This is almost as ridiculous as "you don't need money." Give me a break. Sales aren't made to the man in the moon… they're made to people on your list. People you have carefully cultivated and "primed."
You need to build a list because your money is IN the list!
You need to build a “herd” as quickly as humanly possible… but don’t purchase one of those deals where you "GET A MILLION EMAILS ON ONE CD." (That's not a list -- that's spam-in-the-making.)
And don’t do the co-registration deal. With this approach, where people go to a site to subscribe to a particular newsletter that they want, they find a checkbox (or other response mechanism) "advertising" your offer. If they're interested, they check the box to agree to receive mailings from you.
This sounds like a good way to get traffic because unlike spam, you've been given permission to make contact. The problem is these people don’t know you from squat. To them, the checkbox is just an invitation for another form of spam.
The online sales game -- any successful sale, in fact -- is about connecting with the right buyer and make the right offer. The right buyer comes from the right list.
The best approach to list-building is strictly OLD SCHOOL: build it from scratch. That way, your list people are "pre-qualified" from the start. They KNOW you right from the beginning. They want to hear from you. They want to learn more from you. They want to listen to what you have to say.
And with a list of people like that, it doesn't take long before they'll want to BUY from you
You don’t need a product or service.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
Let's try a little role-playing game. Pretend you and I were thinking about starting an offline business together. What if I said to you, "Oh, don't worry… all we need to do to succeed is open our store. We don’t need any products or services. But we'll still make oodles of money!"
You'd think I was crazy, right?
Well, then why in the world would you believe the same line of crap when it's being fed to you on the Internet by some expert whose credentials can't be verified?
Commerce is all about products and services and if you want to do business, you NEED a quality product or service to sell. Preferably multiple products and services so that you can back-end sell your existing customers and increase their value to you exponentially by turning them into customers for life.
Do I hear you asking, "Dan, what about those super-affiliates who are making a lot of money promoting other’s products and services?"
That's a good question because yes, there are some exceptions to this rule. But the list of exceptions who do well with someone else's product or service is very short. Plus there are a lot of potential risks to being the middleman.
For example, let me ask you this: what if that company you’re promoting products for go out of business? What if they change their products? Where does that leave you?
The answer: High and dry.
And I can’t even begin to tell you how many affiliate "horror stories" I've heard. It's common to hear about vendors not paying affiliates on-time. Or to learn that customers may bypass the affiliate link, so you don’t get paid.
Vendors tracking software screws up, there are "technical difficulties" so you don’t get credited for the sale… and on, and on, and on.
And here's a killer: more often than not, you don’t get to keep the customer, they do. Many affiliate programs are set up so that you only get credit for the first sale a consumer makes. After that, all the profits stay with the vendor.
They keep all the back-end profits.
And when they back-end sell their products and services, you don’t get a dime. It doesn't matter that your links are making the vendor rich. The effort is yours, but the profit is theirs.
When it comes to my income… I'm a control freak! But affiliate programs are out of your control. Your financial well-being is in someone else's hands… and there's nothing you can do to manage your success.
You can't test different things on your site because it’s NOT your site. You can't change what's not working because it's not yours to change. All you can do is cross your fingers and hope for the best…
Hardly a recipe for success, I think you'll agree.
I am not saying you can’t promote other peoples products, but very often you should do it as a back-end, not front-end. You front-end your own stuff, and you can back-end other products and services.
There's still one more problem with promoting other people's stuff: when you stop promoting, your income also stops. You have to constantly be on the lookout to find the NEXT red-hot product and constantly be inking the next great deal.
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