Yeah, you heard me right. The N1WAY 9-step process to making money on the internet came out a few weeks ago and it has hit the ground running hard. One of the readers Mark Hanson is now taking the guide and building a live site to showcase the steps of the guide. At the end of the project, Mark will be giving away his website to one of his lucky readers. If you are interested in joining this competition, click here.

Now onto the guide itself. I purchased the guide last week and had a chance to read through the steps to creating a killer niche store. I will be honest and tell you that the information that is authored into the guide is commonly available information that you can find yourself through hours and hours of research and brushing off inaccurate information on the internet. I found that the content put all the information accurate in a single location and tailored it specifically to building a niche store using either BANS or PhpBay.  I think the guide is well worth the money if you are trying to be successful at building a niche store. When I started BANS almost 3 years ago, I had such a tough time gathering and filtering all the information. Wish I had this guide then.

Here is a different spin on affiliate marketing. Instead of trying to find an offer from an affiliate network, you can create your own affiliate program with your local businesses by negotiating a cut for leads and sales to the business.

ShoeMoney explains how to Make Money Online with Local Affiliate Programs and is a worthy read. Check it out.

What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Nothing!

I have fallen into the trap of doing too much reading and not taking enough action in affiliate marketing. Yesterday, I spent 5 hours reading everything I can on local small-business advertising and the concept seems to have some merit. The business model works as follow:

1. Find a small business niche and setup a web directory to list businesses in that niche. Let’s take “home inspectors” as a niche.
2. Use SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to promote the heck of that web directory to get on the first page of Google’s search engine results page.
3. You want to have a page 1 landing for your local keywords such as, “seattle home inspectors”.
   • Perform cold calling or face-to-face selling with small business owners to advertise their business on this niche directory and get a web presence.
   • Demonstrate to the business owners how your directory is better than the non-local ones like yellowpages.com or superpages.
4. Offer a 1 year-lease on that website for $800-1000.

Rinse, repeat, and make money.

I spent some time thinking about this model and whether I wanted to pursue it. Like I said, there is merit in the concept and I can definitely see the potential. But my goal is affiliate marketing and this deviates from that goal. Maybe somebody will give this a shot and let me know how it works for you.