The second main way of making money online is to start to sell your own product. Well, that’s all very well, but what if you don’t have a product to sell?

If you are new to the online world, there is a real temptation here to assume that you need some kind of world-beating physical product. That you need, in some way, to become the next big inventor that makes money from solving a problem that has troubled mankind since the dawn of time.

That is certainly one way to go, but if you are going to get started with this fairly quickly, you probably need to give up that idea and start looking at the world of digital products. The beauty of going digital is the speed of creation and the ease of delivery for your new product and there are several ways that you can get to market with this approach.

By far the most common is the ebook. If you have started looking at internet marketing then you have been exposed by now to countless ebooks on many different areas of this business but it is completely possible to take this approach in other walks of life.

Obviously this is a subject in its own right and I will go into more detail about how you get your ideas into your creation in another post (or maybe even an ebook )

Once you have started thinking about digital products, you could branch out into audio or even video and in some ways these are more highly regarded than even ebooks in their potential. Everyone has different ways of learning, but a good video walkthrough can often help to clarify subjects for anyone watching them. I posted a quick youtube video in an earlier post to show you just how easy it is to get started.

The beauty of all this, is that you don’t even need to have your own subject matter in some cases. Check out the world of PLR (or, Private Label Rights) to see how you could use someone else’s material, possibly in ebook form, and legally add your own name or rework it into audio or video to form your own product.

Once you have your product, you can obviously sell it direct from your own site (maybe controlling this through one of the integrated shopping basket services that exist) or you could opt to make it available through a service such as Clickbank, which, for a fee, will handle all the aspects of payment collection for you. It will also look after your affiliate programs where others will sell your product for you, for a share of the profits.

As always, if you want more details or if you have any comments on this subject, let me know below and use the buttons to bookmark this page. If you have found this page from somewhere else, follow the link for the rest of the articles on the subject of making money online.

We have all heard the internet marketing rallying cry “make money from home” – well I have a twist on that as we look at the first way to use you new, growing skills to make money online.

So, what do I mean by offline business. Well, as I said in my earlier post about you being an internet marketing newbie, your level of internet expertise is probably already advanced compared to those around you.

Everywhere you go in your local neighbourhood, there will be businesses with varying levels of internet presence and if they have any brains at all, they will have heard that internet-based business is still doing OK, even in a financial downturn. So, for some of them, this could make the difference between survival or failure.

What can you do to help (remember this is always about an exchange of value)? At the most basic level, you can show them how fast they can get online. You may want to take them a step further, into setting up a domain and hosting WordPress on it. This can be completely liberating to some people who are still, quite literally, terrified of that first online step!

That sounds like a small thing, but think of the value to that small company, you have turned them into a world player immediately. A morning of tuition is a valuable thing and is completely reproducible over and over again for all your nearby firms. If they have a site already, it is by no means guaranteed that the existing site-builder knows anything about SEO and analytics, so your training goes in that direction instead.

Now step back a bit and think of the consultancy side of things. How about a keyword search for them before you even grab the domain, maybe checking out their competitors as you go? What would that be, maybe a day, maybe 2 days of your time? So, we are already up to 2 or more days (potentially).

As you educate them, the next phase would be to talk through offsite optimisation, link-building etc. Now this could take some time if done properly, maybe you are starting to appear like a valuable asset to your client at this point…there is potential here to turn this deal into a retained service. Choose your monthly rate.

Can you see how this builds up. A lot of this can be outsourced – link building in particular is drudge work for many. If you get this side of your business sorted out, you can become a lot more scalable and take on more (monthly retainer) clients. Before you know it, you have a steady-ish income. Now, get in front of the local board of commerce and run a seminar for 30 people, make it free or cheap and be excellent! Then take orders for more at the end.

It might sound daunting to get in front of small businesses but we all know people in this position in some way. A friend of a friend, the company your wife (or husband) works for, just talk a bit about what you are learning and watch the faces light up. I know this to be true – it’s a story that is only a week old in my own internet marketing career

There is more to this topic, but for now I must press on with the other three methods I mentioned in my last post.

These are meant to be starter articles, to get your mind racing a bit. If you find it useful, throw me a comment or bookmark it using the buttons below. If you are confused by my rambling, leave a comment as well. I can cope!

As you start to look at Internet Marketing as a way to make money online, you will discover that there are several different approaches you can take.  I have summarized these methods here and over the course of the next few posts, I will go into each one in more detail.

• Selling Services
• Selling your own product
• Affiliate marketing
• CPA marketing

The first two look much more like traditional business models, as they rely on some kind of personal involvement as you set them up. When people first come to internet marketing, they will often have this kind of approach in mind, from preconceptions about how business should be done.

The third, Affiliate marketing, could be seen as a traditional selling role, where you get a “cut” of any money made from selling a product and there is much more to be said about this particular subject in another post.

Finally, CPA, or “Cost per Action” is usually a pure information gathering approach – with some selling at times. In this form it is highly suited to an internet-based approach as the “actions” are usually easy to carry out.

Internet marketing is a huge subject. The more people I speak to people in all walks of life, the more I have come to realise that many of the things that I take for granted are completely strange for others. It is clear that many of the assumptions we make about people when we start to talk about this area of making money online are starting from a different place to where the “man in the street” actually is.

So, for the next few posts, I will try to reset the terminology on the site so that anyone who is really just starting out should be able to get up to speed with the terminology that we all throw around so much.

I hope that this will help you if your business just happens to be in an area completely outside Internet Marketing and you are just looking to take your business online as an extra channel to market in these interesting economic times. Of course, if you want further help with this approach, particularly for projects in London, feel free to drop me a line through the contact page.

So, the first term we need to clarify is just the phrase “Internet Marketing”.  Well, let’s step back a bit and make sure that we all see marketing as the same thing. In essence, marketing is just the way that the value in a product or service is made visible to potential users of those things. It can be as broad in focus as marketing of a “brand” – making the value of an entire organisation clear to the public, or it can be as narrow as concentrating on an individual product, effectively making the sales of that product an obvious choice.

Internet Marketing (IM), then, is just the use of the internet as the main delivery mechanism for this “value message”. The appeal of this approach is obviously the huge reach of the internet. Taking your products to just a small fraction of the internet-using population holds enormous potential for most companies.

In a strange twist of terms, it is also possible that you will see the term “Internet Marketing” used in the context of this huge global marketplace where IM experts create products to help others just getting into the IM world themselves. While this may feel strangely incestuous at times, it is undeniable that people still need this kind of help.

If you are just starting out, let me know if going back this far is useful for you.

I went into London yesterday to help Daniel Wagner at a marketing event called the Ultimate Marketing Seminar. (In fact it is still running if you want to go looking…sign up is free).

Now, my attendance at the event isn’t that unusual. I am, after all, trying to meet as many folk in the UK internet marketing world as quickly as possible, as it is obvious that this is a very social space to be in.

What was an eye opener for me, came partly from some ideas that I had already explored for myself but also from the event itself. In fact, Daniel summed it up succinctly from the stage  when he drew a line (from 0 to 100%) and asked, “where are you on this line, in your chosen field of expertise?”  If you mark the line with an estimate of your skill, then anyone to the left of the mark is a potential client of yours and anyone to the right is someone you need to learn from.

Take that in. You have potential clients waiting for your knowledge in whatever field you are working in…..no matter where you are on the line.

As an additional reinforcement, I spoke to several of the other people attending the show in one of the breaks. They come from all walks of life, unified only by their desire to become entrepreneurs in their own field. This wasn’t just about internet marketing as a pure subject. What I found, was that the vast majority knew only that they had to be online and no more.

I had one of those “aha” moments everyone talks about. Here is a huge potential customer base. Go to non-IM events and just help people – how cool is that? Maybe some will become friends and dare I say it, customers.