In part 1 of this article we'll look at how to develop your own product because I know that is usually more profitable in long-run. With a service, your growth is limited by supply of service you can provide. Providing many services is too labor-intensive or too limited by "the system" to allow unlimited growth.

The easiest product in world to develop is an information product. It's so easy that I personally know more people than I can count who have earned millions doing it. They develop information products that you produce once - and then they sell them forever, with very little additional work required after their creation.

What do we mean by information products? I use term to describe books, ebooks, video and audio tapes, transcripts, CDs, digital audio files, and even software. With all of these products, you write them once, produce them once, and then sell them forever with very little per unit cost. You can breath life back into them when they start fading by updating them or issuing a new release.

With these information products, you create them, set up a website, organize a marketing campaign, and then - literally - sit back and watch money flow in. If you set up your own affiliate program to market these information products you have thousands of people all working diligently to make you a success. Creating an information product really is easiest thing in world.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, I don't know enough about any topic to write my own product. I thought that too for longest time. You've all heard advice, write about what you know. If you really don't believe that you know enough about a topic to produce an information product, then identify a topic that you would like to know more about, and BECOME expert on that product. Unless there are already too many experts on that topic, or unless absolutely nobody cares about that topic, you have a guaranteed winner.

To convince you that what I teach is true, let me share a few examples from my own background:

With prompting from my website visitors, I wrote a cookbook. I wasn't sure demand would be there. However, once I committed to writing cookbook project went very quickly. This cookbook sold over $100,000 worth of copies (in hardcopy and digital format combined) in it's first year.

I wrote an book explaining how to publish your own cookbook. This book is available in ebook format and since so many people have considered writing their own cookbook, this is a natural bestseller.

I'm finishing up a book on how to generate massive traffic to your website. Why did I choose that topic? The single biggest problem facing every webmaster on face of earth is getting enough visitors to his site. I researched, brainstormed, and experimented with virtually every traffic generation method I could find. The results is a book that HAS TO SELL. The affiliate program for this product has to succeed. The pent-up demand for a quality product on this topic is that tremendous!

I turned my personal experience with pay-per-click search engines into both an ebook and a tele-seminar. I hold tele-seminars on how to create a can't fail pay-per-click campaign. The tele-seminar is recorded and participants get reprint rights to tele-seminar. This generated 3 products really. (1) The tele-seminars themselves, (2) reprint rights to tele-seminars and transcripts, (3) recordings of tele-seminar which I can market as a separate product or use as a bonus with other products.

The obvious, head-on type of link campaign would involve visiting a search engine, plunking in keywords that would index your bait piece and screening sites that turn up, selecting those likely to be receptive to a link request. Best bets: non-commercial information sites trying to offer comprehensive links to quality resources in your topic area. For linking to your bait piece, forget brochure sites of companies and professional firms unless they include a sizable link directory.

Because this method forces you to screen out so many poor candidates for links, I use a more backhanded technique. First I identify a well-established site or page containing substantive bait that targets very audience I would like to reach. By "well-established," I mean something from a respected source that has been on Web for at least a year -- longer better. Then I perform a link search to hone in on sites that have linked to well-established site's bait.

For instance, when looking for sites to link to my resources for freelance writers, I sifted through sites linking to late lamented Inkspot, which predated me on Web by a couple of years. When looking for link candidates in solo-professional category for my marketing and publicity resources, I performed a link search on predecessor Working Solo.