One of the main decisions you will make when launching an online
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 locating a valuable product to offer to your market as a partner. When I refer to create, I am referring to the creative process or creating an information product to offer to your market and the market of an army of affiliates and joint venture partners that you have on board.
Affiliate Marketing
The process of locating other internet marketer’s products and matching them to highlytargeted traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s possible to uncover products that are suitable for your niche, offer them and make a living from the affiliate commissions alone.
The process of affiliate marketing involves starting out with doing some niche research. This involves finding a group of people that are willing and able to spend money on the product you’re going to offer. The group of people should have a good level of disposable income and the market for your offers should ideally be expanding as opposed to declining so you can develop a business which has a high degree of sustainability and longevity.
Once you’ve made your decision on your target niche, 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 type of questions will enable you to assemble a customer profile of the people you’re serving. From this point, what are their desires, their fears, their needs, their wants.
Once you put together a customer profile of a typical customer in your market, then you’ll need to find out what solutions 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 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 emotions you’ll need to target 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 promote to your customers to help them in their own quest for online 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 over and above its asking price?” If the answer to those questions is “yes”, then you can consider that it is OK for you to promote it.
The next stage 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 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 a real opportunity to make
numerous 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 email addresses, registering an account, taking part in surveys or other suchlike actions that can be easily monitored 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 relationship building and posting your offers.
Product Creation
This process is much more tricky than marketing as an affiliate but is also much more rewarding. I admit that could be a matter of opinion depending on what your goals are from an internet business and the level of effort that you want to put in for your business. If you enjoy being creative and demonstrating to others how to do things, you’ll enjoy this process.
The product creation process 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 a solution to the problem that you’re 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 way ahead of the high majority of people out there in the internet marketing game. When you market solutions, you will want to communicate the benefits of the solution, the feeling that the solution will provide and the pain that the solution will save your market from. This may be in the form of:
- an eBook which is usually a straightforward PDF document containing valuable textual information.
– a series of audio recordings that[spin] can be a spoken version of [spin]an eBook. 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 quite simply be produced using video screen capture tools like Camtasia Studio.
– a membership area that offers 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 complete with web graphics, compelling sales copy, persuasive testimonials and a rock solid money back guarantee.
- Create an area for affiliates complete with promotional tools to make it as achievable 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 building 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 own network to promote your product.
- Set up a customer service system for returns and possible customer queries.
OK, even after that lengthy list of things 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 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 generating traffic. Product creation is usually more lucrative when you have a list of JV partners, some credibility for your offer, an army of affiliates with a vested interest and you’ve gone through the launch sequence properly.
Whichever method you choose, ensure you have the main
principles in place. Does the market have money that they’re ready to spend on the product you’re offering? Is the market growing with a promising long term future outlook?
Find out important tips about web traffic – please study this web page. The times have come when concise information is truly within one click, use this opportunity.
