Many people can come out with innovative ideas. But coming out with innovative ideas that sell requires some skills. Today, I’m going to show you how to do it.

There are only 3 steps to follow:

1) Find a hot market with lots of buyers

2) Identify the limitation of existing products in the market

3) Think of an innovative solution to overcome that limitation (Tips: the innovative solution is usually a combination of two existing solutions!)

That’s it. If you follow these 3 steps, you will be able to come out with innovative ideas that can easily make you money.

Let me show you how others, including myself, use these 3 steps to come out with profitable ideas.

In the 90s, someone came out with a viral lead building system known as a Safelist system. In this system, everyone in the system is able to send emails to each other, and hence the name “Safe List”, i.e. a list that is safe to send emails to. When it first started, everyone was excited because suddenly, they can reach out to thousands of people for free. However, what they didn’t realize was at the same time, they were receiving thousands of other emails from other members too!

Soon, people realized that their emails were flooded and they started to think of alternatives. A simple solution was to redirect those emails to free accounts such as Yahoo and Hotmail accounts.

Guess what, the trick soon spread throughout the industry and everyone started doing the same thing.

The end result was, everyone was trying to email to everyone but no one was reading any email!

As you can see, lead generation is a hot market. But the existing ‘Safelist’ solution has a big problem. People do not want to flood their emails.

Here comes the idea maker who thought of a solution to this problem……

In 2000, a renowned internet marketing guru, John Reese, came out with an ingenious system. He combined the idea of safelist and network system. In his novel system, members can send emails to their 10 levels of members. Let me explain……

For example, A1 recruits B1 and B2 who become A1’s level 1. B1 and B2 then recruit C1, C2, C3, C4 who become A1’s level 2 and so on. It’s something like your referral structure at EmailCashPro. To A1, he will be able to send emails to all the Bs, Cs, Ds, Es, Fs…. all the way to the 10th level.

This is a powerful system because in this system, the maximum number of emails each member can receive is limited to 10, since only the immediate 10 uplines can send emails to the member. But the member can email to thousands of people in his 10 levels of network. If you don’t get what I mean, take out a piece of paper and work out the maths. It’s not hard to figure out.

John’s ingenious system has shaped the lead generation industry. Today, many other lead generation programs use a similar system to build leads.

What John did was he took the safelist idea, which is an existing system but with a limitation, and combined it with network building system, which is another existing system. I hope you can see that nothing truly innovative is created here. He merely combined two systems into one in order to overcome the limitation of the safelist system.

John’s system solved the problem of members’ emails being flooded with thousands of emails. However, members in the system still have to receive emails from their 10 uplines in the system, which is still obtrusive and annoying. In reality, many people in such system still divert their emails to junk accounts.

There you have it. Another limitation that is waiting for someone to overcome.

This time, I grabbed this opportunity to create a system that allows members to build leads without having to receive any email from any member in the system. You may have guessed it by now. Yes, the system is called LeadsLeap.

Basically, I took John’s system, which is already an improved version of the safelist system, and combined it with contextual advertising system. For those who don’t know what is contextual advertising, go to Google.com and do a search for “birthday gift”. Look at the advertisements on the right hand side. Those are contextual ads.

In a nutshell, members of LeadsLeap.com will not have to receive emails from any other members in the system. They will only receive info-packed newsletters (now info-packed blog) from me.

The twist in the system is that I allow members to post their contextual ads in my newsletter. To a member, besides reading high quality newsletters, he will also see the contextual ads posted by his 10 uplines. He can click on the contextual ads in the newsletter if he is interested in the ad. If not, he can just read my newsletter and learn more about making money online.

Again, nothing truly innovative has been created. I simply combine two existing systems into one in order to overcome the limitation of John’s system.

That’s it. 3 simple steps you can use to come out with innovative ideas that sell!

Make use of these 3 steps. The next winning innovative idea can be from you!

Recently I received an email from a member asking the question below:

“I need to advertise the book that I had written. I really need to promote it in a very big way. How do I do it.” - Mustapha

Find out my answer to his question below……

Before I reply to his question, here are some assumptions I have made:

1) He is promoting an ebook, not a physical book

2) He is writing something related to internet marketing

First thing first……

If you want to promote your ebook in a big way, I mean really a big way, you must make sure that your ebook has some viral elements built in. For example, your ebook should come with an affiliate program so that the readers of your ebook can promote your ebook to other people.

That is the basic element your ebook must have. Or else it’s almost impossible to make it big!

Next……

You need to have lots of traffic to your website that sells the ebook.

Let’s skip all the standard textbook answers and jump directly to the only 2 traffic generation methods that will give you 80% of the results you want.

If you want LOTS of traffic FAST, there are only 2 methods. Either you advertise heavily or you find lots of JV partners. I can’t think of the 3rd method frankly.

Notes on advertising……

Advertising is expensive and in many cases, you may not be able to sell enough ebooks to earn back your advertising cost.

If so, why do I still ask you to advertise?

This is because if you have no resources at all, where else can you start?

I spent more than 10k in advertising to get myself off the ground in internet marketing several years back. I practice what I preach.

But before throwing all your hard earn cash into advertising, you must have the viral element in place. That’s why I said it is the first thing you must have right at the beginning of this article.

Even if you only make 20 sales through your own advertising effort, if your viral elements are in place, these 20 sales will grow into 100 sales and then 1000 sales and so on.

Notes on finding JV partners……

The second method to get lots of traffic fast is through JV partners.

Finding JV partners is usually free but it takes a lot of persistence and hard work.

If you are a newbie, you can forget about finding those top gurus to JV with you. They are not likely to reply your email unless you happen to attend their seminars and manage to rub shoulders with them during the seminars. Or you happen to know someone they trust and that someone is willing to introduce you to them. Or else, your chance of JVing with them is near zero.

But if you’ve purchased any work from an average marketer, you can try writing to them and asking them if they would be keen to do a joint promotion, i.e. you promote their work and they promote yours. Please don’t write to them and say “Hey, I wrote a new ebook. Would you like to promote it.” Most people wouldn’t until you do them a favor first.

Think of finding JV partners similar to digging a well. It takes time to build relationships before asking people to promote your product. Building relationship doesn’t has to be costly. It can be simple things like helping the marketer to write a sales letter for free or do some graphic design for free, depending on what skills you have. If you are starting from nothing, a wise thing to do now is to start offering your service free to some of the marketers out there to build relationship. What I’m saying is you should start digging your well. One day, when you need their help, they are more likely to remember you.

If you have not attended any seminar, purchased any product from anyone or helped any marketers in any way, the only thing you can do now is write to as many marketers as possible and hopefully a few of them are willing to help you. The chance is very slim but try. You are like begging people for water, since you do not have a well. But if you are thirsty and have no money to buy water (advertising in this case), what else can you do?

Similar to advertising, all you need is 10-20 JV partners who are willing to promote your ebook and with the viral elements in place, you will be able to multiply the initial traffic many times over.

Today I’m going to show you an extremely easy way to make extra money from your website.

In short, the trick is to sell links on your website.

Let me show you how I do it……

I have more than 50 content-based websites earning me thousands of dollars every month from Adsense. But some of these websites are not getting much traffic and they probably only make $10 a month. What can you do if you are in such a situation?

More than a year ago, I came across a service that allowed me to sell links on my websites. I thought since some of my websites are not making much money, why not sell links on these websites and make some extra money?

Initially, I was only thinking of making a few more dollars from each website, but it turned out that I was able to make $20 - $30 from each website every month. No bad for an extra income.

Who can sell links on their websites?

Your website must have at least a PR 1 in order for you to sell links. That’s not too hard isn’t it?

The price of each link varies according to the pagerank. Here’s a break down of the pricing:

PageRank (PR) 1 homepage $.50 , subpage $.50
PageRank (PR) 2 homepage $1 , subpage $1
PageRank (PR) 3 homepage $2 , subpage $1.50
PageRank (PR) 4 homepage $3 , subpage $2
PageRank (PR) 5 homepage $4.50 , subpage $3.50
PageRank (PR) 6 homepage $12.50 , subpage $10
PageRank (PR) 7 homepage $30 , subpage $25
PageRank (PR) 8 homepage $75 , subpage $50

I know the pricing doesn’t look attractive to you. That was what I thought initially. But you know what, for each of your webpage, they actually place as many as 10 links on each page!

Just do the maths yourself. It’s not hard to earn extra $20 - $30 from your website.

Things to consider before selling links

I need to WARN you that if your websites are getting good traffic from the search engines, you should not sell links on these websites, at least not on the homepage. This is because Google has announced that they will penalize websites that sell links. If you are caught, the pagerank of your website will be reduced.

Having said that, honestly, after selling text links on some of my low traffic websites for more than a year, I can confidently say that the PR of my website is not affected at all.

But it’s better to be safe than to be sorry. That’s why for me, I only sell links on websites that are not getting much traffic from the search engines.

Another type of website that I like to sell links are squeeze pages. Squeeze pages usually only have 3 - 5 pages and they typically don’t rank well in search engines. You can easily make extra $20 a month selling links on these pages.

$20 a month is not a lot of money. But if you have 10 - 20 of these websites, that’s a few thousand extra dollars every year, enough to cover one of my vacations.