Your Future Product

If you're an affiliate marketer struggling with making a decent profit, then perhaps you should consider the other side of the coin: creating your own e-product.

Sure, it's a lot of research and hard work but if you come up with a half-decent product to market, not only will it be profitable but most likely others will market it as well. And that's where you can make a killing. Market places like Clickbank's Market Place are a great place to get free exposure for your products. On top of that, Clickbank can handle billing (both normal and recurring) for you. But that's only part of the puzzle.

Creating your own e-product entails a number of things, including:

1. Research & Development
2. Branding
3. Website Creation
4. Billing
5. Marketing

Research & Development

Now in terms of research and development, it's important that you either choose a niche that you're passionate about or that you choose a niche that contains information you are privy to. Of course, it's possible to come up with good material for products you have no interest in, but if this is your first product it will come out much more smoothly if you put a little bit of love into it.

Good e-books shouldn't be too short that people feel cheated when they purchase it, but also it shouldn't be too long that your customers won't even finish reading it. The best e-books I've read have been concise and informative. After all, that's truly what we're after in e-books: the information. Don't be afraid to add visuals either. This ties directly into branding.

Branding

Coming up with the right "look" for your e-book shouldn't be something you do in ten minutes. Colors matter, fonts matter and composition matters. I don't recommend stealing a "look" from someone else's e-book, but definitely pay attention to the way successful e-books and their corresponding websites are colored, the way they lay their graphics out, what sorts of graphics they use and the way that they organize text around graphics. If you aren't a wizard with graphics, don't be bashful about paying someone else to come up with something stylish for you.

In order to come up with a nice e-book graphic like the one you see above, either download software or read my post on creating your own e-book cover.

The way your e-book looks will tie directly in with how your website looks.

Website Creation

If you aren't a web developer, your best bet is to pay someone to build you a decent site. Creating a small site (5 pages or less) should run you less than $150 if there's nothing special to it. The best part is, they'll have your existing branded e-book to base the design on. A good site will do a great job of getting people salivating for the information in the e-book, which means excellent sales text. Again, if you aren't the best with words, don't be afraid to outsource that department either.

Billing

As I stated previously, Clickbank will handle virtually any kind of billing you'd need as well as refunds and things of that nature. Paypal is also a solid option, but requires a bit more work on your part unless you want to shell out some decent money for a web developer to custom-create part of your website that interacts directly with Paypal. There are other decent payment gateways out there (2Checkout, for one), but I've used Clickbank's billing with absolutely zero issues. All they require is that you deliver a decent product and that you have a return policy (60 days). And part of the perk of being with Clickbank is the market place.

Marketing

Here's the fun part. When you have your own e-product, not only can you market the hell out of it but so can affiliates. Clickbank in particular has an excellent tracking system for affiliates selling your e-product through their website. You don't even have to worry about your affiliates getting paid as Clickbank does it for you. And at this point you want to start focusing on getting affiliates to sell the product for you as that will only mean more money for you in the end.

Additionally, I recommend doing some heavy search engine optimization to guarantee more hits from search engines to your sales page.

Conclusion

This is not, in any way, a detailed guide to creating your own product. My motivation in creating this post was to illustrate how simple organization can yield great products that will most likely profit you many times over. For anyone struggling to market other people's products, I can tell you from experience that it's exponentially more thrilling to market your own products and even more so to see other people doing it for you.

3D Ebook Cover Generator

For anyone in the process of creating their own informational product, I highly recommend using the 3D E-Book Cover Generator from 3d-pack.com.

Not only does it create the awesome reflection effect for your E-book cover, but you can rotate the image any way you want and the on-page Flash will render it to either a gif, a jpeg or a png image for you.

Creating each side could not be easier. Simply upload an image for the cover, the top, the side (and optionally the back, if you so choose) and voila -- you have a beautiful fake image for your e-book.

I was able to create this e-book in less than 10 minutes in order to demo it here:

Your Product

Sure, you might notice that I could have spent a lot more time making it look fancy but I just wanted to show you how powerful this free online tool is. Here are the three graphics I used:

E-book Front

E-book Side

E-book Top

I just uploaded each image to the corresponding areas and within ten seconds, I had a beautiful E-book graphic. Could not have been easier.

If you guys have similar recommendations for creating 3D E-Book covers and the like, please feel free to share them!

I wonder why that is.

Tracking202 Pro Goes Live

After several months of public beta, Tracking202 is finally opening its doors to the public!

Click here to receive a 10% discount off your monthly fee.

So just a gloss-over of features:

Full Integration with the Big Three

Instead of having to log into each advertising account (Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter), now you can interact with each one remotely from one interface. Tracking202 is fully integrated with all three and does nightly downloads of data.

This way, you can easily see which campaigns, ads and keywords are duds and, more importantly, which ones are profiting you.

Full Integration with the Affiliate Networks

T202Pro will download your earnings and subids automatically every few minutes and give you accurate earning stats! Now you can just login to the platform and all of your costs and conversions will be ready for your analysis right away!

This is an outstanding feature that I've been looking forward to. As I've been using the free version more and more for my campaigns, it's been a bit of an inconvenience to go back and forth between affiliate network and the database to update sales data.

iPhone/Smart Phone-friendly

Like checking your stats throughout the day? Do you own an iPhone? Well you're in luck! Use our Stats202 iPhone Web App that comes with T202Pro and check your stats on the fly wherever you are (will work on other mobile browsers for other phones but is optimized for the iPhone). Now you can, simply with a touch of a button, press on your Stats202 button on your iPhone and clearly see how much you've earned for the day wherever you are, anywhere and anytime. It will pull stats from every affiliate network you work with!

As an iPhone owner who checks stats like it's a crack addiction, this is a most-welcome feature. I've hacked together a script that does this but it only works for a few networks, so I'm happy to use the new application.

No More Re-Redirects

If you've used our old system, you'll understand that it relied on redirects. On our new Tracking202 Pro system, redirects are a thing of the past. Unlike the old system, we do not process redirects through our server anymore, so in a case of a system wide server failure, you can be rest assured your traffic will still be up and you'll still be banking! Should a storm hit, an earthquake destroy our servers, or something else go wrong, your traffic will still arrive to the offer!

I am honestly impressed by this feature. Adding another hop to any jump-link is sure to annoy possible customers, especially if it takes longer than half a second. Great going, guys.

Keyword-level Conversion Tracking

Our keyword conversion tracking isn't just about seeing a list of keywords that converting. It is about seeing all of your keywords across all of your accounts, where they exist in their associated adgroups, and being able to see 100% accurate cost and revenue data drilled down to each keyword. Then right from the interface you can resume or pause the keyword if needed. Imagine being able to see a list of all of your keywords, across all of your accounts and being able to pause them from one application, no longer do you have to login to your accounts to do it one by one. Also to be able to trace exactly where each keyword originated from, from which adgroup to which campaign to which account, something not present in our regular Tracking202 system.

If you aren't using something like Tracking202, you're losing money. Tracking at the keyword level allows you to see exactly which keywords are profitable and which are not, and for which search engine / social media you're advertising on. Being able to see which adgroup and campaign the click originated from in real time is just beautiful.

Conclusion

Not much I have to add besides what I've pointed out and described. Tracking202 Pro is a very welcome addition to the affiliate marketing world. The amount they charge is a small price to pay for the service you're getting in return.

AzoogleAds New Interface

Just popped on over to AzoogleAds and noticed their brand new design. Nice work guys.

Now let's hope they can change things up on the inside.

lol

Sorry for the pause between posts, people. I've been doing some heavy experimenting here and there. For some reason, I've been craving to write about whatever pops into my head and to spare you people the off-topic rants and random funny pictures I find, I started writing in the ScottMW blog. I figured you'd be grateful.

Yes, of course I'm still doing internet marketing. Although, lately I've been switching it up.

You see, I've had some recent success doing organic marketing that kind of took me by surprise. By no means is it what I'd consider 'easy' though. To the contrary, it's been quite a rollercoaster and when you're dealing with organic traffic, you're basically doing a lot more work than you would with PPC to stay in the same positions you'd get with PPC and you're waiting a lot longer to get there.

The beauty of it is -- once you're there, the profit margins are upwards of 90%. Yeah, no kidding.

So while I may not be doing $20,000 in daily revenue these days, I am pushing a few hundred a day with organic and actually keeping most of it. Although, due to a bit of greed on my part, I've been pushed back into the double digits for profit. Needless to say, if you're going to do any kind of organic marketing, DO NOT mess with any kind of black hat trickery. The bads outweigh the goods by far. A good organic campaign can get you a few thousand a day if you play your cards right and that means no hidden links on popular sites, no link spamming and no huge, sudden growths of backlinks. It's all about taking your time and having a plan.

Anyway, so that's where I am right now. I'm still around every day for questions, comments, that sort of thing but until I have something more profound to say in regard to affiliate marketing, I'm going to leave you fine people alone. I think the content on the blog is sufficient for most n00b Q&A.

So until the urge hits me or I have something amazing to tell you...

You stay classy, San Diego. I'm Ron .. Burgundy?

"Dammit. Who typed a question mark on the Teleprompter?"

This question comes from one of our readers.

Dear Reader,

A Zip Submit offer is a lot like an Email Submit offer. In an Email Submit, visitors would submit their unique e-mail address for you to get the credit for the lead. However, with a Zip Submit, customers would simply need to enter their US Zip Code for your lead to qualify for credit.

That means offers like the ones discussed in this post would generate money based on a simple zip submission from a unique US-based IP address.

Zip submit offers are not very common, but networks like AzoogleAds and Neverblue do carry them.

Hope that clears things up.

Scott

Scott

You are a sexy network with brains to boot, but lately I've been craving something more. You see, while your affiliate managers, lead tracking and offers in general are second to none, there is something that is lacking: your interface.

I know, I know ... I said you were perfect just the way you are and asked you to never change, but I lied. I was just trying to get into your pants ... offers. Now that we've grown closer, I feel we can be more honest with each other. So here it is.

For starters, let's talk about your offer interface. I can sort by everything I don't care about, but what about the things I do care about?

Look, if I'm mistaken, I'll gladly apologize but I don't think I'm out of line asking for three measly sorts on the things that matter most to me.

Next? Reports. You have so many amazing reports but to see them, I have to wait until they show up in my email-

And what about your beautiful Toolbar? Once you started giving me the money, I was able to buy a fancy new Mac. Look at where that got me:

Requirements? Windows XP? Where's the love?

Look, no one is perfect. Not me. Not you. But let's get past this little bump. Relationships are about compromise. I'm ready, are you?

Sincerely yours,

Scott

How are those fads treating you, anyway?

Lately, I've been hearing people complaining about the saturated markets for the hot sellers, the latest of which is the Acai Berry. The list is long and includes things like Ringtones, Acne cures, the Dating niche and any other fad market you can think of.

What's funny about this complaining is that there's nothing special about the Acai fad; it's really just another weight loss solution on a long list of "solutions." There will be another fad and another fad will come after that. Affiliates like you and I will flock to it and try to get a piece of the pie before the fad dries up and people will complain that the market is much too saturated.

To all you complainers, here's a little secret: no market is ever saturated, angles are.

What that means is that the only thing that gets too expensive to compete in is the actual advertising method used to sell product X. If that means PPC, that doesn't mean trying organic won't work. If that means organic is saturated, what about e-mail marketing? If e-mail is saturated, try Craigslist. If Craigslist is saturated, try classified ads in your local newspaper. If that's saturated, get creative. Not even I'm above taking my bike out at 2AM to post flyers. But then, that's the difference between wankers and the people actually making money: action.