Make Money Online by Creating Your Own Informational Product
As we’ve said many times before, there are many, many different ways to make money online. Although we discuss PPC the most around here (because it’s what Nate & I have done the most so far in our relatively short Making Money Online careers), you certainly shouldn’t feel limited to only trying PPC marketing to make an extra buck online. And we’ve decided to branch out ourselves a bunch, too. And with that, I want to announce our very first Informational Product: TheBabyNamesBook.com.
How the Book Came to Be:
The idea came to me awhile ago, actually. I was cruising the Google Adwords Toolbox looking for potentially profitable, high-traffic keywords when I somehow happened across the keyword “baby name” and noticed that, between the singular and the plural version of the phrase, there were nearly 11 million monthly searches. And, when I Googled the phrases myself, I noticed that there was nearly no PPC competition for either keyword. “Golden!” I thought. But when I went into all of the affiliate networks we belong to to look for a baby names-related offer to begin to promote, I didn’t find a single one. I was bummed out and quickly put the niche out of my mind to move onto something else. And the “baby names” idea stayed there — on the backburner — until weeks later when I read this post on Shoemoney.com about making money online with your own products. The post was guest written by Scott Skinger, who is the founder and president of www.TrainSignal.com, an ecommerce company that produces and sells computer training products for IT pros. After reading it, I immediately started brainstorming and that’s when I remembered the baby names niche! Brilliant! Since I couldn’t find any baby names products to promote when I wanted to, why not write my own?!
Making the Book:
I was able to procure a baby names database from the Buy, Sell, Trade section of the forums at Namepros.com, which I was able to convert into a Word document and, after a full week of reformatting the database to read like a book, writing an introduction, a table of contents etc. to make it look more like a book and creating a cover for it in Photoshop, I had a final product to start promoting. When all was said and done, the book has nearly 8,000 names — complete with their country or culture of origin, their intended sex, and the meaning of each name, all listed alphabetically — and is more than 180 pages long. Not too shabby. Though it was pretty tedius work reformatting everything, it wasn’t an awful lot of “work” really, and the potential moneymaking benefits could far outweight the work I put into it.
Getting it Online:
I knew I wanted to sell the book online through affiliates. Although it cuts down on the profit margins a great deal to where we’ll only make a few dollars per sale, it also cuts down tremendously on the amount of work we’ll have to do moving forward so we can continue to focus on other projects while this one runs quietly in the background, hopefully bringing in some nice residual income. With that in mind, I set up the landing page in the traditional “long sales letter” style you see many eBooks sold through. Only I didn’t want ours to ramble on for hours like many Make Money Online eBook sales letter pages do; I needed to keep ours short and sweet. I found this great, FREE “sales letter” landing page template from dotcompreneur.com to start with and made some personalizations to it to better fit our niche and our target audience. And just like that, we were in business.
To begin to promote it, I looked into listing the book on ClickBank, PayDotCom, and Click2Sell but ended up opting for ClickBank because of their built-in automation. Although their set up fees are higher than either PayDotCom or Click2Sell, I liked that ClickBank paid my affiliates for me during each sale. With the other two networks, I would have had to pay them all manually from my own funds, which is a pain in the ass. I would have to make sure I was around to pay them on time and that I had enough funds on hand to pay them the money they were due when they were due it. I like that with ClickBank the money that gets to me — even if it takes a few extra days to arrive — is all mine, and I won’t need to worry or do anything more with it.
So I went ahead and followed the ClickBank directions for setting up my site for their system (including the “pitch page”, “thank you page”, payment buttons, etc.) and was good-to-go. I paid the setup fee and litterally 2.5 business days later (yesterday), I got an email saying that my Baby Names Book was approved for sale and would be listed in the ClickBank marketplace to be promoted.
What Happens Next:
From here, we can only hope (and monitor and optimize, of course) that it begins to be promoted right away and takes off, which I think it should. Between all of the Baby Names-related keywords (there are a bunch of high-traffic ones; look them up) and keywords like “mom”, “pregnant”, etc. there are TENS OF MILLIONS of monthly searches — think about it, how many women become pregnant every day; it’s a limitless niche — and very little PPC competition currently. After that, we can sit back and rake in the money while an army of affiliate marketers sell the product for us. As I said, we can then use that residual income to fuel other products we have on our horizon. Here’s wishing us luck!
Note: if you would like to promote our Baby Names Book “Hello, My Name Is…”, make sure you’re signed up with Clickbank.com and then click here to get started.
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