Over years I have been asked an interesting question hundreds of times and I have never felt tired of answering it because each time I have been able to give a different reply to the same question. Does it mean I have extraordinary public relationship skills? No. It means there are tens of thousands of self-employment opportunities and anyone with average skills can identify a promising income opportunity at any moment. The question is: 'I want to be on my own and achieve financial independence. But I don't know what to do. Can you please help me?'
Mohan asked me the same question a few months ago. He told me, "I would like to hear from you about a specific Internet project rather than general principles on money making. I would like to start working on something immediately. At this moment, I am interested in acquiring knowledge about how to run an Internet business by actually doing. I know it is not possible to learn how to swim without jumping into water. I don't mind spending a little money on the project."
I told him, "ClickBank is an online service to vendors who sell unique products or services that can be delivered over the Internet via websites or email. When a vendor uses ClickBank, it will sell his/her products, provide customer support services and enable more than 100,000 affiliates market the products for commission. I will tell you how you can make money using ClickBank. Please remember that I am not an associate of ClickBank and do not have any personal interest in it."
Mohan smiled and requested me, "Can you please guide me step by step?"
I replied, "First go to http://clickbank.com/signup.html and sign up for a free ClickBank account. Actually you are signing up for a free affiliate account. By signing up once using a very simple online application form, you become an affiliate of thousands of vendors."
Mohan had a question, "What is an affiliate account?"
I said, "When you become an affiliate of a seller, he/she gives you a personalized link. You must use that link in your website or email and send a visitor to ClickBank website. If that person buys the product from ClickBank, you get a commission. You don't have to stock anything or provide any customer support service. Without any business risk, affiliates make money."
Mohan said, "That sounds great."
I replied, "Now go to http://www.clickbank.com/ranking.html to get a list of top selling products. Decide on the type of products that you want to promote. If you are interested in Mental Health, go through the list of products in that category and select the products that you are interested in."
"How do I select the products?" Mohan asked me. I said, "Commission amount, reputation of the vendors and the quality of the products are some of the factors that you should carefully consider. Visit the websites of the vendors and read the content. You will get a lot of ready made content to promote the products. Now, consider the products and the nature of the industry and get a domain name and create a website using the content you gathered from the vendors' websites. Do some research on web hosting and get an account. If you are confused about it, please read the article on web hosting in my website. Though it is possible to promote ClickBank using a free website, you will find it very difficult to promote your website through search engines. Learn a few tricks about search engine promotion and then submit your web pages to big search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Make your website useful and interesting and promote it both offline and online. Work hard and you will start making money within a few weeks."
Here is a part of the email that I received from Mohan after a few months, "I love sports and recreation. So I decided to promote the products in that category. I did everything as you had told me. I faced problem in attracting visitors to my website. But persistence and hard work produced miracles. I exchanged links with similar websites and used offline promotional methods. I spent some money on online advertising services such as Google AdWords. My website had a lot of content on football and the recent FIFA world cup generated decent traffic for my website. I spent a total amount of Rs. 4,000 on web hosting and advertisement. I am happy to tell you that I am making Rs. 8,500 a month by working for 6 hours a week. I feel I am the real world cup winner "