So when you’re ready to create your own product you may not be sure what you should start with. There are many options. The digital short report or e-book is probably the easiest. Now that the Kindle is very popular putting your short report or e-book on the Kindle is also becoming popular and lucrative for some.

Other people develop things like WordPress themes or software. Some people develop apps for the iPhone or android or have them developed and then market them.  Still others use their own pictures to create products on zazzle http://www.zazzle.com/ .

The choices of what to sell on the Internet really are endless, even if you are selling your own product.

Many people start with an e-book or a short report just to get the hang of things. So let’s talk about this. One way to create an e-book is to write it in Microsoft Word and then convert it into a PDF file. You can have a cover created at UpWork or you can make a simple one yourself at http://www.myecovermaker.com/ .

A good length for an e-book is 50 pages. A good length for a short report is 7 to 15 pages. The tolerance for high prices for e-books is coming down so you probably don’t want to price your e-book to be above the range that a print book would sell for unless your information is really hard to find and on a subject that people really need to know about.

A good price for a short report is $7.  These aren’t rules written in stone – you will want to test your prices and see what works best for you.

These days you can even self publish your e-book into a print book fairly easily. http://www.lulu.com/

So how are you going to market your new product? A great way to get your foot in the door is to find some people to joint venture with. You create the product and offer them a commission to sell it. Find someone with a big list related to the topic of your product.

Someone who sends out a good e-mail to a responsive medium-sized list could easily make you several hundred or several thousand dollars in a day.

Besides finding people to joint venture with on your own, you can also put your book up for sale at Clickbank. People go to Clickbank specifically to look for e-books to promote on their topic. If you have one affiliate who starts making multiple sales of your book, contacting them to see what else you can do for them is probably a good idea.  It’s hard to find good affiliates and when you find one, you should treat him or her well.

And don’t worry if your first product seems to be a flop or your first JV request attempt doesn’t go anywhere. Just keep trying – keep looking for people to promote your products and keep creating new products for people to buy.

This is how everyone who is successful at Internet marketing operates. No one creates one product and sells just it forever. People create and create and create and sell and sell and sell. This is what you should be doing also.

Unless you’re getting lots of traffic already one of the first things you may want to consider doing is building back links to your website or to the pages you are creating. You also may want to start exploring other ways to get traffic than just what the search engines send you.

Let’s talk about how to get back links:

One of the very best ways to get back links is to create something known as linkbait.  There are a couple of ways to do this. You can study pictures that go viral on Facebook and consider whether or not you could make your own.

If you think you could then you want to put the picture on your website and make sure you have social share buttons above and below the picture.  Once you have this going then start sharing your picture and start recommending it to all your friends and do anything you can think of to get the ball rolling.

Make sure that you also are linking back to your main website from this picture so that your website gets the benefit of any social shares that are made. If you are using free websites, the process is the same.

Another way to create linkbait is to write an extremely informative article about something related to your topic. Make it almost like a Enquirer-style article but do not put any sales links in it. You wanted to be something amazing that people just have to share with their friends. Again, put social share buttons above and below the article and link back to your main site so that the search engines see that people really like this page that is associated with your site.

Other ways to get links into your site are to go out and create them. There are many free websites and blogs and revenue sharing websites that will let you go in and create pages about anything that you want and link back to your website within them. These websites do have authority and will count as links to your website. Here’s some examples:

• Hubpages
• Webnuggetz
• Loveblinks
• Xomba
• Shetoldme
• paper.li
• weebly
• inlinkz
• BestReviewer
• redgage
• in forum signatures of forums that allow this
• in dofollow blog comments

These will keep you busy in starting to create backlinks to your website.  If you are already getting lots of traffic and you don’t think you need to be creating backlinks than probably what you need to be doing is figuring out how to translate that traffic into sales.

There are many things that can affect how well your traffic converts, and this is the kind of thing that you will want to start looking into. Search in Google for how to increase conversion rates and start experimenting.  In affiliate marketing you can always do better than what you are doing now.

If you are an absolute beginner at affiliate marketing one of the biggest and earliest and most important questions you will ask yourself is “what am I going to promote?”

Since you are a beginner, I would strongly advise against promoting anything in the make money online niche. If you are making any money yet – you can’t very well tell others how to make money. Also, the make money online niche is one of the hardest to break into and do well and the competition is very fierce.

So what else is there? Many people advise start with what you love, but this is not always the smartest advice if there is no money in the niche. For example, I have a friend who started a gluten-free recipes blog. She is struggling. There is really nothing to sell in this niche except recipe books. Some people do great with recipe books but it might be easier if the only options of things that people buy in the niche cost more than $14.

Maybe examine your current living situation – do you live in an area that people visit? Maybe Hawaii, or Las Vegas, or New York City? You could consider a travel website or blog.

Are you single and really into the dating scene? You could consider becoming an affiliate for the dating websites. Dating websites pull in a lot of money.

Do you know a lot about a certain medical topic? Is there stuff to buy that will help people get better from this medical topic? Are there books and medical equipment and maybe even e-books on how to cure this thing naturally? Then that’s something to consider.

What have you bought recently? Is your kitchen full of a certain kind of appliance? Do you love a certain color and your whole house is decked out in it? Maybe these are the kinds of things you can write on.

Although I wouldn’t go as far as to say that your first affiliate marketing subjects should be something that you love, I certainly would say it should be something that you know a bit about. That will just make things easier.

Especially if you are going to be doing all of the early writing yourself, instead of having someone do it for you, if you don’t have to do incredible amounts of research just to get your first page written things are going to be much easier.

Plus, if you have some pictures or can take some pictures of the items you want to promote, that will help fill your blog or website out too.

Let me give you some ideas of things to promote:

Digital books on Clickbank, toys, coupon books to certain tourist areas, home decor, strollers, cribs, tools, exercise machines, teeth whitening pens, printer ink, anything on Amazon – if it’s on there that means that people are buying it online – , home saunas, protein powder and protein bars, Cindy Crawford’s beauty lotion, computers, computer batteries, and jewelry.

Have any ideas yet? Think on them for a bit – is there an angle that you can take to make your information in your store unique? How can you stand out promoting this particular product?

Once you can figure that out then you can take it to the next level.