Set Oil Wells By Creating Informational Products

I remember when I first saw Rosalind Gardner’s video, which showed her Affiliate earnings online and the checks she had in her mail. If you need some motivation, have a look here. And I remember, when someone posted a comment thinking that her checks were not that high – each alone. And she answered, that not every check might be high but they all add up. I couldn’t agree more. Later I realized what she did was nothing but setting different oil wells on the Internet – with her own informational products such as her Super Affiliate Handbook but also with thousands of Affiliate links. The more articles, the more eBooks, the more products you recommend – the more money you make in the end. And yes, it all adds up. 50 times $50 also make a full-time income. And it seems to be much more possible to sell items for $50 than $500, or?

But how should we create oil wells and informational products?

Setting up 50 different websites and hope that each will make us $50? I don’t think, that this is a good solution. Some Internet Marketers have 100s of websites and I really admire them. I often wonder how they maintain it? How can you add new content to each of them regularly? I think there are many people, who have proven that you can even make with one site a full-time income (for example our digital scrapbooking site with about 1,000 daily visitors in average). And I think that, if you can make a full-time income with a digital scrapbooking site, you can most probably make a full-time income out of everything.

So that is not what I meant when I said that we should set up different oil wells on the Internet to create us a passive income. Actually, I think that, when you want to be successful, you need to focus on one site until it is successful and move on as soon as it makes money. But you should create different sources of income on your site. For example, at Digidesignresort I first had just set up the store and relied mostly on the products the designers added to the store – if they add new stuff, I would most probably make money if I send out a newsletter and recommend these products. But it never seemed to be enough. A normal commission you get by recommending digital scrapbooking products is about 25% – this means from an average price of $4 per product you make just $1. How many products do you have to sell until you make a decent income?

Well, many. After quiet some time I realized that this wouldn’t make me enough money to live from it. I started to create products as a digital designer and added them to my own store and to other stores. With my own products I could increase my income but the point is – even if you make $4 from your own products, you still need to sell many products to make enough of it. It took me some time again to figure that out 😉

In the end I started to add digital scrapbooking tutorials as well as articles and product recommendations to the site. This was the time when the hobby site finally was turned into a full-time income source. But this did not happen until I figured out that I need to add different oil wells.

What you can learn from my mistake: 

Once you have your website up and running add the “moneymakers” (Affiliate links) but also think about creating your own products – whether this is a video course or an EBook. This way you set up different oil wells and do not depend on anyone but yourself. Additionally, think out of the box: You can reach more people, when you enter different platforms such video sharing sites (YouTube) or podcasting (iTunes). Beside that, when you set up a website think upfront what will make you money and if that will be enough for the time you invest.

Filed in: Blog • Internet Marketing