After watching my affiliate income slowly wither away over the last couple of years, I decided in the new year to become a product developer. This decision came about after reading Scott Boulsch’s report on the Death of Adsense and reading James Brausch’s blog for about 10 months. Interestingly, both people have equally difficult names to spell.
The idea is that you raise yourself to the top of the Internet food chain. The worst place to be is a bottom-feeder shaking your empty “buy me a beer” can at passing web visitors. In the middle are affiliates taking a cut of the product producers profits.
So in January, rather than joining a gym, I started developing my own product to a plan. Hence the “Lead Capture System” was born after just 2 weeks. I even sold some units of this after promoting it on the Warrior Forum and made a profit.
Then I made a WordPress Directory product. No sales of that.
But these products were very basic, so next I caught onto the Local Business Directory Portal craze and decided to develop a portal script. Man, that was hard. One month of grind and I have my basic script working and live on the web. But I learned how to make it better along the way so I am not selling it as a product until it is re-jigged.
Also, I have vastly improved a classified Ads script I wrote before. This is good enough to sell but I want to Ad some PayPal functionality to it to make it very attractive to buyers so that they can make money with it.
I have quite a lot of ideas for cool scripts up my sleeve but it is taking a lot of time and effort to code them and now it’s March already. But the idea of authoring a bunch of great products is a powerful motivating force.
Brausch’s teaching is to record DVD’s of what you are knowledgeable about and sell those via a blog. A good example of such a product that I found was how to play Rock Guitar and play famous riffs. That kind of product is 100x better than a DVD explaining how to comment on Blogs I think.
On the Affiliate marketing side, my interest has been renewed by the appearance of Super Affiliates that are earning staggering sums by leveraging what works. Once they have created a web page (part of a mini-site) that has good conversion to sales. They know how much they can spend on driving traffic to the page and still turn a profit, so they will bid on large numbers of related keywords to drive traffic to the page.
This has given me yet another idea for a product. A mini-site creator that removes most of the effort of creating affiliate sites i.e. you select a template and get pushed to pump out some content pages within a couple of hours and have a reasonable looking site ready to upload to the web in no time at all. Well, you can do this with WordPress, so maybe it’s not such a great idea?
Anyway, go forth and multiply your income …