Here’s a sneaky little underused tactic for making money before you even create your product: Decide what your product is going to be and write an outline for it. From this, create a list of bullet points that presell the product.

Now using these bullet points, offer your upcoming product to your list as a Beta test.

Tell your list:

• • The product is being created right now

• • They will get the product the moment it’s finished – expected delivery date is ___

• • They are getting a killer deal because you want and need their feedback

• • They are your beta testers. If it’s software, they will look for bugs. If it is written material, they will let you know about typos, what they think should be added, etc.

• • Once you get their feedback, you will fix any bugs, add what’s missing, fix typos, etc. and send them the finalized, polished version.

• You will then offer the product to the public for a significantly higher price than they paid.

Not only does this give you some money up front to work with – it also provides you with valuable feedback you can use to make your product even better than you originally planned. Guaranteed a handful of your beta testers will give you suggestions you never would have thought of by yourself – suggestions that can greatly increase your sales later.

In fact, the feedback aspect alone makes this technique well worth doing. One caution: Do not be tempted to give away your Beta product – 9 out of 10 people you give it away to will never get back to you with feedback because they have nothing invested. When you charge something, even if it’s only a paltry sum, the number of users who give you feedback will greatly increase.

The one exception to the previous rule is people you personally know, like friends and JV partners. Because you already have a relationship with them, they don’t need to financially invest in order to feel vested in your success.

Special bonus for using this technique: Ask your Beta testers for testimonials you can use in your sales material.

Let me ask you a question: Are you on a certain marketer’s email list? You know the one – he sends out an email every day or two telling you to go check out “X” product because it’s new, revolutionary, exciting and the most amazing thing ever? Yeah, that guy. I’m on his list, too.

In fact, I’m on the list of a couple of dozen marketers who fit that description. And the fact is, I seldom open their emails anymore, much less buy their recommendations. And I bet you’re the same way.

So who do you buy from? The marketers you trust, right? Me too.

And here’s who I trust the most: The marketer who actually USES the product they promote to me, and then records a video of them using it, or writes an HONEST review of it.

It’s so simple. It’s so easy. And yet 99% of marketers never do these things.

You want to promote a product to your list. You get the product – maybe you buy it, maybe the product owner gives it to you. You open the product up and consume it. You read the pdf, you watch the videos and you take some notes. Then you implement the strategy and you see what kind of results you get.

Then you write a review telling me about the product. What you like, what you think sucks, what is missing and so forth. You tell me who should buy this (ie: newbies, website owners, etc.) and who shouldn’t. Maybe you record a little video showing either what’s in the product or how you used it or both.

You send me an email with this info. Wow! Talk about doing me a service. Maybe I buy, maybe I don’t, but you have now earned my trust. I open your next email and your next email and the one after that. I read your REAL reviews (notice the word ‘real’) and the more I read, the more I trust you. Pretty soon I’m not buying anything unless YOU recommend it.

Congratulations – you have just risen above 99% of email marketers out there. You have earned my trust and my business and as long as you keep it up, I will continue to buy from your links.

But you know what? 99% of list owners who read this will never do it. They won’t actually USE the products they recommend. They won’t write HONEST reviews. They won’t record videos of the results they’ve achieved through using the product.

And in the long run, they won’t build the audience or make nearly the sales of the few marketers who take the time to do these things.

If you market to Internet marketers, you might consider the following: 60-80% of your prospects are currently going through or have just gone through a major life change.

Maybe they were downsized, fired or retired. Maybe something at their job changed and now they want out. Maybe they’re going through a divorce or mid-life crisis. Maybe they have money problems or the opposite – They’ve come into money and want to invest it into an online business.

People who are suddenly looking for ways to make money online have experienced a major shift in their life. They’re probably unhappy with the way things are. They’re looking for guidance on how to make a change. Many of them want money FAST – as in yesterday. They want solutions now. They want to push a button and have it done for them. And if that’s not possible, they want to be told EXACTLY what to do to make it happen.

You can use this information to better communicate with your prospects, to let them know you know what they’re going through, and to show them that it can indeed be done.

And you CAN offer them “push button” solutions, too. The legitimate kind. As an example; “We’ll set up your WordPress site, create your first product in 3 different formats, build your squeeze page, write your autoresponder series and so forth, all for “x” amount of money.” That is truly a push button solution, because they push the “buy now” button and you do everything for them.

Of course, it will be too expensive for many, so you can also offer a downgrade, like this: “Too expensive? Then we can teach you how to do it yourself.” By offering two dramatically different price points, you can appeal to both the people who can afford the real push button method, and those who will have to invest their own work to make it happen. In fact, by wording your offer this way you will often get more sales. Your second option will look so low in price compared to the first option, they will find it difficult to say no.

Another great way to market to new Internet Marketers is to offer micro-continuity products that anyone can afford. For example, instead of charging $100 for your product, charge $9.99 a month. Then give them the option of receiving the entire course now for $89 more. Most will opt for the monthly charge, and a percentage will go for the $89 option because they don’t want to wait.

Once they’ve signed up as members, market other affordable products to them inside your members’ area. Plus, make an offer of a big ticket coaching program where you work with people personally.

You might use the Pareto principle when marketing to the Internet Marketing Community. 20% of your prospects are knowledgeable and perhaps even making money online. The other 80% are new, don’t know a great deal and haven’t yet made their first Dollar, Euro, Pound, Yen, Franc or Rand.

Which brings up my last point – unless you specifically target one geographical area, your market is GLOBAL. Yet the needs are very much the same. People who lose their job in China or Switzerland or Brazil or The United States all have the same concerns and fears – “How do I pay the bills and provide for my family now? What if I can’t? What if I fail to land on my feet?”

It’s scary for them, and what they want most of all is someone to take them by the hand, alleviate their fear and show them the way out of the dark and into the light.

The need for money is universal. Your target market is in distress, and they’re desperately hoping you can provide the very real and legitimate guidance that will see them through their financial crisis. Do so, and you will never want for business or income yourself.

Did you know there are actually 4 types of residual commissions? Let’s explore them…

Automatic recurring commissions – these are likely the ones you’re most familiar with. You promote a membership program and you get paid monthly for as long as that customer retains the membership you sold.

Cookie commissions – when you sell a product, a cookie is placed on that customer’s computer. Then anything else that customer purchases from the seller is linked to you, and you get a commission. But if the cookie is deleted, or if the customer changes computers, then you will no longer receive commissions on their purchases.

Lifetime commissions – this works like a cookie commission, only instead of a cookie the product seller uses the customers email address to track sales. Thus, as long as the email address remains the same, you can receive commissions on all sales from this customer for years.

Second tier commissions – this is when you refer other affiliates to the merchant. Sort of like a multi-level program, you get a small commission for the sales your referral affiliate makes.

Now then: If you make a traditional affiliate sale, you get paid and that’s it.

If you make an monthly membership type of sale, you get paid until the customer cancels which means you usually get paid for several months. Not bad.

But if you promote products with either cookie or lifetime commissions, you can get paid for years on anything else they buy from that vendor in addition to the original sale.

Imagine a product seller with a fleet of 30 or 40 products. You promote just one of their products, and 20 of your customers buy that product. Now over the course of the next few months and years, this product seller promotes other products to these 20 customers, resulting in a further 80 sales over time. Normally you wouldn’t make a dime on these sales, but in this case, you make the full commission on each and every one.

So next month you get unexpected commissions, and the month after that, and five years from now, too.

Nice.

And it’s all because you promoted products with lifetime referrals or cookies.

So where can you find these products?

One method is simply to keep your eyes peeled. Not all selling platforms allow for lifetime referrals, so by looking at those that do, you can find the product sellers who will pay you for every product they sell to your customers, not just the ones you promote.

Next, use a search directory, such as www.affiliatescout.com. When doing your search, choose “lifetime commissions” under “features” without any other search parameters and you’ll find hundreds of results. Go back and narrow your parameters to find the exact programs your audience might be interested in.

Most of all, anytime someone asks you to be their affiliate, ASK if they pay lifetime commissions. Sometimes they’ll have two programs, one in which they only pay commissions on the first product sold, and a second, secret program they reserve for their heavy hitter affiliates in which they do pay lifetime commissions. It never hurts to ask.

Bottom line: If you can make recurring or even lifetime commissions from your promotional efforts, why not go for it? You do the work once, and you get paid over and over again. You can’t beat that.

I see new marketers all the time freeze up with fear. They’ll have a great idea for their business and start to act on it, all excited. Then something happens, something that plants the seed of doubt, and suddenly they’re asking, “Who am I to be doing this?”

Maybe they have something great to teach that would help others, or they have a different way of doing things that would solve people’s problems. Whatever their idea or their business, that seed of doubt takes root. They get scared. They become self-conscious. And they doubt themselves and their abilities.

This is when I tell them, “It’s not about you, it’s about your customers. It’s about the people you’re going to help.”

Imagine you’re about to go on stage to present information that will change the lives of your audience. But you’re nervous. You think you’re not a good presenter. You’re focused on how you’ll look and how you’ll sound and what the audience will think about you.

This is the wrong focus.

If you focus instead on helping those people, if you focus on THEM and not YOU, then you will find it easy to give your message.

I’ll give you an example: Just as you’re going on stage to make your presentation, someone whispers in your ear, “The building is on fire, we’ve got to evacuate these people NOW!”

Do you hesitate? Do you wonder what you’ll say at the microphone? Do you worry about how you’ll look and sound? NO! You rush onto the stage and immediately start directing people to find the nearest exit and go to it now. You tell them to stay calm, to move swiftly, to leave no one behind. If you see smoke coming from the back, you direct people to the front. You say and do whatever it takes to get those people out of there.

And lo and behold, not ONCE during that process did you think about YOURSELF.

Magic indeed.

If you have doubt – If you’re worried – If you’re scared – Then you’re thinking about yourself and you’re NOT thinking about your customer.

Remember, it’s not about you – it’s about them.

You can have all the traffic in the world, but if it’s not converting, then you’re not making money. That’s why the crucial key to making money online is conversions.

How compelling is your presentation? How many prospects out of 100 actually BUY your product, both today and during your follow up sequence? Conversions are where you make your real money, both today and in the future. Affiliates won’t promote you if your offer isn’t converting. But if you have a high converting offer, affiliates will send you as much traffic as you can handle and sometimes more.

So how compelling is your sales letter? How branded are you? People buy from those they perceive have the answers. People buy from those they admire and from those they trust have the solutions to their desires.

There are many conversion techniques, but the big 3 to focus your efforts on are:

– Social proof factors like testimonials
– Claims backed by proof
– Scarcity

In fact if you were to focus all of your efforts on the first two – proof – then your offer would convert. Add in scarcity and you can’t miss.

I’m going to say something here that will seem almost sacrilegious to many marketers: Forget traffic. Traffic is simply a byproduct of conversions. If your offer is converting, you’ll have affiliates wanting to promote it. Just get 3 affiliates, and those affiliates will tell their affiliate friends how great your product is converting and so forth.

But if you can’t convert then you can’t get affiliates. And if your offer isn’t converting you’re also not going to spend time or money on traffic because it will be a waste. Think about this: When you convert and convert well, you can BUY all the traffic you want. You don’t even need affiliates. If you can spend $100 to make $110 then you’re in business. Increase your conversions and make $150 or $200 or more for every $100 you spend, and lounging on that beach can finally become a reality.

But you probably won’t want to get lazy on a beach because when you can convert, this business becomes addictive. You suddenly find you can make a LOT of money and you want to see that money continue to pour in.

Traffic is not money – CONVERSIONS are money. Yet I see marketers totally focused on getting traffic. They think if they can just get MORE traffic, they’ll make money. But if the traffic they’re already getting isn’t converting, how will more traffic help?

Sadly the vast, vast majority of people in this market don’t know a thing about conversions. They’re newbies and they ignore the one thing that is the most critical, most crucial, the paramount thing to make money in this business. It’s the one place you find the money – conversions.

Yet everyone stays away from studying and learning conversions. If they would just focus on how to get their offers to convert, they’d have tremendous results, more than they could even anticipate.

When you start focusing on conversions, the money will come.

So what should you study to convert better? What should you test? I’ve covered many conversion techniques in the past, but here’s a short list to get you started.

Study copywriting. I don’t know why, but copywriting tends to be something most marketers just gloss over, as though it’s the least important element. It’s not. If you have a great offer but do a lousy job of selling that offer to the prospect, you won’t convert. It’s that simple. Changes in your sales letter, or even entirely new sales letters or videos, can make all the difference. You’ve simply got to study what works and practice, practice, practice.

Social proof is huge. The prospect wants to know for a FACT that your product will do what you say it will do. They want to know that others have tried it and gotten the results you promise. They even want to know that your product is selling and selling well. Don’t just dump a few testimonials at the end of your sales presentation – weave them throughout. Make them the foundation upon which you build your sales letters and videos. And make them real, from real people who had real doubts until they actually experienced your product.

Another conversion element online marketers tend to ignore is branding – especially branding yourself. Make a name for yourself in your industry or niche. Become the go-to expert, the answer guy or gal people turn to for solutions. When you’ve built yourself a name, your name alone will make sales from your most loyal fans. They really will see you’ve got a new product, scroll down and hit the buy button. But it takes time and effort to build your brand and your reputation, and most marketers aren’t willing to do what it takes.

Decide what you and your brand stand for. You can’t be all things to all people, so choose who you want to be and then become that person, that expert. Build relationships with people in your niche, especially with potential JV partners who will mail your offers for you. Put a great deal of thought into how you present your products, what you put into your email sequences, what your graphics look like and so forth. This is a BUSINESS, not a magic button.

Branding and being a celebrity is actually the highest form of conversions because you build a reputation of knowing your niche. You’re talked about and people know you only put out real value and they buy based upon your name alone. You’re an expert, an authority figure. When Stephen King puts out a new book, do you think he needs to ‘sell’ it to his readers? No. They just buy it because HE wrote it, and they know they’re going to like it.

Give yourself a title. Who said, “I’m the greatest.”? Mohammed Ali, and everyone else took up the cry. Who said, “I’m the hardest working man in show business.”? James Brown, and that became his title.

Gary Halbert said, “I am the world’s greatest copywriter, and if you don’t believe me, you can go to my website. It says it there.” And the branding caught on and people called him the world’s greatest copywriter.

So don’t wait for someone else to give yourself a title, give it to yourself. Repeat it often enough and it will in fact stick, and after a while few people will even know or remember that it was you who gave yourself the title.

Bottom Line: When you focus on something (like conversions) the answers just start to appear. When you study emails and sales letters, ask yourself what the technique is, what the person is doing that makes it successful. Read between the lines. Make ‘conversions’ your mantra and you cannot go wrong in this business.

Standing apart from the crowd of other emails in your prospects’ inbox isn’t easy. There are gimmicky ways to do it – write subject lines that shock, use lots of funny characters in the subject line, use the latest “hot” subject line [for the past year this has been “Hey”] and so forth. But how do you get your recipients to become avid readers of your emails?

Sane Method #1 – Tell stories. There is a marketer who appears in my inbox about once a day. Gmail highlights this email, because Gmail knows I read his emails. Why? Because he entertains me with stories. I know when I click his email I’m going to get swept up into another world. And even if it’s just his world and just for a minute, it’s a great escape to my otherwise sometimes monotonous day. And yes, I buy his products, too.

There’s an added bonus to telling stories besides the fact that your emails get opened and read, and it’s this: Telling stories is fun. Instead of selling, selling and more selling, you’re now entertaining. You can embellish, you can be flamboyant, you can add your own personal touch, you can get creative and you can have a blast doing it.

Suddenly your day is just a little more exciting because every moment you’re watching for the next story to fall into your life. Even a routine trip to the store can become an exciting adventure. The newspaper holds new meaning and the websites you visit are a treasure trove of possible stories you can share.

Sane Method #2 – Be a coach. Think of your readers as your students. Love your subject and stick to your subject. Only build your list with people who want info on your particular subject, then teach them all you can about it. When it comes to recommending products, tell them the good and the bad. Give them lots of detail. Be their coach first and foremost and they will hang on your every word.

This method works especially well if you love your topic. If you find yourself spending hours on the Internet learning about this topic, hitting all the forums and websites, finding the best products and so forth, then this method is for you. Every new site you visit is an adventure because you are continually on the lookout for more information you can share with your students. And selling becomes easy because again, you are simply sharing your knowledge with your students.

The [Not-so] Crazy Method – Hide clues in your emails that lead to prizes. I haven’t yet tried this method but I’ve been tempted. What if every email you send out holds a clue to a valuable prize? Collect all the clues and you find the prize online. There’s little doubt this method will get your emails opened, but will they be read? In the right niche, yes. Imagine doing this in a gaming niche – what a killer technique. The viral effect alone could be huge.

So tell me – is this last method crazy, or a millionaire maker? I don’t know of anyone who’s doing it – yet. But no doubt someone will. And in the right hands, it could be powerful, indeed.