A lot of people have asked how I started out in the whole ‘make money online’ thing… I started out with no capital (whatever I wanted to spend, I had to make first) and so dabbled quite a little bit with all aspects that I heard and read about starting out – blackhat and whitehat, freelancing and various other things.

Although I did not flipping websites and domains seriously until a few months later, one of the main ways I generated capital was products.

The funny thing was that I was not making a lot of money at that time… maybe less than $500 per month. However, having read a lot of the ‘guru’ blogs, a lot of them recommended using products… and I listened to them.

When I started out, I thought that the ‘make money online’ niche was the ONLY way to make money… heh. Which is why I’m so against most of it these days… I did some stupid stuff starting out, and although I still do stupid stuff today, there is far less of it.

Anyways, I released three products when I started out, I think… one on domain flipping (I had something like $200 in domain flips and considered myself a guru on the topic after that ), proxies (I had a proxy hit $20 a day and considered myself a guru on the topic after that ) and flipping PLR eBook sites (which, to be fair I did around $1,000 a week on).

Combined, I made around $6,000+ just on the total sales on those products. Remember that this is a person who had no experience selling products beforehand, no list, no reputation to be able to build joint ventures… nothing, basically. However, that was quite a lot of money back then and along with the money I earned from other ventures, allowed me to push on.

The reports I sold at the beginning were standard ‘make money online’ products… however, you can use this guide for anything webmaster related. Search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, blogging… you get the idea. However, I will say that MMO products sold best under the below steps.

I’m not going to recommend you use this unless you know what you are doing – there are enough shoddy products out there promising lots and delivering nothing and more are not needed. However, if you think about your customers and want to satisfy their needs enough, you will make money.

Report Structure

The reports were generally 7 – 15 pages long, and sold for between $7 – $20 dollars. I liked to charge around a dollar per page, so people thought that they were getting good value for their money.

Each report focused on one idea of making money (for example, domains, proxies, PLR eBook sites) and basically was a step by step guide, starting with buying the domain and hosting and then discussing the method. I also threw in a few related bonuses when I could get them.

Due to the reports being so simple (I used a free template and didn’t bother with images etc) they took around 30 minutes to an hour tops to write. Reports at this price range will not appeal to established marketers, but newbies tend to snap them up pretty quickly.

You can throw in flashy graphics, a table of contents if you want… I didn’t.

Where To Sell

I sold my stuff in two places. A third is added, for those of you that will be trying this.

Digital Point’s Buy Sell Trade section – I started a thread in the main section, with friends on board before hand that could post reviews in the thread. I also tried to answer questions when I could and made sure that the opening post was in depth as possible (to save time).

If you are selling an MMO product, nothing works better than showing proof. Showing proof of your earnings can boost sales by quite a bit. You should have proof, as I’m assuming you’ve used the method discussed in your report successfully (why would you create a report if you hadn’t? ).

Warrior Forum Special Offers section – I didn’t do this on my first few gos, but my first product (priced at a cheap $7) made around $300 in sales, which was not bad again for someone that a) wasn’t established on the forum b) wasn’t a big name in IM and c) didn’t have a list of partners to help promote.

I mainly released the product to help build a reputation and this definitely worked, with people signing up for my list and people checking out this blog. If your first product goes well, make sure you follow up with a better, higher priced one. The Warrior Forum does charge $20 to list, but the exposure you can get is worth it.

Deal Dot Com – I have not used this yet, but will be for my next one (whenever that goes out… I really have no idea ). As I’ve not used it, I cannot give you guys my personal experience but I do know a few people that have done pretty well using it.

The above three ways are the easiest to get started… of course, if your product was high quality enough you’d start approaching others to joint venture, maybe launch on Clickbank or Pay Dot Com… it’s entirely up to you.

Delivering The Product

For me, the less work you do, the better it is. Which is why I liked to use E-Junkie to automate the purchase process… all the buyer does is pay and then they get automatically emailed a download link. E-Junkie also helps fight against pre-sale fraud.

E-Junkie costs $5-10 per month, but is well worth it.

Benefiting After The Sale

Around 50% or more of the visitors to this blog at the beginning were from products I launched… they liked the products, and so decided to check it out. If someone’s willing to pay for something you create, it’s likely they’ll check out a free source of information created by you.

You can also benefit by building a list with a service like Aweber, or placing affiliate links in your report to products and services that would help people.

You can also sell resell or master resell rights, however I’d advise against this because…

Flipping The Site

You can buy a domain, put up a short sales page using a free template and sell your product as a website with revenue on places like Sitepoint. By doing this, you can make anywhere between $100 – $1,000+.

By sticking up my PLR eBook product on a related domain (that took 20 minutes to put together) I was able to sell the site for $1,500.

What you will basically doing is selling FULL rights to a buyer… of a product that has proven success (if it’s made sales). If you want, you can even do this before you start selling it – there are brand new products going for upwards of $600 on Sitepoint, although they are pretty well developed.

Problems With This

The problem with this method is that you can get yourself into a kind of comfortable rut… and solely depend on it. Once I started with products, and found out how easy they were… I stopped looking at other things, and just started developing one product after another to sell (I had something like ten on the go at one point). Although they made money (around $100 a day on average, I think) I limited myself… and since I’ve started looking at website flips, coaching classes and other things, my income has multiplied far more.

So my recommendation would be to try products – I always think you should try everything once, as different things work for different people, however make sure you concentrate on other income streams too.

I do not regret starting out with products at all, as this is one of the ways I got this blog to the stage it is at today… however, MAKE SURE YOU BUILD A LIST! I have sold products of my own to thousands of people, and had I built a list from the word go I wouldn’t have to work and would probably be one of those annoying big name marketers that hits you with product launches every week promising the next big thing. Ah well, I didn’t so I’m here – so be it.

I will (hopefully) be discussing how to promote other types of products (non-IM-related) over the next few weeks. We’ll see.