

This really is a newbie mistake, but it’s so common I need to point out how futile it is so you don’t make the same mistake.

If your blog only features promotions for products you will never build an audience that trusts you. Why buy from someone who keeps asking for money and never gives anything.

This is actually a huge problem in our niche, which, for the smart marketers is a golden opportunity.

It’s fair to say that the average consumer who goes looking to purchase something that purports to teach them how to make money – a business opportunity – is pretty skeptical. Down right jaded is a better label. These people are petrified of being ripped off and because so many people sell junk online using copy from the hype-machine, as an Internet marketer you have to work extra hard to build credibility.

The opportunity is to stand out from the crowd and build a sustainable business simply by not attempting to steal every penny from an unsuspecting newbie, and instead actually help them with genuine support.

If someone gets burnt once, then comes to you and very cautiously makes a decision, buys your product or a product you recommend, and then has a positive experience, you have generated some very powerful goodwill. Being an honest person in a sea of sharks and hucksters is a HUGE advantage, assuming you can figure out a way to create that perception.

How You Can Profit Selling In Internet Marketing Niche

The key to profiting in the make money online niche is to focus on credibility, authenticity, trust, quality information based on practical experience and sheer consistency.

Most people fail on one or several of those criteria and thus struggle to stand out as anything more than yet another person attempting to steal an unsuspecting newbie’s money and then run away.

The next key criteria, assuming you can adhere to the criteria of credibility is to find your unique positioning in the market. It’s very hard to just teach “internet marketing” and unless you find something you can specialize in, it will be hard to build a sustainable business.

In a sea of also-rans, anyone with a clear point of differentiation, a unique market positioning and a specialized area of expertise, wins. Here’s how you can be a winner -

1. Find a Sub-Niche

Most marketers who make good money teaching how to make money, even at the very top level, have some key point of differentiation, which essentially is just a sub-niche of the overall “Internet marketing” category. Here are some examples of the people I learned from and consider peers and mentors and the sub-niches they focus on –

• Jeff Walker is know for product launches
• Alex Mandossian – Teleseminars
• John Reese – Traffic Generation
• Rich Schefren – Business Systemization
• Mike Filsaime – Viral Marketing
• Perry Marshall – Pay Per Click
• John Carlton – Copywriting

These guys are some of the celebs in our market. If you drill down and take a look at any smaller success stories, the less well known Internet marketers, who every day are making good money in the Internet marketing niche, they still have some form of specialty.

They might focus on email list building, or pay per click, or affiliate marketing, or copywriting or conversion or lead generation or any countless parts of the overall industry. Each person has a focus that distinguishes them in the mind of their customers as the best solution to a specific problem they suffer from.

You can even go deeper than this, with some marketers taking one specialty and applying it directly to a geographic location (Sydney copywriting) or specific type of customer (pay per click for mortgage brokers) or a combination of these elements.

One of the most successful formulas I’ve seen applied well is to become the local specialist for a type of small business in your community and help them market online. Your angle might be to focus on retail stores of a certain type (say antique shops) and help them set up an eBay marketing campaign to sell their goods.

This formula of taking offline businesses online can be done in so many markets and in many ways, and is a fantastic entry strategy for any person who knows at least the basics of Internet marketing. Or, if you can become very good at one thing, for example SEO, you can make as much money practicing your craft as you do teaching it, or more.

2. Ride the Wave of a New Evolution

Specializing is vital for success, but sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can’t find your spot in the Internet marketing landscape. If that is a frustration you have experienced, you might consider leveraging the emergence of a new form of online marketing and become proficient enough in it to be one of the first experts.

My own story becoming a blog trainer is one such example of riding the wave of a new evolution. While I’m not the first blogger, nor the most prolific or the most popular, I was one of the very first to sell an information product that teaches how to make money blogging.

It helped of course that I spent time to build a blog that made money, which leveraged my earlier life experiences in business. I had the sense to realize there was an opportunity there that I could take and become one of the first to establish positioning as a blogging expert.

I also happened to be one of the only bloggers who focused on Internet marketing, so again I leveraged what had worked for thousands of other marketers and applied it to my area – blogging – which was something that few bloggers did, or even do still today.

In more recent time the example of Maria Andros springs to mind as a person who was able to ride the wave of another evolution, this time video and social media marketing, establish herself as one of the most credible experts and – here’s the key part – released a product to cement her position.

Maria had the sense to know she was in the right place at the right time and there was a market she could dominate. She took action, branded herself appropriately and then went after a market. Maria now has very little quality competition, at least in the perception of the marketplace.

3. Stay One Step Ahead of your Target Market

One key concept that I’ve had to remind my students of time and time again, especially if they are attempting to brand themselves as an expert, is to realize that you only need to be one step ahead of your target market.

You can teach how to make money if you know how to do something that a large enough group of people don’t know and would benefit knowing. As long as you are good at one thing there will always be a stream of people new to your topic who need to learn what you know.

If you combine the previous points about building trust, finding a sub-niche or riding a new wave of opportunity, and stay one step ahead of the people you sell to, you are set, even in the highly competitive and highly lucrative how to make money online marketplace.

Making Sense Vs. Making Dollars

Everything I’ve outlined in this article makes sense. It’s clear and you should be able to get your head around the concepts I’m teaching. Unfortunately most people fail to execute and thus fail to profit.

Although this article is about how to make money teaching others how to make money, the rules apply just as well to other markets.

Every market is at a different stage of its development cycle and some will have more competition than others. The current relationship between supply (the number of quality competitors in the market you are in) vs demand (the amount of money you can potentially make from customers) will dictate how much effort you need to put in place in order to make money (I promise you, there will be effort required!).

My advice to you is to get out there and experiment until you find your place in the industry. There is enough room for everyone who provides value. It doesn’t matter if you think you face too much competition, it’s not the competition that will stop you from succeeding, it’s your ability to leverage the advice I’ve outline in this article and carve out your position in the market by delivering value to a specific segment of people, that will dictate your success.

Good luck, and remember the golden rule to making money in any marketplace: The more people you help, the more money you make.

Yaro Starak
Blogging Expert

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Weekend Favs for July Five

I’ve added a weekend post routine that I hope you enjoy. Each weekend I write a post that features 3-4 things I read during the week that I found interesting. Generally speaking it won’t involve much analysis and may range widely in topic. (Flickr image included here is from a shot on recent vacation in the Sangre de Cristo Range in the Rockies)

Enjoy!

Good stuff I ran across this week

• Monitoring Social Media Metrics – Nice “how to” article that uses Google Docs to create SM spreadsheet. I know I’ve run across more than one frustrated marketer that was charged by the boss with showing some metric on the effectiveness of Social Media.
• Keyword CSV file on Yahoo Pipes Demo – this video shows you how to take a series of keywords from a CSV file and uses Yahoo Pipes to run each keyword through various searches.
• GraphJam – Graphs are often used to illustrate business information, both good and bad – this very funny site uses the graph to illustrate some very interesting statistics like “the amount of ink in my printer” – laughing is good medicine!

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• Yahoo Pipes a Smokin Radar Tool (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Cool google and wikipedia mashups (andydickinson.net)
• Use Google Docs to Create Short URLs (labnol.org)

Ever since blogging became big business, monetization became very important. Simple AdSense banners would no longer do. New, innovative way to monetize a blog had to be developed. From the traditional banner ads to sponsored posts and RSS feeds, everyone has been caught up in frenzy over finding the most effective ways to monetize a blog.

Yet, what happened was the focus of blogging seemingly shifted from the actual posts and content of the blog to the advertisements which dominated the sidebars, headers, footers, and even the content of the blog itself. In an industry where credibility and unbiased opinions were if chief importance; sponsorships threatened the very foundation on which the blogging community was built.

There have been countless debates over the role of sponsorships in blogging and whether or not they influenced the content of the blogosphere. Debates raged over companies like PayPerPost and ReviewMe which allows bloggers to generate a significant income from blogging about company’s products and services. While traditionally this would not be an issue, the fact that these companies for paying bloggers to write about their products and services threatened the credibility of these posts. Issues over transparency and disclosure emerged as many insisted that sponsored posts should be clearly marked to not mislead any readers. This information is especially relevant in light of recent news that the Federal Trade Commission will be looking into bloggers “for any false claims or failure to disclose any conflict of interest.”

A blogger’s greatest asset is his or her credibility. After all, people don’t want to simply read what just anyone in the crowd has to say about a specific topic, they want to read what the industry leaders, the credible figures, have to say. Despite the ad revenue your blog generates, without your credibility you have nothing. The revenue and traffic will come and go.

Hence, I would strongly urge all bloggers to not put their credibility on the line in order to make a few extra dollars today. In any situation where you feel the content of your blog may represent a conflict of interest, make sure to disclose everything. A look at the most successful blogs in the world from TechCrunch to Shoemoney shows that whenever a post about a sponsor or a company where the blogger has a particular interest (whether it be financial or otherwise) is fully disclosed to the reader.

This allows you to accept sponsorships on your blog repaying you for all the hard work you put in, while at the same time not risking your credibility. A great rule of thumb to follow is that the focus of your blog should at all times be the content you provide. The content is the product that you are “selling” and if you continue to provide quality unbiased content, than revenues will grow in the long-term. Yet, if you risk the credibility of your blog to earn a few extra bucks today, your blog’s long term viability is placed at risk.