A definition of "strategy" can be, "strategy is the pattern of decisions in a company that determines objectives, purposes, or goals." Strategy is something more long term, how to connect the dots (the tactics) in your business.

Note that there are many different definitions for both strategy and tactics and that they change depending on when and where they are used.

The Tactical Tricks and Traps

Let's start by looking at tactics, as most products you see online in the online or affiliate marketing and making money by marketing fall under this category.

This can be using a script to increase signups, changing ad copy on your web page to sell more or choosing a specific autoresponder service for your newsletter.

The price range for tactical products is most often quite low. The range is from free giveaways and up. Many if not most so-called $7 products will fall into this category.

Here's the reason why this kind of products are easy to sell and attract a lot of people.

The desired and predictable result the product (can) "will" produce is most often a short-term action. This makes it an easy sell as the ad copy can contain a bit more hype, easier to prove thanks to short-term action (quick results), large user base (more user = greater statistical chance someone used it and it worked). This list can be made much longer but you probably see where I'm going with this.

Here are a couple of examples of things you can find in this group,

New scripts that automatically make magical things happen (increases in subscriber rate, more sales due to what the script does, simple but still unknown tricks to increase ranking in search engines, get listed quick or get more tags into social networking sites).

Strategy from Here to Eternity

So what are strategy products? These products most often come as higher priced packages. They are harder to sell not only due to the pricing but from the fact that strategic knowledge and advices normally are more long time focused and are more like "real business plans," making it boring for the make money fast crowd.

What good are they if they don't teach how to make money, you ask?

Well, they do teach you how to make money but not in the direct way most of us want to learn. The foundation for success is strategy, and how you implement and execute it is based in tactics.

Here's an example:

You have a small list of 200 subscribers and you have a new product you would like to sell. The problem with the sell is that the product is not of interest to most of the subscribers. So what should you do?

You create a number of messages describing the product, what it does and benefits. In these messages you invite interested subscribers to sign up to a new special list that only has information about the new product. Once they have subscribed to the new list, you start the normal pitching, selling and so on. Sounds quite straightforward and reasonable doesn't it?

What you just read is strategy!

The tactics would be choosing the autoresponder, implement popups on landing pages for the new list, removing subscribers from one list when they are added on the other, sending out more focused broadcasts to this new group, setting up the sales page, integrating the credit card handling, fixing downloads and so on.

Looking for the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow?

You will find people that from nowhere invent a small script, stumble upon someone that hooks them up with the correct people, big promotion, and 30 days later they have sold over $1,000,000. But there are not too many of these guys and gals in the world. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's neither reproducible nor possible to teach others how to do it in a meaningful way.

Now stop for a moment and look at the people making the big sales repeatedly and you'll see they all build their online business on long-term plans and execute them with short-term tasks. The biggest difference is that they build businesses to last!

So now is the time to clean up and stop doing random acts of script installation, spontaneous broadcast for a product because it has a high amount payout to affiliates or just leaving signup forms on websites and pages collecting people going into dust-filled lists you never mail to.