It happens over and over again, when someone is eager to start making money online by building an internet business they typically look for ways that appear easier and faster but end up to be a disaster in the end.Â
For example, many new internet marketers put all of their eggs in the affiliate marketing basket, they look for solutions such as auto-blogging, ways to “game” the system so that Google sends them lots of traffic and they can make money from that traffic by either selling someone else’s products (affiliate marketing) or having them click on an add (PPC such as Adsense) or some sort of a click per action (CPA) offer.Â
The last thing they think about is creating their own infoproducts to sell online because it seems like too much work and too high a risk, but is it?
WOULD YOU BET YOUR MORTGAGE PAYMENT ON THESE BUSINESS MODELS?
Having started online with our first information products back in 2000 I have experienced thousands upon thousands of people who have buried themselves in systems, techniques and schemes that may have looked promising in the beginning but have crashed miserably to the ground with a small change online.
Let me start with the most recent examples of Amazon affiliates.
One of the easiest ways to make money online more than a year ago was to research online keyword trends to find product-related searches, match that with an Amazon product and quickly put up a pay-per-click Adwords campaign that linked with your Amazon affiliate link directly to the Amazon site – you would make money on any sale from the ads.Â
Many, many people turned this into a six-figure business – but then suddenly Amazon removed that opportunity entirely by disallowing commissions on any sales made by affiliates that came directly from pay-per-click ads.
Now this week, Amazon has changed the rules AGAIN for affiliates.Â
No longer will they support direct pass-through of user reviews from Amazon to affiliate websites – this was important as it served a method of getting Google to give their sites some “love” as content updated frequently from the reviews and was indexed by Google.Â
The change will still allow a method of passing review information through to an affiliate’s site, but it must be done through what is called an “iframe” which means it will no longer be visible to Google – WOW, big change.
I have given just two recent examples, others involving Google’s search engine indexing, commission junction, eBay and Amazon all send us the same message…if you are depending solely on affiliate marketing or advertising for your online business revenue you are AT SERIOUS RISK!
CONTROL YOUR PRODUCT & VALUE
Sure, it may take you 6-8 weeks to put together your own information products (ebooks, reports, courses, seminars, manuals, teleseminars, e-courses, etc…) and yes, there are some nuances you need to learn about marketing your products online to bring in big profits – as we have helped people with for more than 4-years now at InfoMarketer’zone – but in the end…
- You own & control 100% of your product
- Other people sell your product and you set the rules – again, you are in control
- You have multiple distribution formats and paths for your information – if a new method pops up (ex Itunes), then you can easily convert it and adjust
- You can market online or offline…opening up new opportunities and providing security if suddenly something happens to your market method online
- Multiple sources of traffic…you can buy traffic, develop content, focus on publicity, recuruit affiliates, or any other number of methods to drive traffic and build sales and profits – one change will not impact your income
- Information publishing brands YOU as the expert and increases the value of you to your customers – instead of improving the value of someone else through affiliate marketing, you are investing in YOUR future and value
Once again I’ll say it…don’t be someone who puts 110% of their energy into a money-making method that is dependent on a big company like Google, Amazon, Commission Junction or any other large company — YOU want be in control and building your own revenue stream, that is why you want to be developing your own info products today.
