Most people who are in any type of sales will be selling someone else's product. Even the big stores, like Walmart mostly sell products from other manufacturers. So the easiest way to get into marketing is by finding products to sell.

There are lots of ways to find products and lots of ways to market those products. You first need to decide who you are planning to sell to and how you plan to market the product, then you can find products to fit that market. Finding the "who" is really defining your "niche" or market segment. For example the majority of my training falls into 3 basic niches: training for Adobe products, training for web design and development, and training for Internet Marketing. I have a few other titles outside of these basic niches, but this covers 90% of what I sell. In my marketing plan I sell predominately training, mostly on DVD. This was for me a natural evolution from my background in teaching and web design. Basically I teach what I know. I have expanded my product line over the years and sometimes it has required learning new skills so that I can create requested titles. So for me the decisions were: "who" = people who are looking for training for my 3 niches, and "how" = through DVDs marketed on the internet using traditional channels (howtogurus.com, partner web sites, Amazon, EBay, and others). Once I figured out the "who" and "how" it was fairly easy to create the "what", i.e. my training DVDs (ignoring all of the technical side for this discussion).

But it took me years to create a large collection of DVDs to sell and to build up my internet presence where it could become a full time job. For the first 3 years I was also creating training DVDs for other companies and also designing web sites for other marketers, just to keep the bills paid.

Is there a way to speed up this process? Certainly. The deciding on the "who" and "how" just takes research. In my case the "what" took a while to put together. But since most marketers sell other people's "whats" there really is no need to put in the time and effort to create your own product line. You simply need to find products to fit the "what" part of your plan. One easy approach is to use Affiliate Marketing techniques. You will see this on almost all blogs on the internet, they will have ads running on the sides of the blogs. These are usually from Amazon or Google AdSense and are easy to set up. You won't get rich this way but you can easily pay for your internet presence while you are expanding your business. Another approach is to create review sites or speciality online stores that are basically big catalogs filled with offers (Amazon Affiliates is a great way to do this). You can create these sites aimed at tightly focused niches and do quite well.

The next step up in online marketing is to more actively market the products you are selling. This usually involves building up a subscriber list and offering products through email. This is still the best way to make sales on the internet, unless you have a huge reputation like Amazon where people actively go to your site to find products. This is the main focus of Affiliate Marketers. They find products that they would like to sell, signup as an affiliate, then work on building a list and sending offers to that list. You can think of an Affiliate Marketer as a sales person working on a 100% commission basis. They only get paid if they make a sale. This can actually be a win/win situation for both the maker of the product and the marketer. The marketer does not need to put in all the time and effort to create products and the manufacturer gets a sales staff without having to pay weekly salaries.

Aside from a couple of tests I have stayed away from opening up How To Gurus titles to Affiliate Marketers mostly due to our delivery method. It is far easier to handle an affiliate sales staff if you are selling online products or downloadable products. Luckily for everyone who has in the past several years asked me about selling How To Gurus training we are in the process of moving our titles online. We are doing this mostly due to the large number of computer tablets and other smart devices that are currently being sold. This Christmas Tablets out sold traditional computers for the first time. And of course tablets and smart phones don't have DVD drives, so we have to move our training online. But with that move we are also able to finally accept affiliates.

We are in the final stages of testing out the system while we proceed on moving all of our titles online (a huge job as you might guess). We just put up our first title online for affiliate sales, my Kindle eBook Bootcamp. This title is retailing online at $47 and I am giving a 75% commission on sales of this training to my affiliates. How can I give so much in commissions? Easy, since the training is online there is very little that we have to do for each sale, and the affiliates will be doing most of the work selling so they should get most of the profits from each sale. Of course we will also be gaining new customers and our customers always buy more training from us, so we will not be losing on the deal.

If you are interested in Affiliate Marketing and would like to give it a try with a product that you know and trust then take a look at my Kindle eBook Bootcamp. I am running this affiliate program through a site named JVZoo.com, a well established affiliate marketing site in the Internet Marketing niche. Signing up is free and I am supplying lots of marketing resources and additional training for anyone who signs up.

Of course if you really want to make a business out of Affiliate Marketing then you will need to find other products besides ours to sell. But starting with a product you know and trust is a great beginning.

To find out more about becoming a Kindle eBook Bootcamp affiliate just click on this link:

http://kindlebootcamp.com/affiliate/

To your success:

George Peirson