Product Creation Problem

This is such a common, yet important question that I receive
almost everyday that I decided to devote the entire QnA
session to it.

It’s a really, really important stumbling block we must get over.

In the product creation debate – “Should I just promote other
people or create my own product?” – there is ONE clear winner.

Let me explain in my answer below…

Q: Hi Craig, I am looking for some more information on being an
affiliate as opposed to having my own product. I do not grasp how
this all comes together. For example, would I have my own website
that directs traffic back to the purchase site? Do I use the
content created by the originator or do I still have to come up
with original content? If I want to promote more than one product
would I have a separate website for each? Perhaps you could explain
and also provide a link to a great affiliate site.

A fear I am having a hard time getting over is the fear of not
being credible. I am a computer geek by training, but mainly all
the back end stuff for large organizations. The stuff that most
people never see and never think about. I personally do not enjoy
having to troubleshoot end user situation or answer question along
the lines of “How do I get this program to do this or that?”. The
bigger driver for me is I want to get out of the geek trade
entirely. I am no longer satisfied doing this job.

So, seeing as how the topic I am a subject matter expert in and can
build credibility in is a topic that I do not want to be involved
in any longer, do you have any thoughts on getting over this fear
of credibility if I am “newer” to a topic?

I wanted to extend my appreciation for what you have done with ETR
and this series of webinars you are presenting. Along with the
emails, the FIM and the ETR Premium, the amount and quality of the
information you are sharing is top notch. I get excited by
everything I am watching and reading. Wishing you continued
success. – Jeff

Answer from Craig Ballantyne:
Hi Jeff, Thank you for your email and kind words. Happy to help.

The simple answer is that yes, as an affiliate, you’ll need to do
pretty much EVERYTHING that a product creator would need to
do…except create a product. To sell something on the Internet,
you’ll need eyeballs sent to a sales offer that converts the
visitor into a sale. As an affiliate, you could do that many ways:

1) Buying ads that send people to a website where the offer
converts at a rate that makes you more money than you are spending
on ads.

NOTE: This is tough and often requires a lengthy education (12
months) and the willingness to go negative…often thousands of
dollars into the negative…before you finally ‘get it’ and are
able to make money this way. It’s a tough, tough way to do things.

2) You could build a website and use the search engine optimization
strategies from Rick Porter’s “Let It Rain” report to get traffic
(please also watch the webinar he and I did). You would NOT need a
separate website for each product if the products are related.

Now let’s look at a good blog set up for affiliates sales. We’ll
check out my friend Joel Marion’s website at
http://bodytransformationinsider.com/access/. Pay attention to the
bottom right of this screen shot where you’ll see that Joel has
added affiliate banners to his site that promote other people’s
products.

However, you would need to create original content for your blog in
order to get traffic. You can’t put up duplicate content (i.e. just
repost someone else’s content) on your site because Google would
penalize you and you would not get you any traffic.

Please also listen to the success story call I did with Rusty
Moore, a gentleman who started out selling other people’s products
– including mine – by creating a blog filled with great content.
You can listen to that interview here.

3) You can sell to your email list…but you’ll need a way to
generate an email list first, of course. And that requires you to
use step 2 above.

Bottom line:
I highly recommend you find a product you can create. It’s quite
difficult to start from scratch selling someone else’s product.

Plus, after the sale is made, you do NOT collect the customer
information, and therefore you cannot continue to sell more
products to that buyer…and the best buyer is a recent past buyer.

We receive a lot of questions on this topic and I promise to cover
it in more depth in the future. We will also be working on more and
more articles and interviews that show you “how to identify a
product to create” and “how to sell your first product”. Stay tuned.

Dedicated to your success,

Craig Ballantyne

“The only way to be truly financially independent is to have
multiple streams of income, each one of them sufficient to
pay for the lifestyle you want to live.” – Michael Masterson