(1) "It sounds like another scam. What a shameless cliché."

(2) "Others have done it. I wonder if I can, too?"

The truth is, a wise person will lean toward the first response. That's not to say that some people haven't realized great success from some schemes. But statistically, they are few and far between. Yet the phrase remains so seductive. Think of how enthusiastically people discard their cash on lottery tickets and slot machines. Humans are lured by the idea of quick wealth like moths to a flame. "Money for nothing" has been a common refrain for good reason - in spite of skepticism, it continues to work. This is a fact of human nature that you need to understand.

One of the most active areas for internet marketers is in the selling of digital products. Typically these are ebooks (and I use the term loosely) or video tutorials of some type. They are popular since there are no manufacturing or delivery costs. Once created, they can be sold from a website with no further intervention from the seller. Downloading the product and payment is all handled automatically.

You will see these products hawked incessantly in Squidoo lenses and other webpages. In fact, a subset of website types called "minisites" has even emerged to more efficiently attack the market. Sometimes these ebooks and videos are created by the seller himself, but more frequently they are being offered as affiliate products. These are products that are created by some individual and are being promoted by others through special links. These links contain the coded account number for the promoter and route the visitor to a different site where the purchase is actually made. The promoter then gets a commission from the sale. The commission percentages are frequently large.

Many types of digital products are sold in this manner, but there is one type in particular that remains very active despite its frequent low quality. These are ebooks and videos that promise to teach you how to make money selling affiliate products on the internet. It's as if the marketing crowd got to the first link in the incestuous chain and stopped. Ebooks on how to market ebooks - a process that has gone full circle in one step. Surprisingly, this subculture which seeks money from no one else but other wide-eyed marketers is a robust, full-bore, bull economy.

The Process

The basic theory involved in the marketing of digital products is perfectly sound. And done properly, it can be very profitable. It is a residual profit model where the work is done up front, speculatively, and if successful, results in a sales process that runs on autopilot. Here are the basic steps. Do them carefully, be diligent of the quality of your work, and you may well be very successful.

1 - Find a niche market that is active, but not overwhelmed with other marketers. This translates into a subset of a market that can be defined by a phrase. That phrase, used in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, should return a relatively small number of webpages. 

2 - Select keywords or keyphrases that are popular with searchers, but return a relatively small number of Google/Yahoo hits. Clearly, parts 1 and 2 here are performed together.

3 - Having found your niche and two or three keywords that service it, search for a few affiliate products to sell in that niche. If your niche was something related to dogs, you might choose some ebooks and video courses about dog training and dog care. Additionally, you might register with some online retailers selling hard goods for dogs. Many of these will have affiliate programs and anxiously await your referrals. If your niche is "get rich quick in niche marketing" you will want to find some ebooks to sell that tell others how they can do this.

4 - Next, create a Squidoo lens or other webpage that is optimized for those specific keywords. The goal is that your lens or page should turn up in the first page of Google's search results when a search is performed using those keywords. This type of organic search process needs to produce your greatest number of visitors. It is the primary way that you plan to get customers and is the backbone of your business model.

5 - An optional step, but one that will help your sales, is to set up an autoresponder on your webpage. This might be difficult to do in a Squidoo lens, so a link to an external page where the autoresponder signup occurs will be needed. The autoresponder gets people into your mailing list so that you can continue to market to them. You don't want to rely on one visit to your site to make the sale.

6 - Finally, do anything you can to promote your webpage and attract visitors to it. Maybe create some more lenses in other Squidoo topic areas that act as feeders to your main lens. Enroll in message forums where potential customers might congregate. Many will suggest that you need to write articles about your selected niche and submit them to online article publishers. The idea is that people will read your article and then click on the link to your site that should invariably appear at the end.

The Setup

As I mentioned, the basic theory of marketing using the process outlined above is valid. And the secret really only applies to you if you are contemplating entry into this very market. If you are one of these people, you will quickly find thousands of webpages that are optimized just for you. When you arrive, you will find long pages with a very common format. It won't take you long to recognize them. Some of these are termed "squeeze" pages and others are called "sales" letters. In a squeeze page, you are offered something for free (generally an ebook or report) if you will simply supply your email address. That's for the autoresponder, by the way. Getting you into the marketer's mailing list is his or her first objective. It is the hook so that you can't get away so easily.

Offering a free digital product in exchange for an email address is a great idea. This is something you should do when you set up your own website or lens. Give something of real value to your potential customer so that you remove doubt about the quality of your work. The problem arises when people give out junk reports or junk ebooks. These you want to avoid both as a buyer as well as a seller.

Sales pages are usually formatted in a similar fashion, but their goal is to convince you to make the purchase, right then and there. These squeeze and sales pages have been carefully optimized so that they rise to the top when you enter the right keyword as your search term. And they follow a precise layout that walks you through a bold headline that makes a bold claim, on through the marvelous benefits you will get from using the product, followed by some testimonials from seeming-satisfied customers, and ending with a special money-saving offer. The price will generally end in a 7 since studies have shown that purchasers find that number to be attractive.
 

The Secret

The setup just described, in itself, is effective and legitimate, and generally perfectly ethical. The secret, however, involves the way in which many marketers stack the deck.

First, the product itself. We're mainly talking here about ebooks that purport to teach you how to market other ebooks, but the issues we'll discuss can appear in any product area.

The ebook you are being offered, you are told, will tell you all the secrets to earning quick wealth with minimal effort and at virtually no cost. All to often, however, it tells you little more than what you have already read here - the basics. The ebooks are generally typed double spaced in very large fonts, ostensibly to make them easier to read. The real reason, as you might guess, is to make the documents look larger than they actually are. The writing quality runs the gamut with a majority being poorly, sometimes amateurishly, crafted.

Occasionally you will be buying directly from the ebook author. More likely though, you have been hooked by someone else who is trying the get-rich-quick process by selling you pipe dreams. Although they market themselves as experts and marketing gurus, they are really simply conduits, trying to sell someone else's product. Many times, they've never even seen the product. They just selected it from a catalog of ebooks found on the internet. Clearly, a closed circle where many clueless people try to ensnare other clueless people.

Many ebooks are not actually written by the credited author, either. A vibrant market in PLR (private label rights) ebooks and reports exist. These are frequently written by low-end commercial writers who author the originals for as little as $4 each. The ebooks or articles are then sold to someone else along with permission to claim authorship. Generally poorly written, they are fattened out with chatty fluff that discusses the obvious but rarely provides any useful information.

But what about all those glowing testimonials? That's another part of the secret. Marketers meet up in forums and swap out testimonials for each other. Some enterprising individuals even supply wonderful reports for a fee. This trade in testimonials is quite common and carried out publicly. The bottom line is that you must regard these glowing reports with some skepticism. Do they look authentic, or do they look as if one marketer is simply trying to help out another marketer?

The Summary

Having written all this for you, I do want to say that there is the possibility of great success in online affiliate product marketing. It can be done with some hard work and by following a standard recipe. Beware, however, the ebooks and videos that promise secrets to vast wealth. Their main secret is that most are kitchen table junk, developed by people who only know how to sell dreams.