Did "they" tell you that you can make a fortune with internet marketing even if you don’t have a product? If so, they lied.

Here’s the mathematics: No Product = No Sales = No Income

Consider for a moment what a "product" is. It’s anything that someone else wants. I can’t make it simpler than that. They don’t even have to pay for it, they just have to want it.

We can describe products in a number of ways, but for our purposes here, we’ll just call them items that you get paid for. Those items can be real physical products (for example, a CD or a car), virtual products (for example, software), information products (for example, ebooks), and others.

The main point today is that either you are selling your own products or you are selling someone else’s products. This is one of those rare times in life when the choices are simple.

In internet marketing you generally have two ways of earning money. You can be paid directly for a product and get 100% of the sale price, or you can be paid a commission and receive some fraction of the sale price. Again life is simple. So here are the ways you can be paid.

1. Sell your own product – you get full price.
2. Get  someone to sell your product for you – you get less than full price, they get a commission.
3. Sell someone else’s product – you get a commission.
4. Get someone to sell someone else’s product for you – you get a smaller commission.

Nevertheless, complexity lurks around every corner and that’s why you need to start with a business plan, or go back over what you have already done and frame it into a business plan.

If you don’t have a product or don’t plan to create your own product, then where do you get a product? Many gurus recommend that you start with affiliate marketing and look for products at ClickBank. You can include that strategy in your business plan. We’ll talk about that and other strategies in another episode.

I think it was Dwight Eisenhower who said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." 

Do your planning!

Your labor is one of your most basic and intrinsic products. When you sell it, we most often call that a "job". When you work for nothing, it’s called either charity or sweat equity. When you are new to internet marketing or don’t have a lot of experience (that means you aren’t making much or any money), your product is sweat equity – the time and energy you put into developing your business without being paid for it.

You probably noticed that people who want to sell you internet marketing products don’t like the term "sweat equity" because it sounds like work, and they are selling you the easy way to riches. Forget that – if you don’t work at it, it ain’t happenin’.