Admittedly, this plugin may be a bit frivolous since it’s just a simple plugin that adds a little special styling to your posts, and then again it might not be so meaningless. I have noticed that in the magazine and print world, this sort of technique is often used on the beginning of an article to draw your eye to the beginning paragraph or two where the author then has the opportunity to completely suck you into reading the whole article with that first descriptive paragraph.

I figure what we know as regular offline marketers have been perfecting their mind control craft since just after WWII according to what has become one of my favorite shows, Mad Men. And, they’ve spent billions by now on research and testing. So even though these offline sales people usually don’t know jack about Internet marketing to this day, they do know a lot about specific things like presentation and psychology and drawing people’s attention here or there to this or that bit of copy or whatever.

So, this plugin isn’t anything astounding, but I like to incorporate these kinds of things as I become aware of them. Also, this was a good way to teach myself, using a very simple idea, how to write plugins for Wordpress. Besides, it just looks cool.

You can get it in my new Wordpress plugins section here:

http://www.markdrussell.com/wordpress-plugins/

(Also works for Wordpress Pages.)

Perhaps more surprising is that most of you have probably already been suckered into one form or another of online sweatshop without realizing it. Don’t panic. I’m going to show you how this can work in your favor if you are aware of it and know how to take advantage of it, instead of getting suckered into doing someone else’s job for them.

To get a better understanding of this online sweatshop idea, let’s go back a handful of years to when I first got online and started encountering them. Most of these were missed entirely by the Newsweek article.

The first time it occurred to me that the Internet is a sweatshop, it was pretty black and white. It was way back when I first got online that I bought one of those “make money online filling out surveys” scams and discovered that lots and lots of companies were getting who knows how many thousands of people to fill out probably millions of surveys for pennies each. I was shocked to discover how awfully these companies were taking advantage of people and how gullible, or desperate, those people must be to try it. I got suckered into buying an information product about it, but I sure wasn’t going to waste my time working long hours for pennies and hope.

The next sweatshop idea that came along was forums. Forums are more of a gray area and I won’t pick on them too much. Most forums, instead of the example above where they just take and take, fall more into the “user generated content” arena and are a milder form of online sweatshop. If done well, a forum can even seem like more of a community. These little beauties can be challenging to run and moderate, but you can’t beat the user created content that increases the overall worth of the site day by day. But, a forum, and although many are, doesn’t have to be a sweatshop. You can create more of a community by offering incentives for people to make quality posts, or running contests and giving away prizes… or just by giving of yourself and being helpful. Mostly though, with forums, it seems that owners simply offer the company of others and little more. And, who’s looking for that? A: Those who don’t know anything about anything yet, and B: Those trying to sell something to those that don’t know anything yet. So, these forums become little more than a meeting place for hunter and prey, wolf and deer, shark and noobie, if you will, to interact, instead of any sort of community.

And then came YouTube and MySpace and other networking sites. These sorts of sites are the ultimate virtual sweatshops. Users get addicted even, to working for you, to building your content for you, expecting nothing or little in return. They can’t stop and they can’t help themselves. It is sites like this that are more the main focus of the Newsweek article mentioned above and I can see why. It has shocked me for years that people were so willing to work, to even produce whole movies, for free… or just for some sort of “Internet fame”. Whatever it could be, I’m still not exactly sure. They’re drawn to it like… [Insert disgusting metaphor here]. But, more power to them. Everyone’s glad they do it. My advice to you though… if you’re trying to promote a site or sell anything online… make sure you’re using these sites and not the other way around.

The latest and I must say, most annoying, of the virtual sweatshops is another thing that Newsweek missed entirely, the online intern program. When I first noticed the first of these I laughed out loud to myself because I already knew what a bad deal real world intern programs can be, getting kids to work for free because they’re kids and have no experience or the sense to say, “Hey, this isn’t a good deal for me.”, all for the promise of some sort of hands on experience or real world connections that may or may not really happen. Here’s yet another example of the offline sales sharks bringing their awful ideas into the online business world.

Now, I should say that if these Internet marketing intern programs actually taught you anything useful, it would be well worth it. But, the ones I’ve seen so far are simply ways for someone else to automate some boring task they don’t want to do anymore. And, what’s more… the task you’re doing and learning probably isn’t that effective for you to do on your own, unless you start your own intern program around it. What’s worse is I just heard rumor that there’s some new service being released that creates these “intern” sites for people. I suppose that’s a good thing though, because hopefully the more people that get suckered into working for nothing… the sooner everyone else will know to avoid such things.

So, what are the Internet marketing or online business lessons in all this?

I suppose there are a few kernels of wisdom in here for different people so…

The lesson for people who are new to Internet business is to not get suckered into working for free. It takes a lot of time to do the real work of building an online business and you literally don’t time to be working for someone else for nothing. It sucks to be just starting out and totally in the dark, and have little money to invest. I still remember it well from my own experience. But, you’d be better off saving up and paying for some decent information than working for free doing some menial task for someone else that effectively teaches you nothing. Why not just become an affiliate if you want to start slow? At least then you’ll be getting paid while you learn. Hopefully, these people will take all this talent in creating “procedures” and use it to simply educate their affiliates and other webmasters, instead of taking advantage noobies and taking master rights to their first product ideas on top of everything.

The lesson for webmasters and more advanced Internet business owners is that if you want your users to build your content for you, all you have to do is open your doors and let them in. They’re shockingly eager to do it if you have or provide the minimum of incentives for your target market. And user generated content is an awesomely powerful thing to have on your site.
But, as this article in Newsweek demonstrates, thankfully more and more people are catching on that they’re getting a bad deal, even if only from these video sites like YouTube. And, they’re having fun! I can’t imagine how jaded and angry things like these intern programs must be making people on a daily basis. Come on gurus! The last thing this niche needs is more jaded people thinking we’re all shady creeps. You should be battling that perception instead of making it worse.

So, what am I saying? I’m saying that we should absolutely take advantage of user generated content whenever possible; however I don’t think it’s a very good idea over the long term to be using and abusing people like some of these guys do. If you’re going to let people do your job for you… at least give them a fair deal and don’t make it seem like some Internet sweatshop.

Special Test Link:

Countdown Clock:

I don’t normally don’t create many .ico files and as for favicons, besides from trying a program called Microangelo a couple years ago that was more power than I needed for the occasional favicon, I’ve lately just been using Photoshop as usual to create the graphics, then a free online tool to change my .gif images to .ico files, here: http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/

Recently though, I found myself making a bunch of them so I searched around a little and found a plugin that does the trick from within Photoshop. Now I can just save files directly as .ico and that’s that. It’s always nice to save a little time.

You can get the plugin here along with a bunch more interesting plugins and filters for Photoshop:

http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/

If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m a bit of a greenhorn to this blogging thing. The truth is I never had to blog exactly to make money online and I never used them for my sales or affiliate sites in the past, although I’ve made a lot of similar websites the hard way and now that I’m seeing what incredible software Wordpress can be, I’m definitely going to use Wordpress for my blogs from now on.

I was a little burned out on coding my own software, having just spend 6 months with it night and day. So I spent a little time on something easy. Wordpress themes are easy to make and I like playing at graphic design, so I went on a little quest to find or create the ultimate Wordpress theme.

So what am I looking for in the Ultimate Wordpress Theme?

Design Considerations

1. Flexible designs that stretch to fit the screen are great. But, stretching a text area too wide makes it hard to read. I know that roughly 95% of computer users now use 1024×768 as their screen resolution. A handful of people still use 800×600. And, the rest use a higher resolution. So, this theme needs to be designed for 1024×768, squeeze down to 800×600 if need be, and not stretch so much in higher resolutions that the text becomes difficult to read.
2. I am creating this particular theme for this particular blog here, but what I’m really trying to create here, overall, is the ultimate Wordpress theme… a theme that I, (and you), might use for any blog that I, (or you), throw up for fun or for profit or both. So, there should be room for industry standard advertisement blocks throughout the site.
3. Plain websites are boring and an all-white design is hard on the eyes when reading on-screen, so I want the site to have some sort of colored, designed layout. But, I don’t want the site to be loaded down with huge graphics, or be held prisoner by it’s design. So, the designed portion should just “wrap” around the main content area and be independent of it. Also, the colors have to be easily changed on the fly and there hould be a place to pop in any header graphic of my choice, or none. The inner portion of the site will only use small icon graphics and no images for layout.
4. A few additional preferences, at least for me, are that it should be constructed using xhtml and css for easy customization via the stylesheet and have the sidebar widgets capability enabled, possibly with several dynamic sidebars.

SEO Considerations

1. The theme should not have any h2 tags in the sidebar, or h1 tags sprinkled throughout the theme.
2. The h1 tag should be reserved to wrap only the title for a post on it’ss single post page.

There are more SEO considerations, but those have more to do with the actual Wordpress settings and not the theme files, like setting up permalinks and tags, a static archive and a sitemap, and also getting a decent SEO plugin to handle title and meta tags across your site… all of which I’ll have to cover separately, sometime in the near future.

After a few days of searching, how many themes did I find that had all these features? If you guessed absolutely none, you’re absolutely right. To be fair, there are some decent SEO templates out there, but none that meet all my requirements. Heck, most “SEO” templates still leave the h1 tag in the header! So, I had to roll my own, as the gamers like to say.

I spent a couple days reading up on SEO and Wordpress themes (and wading through a flood of sales pitches btw to find real information [boy, is that saturated]) and then I spent another few days splicing and customizing code for this theme. I hope you find it useful.

Remember, the images that make up the outer design wrap around everything else, so you can pop in your own graphics to drastically change the look of the site to just about anything you can imagine, and then of course make with an editor like Photoshop or The Gimp,. Or, you can take them out and go with pure css if you want to.

Get my latest SEO Wordpress Theme here. 

Clickbank provides some code samples for setting up your Clickbank sales site’s security (so only your customers can ever view your “thank-you page”). But they don’t offer any examples or support on how to implement it on your site.

For this tutorial I’m using the PHP version of the Clickbank security script, exactly as it comes from Clickbank.com. After watching this video you should be able to set up basic Clickbank security for any sales or membership site’s thank you page.

Or, to have this and practically everything else done for you, try my new software at CBMerchantPro.com.

Tip: Use the full screen button in the flash video toolbar to view in full screen mode.

To watch the full video and download this free script plus my example code, become a subscriber by visiting:
http://www.cbmerchantpro.com/members/subscribe.php

I know, I know… I said I’d be having some 24 or 48 hour specials for the release of my new software soon. The truth is that it was so much work getting everything created that I just had to take some time off to recharge my batteries. Plus, I’m taking classes at a local college and it’s finals week.

I’ll shoot for next Monday or Tuesday to run my first limited-time special offer. But, if you can’t wait and you also want to pick up another awesome product, check out this offer from Aaron Brandon:

http://www.aaronbrandon.com/newsletter/ 

Through the month of May you can get my software for a whopping 75% off the normal price at only $50! But, you can only get this special price by subscribing to Aaron’s newsletter by the end of this month. I think you’re actually already too late to get this month’s newsletter, but Aaron will email you the link to my special offer when you subscribe… up until May 31st.

You can still look forward to some huge discount specials to be announced very soon, but they surely won’t be as low as $50. That special price is only for subscribers to Aaron’s offline newsletter. Aaron has been a great friend and colleague over the past 5 years and I wanted to do something nice for him.

So, if you want to do something nice for yourself, go subscribe to his private offline newsletter and get yourself a copy of my awesome software for just a fraction of the regular price through the end of May.

The weirdest thing has come to my attention lately and it’s just too ludicrous to believe. But, it seems many of you have been convinced by some wingnut that putting your digital products exclusively on CD or DVD is a good idea. At least that’s what I hear and I’ve now watched at least one friend do it themselves. The reason? Apparently, whomever they’re listening to is paranoid about selling anything online anymore because he thinks everyone is out to get him and stealing his stuff. I’ll tell y’all what I told my friend, “I don’t know what he said to everyone to get them following his lead on this, but it sounds like a bad idea for several reasons.”.

First of all, if you want to protect anything online you don’t just slap it up on a page somewhere with a regular link that just anyone in the world can go to. Duh, right? That’s what I’m told this "teacher" used to do anyway. First of all I’d never do that, but if I did… how could I then turn around and complain about people getting it for free? (Another thing I hear he did, when I asked about all this.) By putting something online without any security at all, I’ve essentially just donated it to the world. Besides if people really want to pirate your stuff they’ll find some way. Also, in my experience the tiny amount of sharing going on, especially in Internet business where it’s even more scarce, simply doesn’t cut into the bottom line as much as a lot of companies like to pretend. I think the ones that claim huge losses due to imagined piracy are probably looking for a government handout or lying for tax reasons or something.

Listen… The magic, (and also the danger, if going without protection), of digital products is that they can be instantly delivered, which means, as a consumer, you don’t have to wait around for days or weeks to get what you just paid for. That’s supposed to be a good thing.

What about the energy and resources wasted and the environmental cost of forcing your customers to exclusively purchase disks and have them shipped around the world? The extra plastic alone is enough to be worrisome, but transportation and shipping organizations are one of the worst polluters out there, so that’s probably the biggest waste. When it’s a downloadable digital product in the first place, why not allow your users the convenience and satisfaction of an instant download? Why make them wait around for an extra needless step, like shipping, to be completed? Because you don’t understand basic website security? That’s a terrible reason.

Sure, having the ability to send out disks when customers request them is a necessary function of many software and Internet business companies. Some people would just rather, for whatever reason, order a disk of your product. So… put in a link. Offer it on the side if you want for the few people that occasionally come along that have to have it that way. But, for the majority of your customer’s sakes and even for the planet’s sake, don’t turn a perfectly good download into a physical product for no good reason other than your own selfish needs. It’s bad for your customers and it’s bad for the planet and so it’s just bad for business.

Although I can’t be sure, this seems to be another example one of the biggest problems that I see happening with Internet business over the last few years. I don’t know if it was because the usual hoard of offline sales sharks finally started recovering from the whole dot com bust or what. But, somebody noticed that resourceful Moms & Pops were still making plenty of money on the Internet and over the last several years the online business world seems to have been inundated and virtually taken over by the old offline sales and marketing crowd.

They bring with them the ugly sales culture that causes even people like my own Mom to wrinkle their noses when I tell them I now teach Internet business and marketing , and say, “Oh, you’re one of those?”, like they just stepped in poo… forcing me to try and explain, beginning with, “No, no, I’m not one of those jerks, I promise”.

Offline Newsletters:

Another thing that seems to be becoming more and more popular these days is turning an online newsletter into an offline newsletter. At first glance it may seem that I would naturally be opposed to this too. But, you’re wrong there. An offline newsletter can be a very good thing for some online businesses because it gives the writer a much deeper sense of contact with a smaller audience and he or she can share more personal, or business trade secret, type information with his or her readers. Although, it still creates what might be further unnecessary resources and time wasted for both you and your customers, because of the extra shipping and waiting time and paper used, taking a second look at it reveals that the offline newsletter has some huge benefits that keep it from raising my ire for the time being.

One great example of why I like offline newsletters is what a friend of mine, Aaron Brandon is doing over at: http://www.AaronBrandon.com/newsletter/. Although, his offline newsletter is brand new, it already shares with it’s readers some wonderful insights into online business and marketing, not to mention some awesome deals and giveaways… things that he would never be able to share publicly with just anyone and everyone. As we all know, some kinds of business information are best kept on the down-low, or the next thing you know, whatever it may be will end up flooded with copycats.

Another point in the offline newsletter’s favor is that the offline newsletter is a nice convenience for many that find reading on-screen more difficult, or like to relax on the couch while absorbing information. Also, the offline newsletter, gives the writer more assurance of security; that his information is only going to the people it’s meant to go to. While securing information like this in a private members area online is probably a faster solution for your customers, and usually just as secure, there is always the possibility of some genius hacking in for some nefarious purpose, I suppose, however unlikely that may be.

So, for these reasons, I won’t be so hard on the idea of offline newsletters as I was on the notion of forcing your customers to buy all your products on disk only. For one, there are actually some positive reasons to still offer a paper newsletter in the age of digital. For another, mailing a few letters out to a small group on your special offline newsletter list doesn’t cause even close to as much waste, in time and energy and land-fill space, as does having disks pressed for every one of your customers. And finally, if it really is a secret idea… then protecting it from prying eyes, even from a single super geek set of eyes one single time, is much more crucial than protecting a copy of some download.

So to wrap things up, as nice as it is to have the ability to have disks pressed and drop shipped so easily, don’t sacrifice customer satisfaction and the ease of instantly deliverable products when selling digital products online, just so you can feel like a big shot that sells DVDs or you’re paranoid about pirates or insecure about your ability to set up a secure website. After all, It’s the Internet, Stupid. Instant access to downloadable material is what it’s for. If you’re worried about it, get some software to protect your information and your downloads instead of trying to rely on something like security by obfuscation or just having no security at all. And lastly, the offline newsletter, even though it is going backwards and turning what could be online into a physical product, it still has some merits and can be effectively deployed to convey special, or secret, information to a select group. Plus, you can then make your followers fold the newsletters into origami likenesses of themselves then light them on fire when they’re done with them… you know, for security purposes. ;~)

Sure, there are a plethora of affiliate clearinghouse and payment processor services to choose from in the online world. But, I’ve tried most of them and in my experience; none of them is quite as reliable and so perfectly simple and streamlined as Clickbank for either end of the spectrum. In this article I will briefly cover the best ways to make money at Clickbank both as an affiliate and as a merchant selling your own digital products.

How To Make Money With Clickbank As An Affiliate

First, if you’re just getting started trying to make money online, affiliate marketing is a great way to start out and Clickbank is a great place to be an affiliate, earning money while you learn the ropes of Internet business, and/or cutting your teeth in any particular “niche” or target market in the digital product world.

To begin, for those of you just starting out and would just like to make a few extra hundred or thousand a month on the side, start by browsing the marketplace at Clickbank and choose a few products with a high gravity and excellent sales pages that catch your interest (Hint: If you only went there just to browse around and check to see if you want to sell a product, and while reading it’s sales page you suddenly find yourself wanting to buy it for no good reason… it might be a good sales page. ;-) ).

You don’t technically have to love, or even have tried, the products you promote but it helps a lot, so anytime you can… be sure to buy the products that are the best sellers in your chosen area, or even just the ones you like the most at first… then promote the products that end up actually being the best products and get your refund on the stinkers.

Also, besides just looking at Clickbank, try to think in terms of overall industries and their current and future potential. That’s a big enough subject for another post. To learn more about conducting market research online, check out this post here.

Once you have some good looking candidates, then you’re ready to begin your marketing.

Unfortunately, the subject of Internet marketing is so vast that I couldn’t possibly sum it all up in one paragraph, or even an article. But, I’ll give it a shot anyway. The general idea is you just try everything… a little of this and a little of that… until you find out what works for you and your website and your target audience, trying new things tracking your results.(I’ll go deeper into the various methods of online marketing and tracking in later posts.)

Some marketers like to use PPC for the majority of their marketing, for instance, and some like to use article marketing exclusively. And, the really successful marketers use several and a variety of methods at the same time while testing and tweaking and searching for that perfect mix… And, even when you think you know everything; it’s still a good idea to try new things as they come along. Duh, it’s the Internet.

But, try and relax into it if you can. It takes time to learn how to constantly keep learning new things, not to mention learning about all the different avenues a person may take to market their products online, from PPC to SEO and article marketing and forum marketing and blog marketing and list marketing and even YouTube or MySpace type marketing now… plus things like classifieds or, buying traffic anywhere for that matter, even offline or maybe organizing joint ventures… the list is probably endless and I doubt I’ve even discovered everything yet after all these years at it.

But, I can tell you for sure that if you keep trying, you’ll eventually “get it” and it won’t all seem so confusing anymore. “It’s not rocket science”, as an old friend of mine likes to say. It just takes awhile to familiarize yourself with the all the concepts and tools and whatnot, and most especially your target market(s). And, of course nothing can substitute for you doing enough research into your chosen “niche”, or target market, beforehand.

One thing that often holds up new affiliates is their lack of understanding of web design principles and the different types of website an affiliate might create.

That’s another thing that’s a large enough topic to have its own series of posts. But, for starters, to learn more about the different types of affiliate websites you can start and get 5 solid ideas, check out this post here.

How To Make Money With Clickbank As A Merchant

Now, once you find a good niche and you start making some money as an affiliate you’ll at some point realize that you’ve become somewhat of an expert in that field, whatever it happens to be, both because you’ve had to do so much research on the topic and you most likely have been writing some sort of content about your main topic, whether that’s articles or web page content, for weeks or even months.

At that point you should start thinking about creating your own digital product(s). For ideas, all you need to have done is paid attention to your target market while you learned to sell to it as an affiliate. If you’ve spent time with your target market and gotten to know them personally, you’re even more qualified to create info-products for your niche as you know exactly what problems they face and what they want.

Once you know that, it’s just a matter of solving a problem or sometimes just giving them what they want. That’s it. It’s perhaps easier said than done but it’s still pretty simple. And, what is easy these days is that all you need is a maybe speech-to-text program or a screen-capture program and you don’t even need to know how to type to create your very own digital product!

Like I mentioned in a previous post, using any speech-to-text program, you can simply dictate what you wish to say into the program and the text will appear, mostly the way you want it, on the screen and then you can simply edit the text later, before you turn it into a PDF and start selling it. Done. Ebook Accomplished.

Or, if you can demonstrate on-screen whatever information you’re sharing with people, you merely have to record your screen with some screen-capture software while you demonstrate how to do something! Now you have a video product with an even higher perceived value to your customers. (Just why that is I don’t know since I find videos to be a slower and more boring way to learn something. But, anyway…)

I see that sort of thing every day and believe me… most of the products that come out like that are terrible and just haphazardly slapped together in a hurry… and yet people still constantly buy them, and apparently even find them useful and keep them, from what I’ve seen.

So, if your product is actually good, and by good I only mean not completely outsourced or slapped together willy-nilly… or, even if it is… and it actually helps people and solves a problem or makes things better in any small way… “you’re golden” and marketing will be simply a matter of letting everyone know your product exists.

So you spend awhile creating your digital product and you’re pleased with the results. You’d think that after all that work you’d be done but there’s still more. Next you have to figure out how to sell it and make the website for that.

Once you get your first info-product created you might start looking around for a payment processor. But, hold on a second. Here’s the main point I’m trying to get across in this article. If you’ve been an affiliate of Clickbank for any length of time you’ve probably already fallen in love with their ease of use, the reliability of their bi-weekly checks and their near instant stats compared with the other affiliate clearinghouse sites. Right? I know I have. Well, you’re in luck and you can look no further when you want to sell your own digital products!

Whether you’ve noticed or not, as a Clickbank affiliate you already use one of the best digital product payment processors on the Internet to help you sell other people’s products… now harness that power yourself when you begin selling your own digital products by becoming a professional Clickbank merchant!

“Okay, I have sounds great. But, how do I actually do it?” you might be asking. Well, the only problem with setting up as a merchant, or publisher, at Clickbank is that they don’t offer much in the way of help in building your sales or subscription sites so you can make sales and accept payments and/or provide private members areas to subscribers only. They also don’t offer any way to protect your downloads if you’re selling a one-time fee info-product that people download.

Well, since I do a lot of info-product sales at Clickbank, I wanted a one-in-all solution that would make it faster and easier to set up shop at Clickbank each time, for any of my info-product ideas as they come along. I was willing to pay several hundred dollars for a good solution and I looked around for months without finding anything worth mentioning.

It seems that there’s really no good solution out there that fits what I need to sell my products through Clickbank. So, I made my own. My new software handles all the Clickbank security, private members’ areas at various “levels” of subscription or one-time payment, download protection and "thank you" pages and even the backend Help and FAQ section for your customers. It does a lot more and is highly flexible and customizable. You can find it here:

http://www.cbmerchantpro.com

But, unless you’re already a rich Clickbank pro and you want to pay full price now just to be one of the first to get your hands on it, you should wait until next Tuesday, when I plan to start a 24hrs special here on the blog, where you can get the entire CBMerchantPro package and access to the private members area with all the extras for a huge discount for a limited time.

But, I’m getting a little off topic. To wrap things up, the gist if what I’m saying is this:

I’ve been using Clickbank for years now, both as an affiliate and as a merchant and amazingly I’ve never had a single problem with them ever… in fact they’ve only ever surprised me with good things, and that’s just totally unheard of online and totally blows my mind when I think about it. So I just have to recommend them to everyone, whether you’re just starting out and would like to make money while you learn, or even if you’re already an expert in some field and you’re ready to create your first digital product, Clickbank is usually the best tool to use to get the job done. And, where it falls short is where my new software begins, making the whole thing more powerful than ever… at least for merchants. Sorry affiliates, I’ll make some cool software to make your lives easier too, one of these days.

Ok, so you’ve done your research, you’ve maybe started a few affiliate sales sites to test the waters and find out what most people in your target market seem to want with a passion. And, now you have ideas for information or software products that are just going to knock their socks off. So now what? How does one go about digital product creation?

A lot of people these days seem to have a knee-jerk response to this question: “Outsource it”. (Or, worse… some tell you to just slap anything together and sell it.)

But, these sorts of answers seem to be not much more than a cop-out, like the “Just test it” knee-jerk response, they seem to be simply a way to deflect questions that people either don’t want to answer, or maybe they don’t have the creativity or experience to offer an educated guess.

Everything has to start somewhere and skimping on that initial version because you haven’t done your research and you have no idea what your customers actually want and you are “testing”, doesn’t seem to me like the best way to do business.

Besides, I’ve tried a couple of the major freelancing sites over the years and I’ve always felt I got poor quality work at over-inflated prices.

So, just as good old fashioned experience and intuition can be a good way to avoid unnecessarily having to “just test” everything under the sun, right out of the gate… maybe experience and intuition can also be useful in knowing when to outsource and when to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself.

In my experience, where your actual info-product is concerned, it’s usually better to do it yourself. Sure, anything else should be outsourced as much as possible, but, not the main product, in my view.

But, don’t worry, I have good news if you don’t have the cash, or the patience for outsourcing yet you think you don’t have what it takes to create your own info-product either.

Truth is, you’d probably be surprised at how easy it actually is to create an info-product without paying someone to hold your hand. Sometimes all you need is a little more confidence and someone to let you know that it’s not that hard to do and point you in the right direction. Besides, gaining the knowledge you’re about to share was the hard part.

Ideas for creating your info-product:

• Dictate an ebook: You don’t even have to type it yourself! Using any speech to text program, like the one that comes with MS Word, all you have to do is say what you want to say and then edit the document to your liking. (Speech to text is not perfect, but if you can’t type it’s fast and easy enough.) Or, even if you type it all out yourself… isn’t it just like doing a report back in school? You just research your topic and assemble all the information with your own insights. It’s not like you’re writing a novel and need to worry about plot and character development. It’s just a report on whatever amazing thing you’ve just discovered. The research is the hard part and maybe a better candidate for outsourcing.

• Create screen-capture tutorials: If your subject involves tasks that can be demonstrated on-screen, you can simply use a program like Camtasia, or CamStudio, to create what’s called a screen-capture video. You just record your screen while you show your customers first-hand how to do whatever it is you’re showing them how to do. Although these are recommend as the sole means of info-product creation by some, these “screen caps” shouldn’t be relied on too heavily and should not be used as the primary delivery method of your content, especially if it involves many steps or takes hours to complete, because long screen capture videos get boring and they make it difficult to find specific steps and needed information later on. That said, screen capture videos are a great way to demonstrate any “sticky” spots.

• Put up a website with a private members area: This is my favorite method for creating and delivering information products because it is a delivery system that can actually become the product itself when you put your information in a web page in one of your private members areas. Not only does it give you more security and control over your products and who has access to them, but you can also include any of the other types of products within the members areas… videos, downloads, interactive members areas, or whatever else you can think of. And, to top it off, it also gives you the ability to charge either a recurring or a one-time fee for access to any level or specific area of your site. This all around solution has served me well over the years and is actually the main focus of my latest product over at CBMerchantPro.com.

(The site is up, but I haven’t officially begun the marketing for it yet, so don’t run off and buy it today unless you want to pay full price. I won’t mind, if you do. ;~) But, hold onto your hats… I’ll announce the grand opening and a special discount price here on the blog any day now. [ I just included a new file upload system to store digital products for easy customer downloading and I’m putting final touches on the instructions for that.].)

It would probably serve my purposes better to just tell you to get a product outsourced or slapped together as quick as you can so you can try my system that makes it easier to sell your new product online… but that’s just bad advice and I can’t do it.

I can, however, tell you that even if you don’t have a product yet, you could easily create one with my system by simply filling in a members area with the information you plan on selling, without worrying about converting to PDF problems, or security, or wondering how you’re going to deliver it… You could just insert your information into the page and upload your downloads to the database and have it displayed it in the private areas where you allow customers to interact with the system.

So, in conclusion I say that info-products are easier than ever to create and outsourcing is a great tool for some things but it’s not something to be relied upon too heavily or used to create the core of any product. Besides it’s probably easier than you think to just create your own info-products when we live in this age conveniences like screen capture and speech-to-text programs, plus dynamic website software ;~).

Also, the experience of creating your own products can be more difficult, sure, but it also can be more rewarding and enlightening. I recommend you create as much of at least the core of your products as you reasonably can in a doable time-frame.

That said, all the secondary stuff just slows you down and takes time away from you creating your actual products… and for that matter anything that’s not your actual product, like the system you use to set up your “store” or sales or membership sites… (wink, wink) But, no seriously… these sorts of tasks should absolutely, without a doubt, always be outsourced as much as possible to save time and sanity.

And, now you don’t even have to hire out the work to create it all. I made it for you. If you sell information of any kind, it all of it just got a whole lot easier with my new software and systems. But, more on that later…

I just can’t do it anymore. I’ve had enough of pretending I like the emperor’s new boring white “clothes” (er.. website actually). I imagine that to any creative person like me, having a plain white business blog ( like the friends who encouraged and persuaded me into doing this said was the best thing to do ) is like letting my website sit around it it’s “tighty whiteys”.

I can’t take it anymore. The designer in me is crying for freedom and my business instinct tells me that this whole “plainer than plain” idea is just put out there to stop the sort of thing that was common in the early days of the Internet; websites that were styled not by any sort of common standards like we have today and sometimes looked like a kaleidoscope of colors and backgrounds and fonts that were hard to read through all the “creativity”.

But… I have a decent eye for design and I know enough to leave the main text alone, leave it black on white, and just style the rest as subtly as I can. Why can’t I have some style then, instead of some plain-ass boring whiter than white tighty whitey website? Why not?

Because the readily available testing results say so? I don’t buy it. They probably tested crappy graphics against no graphics. Anyway, I’ll test it myself and that’s the position I’d recommend to everyone. Don’t listen to the gurus. Try things for yourself. I’ve always known that and I’m ashamed to have forgotten it temporarily or for having gone against my instincts again, just to be polite.

Now that I think about it… I’d bet money on decent graphics over none any day.

The only person I ever heard of that actually tested professional graphics against no graphics was Marlon Sanders and you just have to check out a few of his sales pages to see what must work the best: Graphics.

I don’t know why I ever started out with that plain white theme… Oh wait, it was to make the friends who pushed me into finally blogging that suggested it. (They’re all in some kind of cult with one of these latest gurus.) I was trying to be respectful to some of my friends and students who said that it’s the best way to start a business blog.

But, I can’t do it, sorry. I need to take my own path, especially since I think the guru y’all bend over to is a total jerk and I know for a fact he outright stole the idea for his best product from a guy that was offering him a joint venture. The worst part is he gets all righteous on his blog, telling people how to live their lives and whatnot. What a hypocrite.

I’ve seen these guys come and go for years now and it’s nothing new. Once they’ve sufficiently impressed their girlfriends or made whatever fast cash they came for they usually go out like the paper tigers they always were.

Hopefully, I can begin to set it straight as my blog develops. I plan on taking the strangest possible path to making money in this “making money” niche. I’m not going to hustle you, or tell you how to live your life, or fill your head with so much information I cause the dreaded overload. What I will do is, I’ll tell you what works. I’ll make you software that makes your life easier. And, maybe I’ll someday find my teaching voice and do a decent job of explaining this whole Internet business mess.

One thing I’ve never been and I’ll never be is one who follows the herd. To my early readers, I’m sorry I let you down; I was blinded by a friendship and the spirit of being respectful to those bloggers that came before. That won’t happen again.

I’m the captain of this ship and from here on out I’m setting a new course.

“Put ‘er into the wind and head on straight until sunrise, captain (that’s me)! …I see adventure on the horizon.”