Loading ...One of the key decisions you will make when starting an internet business, or even developing an internet business is “should I locate or create?”
What do I mean?
When I refer to locate, I am referring to searching for a product to offer to your market as a partner. When I refer to create, I am talking about the creative process or creating an information product to offer to your niche and the list of an army of affiliates and joint venture partners that you have on side.
Affiliate Marketing
The process of locating other people’s digital products and matching them to highlyqualified traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s easily possible to locate products that are suitable for your niche, offer them and make a full time income from the affiliate commissions alone.
The process of affiliate marketing involves beginning with doing some niche research. This involves finding a group of people that are willing and able to spend money on the offer you’re going to offer. The selected market should have a good level of disposable income and the market for your products should ideally be growing as opposed to declining so you can build a business with a high degree of sustainability and longevity.
Once you’ve made your decision on your target market, you will want to find out where they ‘hang out’.
What forums do they visit? What are their favourite sites? What email lists are they on? These sort of questions will enable you to assemble a customer profile of the people you’re serving. From here, what are their desires, their fears, their needs, their wants.
Once you assemble a personal profile of a typical customer in your niche, then you’ll need to find out what solutions they’re looking for to solve their problems. This is not always the same as the solutions that you consider they need for you to resolve their problems. People will often pay money for things they want rather than for things that they actually need.
Once you understand your customer well including their entire psychology, then you’ll be able to market more effectively to them. You will understand the things you need to communicate for your customers to take the desired action. This persuasion should always come from a service mindset rather than a place of deceit.
Now you need to look for a valuable solution that you would like to suggest to your customers to assist them in their own quest for internet success. The acid test you should use when deciding whether or not you want to offer a product is “would I put my own name on that product?” and “does it deliver value in excess of its asking price?” If the answer to both of those questions is “yes”, then you can think of it as OK for you to refer others to it.
The next step is to drive traffic from one place in the internet to your affiliate offer. Most affiliate offers take the form of sales pages where the desired action for both the product owner and affiliate is for the prospect to buy the product which of course results in a sale and a commission for the affiliate.
Nowadays, CPA marketing is gaining some momentum with internet marketing newcomers and experienced marketers
alike being attracted to it because it offers the opportunity to make lots of small sales because the action attached to the commission is usually something more achievable for a payment to be released. These desired actions from the CPA networks are often capturing leads through the submission of email addresses, creating an account, participating in surveys or other suchlike actions that can be easily measured with online tools. The advertisers are willing to pay per lead because they know the metrics of their customers.
The next stage of marketing as an affiliate is traffic. There are literally thousands of ways of
generating traffic which is beyond the scope of this article, however you should bear in mind the questions to ask yourself that I spoke of earlier. Where do my market hang out? This is where you need to be building relationships and posting your offers.
Product Creation
This process is much more tricky than marketing as an affiliate but is also much more rewarding. I guess that could be a matter of opinion depending on what your goals are from an online business and the amount of effort that you want to put in for your business. If you enjoy being creative and teaching or training others how to do things, you’ll love this process.
The product creation process requires you to:
- Locate a need in the marketplace which you can solve, and crucially, which other people believe you to be able to solve.
- Make a digital product that is an answer to the problem that you’re solving.
Contrary to popular belief, you’ll be offering a solution NOT just marketing a product. There is a huge difference and if you can grasp the fact that you’re offering solutions and not just products, then you’ll be way ahead of the high majority of people out there doing internet marketing. When you market solutions, you will want to communicate the benefits of the offer, the pleasure that the solution will provide and the pain that the solution will save your market from. This may take the form of:
- an eBook which is usually a straightforward PDF document which contains valuable textual information.
– a series of audio recordings a report. It could also be recordings of interviews. A tool like Pamela with Skype is a popular choice with the internet marketing community.
– screen capture recordings which can be easily produced using video screen capture software like Camtasia Studio.
– a membership site that provides time sensitive and high quality information that serves your market continually. A membership site can be relatively simply produced using WordPress with a plugin called WishList Member.
- Make a minisite complete with web graphics, compelling sales copy, powerful testimonials and an iron clas money back guarantee.
- Create an affiliates area complete with promotional tools to make it as simple and inviting for the partner to promote your product. You should remember that you are offering your product alongside other product owners for your affiliates’ attention, and therefore their traffic sources. The more tools and training you provide, the easier you make it for your affiliates and the more likely they’ll be to promote your product.
- Go through a pre-launch sequence for both the sale of the product and for affiliate recruitment. This process involves raising awareness and anticipation for the product as well as finding people that would like to partner with you for a share of the profits from the product’s sales.
- Find JV partners in your network of contacts to promote your product.
- Set up a customer service system for returns and possible customer queries.
OK, even after that lengthy list of activities to do during the product creation process and launch phase, there are still other things that must be done. The starting point for you to consider is whether you really want to go through the process of creating your own product.
Affiliate marketing can be profitable enough if you can get to grips with the art of driving traffic. Product creation is mainly more profitable when you have a list of JV partners, some credibility for your offer, an army of affiliates helping and you’ve gone through the launch sequence properly.
Whichever method you decide upon, ensure you have the main
principles in place. Does the market have money that they’re ready to spend on the solution you’re offering? Is the market growing with a promising long term future outlook?
Access pragmatic things to know about the topic of internet marketing – please go through the publication. The times have come when proper information is truly only one click of your mouse, use this chance.
