Work at home on the Internet: internet marketing and affiliate program help.
Back issues here Issue 260 | Feb 5thh 2003

how to profit from reprint rights

mini sites and niche markets

who designed this site?

back to building niche sites

which site gives me ideas?

Letter from Phil

here's the issue I held over from the weekend, after the tragedy of the space shuttle disaster.

Well it's not actually held over, because I didn't write anything.

So everything has been written today...

What's first?

A piece on reprint rights...

I've long admired internet marketer Willie Crawford, who quietly goes about the business of helping people succeed online.

And one of the things I admire about him is that he doesn't make all his income from this "internet marketing" niche.

Which is the general theme of today's letter, as you'll see when you keep reading.

Anyway, Willie, who is making over $100,000 a year writing and selling cookbooks has now released (with Bob Silber) a product teaching you how to profit from buying and selling reprint rights.

There's a lot of money to be made in this field, and it's all detailed here for just $27 which includes a recording of a one hour tele-seminar, with Willie and Bob sharing everything they know. It also comes with a .pdf transcript.

Naturally, a product about reprint rights also comes with the option to buy reprint rights... and if you have an ezine or mailing list to
market to they're well worth considering.

But here's a bit of a warning...there's also a lot of money to be lost buying resale/reprint rights...rights to some products go for
thousands of dollars and if you don't know how to market them you can lose out big time.

2. Now for some stuff about mini sites and niche markets...

Ok, we're about to delve into niche marketing. As you probably know I build mini sites to promote affiliate programs, but things aren't always smooth sailing....

Here's an example:

1. For the past few days I've been working on a brand new site selling an electronic product.

And I've had big problems finding a good affiliate program to promote on the site.

The product is so new there's hardly anyone around selling it... which is why I'm building the site...but I made the little mistake of not checking out the available affiliate programs first.

The main one I wanted wouldn't let me join because I'm not in the USA. The second one rejected my application with no explanation. A third turned me down because the site has less than 5000 monthly visitors (well it would, being brand new, wouldn't it?)

It only leaves me with a choice of three affiliate programs. One is Amazon which doesn't pay well. Another has a site so complicated that it probably has a terrible visitor to buyer conversion rate.

The third, and the one I'm going to concentrate on, seems ok, but pays lower commissions than the programs which rejected me.

3. Put the man who designed this site to work for you...

A quick way to put up a great looking site is to hire the very talented Brian Terry to do all the hard work for you. He designed this site, and he also and delivers excellent ebook covers as part of the package.

Here's one of the ezine/ebook/report covers he did for this newsletter.

Brian's not cheap, but he charges a lot less than he should.

4. Back to building niche sites...

I keep getting asked why I spend time building sites selling electronic products, and other consumer products when I'm quite well known in the "internet marketing field" and could be "cashing in" on it.

Well one answer to that is I hate the thought of "cashing in" on you.

I don't want to put put in the situation where I have to spin a lot of hype here to earn my living.

But there is another reason...and it's that there's a whole big world out there. This "internet marketing" niche is just a tiny arena, with very few people doing well in it.

Or even searching for information about it.

Using the Overture Search Suggestion tool you can see that:

internet marketing was looked up 51,854 times.

which is less than

golf balls at 85,899

chocolate at 128,653

binoculars 197,859\

tropical fish 364,792

horses 502,779

candles 544,710

recipes 1,462,713 (no wonder Willie's doing so well with his Soul Food recipe book)

and the list could go on and on.

Mind you, I did find something looked up less than internet marketing, and that's earwax with just 894 searches.

That's not to say you should dismiss building a site on earwax. If you could find a product to sell, (and I'm not sure you could) it wouldn't take much to get to the top of the search engines.

The third placed site, for instance, only has a Google Pagerank of 4 and has just 10 backward links. I'm sure you could beat that :)

Even the top site, which is nothing to do with wax in ears, only has 40 backward links.

I found out this information by using the free Google Toolbar

Why are Pagerank and backward links important? Because Google uses backward links as a large part of it's ranking criteria.

You can read more about this...and a whole lot more... in Andre le Roux's useful new book, The Search Engine Yearbook 2003. More on Andre's book when I've had time to devour it properly.

5.Do you know which site gives me more ideas
for mini sites than any other?

It's Corey Rudl's "Secrets To Their Success" site which I've written about a few times. Take a look at the Mad Fish and Englishmen piece from issue 257 for more on this site and subject.

When I read the success stories, and see the subjects people are building sites around, my 2 brain cells go into overdrive and start throwing ideas around my mainly empty head.

So if you're looking for some inspiration give the free trial a spin.

This month features a 20-something Brit who started a small site about exercise equipment just 10 months ago and is now making $5000 a month in affiliate income.... and works on it just 2 hours a week.

Now imagine building and running 5 or 6 sites like that?