Having a lot of affiliate sites can be a great way to make a living. However, with search engine rules changing on a monthly basis, only those that have created pure "white hat" affiliate sites, with engaging and informative content, will survive long-term. Having all of your eggs in the affiliate marketing basket is dangerous to say the least.

You should create a goal for yourself.

CREATE YOUR OWN PRODUCT(S)

This might be an eBook, software, or video tutorials on a subject you have a lot of experience in.

Not everyone is a writer or programmer, but everyone can own and sell his or her own products online by joining one of the increasing number of eBook membership sites. These offer you rough products that can be turned into your own products with very little effort.

My favourite of all these is Kim Standerline’s excellent Niche Health Products membership site.

This membership site gives you two infoproducts per month, that you can use for content, or modify and sell as your own. I have been a member since it opened, and love it.

The original membership site is called Nicheology. It is usually full, but you can sign up to be on their waiting list, so you can join when others drop out.

Other alternatives to this type of membership site include hiring programmers or writers at places like elance.com.

As a programmer myself, I have never hired a programmer to create my own products, so I cannot tell you how much it would cost, but I have hired authors.

Articles (250 - 300 words) can be bought for between $5-$7. You do need to be careful about who you hire, as plagiarism of online material by some authors is common. When I have bought articles, I have used Justarticles.

They check all articles for online plagiarism, and also check batches of articles for duplicated sentences/paragraphs. This ensures that your articles are unique.

What if you wanted to get your own eBook written by a ghost writer?

Well, my wife did just this recently for a new project of hers. She got justarticles.com to write an eBook for her on a topic she is interested in. Justarticles.com charged $20 per page (450 words per page). The eBook ended up being just over 30 pages in length costing just over $600. As my wife edits the eBook, adding her own content, pictures etc, the eBook will likely rise to 60 or 70 pages in total. I have been watching her progress, and can see the immediate benefits to getting ghost authors to write for you, especially if English is not your native tongue (as is the case for my wife).

I should add here that the eBook was top notch, and the author that wrote it obviously became very involved and interested in the topic as she wrote the book. I will be making use of this service myself in 2006, as I create more of my own products.

The ordinary person starting out probably cannot justify $600 to get their own product custom written for them. That is why sites like Kim’s mentioned earlier are a great deal for those starting out.

Incidentally, I often see questions on forums asking how to create cover graphics for eBooks and software. These covers increase the perceived value of a product and do increase conversion rates, so you should use them on your sales pages.

I have created some that I am very happy with. My tool of choice for that is called eCover Studio. If you are going to be building your own inventory of infoproducts, this is one tool I can highly recommend. You can see a couple of covers (software box and training manual cover) I created using this tool on my SEO Website Builder sales page.