Every good marketer knows how important it is to increase the lifetime value of the customer.  It's much cheaper to make a sale to a previous customer than it is to get a new one on-board.  The cost of acquiring new customers can be high, but getting more money out of existing customers won't cost you a penny.

Building a backend to your business isn't hard... but without one, you're limiting your financial potential.  A backend is how you continue selling to an existing customer. Let's say you sell an eBook on how to make money blogging, for example.

Your eBook could discuss what a blog is, how to set one up, and how to make money from it.  Your backend sales could come from affiliate items (if you don't feel like taking the product creation route again) or a new eBook, membership site, or video/audio package you sell.

Whenever you first start selling online, always think of complementary topics you can tack on as a backend. For our example, your backend sales could be about social networking on other web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Facebook, or bookmarking sites.

After you've begun seeing success with those, your back-end sales could continue by focusing on more paid methods of marketing, such as AdWords.  You set up your offers with your audience like stepping stones, moving from the first logical starting point to a more advanced stage.

Insert your offers right into your autoresponder system and it will automatically serve the needs of your subscribers the longer they stay on your list.

Another common way to add a backend onto a product is to offer personal coaching. 

Personal coaching can be expensive, sometimes even costing up to thousands of dollars per month.  A lot of marketers offer this as a backend strategy, giving them the potential to significantly increase the return on their investment(ROI) of acquiring the prospect.

If you take care to create top quality backend offers that add value to their needs, they'll continue buying from you. If you promote anything and everything just for the sake of cashing in, they'll eventually lose trust in you.

Your backend sales strategy isn't limited to just your autoresponder. You can put links to backend products on your "thank you" pages as well.  And don't forget that each product can act as a backend item for another one. So you might start with an ebook about social marketing and then use a blogging ebook as your back-end item for the customer.

Just make sure you don't set yourself up for limited profits by using a single product without implementing a backend strategy that will work to increase your ROI over and over again. You're building a business, not dabbling in a few hit or miss sales.
 

Here's another great resource I created to help you build your business:

CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR COPY!

AdSense can be a fantastic moneymaker.  There are many people who make thousands of dollars per month through AdSense alone.  Hearing this may get you excited, and you may already have dollar signs in your eyes.  But don't get your hopes up just yet.

Although you've probably heard about people who bring in five or six figures per month with AdSense, you need to keep one very important thing in mind.  In order to make that kind of money with AdSense, you need to have a ton of traffic.  

In fact, most people who make more than $100 per month with AdSense either have a very large website with thousands of visitors per day, or they have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller websites.

For most people, AdSense may not be worth the effort to create sites only for promoting it.  AdSense only pays a few cents for each click, depending on the keyword you target (some pay a lot more) and those few cents are a lot smaller than they were just a few years ago.  

A few years ago, some people were getting several dollars per click for many keywords.  These days, $1 clicks are relatively rare in most niches.  Most clicks seem to bring you under $0.50 now, and smaller niches may experience clicks of only around $0.10 (or even less.)

In order to make $10 per day, at $0.10 per click you would need 100 clicks.  If your click through ratio were 5%, you would need 2,000 visitors to your site every single day just to earn $10 per day. 

For sites with very little traffic, you would have to have a really fantastic click through ratio in order to earn decent money with AdSense - or, choose highly competitive keywords that pay a lot, but are harder to rank high for in the search engines. 

Some sites just naturally have traffic that doesn't buy much as far as paid information, but the visitors like to click through links to access free information.  Webmasters who have sites that target the freebie-seeking demographic should test AdSense links to see which type performs best.

If you're running a site that has an extremely general audience, AdSense might also be a good alternative.  AdSense is usually pretty good at delivering targeted ads.  You can create thousands of content pages with AdSense links, place the code in your blogs, and watch your monthly earnings rise as you create more content for your readers.

If your only goal is to make money without becoming a product owner, then consider creating a content-laden site that weaves affiliate links into the text and provides ample opportunities for clicks to AdSense links so that you can profit from the information you're delivering.

Watch this great full in depth AdSense Tutorial