One of the key decisions you will take when launching 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 valuable 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 people and the market of an army of affiliates and strategic partners that you have on side.
Affiliate Marketing
The process of locating other online marketer’s products and matching them to highlyqualified traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s easily possible to uncover products that are suitable for your market, offer them and make a full time income from the affiliate commissions alone.
The process of marketing as an affiliate involves beginning with doing some market research. This involves uncovering a group of people that are willing and able to spend money on the offer you’re going to offer. The selected niche should have a good level of disposable income and the projected requirement for your products should ideally be getting bigger rather than declining so you can grow 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 discussion groups do they visit? What are their favourite websites? Whose email lists are they on? These type of questions will allow you to devise a customer profile of the market you’re serving. From here, 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 uncover 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 action you want them to take. This persuasion should always come from a place of service rather than a place of deceit.
Now you need to look for a valuable product that you would like to recommend to your customers to help them in their own mission for internet success. The acid test you should use when assessing whether or not you want to offer a product is “would I put my own name on that product?” and “does it deliver value above its asking price?” If the answer to both of 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 are sales pages where the desired action for 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.
More recently, CPA marketing is gaining some momentum with internet marketing newcomers and experienced marketers
alike being attracted to it because it offers the opportunity to earn
numerous 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 email addresses, creating an account, completing questionnaires or other suchlike actions that can be easily tracked with online tools. The advertisers are willing to pay per lead because they know 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 market hang out? This is where you need to be building relationships and posting your offers.
Product Creation
This process is much more complex than marketing as an affiliate but is also much more rewarding. I guess that could be a matter of opinion depending on what you want from an online 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 love this process.
The product creation process requires you to:
- Uncover a need in the marketplace which you can resolve, and crucially, which other people consider you to be able to solve.
- Create a digital product that is an answer to the problem that you are solving.
Contrary to popular belief, 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 offering solutions and not just products, then you’ll be way ahead of the high majority of people out there in the internet marketing game. When you market solutions, you’ll want to communicate the benefits of the solution, the pleasure that the solution will give and the pain that the solution will spare your market from. This may be in the form of:
- an eBook which is usually a straightforward PDF document that contains valuable textual information.
– a series of audio recordings which. It could also be recordings of interviews. A tool like Pamela with Skype is a common choice for 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.
- Make a minisite with web graphics, excellent sales copy, powerful testimonials and an iron clas money back guarantee.
- Create an affiliates area complete with promotional tools to make it as achievable and inviting for the partner to drive traffic to your product. You should remember that you are offering your
offering alongside other product owners for the attention of your affiliates, and therefore their traffic sources. The more tools and training that is provided, 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 building awareness and anticipation for the offer 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 offer.
- 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 profitable enough if you can master 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 choose, ensure you have the fundamentals in place. Does the market have disposable income they’re willing to spend on the product you’re offering? Is the market growing with a promising long term future outlook?
For pragmatic knowledge in the sphere of internet marketing – make sure to read this web site. The times have come when proper info is really within one click, use this opportunity.
Tags: affiliate marketing