The Super Affiliate Handbook

Super affiliate Rosalind Gardner started tooling around the Internet in 1996, swapping seeds and growing tips with other passionate gardeners.  When she visited a dating site a few years later and saw a “Webmasters Make Money” banner, she was intrigued and clicked on it.  A few months later, after setting up and playing around with a dating website, she got her first $10 affiliate check payment in the mail.  She knew she was on to something.

That was 1998.  By 2000, she’d replaced her air traffic controller salary with affiliate marketing income and quit her day job.  By 2002, she was earning nearly $500,000 a year as an affiliate marketer and wrote the Super Affiliate Handbook to tell how she did it.  It was an instant best seller and remains popular to this day because of Rosalind’s step-by-step approach (she updates it regularly as the Internet changes and her skills increase).  She wasn’t a business person when she started and had no prior experience selling stuff online, but she had an idea, a desire to replace her income, and a strong work ethic.  That’s all it took.

Today, Rosalind works just a few hours a week, frequently takes month-long vacations, lives an affluent lifestyle — and makes six figures a month with affiliate marketing. 

I’ve learned a lot from her and the Super Affiliate Handbook and think you can too.  If affiliate marketing sounds interesting and profitable, the Super Affiliate Handbook is a ”must have” resource for your digital library.

Info-Products: Turn Your Knowledge into Cash

Know a lot about something, like gardening, beekeeping, kayaking — or dating hot guys?  Then turn your knowledge into cash by creating an info-product and selling it online.  It’s one of the fastest, easiest ways to make money these days, and people are literally making fortunes selling doing it.

So what’s an info-product?

An info-product (or information product) is simply information that you create (write/speak/video/software) about something you know well that others may like to learn.

For example, let’s say that you have extensive knowledge about how to care for specialty plants in your region. Think others might benefit from your years of experience? You bet! Take all your favorite tips and tricks and turn them into a guide. Know how to raise chickens, find a needle in a haystack, or scuba dive in New Zealand? You could have yourself a infoproduct!  You’re only limited by your imagination.

Here are a few examples of what other people have come up with:

Instant Sales Letters
A marketing wiz took his best sales letters templates, put them together in a collection, and sells them online.  This one product alone has been paying his mortgage for nearly a decade.

Calling Men
A relationship expert shares her tips and tricks on how and when to call and text the datable men you meet.  This product was developed to answer the tons of questions she got on this subject matter from the other relationship books she wrote.

How to Build a Chicken Coop
No only does this product show you how to build a chicken coop that will protect your chickens from predators and deliver delicious eggs, it’s an internet best-seller!  Who’d a thought?

Learn How to Play Piano at Home
A classically trained pianist, tired of the quality of piano programs on the market, decided to produce her own play piano info-product.  She’s been able to replace her teaching income, and now sells info-products and plays in jazz clubs for fun.  No starving musician there!

See the wide variety?  Turn your knowledge into cash!  Just down some of your passions and then take a little time to “flush out” the ideas and see if you have a winner.

How?

Before you do anything, make sure you have a buying market for your product.  This is crucial.  You don’t want to spend time, money, or energy creating something that only a handful of people might buy.  Do your research first.

The easiest way to do this is by going to Google and typing in a phrase that best describes your proposed idea, like puppy training, cooking for two, wedding theme ideas, or whatever, and seeing what’s already available.  If there are millions of pages and lots of paid ads running along the top and right side of the screen, that’s good.  It means you have competition because the market is buying this kind of product.  It’s what you want.  Think about it – how many books or products about your hobby do you have?  Just one?  Unlikely.  You probably have a dozen resources or more.  Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to create an info-product that fills a void in your market, whether it be video, software, checklists, or whatever.  Give the market what they want in a format they haven’t seen before – and you’ll make a ton of money.

If your research turns up few competing websites and few or no paid Google ads, it’s probably because this market doesn’t spend money.  Come up with another idea.  You want to fish where there are plenty of fish to take your bait, not in a vacant field.

If you have an existing business, you can also use infoproducts to educate your customers. If you own a jewelry store, for example, you could create an infoproduct to show what to look for in a diamond. If you’re an accountant, you could produce a “business startup accounting checklist.” By giving your customer valuable information for little or no cost, he’ll be more inclined to trust your advice and buy your product or service.

I first saw this idea in an article about a used piano salesman who created a “How To Tell If Your Used Piano Is Worth The Money” pamphlet in which he revealed the dirty tricks some second hand dealers use to make a used piano sound like it’s in better shape than it is. The pamphlet was distributed to students free of charge through piano teachers in the area, and brought in a huge response from parents not wanting to get ripped off on this major purchase.

It’s a clever tactic you can modify to suit your own needs.

If you’d like to learn more about creating an infoproduct, I highly recommend Make Your Knowledge Sell! by Ken Evoy and Monique Harris. Not only is this course a great bargain – it’s free! - it walks you step-by-step through creating an infoproduct so you’ll have marketable material by the time you finish. See for yourself.

Could you make money with an info-product?  There’s only one way to find out…