A producer is someone who creates value and shares knowledge with others. In the process, a producer helps improve lives and earns continuous active and passive income.

Step one is committing to becoming a producer. 

To attract customers, and partner with affiliates who’ll help promote your products, follow these principles:

• Have a solid understanding of your customers’ needs. When you identify your target audience’s biggest problems, you’ll be able to create products that solve them. Once you do so, you’ll have customers for life.
  

• Be clear about what your customers are willing to spend. You can’t expect meaningful rates of conversion if you develop champagne products for beer budgets. Test, poll, research similar products, and interact with potential customers to discover what they’re willing, or even able, to spend on your product.
  

• Deliver your product in the expected format. Trying to sell a magazine to someone who wants to see a movie is an effort in futility. A videocassette won’t sell to someone who has only a DVD player. Learn how your target customer wants to receive your content and then deliver it via the appropriate medium. 

Higher prices lead to greater affiliate participation. Whether your product costs $10 or $10,000, it’ll require roughly the same amount of effort for an affiliate to promote it. As a result, most affiliates will choose to invest their time into selling high-priced products that provide substantial returns. Printed books and ebooks, while often providing wonderful content, are ill suited for commission-driven relationships as are most other products that sell for under $500. Today’s successful partnerships involve the promotion of products priced between $500 and $4,995. Products above and below these price points continue to be sold, but they represent the two ends of the bell curve. Successful Internet marketers offer products at the center of the curve—and right now that sweet spot is roughly $2,500.  

Higher commissions mean happy affiliates. Selling a highpriced product isn’t the whole story. You must also be generous on commissions paid. Today, 40%-50% commission rates are commonplace, as is the payment of an additional 10% for second-tier affiliates. Second-tier affiliates, also known as brokers, help recruit affiliates for a product launch. When a product is sold, a second-tier affiliate typically receives 10% of the purchase price. Naturally, this cuts into your net profits. However, industry leaders understand that 40%-50% is a price worth paying for instant massive exposure, immediate income, and adding thousands of hopefully satisfied customers to their sales funnel. 


Continuity programs create long-term relationships. While instant cash is always nice, long-term passive income is even better. Whether they consist of bi-weekly one-on-one coaching, monthly product shipments, quarterly VIP programs, or annual membership dues, continuity programs provide ongoing benefits for both you and your affiliates.   

Developing products from scratch is hard. But even more difficult is creating products that fulfill audience needs, provide immense value, are of superior quality, and convert prospects to paying customers. Success requires satisfying all four criteria.

Today, he who has the list controls the game. 

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

Georges Simenon was one of the most prolific novelists of the twentieth century, publishing 425 books in his career, including more than 200 works of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms, as well as 220 novels in his own name and three volumes of autobiography. Remarkably, he didn’t write every day.

The Belgian-French novelist worked in intense bursts of literary activity, each lasting two or three weeks, separated by weeks or months of no writing at all. Even during his productive weeks, Simenon didn’t write for very long each day. His typical schedule was to wake at 6:00 A.M., procure coffee, and write from 6:30 to 9:30. Then he would go for a long walk, eat lunch at 12:30, and take a one-hour nap. In the afternoon he spent time with his children and took another walk before dinner, television, and bed at 10:00 P.M.

Simenon liked to portray himself as a methodical writing machine—he could compose up to eighty typed pages in a session, making virtually no revisions after the fact—but he did have his share of superstitious behaviors. No one ever saw him working; the “Do Not Disturb” sign he hung on his door was to be taken seriously. He insisted on wearing the same clothes throughout the composition of each novel. He kept tranquilizers in his shirt pocket, in case he needed to ease the anxiety that beset him at the beginning of each new book. And he weighed himself before and after every book, estimating that each one cost him nearly a liter and a half of sweat.

Simenon’s astonishing literary productivity was matched, or even surpassed, in one other area of his daily life—his sexual appetite. “Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically,” Patrick Marnham notes in his biography of the writer. “Simenon had sex every day and every few months indulged in a frenzied orgy of work.” When living in Paris, Simenon frequently slept with four different women in the same day. He estimated that he bedded ten thousand women in his life. (His second wife disagreed, putting the total closer to twelve hundred.) He explained his sexual hunger as the result of “extreme curiosity” about the opposite sex: “Women have always been exceptional people for me whom I have vainly tried to understand. It has been a lifelong, ceaseless quest. And how could I have created dozens, perhaps hundreds, of female characters in my novels if I had not experienced those adventures which lasted for two hours or ten minutes?”

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

The ad has all the elements you would expect any space ad to have. And to understand this first axiom, I would ask my students to define the purpose of each element in an advertisement. The following is what we finally decided:
1. Headline: To get your attention and draw you to the subheadline.
2. Subheadline: To give you more information and further explain the attention-getting headline.
3. Photo or Drawing: To get your attention and to illustrate the product more fully.
4. Caption: To describe the photo or drawing. An important element and one that is often read.
5. Copy: To convey the main selling message for your product or service.
6. Paragraph Headings: To break up the copy into chunks, thereby making the copy look less imposing.
7. Logo: To display the name of the company selling the product.
8. Price: To let the reader know what the product or service costs. The price could be in large type or could be buried in the copy.
9. Response Device: To give the reader a way to respond to the ad, by using the coupon, toll-free number or ordering information, usually near the end of the ad.
10. Overall Layout: To provide the overall appearance for the ad, by using effective graphic design for the other elements.

Axiom #2

All the elements in an advertisement are primarily designed to do one thing and one thing only:

get you to read the first sentence of the copy.

At this point, there was usually a confused look on the faces of my students.

They thought that each of these elements had its own reason for existence. But I was saying, “No, they are there strictly for the sole purpose of get ting you to read the first sentence.”

I know what you’re thinking. “What about the headline? Isn’t it supposed to be 16 words long and what about . . .”

Stop.

Just accept my word at this point that each element (of an ad or copy) has a single purpose and that is to get you to read the first sentence.

If somebody asked you for the main purpose of the logo in an advertisement, you could answer, “to establish the corporate integrity of the company selling the product,” or you could answer, “to provide a degree of continuity.” But the real answer is to get you to read the copy.

Really.

Advertising Secrets of the Written Word: The Ultimate Resource on How to Write Powerful Advertising Copy from One of America's Top Copywriters and Mail Order Entrepreneurs by Joseph Sugarman

As soon as Guns began to play regularly in L.A., we started up a phone and mailing list. We obsessively made sure people who came to shows signed up—well, actually, what we did was send stripper friends out into the audience and have them convince people to sign up. Obviously we had to write good songs and play well live to get a bigger audience. On that front I already knew we had the components we needed. But the mailing list really worked for us—within six months we had a thousand names with contact info for each. Other bands had mailing lists, but one of the secrets to GN’R’s success was how much time and effort we spent building and maintaining ours. We knew we had to make it on our own, and after our Seattle road trip, failure was not an option with this crew. 


It's So Easy by Duff McKagan