One of the main decisions you will take when starting an internet business, or even developing an online business is “should I locate or create?”
What do I mean?
When I refer to locate, I am referring to locating a product to offer to your market as a partner. When I refer to create, I am talking about the creative process or product creation to offer to your people and the list of an army of affiliates and JV partners that you have on side.
Affiliate Marketing
The process of locating other people’s digital products and matching them to highlytargeted traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s possible to find 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 market research. This involves finding a group of people that are willing and able to spend money on the
solution you’re going to offer. The selected niche should have a good level of disposable income and the projected requirement for your offers should ideally be growing as opposed to declining so you can grow a business with a high degree of sustainability and longevity.
Once you’ve decided on your target market, you will want to discover out where they ‘hang out’.
What forums do they visit? What are their most visited sites? What subscriber lists are they on? These sort of questions will enable you to put together a customer profile of the market you’re serving. From this point, what are their desires, their fears, their needs, their wants.
Once you assemble a customer profile of a typical customer in your market, then you’ll need to find out what products they are 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 need.
Once you understand your customer well including their entire psychology, then you will be able to market more effectively to them. You will understand the things you need to communicate for your customers to take the action you want them to take. This persuasion should always come from a place of service rather than a place of deceit.
Then you’ll need to look for a valuable product that you would like to suggest to your customers to help them in their own quest for internet success. The acid test you should use when assessing whether or not you want to promote 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 those questions is “yes”, then you can think of it as OK for you to offer 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 the product owner and affiliate is for the prospect to order 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 seasoned professionals alike being drawn to it because it offers a real opportunity to earn lots of small sales because the action attached to the commission is usually something much smaller for a payment to be released. These desired actions from the CPA networks are often capturing leads through the submission of email addresses, registering an account, taking part in questionnaires or other suchlike actions that can be easily tracked with online tools. The advertisers are willing to pay per lead because they understand the metrics of their customers.
The next stage of affiliate marketing is traffic. There are literally hundreds 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 prospective customers hang out? This is where you need to be building relationships and posting your links.
Product Creation
This process is much more complex than affiliate marketing but is also much more rewarding. I guess that could be a matter of opinion depending on what you want from an internet business and the level of effort that you want to put in for your business. If you enjoy creativity and showing others how to do things, you’ll enjoy this process.
The process of product creation requires you to:
- Locate a need in the marketplace which you can resolve, 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 are solving.
Contrary to popular opinion, you’ll be marketing a solution NOT just marketing a product. There is a huge difference and if you can grasp the fact that you’re selling solutions and not just products, then you’ll be light years 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 give and the pain that the solution will save your market from. This may take the form of:
- an eBook which is usually a simple PDF document that contains valuable textual information.
– a series of audio recordings a book. 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 area that provides time sensitive and high quality information that serves your market continually. A membership site can be easily produced using a popular premium WordPress plugin called Wishlist Member.
- Create a minisite with web graphics, compelling sales copy, powerful testimonials and a rock solid money back guarantee.
- Create an area for affiliates complete with promotional tools to make it as simple and inviting for the affiliate to drive traffic to your product. You should remember that you are positioning your
offering alongside other product owners for the attention of your affiliates, 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 will be to promote your product.
- Go through a pre-launch sequence for both the sale of the product and for the recruitment of affiliates. This process involves raising awareness and anticipation for the launch as well as finding affiliates that wish 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 little 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 that you must consider is whether you actually want to go through the process of creating your own product.
Affiliate marketing can be lucrative enough if you can master the art of generating traffic. Product creation is usually more lucrative when you have a list of JV partners, some credibility for your product, an army of affiliates helping and you’ve gone through the launch sequence effectively.
Whichever tactic you choose, make sure you have the main
principles in place. Does the market have money that they’re willing to spend on the product you’re offering? Is the market increasing with a promising long term future outlook?
Find out pragmatic tips about the topic of internet marketing – go through the page. The time has come when concise information is really only one click away, use this chance.