Back to the money stuff. Well, one could argue that most of business is about the money stuff, but asking about the money often gets you to something more valuable. This question does that. Leaders ask this question to investigate, challenge, and assign responsibility. They use it to investigate the forgotten areas within their control but not in their view, to challenge people to think for themselves, and to let people know that they are expected to engage their brains on the job. Look at it this way. Pretend you don’t do the grocery shopping in your household. In fact, you very seldom even go into a grocery store. The balance in your checking account is running lower than usual, and you notice that the checks made out to the grocery store represent a significant percentage of your monthly expenditures. So you sit down and develop a strategy to lower your grocery cost and present your plan to the family shopper for implementation. If you had to guess, how’s that going to work for you?

Okay, try this approach. You catch the shopper as you walk through the kitchen and say, “You’re spending way too much at the grocery store. I expect to see smaller checks in the future.” And as you walk out of the room you add, “By the way don’t let the quality of our meals suffer.” Is that better?

Please tell me you didn’t think that either of these approaches would work well. Please tell me that, as you read the last two paragraphs, you were shaking your head and grinning. Unfortunately, we act that way at home way too often. This behavior (as expressed about grocery shopping, punishment for children, and other areas too numerous to mention) has far-reaching implications—ask any-one you know who’s gone through a divorce. Don’t kid yourself. If you do it at home, you do it at work.

The problem with this behavior (in case you’re not certain) is presuming that you know better than the person closest to the issue does. When you ask about saving the company money, you send a message that you expect and value your employees’ expertise because they’re the ones who do the work, day in and day out. Of course, the reasoning goes, they have ideas and I want—no, need—to hear them. The more you ask this question, the better the answers you get will be.

Using Fingertip Marketing to Sell Your Books

Q: What is Fingertip Marketing?
A: Fingertip Marketing is defined as, any marketing that adheres to the following two requirements:

1. It is free of charge.

2. It includes no verbal sales pitch to anyone.

You communicate through your computer keyboard using your fingertips.

In this article, you will find many examples of fingertip marketing. The address is:

www.eBook-marketing.com

Q: How did you come up with Fingertip Marketing as an effective way to sell eBooks?
A: When I was writing my first paperback book, I thought my marketing work was over.

I actually believed that I would be in a universal listing that bookstore managers and librarians would see and then order my book.

Boy, was I stupid!

The truth is that the author must do all of the marketing of his/her book.

There is no universal listing that will get libraries and bookstores to order your books.

You have to become a “salesperson.”

Most authors that I have met are not salespeople. In fact many authors I meet despise salespeople.

The Insurance Sales professional

Think about how the typical insurance sales professional works each and every day.

The insurance salesperson has to call on people called “suspects” of which many are not interested in his/her product. Most people will not be interested in buying insurance.

From the group of “suspects” evolves a smaller group called “prospects.” Prospects are people who are interested in buying insurance.

Out of that smaller group called “prospects” evolves “customers” or the people that actually purchase the insurance policies.

The next day the salesperson gets up in the morning and begins the procedure all over again. Every day is exactly the same as the day before.

Does this sound like fun? It can be a great deal of fun. But most authors I meet would never be comfortable working in an environment like that.

Characteristics of the insurance sales job.

Many insurance sales professionals work eight to twelve hours a day, five days per week. However, they must meet with they’re clients when the clients are ready. Many successful insurance professionals spend weekends selling insurance.

Insurance salespeople are usually restricted to handling specific insurance products and they are restricted to a specific geographical territory.

The Traditional Book Author

Here is the typical day of a book author once the book is published.

The author makes a list of bookstores, contacts the Bookstore Manager or the Community Relations Coordinator, if it is a chain bookstore.

The author then makes a sales presentation to interest the store in carrying the book.

The author will try to schedule a book-signing event or just get the bookstore to place a purchase order for books right away.

The bookstores are called “suspects.”

Most bookstores already have enough books on their shelves so the author has to employ super sales skills in winning over the bookstore decision-maker to buy books or schedule a book signing.

If the store agrees to purchase the book, the decision-maker will tell the author that they will only deal through an established book wholesaler. They do not purchase books from individual authors.

The author must call the book wholesalers or large distributors and sell the wholesalers or distributors in carrying his/her book.

Excellent sales skills are needed for this process.

Several follow-up sales calls are made by the author and hopefully the wholesaler or distributor will agree to carry the book.

Now, the author will go back to the bookstore and offer to present a book-signing event.

The bookstore CRC will jump for joy to get the author signing booked for that day.

Author signing events are usually booked up eight weeks in advance to make sure there will be books available to sell.

The bookstore orders 40 books from the author’s wholesaler. The books will not be paid for until after the completion of the book-signing event.

The author goes to Kinkos or some other office print shop and creates banners, bookmarks, and other marketing materials. The author pays for the materials.

The author calls radio stations, writes news releases and calls personal friends to attend the book-signing event.

The book signing is held. Fifty or sixty people show up to listen to the author.

Five people purchase books.

Immediately, after the book signing the bookstore sends the remaining 35 books back to the publisher.

Thirty days after the book signing the author goes to the bookstore and asks for payment for the five books sold a month before.

The bookstore requests the author to invoice the store at this time. The publisher will receive payment and the author receive a royalty check for those five books purchased from the wholesaler within 90 days of the book- signing event.

Any unsold books that were returned in damaged condition will be credited against royalty payments.

Returns can run between 7% and 35%!

Does this sound like fun to you? How much money does it cost you and how much time will you spend selling five books at a signing?

This is a very realistic example of booksignings. In fact, if the author sells five books at the event the store considers it a success! You have introduced many people that will purchase other books while they are in the store or at a later date.

If you were to present this book-signing example to successful insurance sales professionals that are earning over $100000 per year, they will simply not believe you!

The author spends too much time selling for too little money.

The eBook Author

The eBook author writes a book.

The eBook author posts books on Mightywords.com.

An hour later the book is selling over the Internet. Mightywords is handling payment and fulfillment of each order.

There are no book returns.

Then the author posts the book to other eBook selling websites, negotiating all contracts by e-mail. The author never has to speak to another individual and waste valuable time over the telephone.

The author takes a sample chapter or an article and submits this information to top websites that may be interested in the author’s subject area.

Offering content for web visitors greatly enhances the value of the already popular websites. Almost all of the website content managers will jump for the opportunity to give their web visitors more reasons to come back to their websites.

The sample chapters and articles are given in exchange for links back to the author’s book listing at Mightywords.com, the Booklocker, 1stbooks Library, or perhaps the author’s own website.

If you can propose just four or five new article postings each day for just five days per week, you can achieve tremendous success in selling your eBooks.

This is a great technique used by authors that have to work a regular job for a living. The authors can create and deliver their proposals by e-mail. They don’t have to make business contacts during working hours. By working just a few hours each night and on weekends, each author can drive thousands of readers to his own website within just a few months.

Once the article is posted to a website it will stay in a particular location for a while and then will be “archived” for new subscribers to read later on.

The article will include links back to the author’s website or a designated book selling website and will be referenced by major search engines.

This gives the author a major boost in popularity.

A great benefit of this type of selling for an author is the fact that no words are spoken. No sales skills are needed. If the eBook author prices the book at only $10 per book and each contact for the month sells one book per contact, the author will sell over $1000 in volume the very first month of book selling!

The author will receive anywhere from 25% to 100% of the sales totals based on the arrangements made with eBook sellers and eBook publishers.

For this example let us assume that the author earns $500 clear profit for the first month of selling eBooks.

How much did the author have to spend in marketing the eBook?

Zero!

The author did not have to make banners, bookmarks or other marketing materials.

The author did not have to make a single phone call.

In the second month, if the author executes the same marketing strategy, another 100 eBook sellers or book referring websites will be added to the author’s sales force.

Again, if each eBook publisher only sells one book, the author has $500 plus another $500 from the original websites that are selling or referring his book from their archived web locations.

If the author keeps up this pace and the book selling websites are only sending one new book buyer each month, the author will keep $39000 the first year.

If the author adds a second book, the total could be $78000 or more.

Also, remember the author will receive around 100% of what is selling from his own website.

We are not factoring in you working more than two or three hours per day. We are not factoring in the fact that you can set up an affiliate program like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble and bring potentially thousands of potential book-sellers to link over to your website and send you business.

The example is based on each of your website content contacts. Each of the contacts has your sample chapter or article sending you just one customer each month!

You are adding hundreds of sales people each month that are working 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. There are no product or territory restrictions.

You may wish to go back and send each contact two or three articles thus doubling or tripling your eBook sales.

You still haven’t spent any money!

Show this model to insurance sales professionals.

Watch how huge their eyes become when they listen to your eBook-marketing plan!

Q: Can I sell my very first eBook without spending any money?
A: Yes. Actually you will have to pay a small amount of money for eBook storage charges but the fee is only $1 per month at Mightywords.com.

Let’s begin by showing you how to take care of marketing your eBook on Mightywords.com

After you sign up you will receive confirmation e-mail and the URL (universal resource locator) of each eBook you upload. Once you have that URL or Internet address of your eBook, consider that a website. In order to sell your eBook you must market the eBook effectively yourself.

You will be put in the Mightywords.com website so people can find you but just as you are listed in a traditional bookstore with a traditional bound book, it is still up to the author to push the book.

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend any money to accomplish this goal. The magic about using the Internet for marketing is that you always have two choices to make. You can pay for marketing or you can get it for free.

It may cost money to get featured on Amazon.com or barneandnoble.com. When you enter a brick and mortar bookstore and see books facing out on a table, the publisher and sometimes the author paid for that placement. Book placement in a retail store just isn’t a whim of the store manager or the favorite employee’s choice. You spend money to get the best position in the stores.

By marketing your eBooks over the Internet, you will always have a choice to pay or not to pay. Elect not to pay. Once you have extinguished all of the free marketing resources then make a decision to pay. You may surprise yourself and really find some great things that work for you without spending a dime for marketing expenses.

I am betting you never run out of effective free Internet resources.

It is absolutely impossible to run out of free Internet marketing opportunities.

Marketing On Mightywords.com

The following Steps will help you succeed in selling your eBooks with Mightywords.com:

1. Go to the section on Mightywords.com that is labeled the “Writer’s Corner.”

Read and re-read all of the free help given you on this site. Visit this site often as Mightywords adds additional Internet marketing resources.

2. If you have a website, join the Mightywords.com affiliate program. If you don’t find the program listing on
Mightywords.com, go to Fatbrain.com’s website at:

www.fatbrain.com

This affiliate program is great. Rather than creating a space on your personal website you get to create your own personal eBook Store, which is stored on Fatbrain.com’s server. You receive an Internet URL that you can link to your site or send to friends and insert in your marketing information. You can give your own special name to that store. Every time someone uses your unique eBook store to purchase eBooks, Mightywords pays you commissions.

You can earn up to 20% of the selling price at this writing. Even if you don’t sell any of your eBooks through this linking process you may earn money on selling other “favorites” that are sold from your web links.

3. Contact discussion lists on the Internet and offer a free chapter of your eBook to the list manager. Copy and paste the sample chapter of your eBook and send this to the list manager. This is an effective technique I personally learned from Angela Adair-Hoy the author of How to Write, Publish and Sell eBooks. (Buy it, Angela has great information) You can find the URLs of the discussion lists in Chapter Seven of this book and on my website.

At the end of the sample chapter insert the precise link to your eBook located on Mightywords.com or the precise links to your Mightywords website store, or both. Make sure you insert the full URL with “http” included. This way a person can open the URLs by clicking on your text e-mail.

4. Conduct a search on Yahoo, the famous search directory. Look up the topic area of your eBook. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes. What kind of information would they be looking for that your book is a perfect fit?

For example, if you have written a Southwestern Style Cookbook, who would be interested? Would people that are vacationing to Arizona or New Mexico be interested in southwestern style cooking? These people may be interested in Cowboy Poetry, or travel information.

Lets assume they enter search words like, cooking then Arizona or New Mexico. Your job is to search using the same words. Take the first 10 search returns and send an offer to the webmasters at each website. Offer to send the webmasters free articles or free chapters that will be posted on the websites. Top websites usually offer free content to their visitors. In exchange for posting your free chapter, tell the webmasters you will provide content with the consideration that you receive a bi-line that tells webs visitors where they can purchase your eBooks. Most webmasters will respond favorably to your offer.

5. Look up e-zines that fit your eBook genre. An e-zine is a newsletter that all the great websites offer to their visitors. E-zine editors are ALWAYS looking for articles.

E-mail a proposal to the e-zine editor and offer to submit an article or free chapter of your eBook.

You may even offer the e-zine editor non-exclusive serial rights to post a chapter for each issue in exchange for an advertisement in the e-zine.

You will offer the free information in exchange for links to your eBook store or your unique eBook Internet URL.

6. Contact your local newspaper and give them a similar offer.

7. Contact the editors of association newsletters that focus on your subject area. Make the newsletter editors the same offer. Association members have computers. They have the ability to purchase and read your eBooks.

8. Ask about speaking to the group on your topic. In exchange for speaking have handouts ready that include complete ordering instructions on how each member can order your eBook from Mightywords and other eBook order fulfilling websites.

9. Offer to teach a class based on your eBook at a community college. Make your eBook the required textbook. Print it out and put it into a binder. Set a price and get it into the college bookstore.

10. Read everything you can on marketing books and eBooks over the Internet. Create a marketing plan and do at least 3 eBook marketing activities each day.

Always believe in yourself. Your efforts will pay off with persistence. As you talk to other people about your newly published eBook, your friends, co-workers and relatives will give you valuable insights on other free eBook selling opportunities.

Get the Internet business tricks and tools that I use in my business everyday at:

NetProfitsToday.com/resources/

Here’s the full list of goodies:

• Advertising (PPC)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Auctions
• Audio
• AutoResponders / Ezines / Mailing Lists
• Consultants
• Copywriting
• Credit Card Processing
• Domain Registration & Hosting
• Dropshipping
• Ebooks
• Ecommerce/Credit Card Processing
• Education
• Freebies
• Forums
• Graphics
• Income Opportunies & Products to Sell
• Joint Venturing
• Research Tools
• Surveys: Get Paid for Your Opinion
• Traffic Generation
• Web Site Design & Packages
• Writing

Here are some examples of successful affiliate marketers… Remember, these are ordinary people, just like you and me.

Cashring is the affiliate program for the I Want U online dating service. Their top affiliate earns an astounding 5000 per month, each and every month, and JUST from that one program! I’ve also heard that the top iFriends affiliate earns over $80,000 per month. My guess is that figure is LOW by a long shot, as iFriends pays up to $70 per free signup to their program, which is an adult web chat service.

Matt Haller is a young man who signed up for my Net Profits Coach newsletter, bought Ken Evoy’s Site Build it! ecommerce package and then started an affiliate site promoting hip hop items. Six months after he started, he sent me an email thanking me for helping to change his life. Why? Because he was already earning 10 grand per month!

Deborah Casey is another student of mine, a 53 year old disabled lady living in Seattle. Within eight months of starting her affiliate business she was making 8 grand a month, and she’s now up to $15,000 per month!

Jim Cockrum is an affiliate of mine who sells my ebook, the Super Affiliate Handbook. One day, every time I checked stats for my book sales, I was floored by how many orders Jim was generating. In a little under 24 hours, he’d made $1000 just by sending out an endorsement to his mailing list.

Oh ya, and yours truly, Rosalind Gardner… THAT’s why I wrote the “The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online”. I wanted EVERYONE who was interested in making money online to know what possibilities exist for people with no experience. Because, I had absolutely no business background, no selling experience and actually some disdain for sales people as a group, I’m proof positive that ANYONE can earn money as an affiliate.

In this section I discuss the 6 steps you will take to quickly, easily and inexpensively get started in your affiliate marketing business.

Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics

The topic you choose should both interest you and have high consumer demand. You already know what interests you, but how do you find out whether a topic has high demand?

Well, the first place I check is a free tool call the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It is located at:

inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

At Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, you simply enter a term related to your site and it will show you:

• Related searches that include your term
• How many times that term was searched in the previous month

So, let’s assume for a moment that you are a mortgage and insurance broker who suspects that insurance might be a good service to sell online.

To find out how many people are looking for insurance online, I typed in the word ‘insurance’ and discovered that the keyword ‘insurance’ had been searched for 971,914 times at Overture and its search partners in just one month!

That’s almost a million people! Wow!

As I consider any term that receives 50,000 or more searches in a month a subject with good demand and potentially viable, insurance looks like it might just be a winning topic for an affiliate web site.

Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services

Once you’ve determined that your topic is in high demand, you need to find out now is whether there are merchants selling related products and services online, AND how much commission they pay.

For that, I go first to Commission Junction.

Commission Junction is an ‘affiliate network’ that puts merchants and affiliates together. They refer to merchants as ‘advertisers’ and the affiliates are called ‘publishers’.

To see all the merchants with products and services at Commission Junction, you’ll need to set up a free account.

To do that, go to Commission Junction, then click on ‘Solutions’ near the top right- hand portion of the page, then go to the left side of the Solutions page and click on ‘CJ Marketplace’.

At the very bottom of that page and you’ll find a link for the application process. Where it asks you to supply a URL, just enter yahoo.com or geocities.com if you don’t already have a web site.

Once your account is set up and you’ve logged into the Commission Junction interface, click on ‘Get Links’, and select ‘Advertisers’ in the drop-down box beside the word ‘Search’ near the top of the page. Next, type in the word ‘insurance’.

My search came up with 51 merchants. Your results may be more or less depending on whether merchants have been added to, or dropped from the network.

In choosing merchants, you want to select those with the highest EPC ratings and commissions.

What is an EPC Rating?

3-month EPC: 3-month EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows how well an advertiser converts Web site visitors into commissions, over a three-month period.

7-day EPC: 7-day EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows the average commissions paid to publishers for every 100 clicks, over the past seven days. Use this number to see the most recent EPC trend for advertisers.

So how well did our insurance merchants do?

Zurich insurance had a 7-day EPC rating of $250.88. That means that affiliates are earning an average 250.88 for every 100 visitors they send to Zurich Insurance.

Wow!

Now what about those commission rates?

Well, at the Good Sam Club, if the customer completes a form and becomes a member, Good Sam will pay you $5.00. That’s JUST to fill out a form.

And if they purchase an Emergency Road Service package, you’ll get paid $15.00.

Not bad!

You can find even MORE merchants at the following affiliate networks:

„ Linkshare
linkshare.com

„ BeFree
affiliates.befree.com

„ Clickbank
clickbank.com

Cheap Sources of Site Content

Because we want to leave the selling job up to the merchant, an affiliate’s job is to ‘pre-sell’ their merchants’ products.

To pre-sell, you need site content.

Content consists of articles and endorsements that explains how your visitors problems can be solved by using the products you promote. In most cases, webmasters write their own endorsements for the products they promote.

However, if you aren’t inclined to write product endorsements, you can:

„ Find Free Content
„ Use Merchants’ Ad Copy
„ Pay for Content

I like looking for free content first.

Staying with our ‘insurance’ topic, I searched Google for the terms “Free Articles”+ “Insurance” and found the following articles listed at legalwhiz.com:

• “How to Save on Title Insurance Costs”
• “Understanding the Terms of Your New Loan”
• “Common Sense Mortgage Tips!”

In many cases, the author will allow you to use his work on your site if you include credit to the author and a link back to his site.

This is even MORE effective when the author has an affiliate program and you can make money from that link.

To get approval to use the article, you’d simply email the author a request, and they will usually be very happy to have you use their articles on your site.

Another way to get free content is to use what the merchant makes available to their affiliates.

For example, here is an email promotion that Corey Rudl gives his affiliates to promote his very popular ‘Insiders Secrets to Internet Marketing’ course.

Dear Friend,

This e-mail is extremely urgent so please read the entire thing… I would feel terrible if you missed out on this because you did not get my e-mail in time.

I just got an e-mail from Corey Rudl and he said there were only 150 copies left of the new version of his best-selling Internet marketing course, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, that includes the $952 in FREE bonuses!

Chances are, as you read this, a lot of those 150 copies are already gone.

Just to recap my last e-mail, Corey Rudl is literally “the” guru of Internet marketing… he’s grown his online businesses to over $7.6 million in online sales last year and he gets over 1.8 million visitors to his web sites every month!

And in the new version of his best selling course he is going to show everything from step-by-step instructions you can use to start your very own Internet business in as little as 48 hours to how to build a top-selling web site… for less than $100!

No matter how small your budget is, Corey shows you the cheapest ways to build a web site that sells!

He is going to show you where to find hot products (in 20 minutes or LESS!) that you can start selling TODAY! These in-demand products will sell like hot cakes, no matter what your experience!

Corey will even reveal his personal rolodex with 100s of FREE and cheap online tools, resources, and software that you can use to automate your web site (and save yourself at least 35 hours every week)!

And if that’s not enough, he is going to even reveal, for the first time, some of his most advanced strategies like how to get #1 rankings in the search engines and get tons of free traffic from the “Big Guys” like Google… and his secret to writing sales copy that increases sales by 400% (or MORE)!

Like I said before, I know these strategies are going to make my business tons of extra money in 2004 and as my subscriber I want to make sure you experience the same rewards, so go to…

www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/3885

… if the page is still there, this means you made
it in time and he still has some copies of his course with the additional $952 worth of FREE bonuses!

So please hurry! And if you have any questions, just let me know.

All the best…

As you can see, that copy is written in the first-person, so it looks like it is coming directly from you. Use merchant copy judiciously however, as your credibility will take a beating if your subscribers and visitors have seen the exact same copy in other newsletters and on other affiliate sites.

Lastly, you can have articles written for you, sometimes very inexpensively.

To find ghost writers on the net, check out some of these sites:

• Guru.com
• FreelanceWriters.com
• Elance.com

Once you have organized your content, it’s time to start putting you’re your site together.

The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite

There are 3 steps to quickly build your website. They are:

1. Register a Domain
2. Domain Hosting
3. Buy Template

Domain registration is painless, and CHEAP. Go to Godaddy.com where it will cost you 8.95/year for each domain. You can get them even cheaper when you register for more than one year.

Here are two good, yet inexpensive, hosting services that I recommend.

• GoDaddy.com - $8.95/mo.
• HostRocket - $9.95/mo.

The quickest way to build a website is to buy a template. Here is a list of some of the best template sites I’ve found to date:

o 4Templates.com
o BigWebmaster.com
o BoxedArt.com
o DollarTemplates.com

My personal favorite is BoxedArt.com. You can download as many templates as you want from Boxed Art, all for only $49.96 for six months access.

Once you’ve placed your content in your template and sent it to your web host, it’s time to join affiliate programs.

Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs

Go back to Commission Junction or the site where you found products you want to promote and sign up for the merchants’ affiliate programs.

The reason you build your site before joining the programs, is to have a site to show the merchant. This demonstrates that you are indeed serious about selling their product, and will almost guarantee your acceptance into their program.

Get Oodles of Traffic Today!

After placing merchant links on your site, it’s time to let the world know about your site.

Although I discuss ‘29 Ways to Market Your Site’ in the Super Affiliate Handbook, my favorite way to bring visitors to my sites is by using cheap Pay- Per-Click search engine advertising.

The primary benefit of PPC’s is that you can drive targeted traffic to your site quickly, instead of waiting months for the search engines to list your site… if they ever do.

Just a few of these include:

• Google.com
• Overture.com
• Enhance Interactive
• Findwhat.com
• Kanoodle.com

Pay-per-clicks allow you to bid on terms or keywords that are relevant to your site. In our insurance site example, the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool produced a list that included terms like:

car insurance
insurance
health insurance
life insurance
home insurance
affordable health insurance
travel insurance
renters insurance
insurance quote
car insurance quote
insurance lead

You should be able to find and bid on HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of terms in any category you choose. The more keywords you list your site under, the more exposure your site will get.

I HIGHLY recommend that you use PPC’s to advertise your site. I get returns of 2, 3, 4, and sometimes even FIVE dollars for every dollar I spend advertising my site.

So, let’s summarize again the steps that it takes to build an affiliate site…

„ Find a HUGE Market
„ Find Products & Services
„ Collect/Create Web Content
„ Build Site
„ Market Site
„ and… Enjoy the BIG Kachings!

Unlike building a new brick and mortar business in Downtown Anywhere, the things you’ll need to start a business on the Internet are CHEAP.

Here’s a list of the basic tools you’ll need to become an affiliate marketer.

• Desk
• Chair
• Computer
• Internet Connection
• Email
• Text Editor

You probably already have all those things, right?

Even if you don’t have the desk and chair, you can always throw the laptop on your bed and work from there.

Here are some basic expenses…

Register Domain
Hosting
Web Site Template

$ 8.95/year
$ 8.95/month
$10.00 - $50.00 (once)

With start-up costs this low, I don’t know why anyone would consider starting a business anywhere other than on the Internet!!

There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business…

1. No Production Costs - The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren’t an issue. The product has been developed and proven - all on the merchant’s nickel.

2. Low Cost Set-Up - Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need.

3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy - I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate’s ability to promote his web site.

4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services - What isn’t sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site.

5. No Sales Experience Needed - When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

6. No Employees - The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries. Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for you as an affiliate, it’s doubtful you’ll ever have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions.

7. No Expensive Merchant Accounts Needed - Setting up a merchant account for any business is a time-consuming and costly business. It’s even more tedious for Internet businesses. However, merchant accounts aren’t a concern when you’re an affiliate. The merchant bears that cost and handles all processing of payments. You never have to lose sleep over potential chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account when you’re an affiliate.

8. No Inventory to Carry - Even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment, as an affiliate you can sell large items without storage concerns.

9. No Order-Processing - Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that!

10. No Product Shipping - The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates.

11. No Customer Service Concerns - Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don’t worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers.

12. Make Money While You Sleep - What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night?

13. The World at Your Doorstep - The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than many small-town merchants see in in a year.

14. Minimal Risk - The product you chose isn’t making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It’s that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don’t sell.

15. High Income Potential - If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there’s not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination.

Affiliate marketing is a Partnership or Joint Venture with an online merchant to sell their products and/or services in exchange for remuneration.

Your affiliate link is coded with a special ID which is unique to you. When a sale is made through your special link, the merchant credits that sale to you.

Then you just wait for the check to arrive!

You can use Resell Rights products to effectively upsell to your customers and increase your profits dramatically.

Di you ever order a meal from McDonalds?

I’m sure you have noticed that they always ask if you want something extra with your order.

“Would you like fries with that?”

“Would you like some dessert with that?”

Do you ever think of how much extra money this tactic produces for the store?

Let me tell you - lots!

So what does this got to do with the resell rights business?

Well, you can do just the same…

Let’s say that you sell a $47 valued Ebook package. When your customer clicks through to your order page you can ask them for an upsell.

You may give them the option of purchasing an extra product for a special discount.

You could for example offer them a $47 valued Ebook for only $17.

That’s a saving for your customer of $30 but also an increase in profits for you - at no extra cost!

This marketing tactic is a real winner and owning the rights to a whole list of products gives you the ability to unleash this strategy for mind blowing profits.

Think about it for a minute.

If you click through to buy a product, and you see an offer like the one above and you know that this offer is only available now - decide whether you want to save $30 by getting the extra product or just get the initial product you wanted.

Not many people can resist a bargain and many -if not most- will choose to take the upsell.

This is the real magic of resale rights products.

This is simply amazing - and you know what?

I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I didn’t own all the resale rights products.

That’s another advantage of resale rights products.

You can also create a best selling product yourself… without doing any writing easy and affordably.

For instance… you can get the content for your own Ebook by:

-Hiring a copy or ghostwriter.

Keep in mind when you’re hiring a copywriter that they should provide you original content and not just copy and paste from web sites. A good rule of thumb to go by is $5 per 500 – 1000 word article.

Remember that the initial investment that you make for any type of product that is downloadable, will pay you over and over again without any extra costs.

(If you’d like to know what to look out for when you hire a ghostwriter, you should get a copy of the Ghostwriters From The Inside Out report.)

Here are some freelance sites where freelancers bid for your work. It doesn’t cost you a penny to find out how much it costs to have something produced.

www.elance.com
www.guru.com
www.scriptlance.com
www.designoutpost.com
www.getafreelancer.com

- Gather articles and compile them into an Ebook.

It is perfectly legal to gather articles that you find for free and place them in Ebooks that you sell or give away.

Just contact the authors of the article and tell them that you want to use their article in an Ebook. Most authors will appreciate this.

I prefer this method because it doesn’t cost any money. Make sure that the articles contain quality information so your readers will not be disappointed.

As long as your Ebook delivers what you promise in the sales page, you’ll be ok.

If you’re afraid of selling information that is available for free, let me tell you that people pay not only for information but for convenience.

They don’t want to wade through tons of crappy content to find good content.

If you can find good content for them, then they will reward you with a “finder’s fee”.

Here are some places where you will find articles:

www.ideamarketers.com
www.articlesubmissions.com
www.authorconnection.com
ezinearticles.com

- Interview experts and create an Ebook.

This is another easy way. There are many products curently selling interviews of experts.

The good thing is that most people who market online will feel proud to contribute to an Ebook.

I know I do

The trick is to be original.

People get excited over new products that they can resell, because they are tired of seeing the same products circulating around.

If they hear about a new product with resell rights, it will really catch their attention.

TIP: In Resale Rights Secrets, Ewen Chia interviewed 19 experts on resell rights marketing. I highly recommend you to get a copy. You’ll discover amazing secrets and powerful strategies to outsell your toughest competition -especially if you’re selling the exact same products as them!

The most important aspect for resell rights marketers is that they don’t have to create their own product.

So… why not create your own products?

Now you probably wonder why you would create your own product when you’re interested in reselling other people’s products?

Because its dead simple…

It comes down to bundling some resell rights products together in a unique way, creating a unique angle for selling it and then write a compelling sales page. That’s exactly what I did when I created the Instant Niche Turnkey Package.

You can use your imagination and create your own theme. The more you niche (segment) your topics, the better your product will sell.

Here are 4 other important reasons to set up your own niche Ebook package:

• You can barter your own package to obtain other resell rights products.

• You can customize your own package for joint venture partners.

• You have no restrictions on how you want to promote your package.

• You can greatly enhance your ability to promote resell products and affiliate programs by offering your package as bonuses.

Another example of a niche package is the eBay Extreme collection. I searched for some old Ebooks about eBay on my hard disk, checked to see if the content was still up to date, and then I compiled a package from these Ebooks.

I announced the new package to an eBay related Opt-In list that I had built in the past, and started selling copies within minutes.

TIP: It’s really simple to turn an old Ebook into a hotselling Info-Product. I did it in less than 1 hour, and now this Ebook works like an automated profits generator, without me lifting one finger.

Do you see how it works?

You select some quality Ebooks with Resell Rights about a certain subject, bundle your own package, create a sales page, and wham… there you have another unique product to make profits from.

Print out the following line, and spell it on your PC monitor…

A Unique Offer + An Attractive Sales Page + A Targeted List = SALES !

You can offer resell rights to your package, barter your package for other products with resell rights, offer your package as an upsell, offer your product as a bonus, the posibilties are endless.