IF YOU DON’T have a product of your own or don’t want to invest in creating one, you can use email, social media, podcasting, blogs, online video, and all the tools we have discussed in earlier posts to make money from other people’s products. When promoting other people’s products, you start with an already proven product and use your own skills to make money by discussing, reviewing, or promoting it online. This is a good strategy if you like to promote things, if you enjoy “sharing” in social media like Pinterest, Twitter, or Google+, if you like to shoot YouTube videos, if you have an interest in interviewing people or reviewing products, and if you would like to avoid much of the writing, research, and production usually required to create new products.
Online Promotions Services
You can start an online business like these, which offer promotional services to businesses that want to reach your target market:
At AnyLuckyDay.com advertisers pay founder Giancarlo Massaro to promote and give away a new product each day. He also promotes the sponsor’s product by creating a YouTube video about it, tweeting about it, posting on Facebook, and emailing his subscriber list. The audience gets a chance to win each day’s prize by simply leaving a comment on his site and the sponsor gets great online and social media exposure.
Jason Sadler helps companies reach new customers by wearing a different company t-shirt every day to promote each sponsor’s product. As a human billboard he then shoots an original promotional video for YouTube, webcasts a live video show on Ustream, and shares photos across Facebook and Twitter, too. Jason has grown from being a solo operator in 2009 to employing four professional daily shirt-wearers across the United States for IWearYourShirt.com.
Many companies want to expand their brands online but are understaffed or still new to social media. Services like these make money by helping them spread the word online.
Reviews
You can also pick a niche and review the latest products and services other companies are selling to that niche. For example:
Rumi Neely started her style blog “Fashion Toast” in 2008. Photos of her wearing different fashionable outfits with commentary were enough to attract the attention of fashionistas worldwide. Today ad sales (and lots of free clothes) help Rumi model, blog, and travel worldwide (for more modeling and blogging) to share the latest fashions with her audience.
RottenTomatoes.com is a top movie reviews site but Senh Duong started it simply because he wanted to collect all the reviews of Jackie Chan movies he could find online into one place. Today it boasts more than 20 million visitors monthly and Warner Brothers owns the site.
Ray William Johnson has the #1 most-subscribed-to channel on YouTube. He’s attracted almost 2 billion views of his videos. What are his videos about? Reviews, criticism, and jokes about other viral videos!
Interviews
Simply asking questions can also be the foundation of a Click Millionaire business.
Wayne Hurlbert interviews the authors of new business books on his Blog Business Success Radio podcast show and reviews the books on his Blog Business World blog, too. As one of Blog Talk Radio’s most enduring podcasters he has interviewed more than 400 leading business book authors, CEOs, business visionaries, and entrepreneurs since he started in 2006. In addition to enjoying working from his home in Winnipeg, Canada, Wayne’s interviews and reviews attract business to his SEO and social media consulting business, too.
Andrew Warner has a similar interview-based business called Mixergy. His interviews are usually video chats with start-up company founders. He has interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs and also compiled what he has learned from those conversations into dozens of online courses. His audience loves his “business tips for successful start-ups” approach and Andrew makes money through a combination of sponsorships, course fees, and premium membership sales.
Affiliate Marketing
Another way to become a Click Millionaire is by participating in affiliate programs. This type of online marketing can make you money for each sale that you deliver to a merchant from ads you place on your site or in your emails. Sales commissions can range from a small percentage to hundreds of dollars from each sale.
While affiliate marketing is often promoted as a business in and of itself, I see it more as an ad strategy for making money after you have already collected an audience. Like multilevel marketing (which we’ll discuss in the next post), it can be challenging to make money if you don’t yet have an audience or if you only represent one product as your entire business. But, if you have developed an audience and then you join the affiliate programs of merchant companies that sell quality goods or services which are a good match to your audience’s interests, affiliate marketing can be easy, inexpensive, and very profitable.
Flash Sales and Daily Deals
There is also room for more “deals” sites targeted to niche audiences. While Woot.com does a great job of offering daily deals on technology products, and Haute Look and Gilt.com cover clothing and high-end fashion well, there are thousands of other niches where targeted audiences could be developed to help you make money promoting or reselling third-party products.
