Hi Elisha,

I wasn't subscribed to this post and I just noticed your question. Sorry for the delay. If you are an absolute newbie, as I suggested to Paul, I would really consider breaking into another niche. It's just that it's really hard to appear to be an expert in an arena where you have absolutely no idea what you are doing (especially when it comes to "making money"). There is another way to do it that I did not mention earlier, however. That is, if you are absolutely dead set on choosing IM as your preferred market.

Here's your answer... Interview experts! This strategy was used to perfection by now well-known marketer Tellman Knudson on his first listbuilding venture (when he was a "nobody" and had zero credibility, from a marketing perspective).

You could contact product owners, and ask them if they would be willing to allow you to conduct a teleseminar where you would be interviewing them about their new product or service. You would set everything up-- coordinate everything so that all the product owner has to do is simply show up for the call. And the only thing that you would ask for in return is the rights to the interview and perhaps a small affiliate commission for each sale.

It's a win win situation for both you and the product owner for the following reasons: You now have a full-length audio product along with the transcripts that you could sell as your own for 100% profit, and the product owner now has a passive viral resource (your product) that will help to market his material as well (obviously assuming that you mention the name of his website and/or provide an affiliate link in the transcripts of the interview). Not to mention the immediate promotional value that he/she recieves from the teleseminar.

Once you conduct enough of these interviews, your name will end up becoming synonymous with the very people (the experts) with whom you are associating yourself. In other words, you end up becoming the company that you keep.

It's not a foolproof method, but if your determined enough, it can work extremely well.

Cheers