Tag Archives | Affiliate Marketing

Why Affiliate Marketing on the Internet Makes the Perfect Home Business

By Lowell on May 28, 2015 in Blog

There are many reasons why affiliate marketing may be the number one way to start a business from home. Just to name a few obvious things, the program will provide you with a web page to use to advertise. There are no technical skills required.

While this is usually not a website where you can change and customize it, it is a lean, mean advertisement with a link address that is ready to use from day one. No wasting time and being in ‘pre-launch’ forever while you are debugging and etc. Having this one major tool is a huge step up that allows you to focus on promoting your business to earn commissions.

While this is a great benefit and ‘leg up’, even more critical is having a product to sell without years of development and market research. With affiliate programs, they may have tangible or digital products you can earn money with and even use for your own business. In addition you can earn money for referring others to the business opportunity.

With both of these issues covered instantly, not only are you saving time, but a huge amount of money in start-up costs that you would otherwise need to spend to develop a business. It is assumed you have a computer and Internet connectivity and this configuration more or less defines your business. Beyond that necessary equipment, your expense as well as effort will be largely focused on advertising and marketing.

It is a fair exchange between the affiliate program and the member. The member receives the right to earn money from the program’s intellectual property and to use various resources that they may provide toward that end. In return the member advertises the business to sell the products and refer others to the company. For the company this means they will spend less in the advertising the affiliates will need to do if they want to earn commissions.

An additional benefit of being in business on the Internet is the cost of doing business. Anything that you can do in the virtual world is 10 times less expensive than doing basically the same operation offline. For example you are reaching millions of people by advertising on the Internet and via email marketing which goes hand-in-hand with any online business. If you were to pay for enough paper, printing and postage to reach even half that many people, it would cost you a small fortune.

It’s just the way the world is that things are easier done with money and although you can do many things to promote your business online absolutely free, it will require less effort and time if you are able to afford some help, for example to build your list of prospects. Of course there is nothing to say that someday you can’t start your own affiliate program and your members will help you advertise your business!

Internet Affiliate Marketing Strategy: Is ‘Autopilot’ Working Without Working?

By Lowell on May 25, 2015 in Blog

‘Autopilot’ is short for ‘automatic pilot’. This word has been adopted in Internet marketing strategies to describe “business in a box” models. Let’s understand what autopilot is and isn’t. Look at the associations to some keywords from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia description of ‘autopilot’ that are relevant to Internet affiliate marketing:

“An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of a vehicle without constant ‘hands-on’ control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace a human operator, but assist them in controlling the vehicle, allowing them to focus on broader aspects of operation, such as monitoring the trajectory, weather and systems” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot

The secret here is that you must learn how to use your system and have all your ducks in a row if you are going to run your business on ‘autopilot’! It’s really not pie in the sky! If you can just pull it off.

Right off the bat as an affiliate marketer you have tremendous automatic pilots. To list these assets just off the top, the affiliate program first gives you a web page to promote on the Internet. That is a ‘storefront’ that is open 24/7/365. At any time you could make a sale and you could be sound asleep, at the beach or a ballgame at the same time. Your store is open and ready to do business should the opportunity arise (you get visitors, aka traffic, hits, etc) …

The affiliate program also processes the orders that you generate; and provides customer services and tech support for you and your customers (your ‘downline’). So these things truly are on autopilot. … AND it is actually Automatic.
However you initiated that transaction by joining the program and that is the trigger that sets it all ON. But as it says in our description, “…Autopilots do not replace a human operator”.

YOU are YOUR business! The best asset you have! So you have to be seriously engaged in your business at least in so far as continuous learning, understanding, monitoring, and managing every component of your business. (It’s ok to think about the day you can pay somebody to handle the day-to-day operations and send you a report)!

Of course your main concern is promoting your business through marketing and advertising online. The techniques you may use are systems that can be ‘autopilot’. Again here you need to be involved in doing research; and setting your tools up correctly so that you can depend on them functioning without your constant attention to detail.

Working smarter surely would include using autopilot platforms to run a business! Being logical you would just know that you need to be ‘taking care of business’ whether or not you have automated. If you have an organized plan with target goals, probably the most work you will ever do is only at the beginning as you build each new facet.

Affiliate Marketing Programs

By Lowell on May 1, 2015 in Blog

One of the best ways to get started with an online business is to try affiliate marketing. The primary reason being that everything is all put together for you and you can just sit down and get started right off the bat with learning how to market a business on the Internet.

While some people may balk at the membership fees, they should actually be grateful that this is a small price to pay for all that they will be provided just by virtue of their membership. They will save untold hours and much more money in that again, everything is put together already.

There is no learning how to build a sales page because the affiliate program will provide one, encoded with the affiliate ID that is associated with the membership. When any sales are made from that page, they will be credited to the member. Additionally the affiliate program will handle the customer service for the member’s customers, and process the transactions. So here we see our affiliate is saving time and money again as they do not have to provide either support or a payment gateway which can be very costly.

Additionally the affiliate program may provide other resources for their members such as training in Internet marketing, banners and other graphics for advertising purposes, autoresponder messages, an actual autorepsonder system, and list building mechanisms.

It is actually a very fair exchange that a member pays membership fees to compensate the program for the expenses they had in creating and maintaining not only the membership system but the product or service provided by the company as well. This again, greatly reduces the time for a learning curve and development for the member in that they can just walk in and use what is already there, rather than to need to create their own system and product.

Affiliate program membership makes it legal for members to profit from the company’s intellectual property. It is a very fair exchange that the company may benefit from the advertising and marketing the affiliates do to promote their own businesses to earn commissions. This is why they pay the commissions on top of all they do. The relationship is definitely a win/win all around for everyone.

The key however is for the affiliate to realize there is nothing magical about having an affiliate link. They have to really work to make anything happen. They have to learn how to, and then they have to actually promote the link diligently in order to make any money. Nobody will ever see their link unless the affiliate does substantial marketing and advertising over time. They need to be very aggressive about it rather than lackadaisical (“lacking enthusiasm and determination; carelessly lazy”).

So if you are really serious about wanting to have an Internet business, try at least one affiliate program to see what it is all about; then give it a fair chance of at least 90-days where you consistently focus on developing your business. Even if you fail the first time, try another one. The more experience you have the more likely it is that you will succeed.

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Tag Archives | Affiliate Marketing