What You Need To Know About IM Business Models – The Long and Short of it

What You Need To Know About IM Business Models


There are countless excellent reasons to be interested in earning money online and it is no exaggeration to say that this is a decision that can change your entire life. Earning money online is appealing first and foremost to many people for the freedom that it affords them. If you can earn money online, then it essentially means that you can work from anywhere in the world.

For some people this then means working from home which is a great way to have a much more relaxed lifestyle. Imagine if you had no commute, if you could pick and choose your working hours, or if you could work in bed when the mood took you? Others will be more ambitious with their ability to work from home and will instead use it as a way to travel the world as a ‘digital nomad’.

If you have an online business model that works, then you can earn a living anywhere in the world as long as you have a laptop and an internet connection. Why not see the world and have some amazing experiences along the way?

This opens up a whole new concept called ‘lifestyle design’. Lifestyle design means deciding what kind of life you would like to live and then coming up with a career plan to fit that lifestyle – rather than falling into a job and then being forced to change your life around that.

It’s not just the lack of commute that makes working online ‘more free’ though either. Many online business models have the distinct advantage of being forms of ‘passive’ income. What this means is that you can earn money even while you’re sleeping or relaxing with friends. Ultimately, if you are very smart with your online business model, you can end up generating massive income while spending very little time actually working!

But there are other massive benefits to earning money online too. For example, earning money through an online business model essentially means that you’re running your own business and that is a highly rewarding and satisfying experience. You can to do something you really care about and be your own boss with your own company name, your own logo and your own mission statement.

Then there’s the fact that you can potentially earn much more online. Most of the best online business models are highly scalable and have very little overheads. With you being the sole earner and possibly even the sole employee to begin with, you can generate a massive amount of money and progress much more quickly than you would do by climbing the corporate ladder in a traditional manner.

But perhaps that all sounds a bit like a pipe dream? Maybe you don’t think you have what it takes to be a successful internet marketer, website owner or app developer? Actually, it turns out that this type of business is more common than you think. And it’s becoming much more common too. In all likelihood, these online business models are a glimpse into the future.

One day, we may find that very few of us end up working in stuffy, corporate environments. To demonstrate just how possible this is today, read on to see some rather impressive statistics regarding online business.

Statistics About Online Earning

8% of affiliate marketers earn $50K-$100K

12% of affiliate marketers earn over $100K

Many affiliate products offer up to 75% commission!

Over one third of businesses are introducing a ‘digital transformation program’ buying into the promise of earning money online

Another third have already put such a program in place!

In 2015, content marketing generating 3 times as many leads for businesses as traditional marketing

73% of B2B organizations use video marketing

78% of companies have dedicated social media departments

91% of all consumers check their e-mail daily

66% of US customers over 15 have purchased a product via an email ad campaign

Email advertising has a ROI of 4,300%!

One in five Americans now work from home (thanks to the internet)

That totals 53 million freelance Americans

54% of marketers believe SEO will be more in demand

96% of marketers rely on search engine optimization

Ironically, search engine optimization is the most popular search term on Google relating to marketing

Search ads accounted for $9.1 billion of advertising spend during the first half of 2014

I could go on and on!

So the point is, earning money online is indeed something that is going up and that more and more people and businesses are becoming interested in. It’s not rare or unusual to earn money online now – it’s something that

over 50 million Americans are doing and even big businesses are now doing most of their business online.

What’s more, is that this eBook is going to show you just how easy it is to start marking money online.

As you’ll see there are countless different methods you can use to earn money online and many of them are

incredibly simple and don’t require any upfront investments. That is to say, that if you’re so inclined, you can go start making money online this evening. And that’s another exciting thing to consider. Earning money online is something that you can do on top of your current job.

This doesn’t have to mean taking the frightening step of giving up your current job and putting all of your eggs in one basket. You can start earning money online today and only ever have to leave your job once you’re making a stable income and you decide it is safe and sensible to do so. Or you can carry on running a ‘side business’ on top of your current career indefinitely and potentially double, triple or quadruple your income!

What You Will Learn

All this will be possible thanks to the eBook you now hold in your metaphorical hands. In this book, you’ll learn of multiple different online business models that you can start making money from right now. These are tried and tested methods that are currently being used by countless people and that you can start benefiting from right away. Take a look through this article and see how they work.

That way, you can then decide which method is right for you – or whether you would rather take a different approach to your online money making!

Here is just a small preview of what you will learn:

How to sell affiliate products

How to create and sell a piece of software

How to make money from a ‘software as a service’ business model

How to make money from a website or blog

What CPA is and how you can use it to make money

How to run a business through eBay

How to promote a website, blog or eCommerce store

How to create a drop shipping business

How to create a membership site

And much more!

Things to Keep in Mind In Promoting Affiliate Products

Once you have identified the product that you want to market, there is still a little bit of work that needs to be done and they are set out below.

Profit

This is obviously the first thing that you should look for in any product that you want to market. Affiliate marketing is a business, and just as in any other business, it is profits that matter. All decisions therefore have to come down to this baseline, and if you, after all the research in the world find that the product is not profitable, there is no point in going any further.

This is the reason why there are a number of people who would have started out with affiliate marketing, but would have had to give up half way, because there is no money to be made. This is also the main reason why newcomers are advised to go for those products that are already selling well. That way there is not much decision making regarding the product to go with.

You will therefore have to concentrate only on improving your ranking in Google and while the competition is also much stiffer, you will at least know that if you are not able to sell, it has nothing to do with the product. It is important to make a distinction between profit and profitability. Most people go with high profitability, which means that you get high margins on sales.

While this may be a good income stream, it may be a good idea to take a look at the low margin, high volume segment. Many times the quantity of sales will be such that your total profits will be more in the low margin products than in the high margin ones. For example, trying to sell an eBook for $60 a book may give you a commission of $5 per sale but if you are netting only 20 sales a month, you are earning only $100.

Instead, if you go for the ones that sell at $10, your commission may well be only $1, but if you are able to make 200 sales, you earn $200. This is only an example but it serves to illustrate the point.

Marketability

The first point dovetails into this. You need to find products that are marketable. Unless there are people to buy what you have to sell, there is really no point in you even trying to sell it. You need to make sure that there is a market for your product before you try to sell it.There may be geniuses who were able to create a market, but this rarely happens. For the vast majority of us, selling products that already have an existing market is the only way out.

Stick to consumables

This is good advice because only consumables are sure to give you repeated sales. For example, dog food may not sound appealing, but there are more than 1,500,000 people searching monthly for it, and they will have to buy dog food the next month and the month after that. This way, even if the size of the market is low, you are guaranteed recurring sales because as long as you give a good deal, buyers will return to you.

Of course there is always the fear that repeat customers will go straight to the home site, but your advantage as an affiliate is that you are not stuck to just one product. You can have as many brands as you wish and as long as you make sure that there is something different about your site, like a new brand that you feel is better, or something else, people may very well try out different products from you.

It is easier to remember just one site and bookmark it, rather than 10 different ones for 10 different products, and so you are ensuring that they will keep coming back to you first before going elsewhere. As long as they do that, you will be credited with the sale.

Quality

This is important because although the net gives you a lot of anonymity, purchasing is still governed by old fashioned values like quality of the product. You are putting your reputation at stake by saying that a product is good quality, so either make sure that the product really is as good as it says it is, or give an honest review. Either way you will have to try the product to build up consumer confidence in your site.

It is not necessary that you sell only top quality products. High quality generally means high price but more people are satisfied with fairly high quality, but lower price product. Just don’t say that something is really good when it is not. For example, if you are selling cameras, there are a number of low cost, good enough cameras that will probably make up the bread and butter of your sale.

You cannot afford to not sell them as the high priced ones are not as often sold. Yet, you need to make sure that the purchaser gets good value, so inflating specifications, and giving opinions like something is really great when it isn’t, should be avoided. Honestly saying that something is good only for a certain use, and that if you want more functionality you should go with another model, is more appreciated than if you say that it is the best that money can buy.

Many sites offer customer reviews as their marketing ploy thinking that a customer who finds a review by another customer will be more inclined to believe it. Unfortunately, not all customers leave a review, which means that many of these sites resort to putting in reviews under different names just to bolster their site. This also means that you will have reviews that are not entirely accurate, meaning that you yourself are bringing down the value of your site.

A much simpler and as effective way is to just give an honest review and as long as you have taken the time to review the product properly, you will find people respect your opinions. This may take longer, but in the long run, is easier.

Popularity

Look into the popularity of the product first. Affiliate marketing is not as easy as just creating a site and becoming an affiliate. A lot of legwork is needed and just because you find a product that is searched for does not make it a good niche to be in. For example, there are a large number of people who search for anything “Labrador”. Yet, this is of no use to you because most of these people are looking for information.

Few people buy puppies online, and although you have the option of marketing various dog products, it is still not a very profitable niche to be in. Even people who like their dogs very much generally get what they need at the supermarket, and unless you can offer a really good deal on your products, they will not buy it.

This is just an example of something that is really popular, but does not net you anything in the form of money. Of course, if this is a niche you really want to be in, you could do further analysis on finding out why exactly people do not buy, and then create a site that takes into account all these problems. This is not only time consuming and expensive, there is also no guarantee of success.

How Do you Identify Products to Promote

After you have gone through some or all of the above-mentioned ways to identify products to market, your work is still not over. You are still left with choosing which product you want to go with. Using Amazon or Google’s affiliate network may be very easy, but all that it will help you with is with giving you options to choose from. You still have to choose, and if you make the wrong choice you will not only be not earning any money, you will be wasting your time and effort on something that is well spent elsewhere.

Choosing these products is an art, you need to have a gut instinct for it. There are a number of tools that will help you with making the choice, and we will discuss them in detail later, but making the final choice is still something that is as arbitrary as you picking one because you like it. If picking products were totally scientific there would be no place for you to enter in at all because everyone else would use the same tools that you want to make use of and choose products to market.

It is because it is not so easy, and it requires a lot of hard work that there is potential for the person who is willing to work hard at it. There are a few basics to selling both online and offline that are applicable and the primary among this is that selling is very easy if you are catering to a need. For example, selling clothes is never difficult. What is difficult is to sell them at a 300% profit, because buyers know when they are being ripped off.

Most of the advice you get will be different variations of the same thing. Find something that people need and start to sell it. A slight tweak on the same thing would be to find things that people need, that other people do not sell, and then sell it. This is just to make your job of selling it much easier than it would be if there were a horde of others selling the same thing.

The problem is that most of the needs of people are already met. Not only that, there are a large number of sellers already in the market and finding a spot where you will be alone is going to be a difficult thing to do. Taking advantage of changing trends will give you huge returns in a short time, but there is nothing permanent about it. You will have to keep finding new things to market and will always have to be on your toes.

It is simply because of all these difficulties that choosing the product to sell becomes an art. You make use of the tools available to you to gather as much information as you can about the product and then take a call on whether it is a good idea to promote it or not.

Below we will take a look at both what you can do as well as the tools available to you to help you choose the product to promote on your site.

Become an Expert

This takes a lot of time, and even more hard work. The Internet is amazing in that it basically creates a level playing field for everyone. It takes very little money to start a website of your own, and if you are not particular, you can even host your site for free at certain places. This means that you have just as much of a chance as anyone else out there to make good. The bad thing is that this increases the competition tremendously.

While in real life, it takes a lifetime of hard work to not only become an expert in a certain field, but to be accepted as such, it takes considerably less time online. Yet, this same factor means that there is no dearth of experts in any field on the net. You will therefore have to put in a lot of hard work to show people that you truly are an expert and that what you say is reliable.

This is because most of these so-called experts are really not, and all they do is scrape information off other sites and put it on their own. It does not take long before people find out that such people rarely have an opinion of their own, and discard them. The true expert though will not only catch the fancy of the net going public, but will stay there for a length of time, and even build up a fan following.

Let us take a simple example to explain the point. If you are going to set yourself up as an expert on cameras, you will find that there are a number of affiliate sites that push products by saying the exact same thing, that they are experts on cameras. However, you invest in some time to build your site up as a place where people can come to for reliable reviews of cameras, you will find that pretty quickly there will be a number of people who do.

As long as you make sure that your reviews are honest and accurate you are sure to become popular sooner than later. If you start to sell cameras from your site, you are poised to take advantage of a lot of traffic that comes to your site looking for reviews. Even if most of them are only looking for the reviews but are not interested in making a purchase online, you will still profit from the few who do.

The reason why the reviews need to be accurate and honest is because if not, the same people who came to you thinking you were an expert will go out of their way to tell everyone else that you are a fraud. You will find bad reviews about your site cropping up all over the net, and all of a sudden you have lost everything you had.

This also means that you do not need to go searching for products to promote. Any new camera in the market that you do not have on your site is a potential candidate for promotion.

There is little in the way of research or analysis that needs to be done, and all you have to do is to put in a review of the model and sit back. The advantage of this model is that you have a regular income stream. Even if you have to do a little maintenance work like always making sure that your content is current, or ensuring that you have a new model up on your site within a few days of launch, everything else runs along pretty smoothly.

The flip side though is that you will not be able to take advantage of anything new on the market other than cameras. If Apple brings out its new phone, you won’t be able to do anything about it. Having a site that is too general is not good because you will not be able to focus on any one product or niche, bringing down the value of your whole site. You will also not be able to target your market properly because you really do not have any target market.

Online stores

Most affiliate sites go with the large online stores because not only is it easy to become an affiliate, it is also easier to sell the products. For example, if you have a site that promotes cameras, it is much easier to sell these cameras through Amazon or eBay than through some other site. With the number of scams only increasing, people are wary of making any sort of payment unless they know that the site is bona fide.

The second good thing is that most of these online stores really do not even give a good description of the product, far less a comparison with similar ones from other brands. This means that they are just a place where people can buy, but it also means that people who want to buy will look elsewhere for expert opinions. If you are the person with the expert opinion, they will visit you, and if you have been convincing enough, will purchase the product online thus crediting you with the sale.

For example, you have pitched on washing machines as your niche; you will find that Amazon stocks pretty much everything that you can find in your local store, in terms of brands and models, and then some more. You have two choices here, you can go with washing machines as a niche for your site, or you can target specific manufacturers or even brands to sell.

The advantage of doing this is just that you can focus more narrowly on a particular brand or model allowing you to go even higher in the search rankings.Just looking through the most popular list on Amazon will tell you which model people are buying. Generally speaking, this alone is enough because if people are buying something, it means that there is a demand for the product. There are a few things that you have to do to confirm whether that particular model is what you want to go with.

Google it

is the simplest way to check if the product you selected is already being marketed by other affiliates, and what king of competition there is. If you see a number of paid advertisements as well as a number of affiliate sites coming up high in the display page, you know that this niche has already been covered and continue your search for your product.

The reason for this is obvious. You will be investing a lot of time, effort and money in building a site dedicated to a particular model and if you are going to have to fight it out, it will take you that much longer to start seeing any returns. Going in for something where the competition is lesser is a better idea.

Probe your competition

This is the stage where most of us find ourselves. Most new niches are already taken and finding one where there is little to no competition is not as easy as it seems to when you read about it. This means that you have to probe your competition to find out exactly how good your competition is. For example, let us take it that you are interested in selling washing machines. You are pretty confident about selling them because you know that there is a need for them.

Everyone needs a washing machine. It only remains to be seen what the competition is like. Searching on Google shows you that that particular niche is taken. There are a number of affiliate sites that deal with washing machines and some of them are actually quite popular and not only give you a good review of different washing machines, but also have a rating system that lets you compare different models.

If you search on Amazon for the bestselling washing machine, you will find that it is the Haier HLP23E. Yet, when you search with this “Haier HLP23E” as the search string, the results are completely different. You get six results in the display page and we will restrict ourselves to the first page alone.

In this first page, you will find that apart from Haier’s official company site, there are six affiliate sites. Yet, out of these six there is only one that offers anything approaching a reasonable review of the product. Most of the other sites either give you a general description of the functioning of a washing machine, that you really don’t want, or give you the features of the machine that you can get from the company site directly.

All the sites offer customer reviews, but barring one all the others have between two and five reviews, which is really not good. Even the one site that has what looks like a promising review by a customer looks like it has been written by a professional article writer rather than an actual user. This fact immediately shows you how you can improve on your competition.

When you come down to this level, you will be able to identify products that have lesser competition than others. Yes it is not a totally empty niche, but there are possibilities that are worth exploring further.

Use tools

You will also find tools that will supposedly help you find weaknesses in your competitor’s websites. These tools are generally paid and will do everything from checking the keyword density to checking if your competitor has the ideal address in his URL. The effectiveness of these tools is debatable, but then it is something additional that you can try if you want to.

If you can do all the research yourself, it is probably the best, but where you cannot, you’ll have to rely on tools, even if they are not as good. The one thing that you need to remember is that all the pages that have made it to the first page on Google are those that have Haier HLP23E in the URL itself, which shows you how important it is to target specific products.

Identifying products is all about legwork and although we have taken Amazon as the basis of our search, this can be done in many other ways.

Affiliate networks

ClickBank and Google’s affiliate network gives you a list of all the products you can promote on your own site. All you have to do is to sign up with them, and this information is made available to you. The sign up procedure is free, and if you go through the procedure of finding products and marketing it, you find that it is one of the simplest there is.

You can search by product categories or you can go with specific keywords.

If you want to go with the categories, you will get a list of all the products including the “vendor’s pitch” which gives you relevant information about the product. This information may often not be enough, but it will at least help you shortlist likely products. You will have to do further research before you choose individual products.

The stats button shows you how much your commission is for each sale and the promote button generates a HopLink that will link your site to the vendor’s. This is the link that you will have to use in your site, as if you copy the URL of the vendor, you will not be credited with any traffic you drive to the vendor. Such a simple process has seen them grow tremendously and they are one of the more preferred affiliate vendors in the market.

When compared to online stores, they also offer much higher commission rates, meaning you earn more. The difficulty though is in you making the sale. Everybody knows Amazon and is comfortable with purchasing from them. When they have to give out their credit card details in other places though, many people will refrain from doing so meaning that you will find selling that much more difficult.

Going with the products that have a number of affiliates is a good place to start off. The more the number of affiliates, the more the chances are that that particular product is a large selling one. This is a different take on aping your competition, and your whole strategy is based on the simple fact that if everyone else is selling something, and making a profit out of it, then you can as well.

Yet, this logic is not without its pitfalls. Just because a particular product has a number of affiliates, it is no guarantee that you will be able to sell the same product. It also means that the competition is already stiff, and breaking into the market is not going to be easy. Moreover, all the juicy sounding URL addresses would have already been taken which will make it more difficult for you to get the product name into your address.

This is especially true of you are going in for a totally unrelated product from what you are selling now, or are starting out new. The other way is to look at the products with the maximum commission and then figure out a way of driving sales. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, and in many cases the commissions are high and the competition low because making a sale is so difficult.

The second thing that you will have to think about is that you can drive any amount of traffic to a particular site, but unless the home site is written well, no one is going to buy the product. For example, if you become an affiliate to sell eBooks for someone else, however much you do your part, unless the home site itself has something that will make the people you send, buy the product, you are not going to get any sales, and all your effort will be to waste.

Generally speaking going for the sure shot ones, like the ones that have a lot of competition is better, because if you work hard enough and get the ranking on your site up, you are at least guaranteed success. If you go for the hard to sell products, you cannot be sure that even after all this effort you will make any sale.

Promotional tools

Many times the affiliate site will offer all the promotional tools that you will need, like page banners, informative articles, and even email promotions. Of course, the articles cannot be used as is but you at least have all the basic information about the product to help you create a wonderful sales pitch.

If you find a seller that does not do this, it is better to stay away from them. This is because it shows that they are not serious about marketing online. It also means that you will have to put in that much more effort at marketing their product and their commission may not justify this added effort.

Use keyword tools

Most search engines offer free keyword tools that you can use to find related keywords. There are also other paid software programs that will help you do the same thing, but with increased functionality. This is the one I use. While usually these tools are used mainly to find related keywords, they are also useful to find the most often searched strings. This process is time consuming and takes a long time, but will give you solid information to move forward on.

For example, if you feel that washing machines are a good option, just typing washing machines into the tool will give you all the related search strings that are being searched for, their local and global numbers for the month.

This gives you an approximate idea of the number of people searching for a particular product. For example, if you type in Yorkshire Terriers, you will get a number of results that range from more than 80, 000 to less than 2,000.

You therefore know that there are at least 80,000 searches for the Yorkie on average every month. On the other hand, if you put in Labrador retrievers, you will find that this number triples. It is pretty obvious that there are more people searching for them than for the Yorkie. This gives you a good baseline to start off on. While looking in online stores like Amazon may give you similar data there are two advantages of using the keyword tools that search engines offer.

First, you get actual numbers of the number of people searching for a certain product while all Amazon can do is tell you which products sell the most. While you may be more interested in promoting products that sell more, you may be losing out on a good opportunity to convert sales. Amazon gives you data for sales converted, while Google gives you data about potential for sale. There may be innumerable reasons why there may be more people searching for a product than there are buying it, and one of them could be that the sellers are not doing a good job.

This gives you the opportunity of entering into a market where even if there are other competitors, the competition is really nothing much to talk about. The second advantage is that Google offers you the ability to find niches that are as yet untouched. While this may be difficult and may take a lot of time, the possibility at least exists with Google, while with any other way this possibility is not an option at all. Of course, doing random searches will mostly be a waste of time. You will have to approach it in an organized manner.

The way to do this is to brainstorm and note down as many niches as you can come up with. Then go through Google with all these niches one by one. If you hit something, good, if not you continue the same process. It is simply because this process is so time consuming that many people prefer to go with the affiliate network or check on online stores. Yet, doing this is still not useless as if you do get lucky and chance upon a niche where there are a number of people searching, but very few people selling, you are on to a sure thing.

Where do you Look for Products to Start Promoting?

Once you have the first question out of the way, the next one is to start looking around for products to promote. This is really not as easy as many people say it is and requires a lot of effort. There are not too many places where you can look for products and most of them are known. Below we will take each of these and individually discuss their pros and cons.

Google AdSense

This is one of the easiest ways to spot products to sell. Whenever you type out any search string, you will get sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page. Usually these ads would have been put up by affiliates wanting to increase traffic to their websites.

For example, if you type in “Herbal beauty creams” in the search bar, you will get five ads on the right hand side of the results page. Barring one, all the others are affiliate sites that sell different kinds of herbal beauty products, and just looking at the different products they sell will start you off on your search for products to market.

Generally, if you follow the link to the home page, you will find details of how to become an affiliate member. It is not necessary to sign up to the affiliate network immediately as there is many analyses that needs to be done before you pick a product, but it makes finding them easier.

The negative of this method is that you will be entering a crowded market. If there are four ads by affiliates themselves, think of the total number of affiliates who will be marketing these products. Standing out from this crowd to make your site unique is not going to be easy. Yet, if many affiliates are promoting a particular product usually means that it is a good selling one, so the chances of you making a sale are also better.

Check out your competition

This is one of the easiest ways to find products. If you are in a niche, you will be aware of whom your competitors are, and all you have to do is to follow their lead. This way is easy because you let someone else do all the legwork for you, while all you have to do is copy them. There is a lot of analysis required before you decide on whether you want to go with a product or not, and allowing another person to do this frees you up to do other work.

The drawback to this model is that you are always following the leader. Depending on how long it takes you to set up your site, get content posted with everything else you have to do to get its ranking up, you may very well miss the boat. However, some people follow this policy because their costs are low. All they have to worry about is marketing a product, not finding it.

Use affiliate programs

There are a number of affiliate programs like Google’s affiliate network and ClickBank that allows you to browse through sites that have registered with them and who are open to using affiliates. It is similar to what you do with the Google results page ads, but the difference is that you get a much bigger number of sites from which to choose. You can search according to product or niche and identify the product you want to go with.

Not only this, you will be able to compare the commission given to affiliates. Different sites will offer different percentages of commission, and while going with the one that offers the highest commission may seem like a good idea, it may also mean that the high commission is because of the difficulty in selling the product. A more easily salable one may have a lower commission per sale, but total sales volume may be greater, giving you more total income.

The biggest advantage is not even this. Most of these affiliate programs will give you a track record of the company that you want to start marketing for. This is very important because if you are pulled in by a scam artist, sell his products and he doesn’t pay you, there is very little you can do about it. Checking the track record of various sites gives you the knowledge that you require to weed out the strong candidates from the not so strong.

You can check their payment history to see if they make their payments properly, and even check how long they have been online. Generally speaking, going with someone who has had a web presence for at least 6 months to a year is good because if not you have no idea if they are real or not. By going with sites that already have an affiliate program running you may be entering an already tight market, but you at least know you will not be cheated.

Look up online stores

This is becoming very popular nowadays. Amazon actively encourages affiliates and with their sales volume increasing by leaps and bounds, it is relatively easy to make a sale on Amazon. Not only that, their whole affiliate marketing system is mostly automated and there are no payment issues at all concerning commission. There are a few negatives here, with Amazon offering the lowest commissions anywhere on the net.

They start off at a low 4% and many times you will have to work really hard to start seeing any money from your site at all. Many affiliates just drop out because they will be putting in more than they are getting out of it. Yet, if you are willing to be patient it is also one of the best methods. Not only does Amazon give you all the details of what the most searched for products are on their site, they give you the option of tracking a number of other details.

There are a number of people who earn just out of promoting products on Amazon. Their per product earning may not be much, averaging around $1000 per month for a really good affiliate program, but if you have 10 such sites you’re earning quite a tidy sum of money. Amazon has been taken simply as an example, and the same is true of any online store that you want to start marketing for. All of them know the value of affiliates.

Many of them take a day to check into the antecedents of those who want to start on their affiliate program to find out of you are serious or not before accepting you into their program. Although there is no minimum qualification that you need to become an affiliate, it is better if you have an existing website with a bare minimum amount of traffic monthly. It shows that you are in it with your eyes open and for the long term.

Approach potential partners

This is something that you can do only after you are really set up with a really good site and are doing business. You can approach both online partners and offline ones to check with them if they would be interested in having you market their products. This will work only if you are able to offer an already existing marketing network, with both a large amount of traffic as well as sales going on in your site.

Most companies are interested in increasing sales and are open to commissions if you can give actual increase in sales. A few of the top bloggers and review sites have done this with success, even approaching companies that have never done any online marketing before and partnering them. Although this means that you already have an existing set up, if you can do this you are effectively putting yourself in a place where there is absolutely no competition.

Because these companies themselves have never worked with affiliates in the past there is no competition that you have to worry about. You would still have to do a basic analysis to find out if you have a good chance of making a sale or not. For example, if you are able to convince Ferrari or Lamborghini that you are a good person to start an affiliate program with, it still does not mean that you will be able to sell even one car. You need to research into the market to find such products that have a reasonably good chance of being sold online.

Google search

This is the simplest way for you to find anything that you are looking for. If you want to enter the health and fitness niche, just Googling “health and fitness” will give you a number of products. This is very time consuming, but there is nothing better to give you an impression of how the market is. In fact, if you rely only on affiliate programs and other directories, you will be mission out on a number of products whose manufacturers are not a part of these directories.

They may not necessarily be against affiliates as such, just against being part of a third party program. Even with all the amount of online activity that is going on, not every niche is crowded, and sometimes there may be a new product that has been launched in the market, and you will not find more than one or two sites promoting it. This is the opportunity for you to jump into that particular niche and take advantage of this lesser competition.

A simple example would be when it comes to record labels that come out. When a particular artist brings out an album, it does not take you more than 24 hrs to find out how much of a hit it has become in the market. Checking online the next day will tell you what the competition is like and very often it will be nil. If you work fast, you can have your site up in just a couple of days at the most, to take advantage of the interest in the public for that album.

Getting affiliated and starting your marketing is going to be very easy simply because there is little competition. Getting to be the number 1 ranked site is very easy as long as you take some basic precautions like including it in your site’s URL and putting in at least a couple of good quality content that is optimized towards that artist’s name and other related keywords. Interest may taper off within just a matter of weeks, but you would have taken advantage of the wave of public interest, and have ridden high on it because you got an early start.

Finding the Best Affiliate Products to Promote

The Internet has become a virtual world. There is nothing that you can do in the real world that you cannot do in the virtual world including buying and selling products. This has been a known fact for some time, and when you promote products on the net it is called Internet marketing. There are a number of websites that sell products and a few large organizations that dominate the market.

Companies like Amazon and eBay are some of the most commonly known names although there are a few others as well. While Amazon and eBay sell products, they do not actively advertise for them. Considering their sales volume and growth – Amazon grew 16% last year when compared to 2.4% for retail sales, it is possible that they feel that they do not need to advertise. Yet everyone knows the value of advertising.

This gave birth to what is called the affiliate websites. When you are selling a product, and someone comes to you and tells you that they are willing to promote your product, they are vendors. When they do this online, they are called affiliates. Affiliate marketing works because it is a win-win situation for both parties. The affiliate takes it upon themselves to promote his website.

He toils hard and puts in a lot of effort to increase his ranking on Google. The result is that any product that he is promoting for you will also get the increased exposure, and you have not spent one dime, or one minute of your time to do this. The affiliate is paid a commission that can range anywhere from 4% to 30% on profits depending on the product that they are marketing.

He is paid only if any person who he directs to your site makes a purchase. You may miss your profitability per product here, but your overall profits will increase because of the increase in sales volume. You keep track of who comes to you through whom by giving each of your affiliates a different cookie. This cookie has a definite expiration date and is installed in the system of any person who visits the affiliate site.

When said person comes to you, the cookie in his system will tell you who has sent him allowing you to keep track of both the number of people he directs to your site and the number of sales made. Most of this is automated and it is a system that works for everyone. If instead of being the person who sells the product you are the affiliate, the process is the same, but in reverse. You contact the seller, get his cookie, and you are set.

All you need to do is to put in the legwork to increase your web traffic because it is the basis of all conversions and ultimately the amount of money you make. Because you go to such lengths, investing your hard-earned money and time into promoting a product, you need to make sure that the product that you choose is the right one. There are millions of products being sold online, but not all of them will give you what you are looking for. Then there are the scam artists who are out to cheat you.

This being the case you need to be careful how you choose the product that you want to market. There are a few ways to do this and we will discuss them in detail below.

Where do you stand?

This is the first thing that you have to think of. Either you will be creating a completely new website or blog to market a said product, or you will be integrating it into your already existing site. There are pros and cons to both of these.

Promoting products on an already existing site

If you already have a site or a blog up and running, you are lucky in that you would already have a certain ranking with Google. You can focus your attention on your one site and over time you can get quite a high ranking with all search engines.

The advantage of this model is that you already have a certain amount of traffic that you are getting on a daily or weekly basis, which means that the chance of you getting a sale quickly is higher. In addition, if you have more than one product in your site, even if you put in activity promoting one product, all the other products will reap the benefit. You just have to concentrate on improving the ranking of your one site so that you increase traffic.

Once you do this, if you have made a good choice on the products and if you have designed your web page well, the sales will come. The other side to this is that you will have to pick and choose the kind of products that you can promote. For example, if you have a website that reviews dishwashers, you cannot start selling air conditioners there. You can take your pick of any dishwasher to promote, but you are pretty much limited to only one product category.

Of course, you can try to work around this by creating a generalized website where you can promote anything you like. The problem with that is that such sites have no focus at all. If you want to sell home appliances, beauty products, herbal medicines and books all in the same place, you will have to choose a name that is very general, like “Amazon.com” for example.

Unfortunately, it also takes that much more work to bring it to the notice of search engines first and then to the notice of the public. When a person is looking to purchase anything online, he or she is apt to click on the link that carries the name of the product that they wish to buy. For example, if you name your site www.xyzreview.com people will realize that your site is providing reviews about the product xyz.

If on the other hand you name your site www.purchaseproductsonline.com nobody knows if you are connected in any way to the product xyz and will not click on it. Furthermore, even the search engines will lower your ranking because they tend to give the highest ranking to those sites that carry the search string in the site name itself.

Building separate sites for different products

This is the second option open to affiliates. They can choose to create different niche websites and then actively push their product online so that over time they get a good ranking with search engines, consequently resulting in increased sales. This tactic is a good option in that everything about it is a positive. You can choose a site name that carries the keyword in the name of the site itself.

As mentioned previously, sites that carry the keyword in their address not only have a good chance of getting high up in the rankings, but are also the ones that are clicked on more frequently. You will be targeting a certain product and can focus your attention on that single product, helping you build a good site, one of the prerequisites to getting traffic. Consumers online will only remain and read what you have written if the site looks nice and if the content is worth reading.

By focusing on a single product, you are able to provide targeted content, what people are looking for. This increases your conversion ratio. On the other hand, you will have to create a different site for every product that you promote. This will increase your work a hundred fold because instead of having one site where you can sell five different products, you will have one site selling one product.

This means that if you want to sell a total of five products, you will have to create five different websites, and work on all of them so that they all start becoming income streams for you. It is a little difficult to decide what to do, and many people prefer to go the latter way, creating different sites for different products, because even if it is more work, it gives you more returns. This is the most common advice that you get with regards to affiliate marketing.

Focus is everything and if you do not target one thing, a niche or a product, you cannot hit anything. Yet, this is not always the case because if you create a generalized site but are willing to work on it for some time, you are creating a brand, and over time people will start to recognize the brand. Once this happens, the sky is the limit on what you can promote.

Amazon.com is a simple case in point. The company was started in 1995, but did not show any profit until the fourth quarter of 2001. At that time profits were a modest $5 million on a turnover of nearly $1 billion. Now, just nine years later, it is growing at a rapid 14% while retail sales are struggling to post 2.5% growth. Their profits have grown to more than $2.4 billion, and are still growing. Yet, it is important to note that it took six years for them to become profitable.

Irving

Affiliate Marketing – All the Many Options

Affiliate Marketing, Where to Start

Affiliate marketing is very interesting as it’s actually similar to the last business model we looked at but with one key difference: you don’t need a product. So if you thought that creating a digital product was low risk, this is even lower risk.

How is this possible? Simple: you are selling someone else’s product. Your profits then will come instead from the commission made on that product which is much higher on the web than it is for door-to-door salesmen. To put things in perspective, you can sometimes make as much as 100% commission on a digital product. That means you actually earn more than the product creator!

So how does this work? Why would they be interested in offering you more money than themselves? As we discussed, a digital product has no COGS which means it offers 100% profit. A product creator can sell as many copies of their product as they like then and then get affiliates to sell more of their product on top of that. They might not get 100% of your sales, but those are still additional sales generating additional profits on top of what they already earned.

And the more commission they offer to you, the more people will take on their product and start promoting it. This means they can end up with a legion of people selling their products while they reap the benefits! From your perspective though it makes perfect sense too. Not only are you getting to sell a product without having to invest any time or money on creation – but you’re also able to choose a tried and tested seller.

In other words, you can pick something that you can already see is selling really well! And there’s no limit to your earnings here either: if you want more money, you simply find a more expensive product. Or maybe you end up taking on 2 or 10 affiliate products and earning from all of them!

How to Get Started In Affiliate Marketing

So how does this actually work? To begin with, you need to find your product that you want to sell. The easiest way to do this is through an affiliate network such as JVZoo (www.jvzoo.com), Commission Junction (www.cj.com), ClicBank (www.clickbank.com), WSOPro (www.warriorforum.com/warrior-specialoffers/) or others. Here, you’ll then be able to find a massive list of affiliate products along with the amount they’ve sold, the commission they’re offering and their price.

You then find something that appeals to you and that fits your niche and you apply for an ‘affiliate link’. That link is basically a special URL that directs people to the page where they can buy the product while also storing a cookie on their computer to show that you sent them. If they click your link and then buy the product within a certain time frame, it is logged as your sale and you get the money. Very straightforward!

Your job then is to simply promote that affiliate link, which you can do in a number of ways. You might for instance decide to simply set up an advertising campaign using Facebook Ads or AdWords. As long as you’re paying less for the advertising than you’re earning from the sales, then this will be an effective method.

Another option is to use your own channels. If you are able create a large email list then you can send your affiliate link to those subscribers after you’ve built their trust. Or if you have a blog, you can promote the link that way. You can even promote the links via social media, or using ‘real world’ posters and flyers. Or how about a YouTube channel? Either way, this is a very simple and straightforward business model that lets you earn big cash without having to invest anything or take any risks yourself.

There are some very well-known figures in the affiliate marketing industry which include the likes of John Chow (www.johnchow.com) who is now somewhat famous online and regularly attends talks and interviews. Other big names include Mark Link and Rae Hoffman. All these people now live incredible lifestyles enjoying passive income while they travel the world or spend more time with their families.

Affiliate Marketing Best Practices And Tips

Now you know what affiliate marketing is and how to get started with an affiliate marketing network, the next thing to consider is how best to succeed in this space and to really start generating the kind of income you’re looking for.

One of the most important points here is to pick the right product. Of course this means that you should choose a product that is selling well and that offers large commission at an attractive price point.

But on top of that, you also need to think about how you’re going to sell that product and succeed in that niche. This is the most important part and it’s something that will help you in a ton of different online business models actually. When selling anything, you need to look for what is known as the ‘route to market’. This essentially means the route you’re going to take to present your product to the largest number of people who may be interested in it.

If you are able have an eBook on flow arranging, then a route to market might be something like a blog on flowers, or maybe a magazine for brides-to-be. Most of us have a few contacts and resources we can already use. Maybe you happen to be in touch with a big blogger in the fitness niche? Maybe you happen to know the editor of a magazine? Instead of choosing a random product and then trying to build that audience from scratch, choose the subject that you already have a head start in and then exploit those contacts and opportunities.

When you choose your product remember that you aren’t just choosing your product – you’re choosing your market, your marketing strategy and your audience! Oh and often this means going for slightly smaller niches. It’s sometimes

easier to find and connect with a group of truckers than it is to get noticed among all the different marketers going after the dating crowd. Once again, starting small and building up is often the best strategy.

Physical Products?

One last point to consider is that there are also a number of affiliate programs aimed at people who want to sell physical products. The best known of these is Amazon’s Associate Program (https://affiliateprogram. Amazon.com/) This lets you promote any product on Amazon for commission, potentially opening you up to a much wider audience. Bear in mind though that these sales offer much smaller commissions – typically about 3-10% of the retail price.

How to Create Your First Information Product

So there are lots of options when it comes to selling a digital product. Simply put, this is one of the simplest and easiest ways to get a product that you can then start promoting and marketing. But how do you go about making one? There are plenty of options here but in many cases you’ll be able to simply handle the creation of your digital product yourself. If you are able are selling an eBook for instance then you only need to create a large MSWord document, include some images and good formatting and then save the final file as a PDF. Consider a low price for your product, say $7, and put on Warrior Forum to get you started.

Alternatively, if you’re creating a video series, you can just film yourself on camera and then edit the video neatly using editing software such as Adobe Photo Shop. Creating an email course is even easier. For this, all you’ll need is to write out some emails and then sign up to an autoresponder which you can use to automatically send your emails. A good choice is AWeber (www.aweber.com). I personally use Trafficwave, as it allows unlimited use and subscribers for the low price of less than $18 per month, They also have an affiliate program. If you are able can recruit 3 referrals, your autoresponder if free. Check this out here.

The main tip when doing this is to make sure you come up with a digital product that will play to your strengths and that you can be proud of. It’s very important to come up with a digital product you’re proud of because that way you’ll be able to promote it much more easily. When you talk about a product you truly believe in, your passion will come across and people will be far more likely to believe in what you’re offering too.

If you are able’re kind of shy of the quality of what you’ve created, then your marketing will lack conviction and you won’t attract repeat customers. In terms of creating something that plays to your strengths, that means picking a topic that you know a lot about and that is relevant to the topic or niche of your website and it means creating something you can create well. If you are able’re a great writer, then write an eBook!

If you are able aren’t so good at writing though but have an excellent manner on camera, then film a video series! If you are able can’t do either of those things, then consider using screenshots of your computer/creating slideshows and then narrating them. Alternatively, another popular option is to simply outsource the creation of your digital information product. There are thousands of writers, video editors and other skilled individuals on the web and any one of them will likely be happy to help.

The best places to find these people are generally freelancing sites which include the likes of ‘Elance’ (www.elance.com) or ‘UpWork’ (www.upwork.com). On either of these you should be able to find someone with the skills you need and from there it will cost you between $100 and $1,000 depending on the nature of the job you need done and the quality you are looking for (good writers will generally charge upwards of $3 per 100 words).

What To Price Your eBook?

Once you have your digital product, the next question is how much you want to charge for it. This of course is entirely up to you, though you don’t want to charge too much and alienate your audience. As I previously mentioned I recommend around $7 for a short report, or $17-27 for a full length eBook (10,000 words plus). What you’ll find when you look around the web is that there are plenty of examples of eBooks being sold for ridiculous prices – sometimes as much as $50, $100 or more.

While this does happen, the books very rarely manage to provide value for money and in the long run this can lead to damaged reputations and angry customers. Likewise, you’ll find it much easier to sell a cheaper book to begin with until you have built up a reputation for yourself as someone who can be trusted and who delivers premium content.

A good tip is to start with something small to test the market. Don’t aim to create the eBook to end all eBooks.

Instead, start out with something smaller like a report and sell that for $7. This allows you to very quickly and easily start honing your business model and generating income without investing too much or creating too much risk. Only once you’ve seen that this method is working and you’re earning money, do you then go and invest further into the business model with a bigger product at a higher price point. Remember too – there’s nothing to stop you from experimenting with price points and running ‘split tests’ to see which is the most profitable!

Creating Your Landing/Sales Page

One of the most important tools when it comes to affiliate marketing is to create a landing page. This is essentially a single page, also known as a ‘sales page’, that is entirely dedicated to selling your one product. A sales page will look different from the other pages on a website because it has no links to other parts of the site, no adverts and no distracting images.

In other words, everything on the page is there to serve the one objective of selling copies of your information product or whatever else it is that you’re selling. Often these pages are long and narrow and they contain a lot of text and a lot of ‘buy now’ buttons. Those buy now buttons are your ‘call to action’ buttons and of course they contain the affiliate link you just acquired.

The real magic of the landing page is the text. All the copy here is going to be aimed at persuading people to buy the product and this is where you’re really going to earn your wage. Your objective is to be as persuasive as possible while not misrepresenting what you have to sell. The way to do this is to remember that ‘value proposition’. That means focusing on what the product does for people.

How will their lives be better after they’ve used it? Maybe they’ll be a success with the opposite sex, or maybe they’ll be much richer and happier. Your job is to get them to imagine that possibility and to really desire it. At the same time, you point out their current failings in their situation and why their previous attempts to improve their lot in life may have failed.

In other words, you present a problem and then provide the solution – that solution being the eBook you’re selling or the online course. An easy and fast way to create a sales page is by using your Trafficwave account. Once you have this landing page, you’ll then be well equipped to market your product very easily.

For instance, if you pay for advertising then all you need to do is ensure those ads are sending the right kind of traffic to your sales page! Likewise, you can hand out flyers with the URL of your sales page, or you can mention it in social media posts. If you have written your sales script well then you can expect numerous people who stumble on that page to end up converting – becoming paying customers!

 

Irving

 

Choosing a Niche – The Best Way to go About it

Choosing the Right Niche for You

Alright, the first thing you need to do is choose a niche to focus on. This method is so much easier than the micro niche method, because it doesn’t involve hours upon hours of researching products, affiliate networks, and keyword tools. You just pick a niche and go.

Okay, so it does involve SOME research, but the research is faster and easier using this method and using a few free tools you can complete this in an hour or less in most cases. The first thing to do is figure out a niche that has voracious buyers but NOT a ton of competition. This is the toughest part, because most markets with voracious buyers are insanely competitive. (Some competition is good, but too much competition makes your job much harder.) I use a program called Jaaxy for this.

Golf, for example, is a popular niche for internet marketers to get into. This is especially true for beginners. Yes, golfers do tend to have excess income to spend. Yes, they do tend to spend a good chunk of that excess income on their hobby. But because pretty much everyone knows this, competition is ridiculous. There are just too many established golf websites for the average marketer to compete.

I use this tool for my keyword research, and I find it second to none. Try THIS.

Is it possible to compete? Absolutely. But unless you are extremely good at marketing and/or have a huge budget for advertising and content creation, you’re not likely to make a whole lot of headway in this niche. It’s just far too over-saturated. A great idea is focusing on a broad interest group rather than a more competitive niche. Look at DIYReady.com (http://www.diyready.com), for example.

They have a niche—DIY—but it’s broad enough that they have a huge number of topics they can focus on within the DIY spectrum, which also gives them a broader range of products they can promote. Because there are so many individual topics under the DIY umbrella, virtually anyone can compete in this niche.

People who enjoy this type of content typically frequent multiple DIY websites, and those users are easy to access because they are prevalent on Pinterest and other social websites. This is the type of niche you should try to locate. You want something broad—but not too broad—with voracious buyers and fans that are easy to locate.

Some examples include:

DIY, crafts, home improvement, gardening, etc.

Prepping, survival, outdoor skills

Model building (cars, ships, airplanes, etc.)

Various careers

Pets (specific breeds, or types)

The great thing about this method is that if you discover one aspect of a niche isn’t working for you, it’s easy to switch to another one as long as you get a domain that covers the whole, broad niche. For example, if you decided to market to model builders and want to focus on model cars, you might want to register a domain like model builders.com instead of modelcarbuilders.com so you can branch out into planes and ships later. (I’m sure those domains are taken; I’m just using them as a basic example.)

Worst case scenario, if you create a large amount of custom content in a niche and it doesn’t pan out the way you hope, you could sell the website or articles to someone else in the niche to recoup some costs you incurred, and probably make a good profit. Once you’ve chosen a niche and bought a broad domain, it’s time to move on.

An Introduction to Amazon Affiliate

Amazon has been a great income earner for affiliates for many years, but changes to a variety of factors such as SEO and the habits of your typical web surfer have made it a much different environment than it was a few years ago.

It was once possible to create micro niche sites that focused on a very specific niche subject, or even one single product, and make very good money.

Google seemed to love those micro niche sites, and it was very easy to rank them and make a lot of money quickly.

But times change. Google apparently decided they wanted that most micro niche sites were spam, which was mostly true, and decided it wanted to rank sites that had huge amounts of quality content instead.

It destroyed a lot of businesses, and domains began expiring left and right because they lost their rankings and were no longer profitable. With all these changes making old methods difficult, if not nearly impossible, is it still possible to make money as an Amazon affiliate?

The answer is a resounding, “YES!”

The methods may be different, but it certainly is possible to earn very good money as an Amazon affiliate, and you’re going to learn how in this guide.

So let’s begin.

Getting Started


The first thing you need to do is toss out your old notions of micro-niche sites. These sites are a lot harder to make profitable, and it requires a lot more marketing and promotion. It’s simply not feasible. Google doesn’t like tiny websites, because tiny websites are generally nothing but spam.

For this reason, it’s incredibly difficult to rank a “thin” website, meaning the original purpose of micro niche sites (to bring in a large amount of traffic to promote just one or two affiliate products) is pretty much dead unless you’re willing to put in a ton of time and effort into other marketing methods.

Instead, it’s important to focus on wider niches, because if you’re going to put so much effort into promotion, you might as well have a lot more products that you can potentially sell. Another thing that is practically dead is the review site. Review sites just aren’t going to rank in Google, and most people just go to Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, or some other major retailer to find reviews.

People online are more savvy than ever, and they have learned that the average “review site” is nothing more than a thinly-veiled affiliate site. While review sites can work, it’s just so much harder than it once was. You can no longer easily rank these sites, and they require a lot more promotion, and since people no longer trust them like they once did, they really aren’t as profitable.

Fortunately, there’s a better way.

 

It does NOT involve:

 

  • Creating “thin” affiliate sites with little to no original content
  • Focusing on single products or narrow niches
  • Spamming Google and other search engines
  • Registering dozens of domains (or more)
  • Intense keyword research
  • Paid advertising

This method is actually easier and more fun than the old method, and requires less financial investment than the old micro niche method, because you only need one domain, or maybe a handful, instead of dozens, hundreds, or thousands.

You can focus on a broader niche, while still attracting Google traffic and getting traffic from other sources. In fact, this is actually the type of method Google prefers, because you’re creating REAL website with REAL content and REAL benefits to your visitors!

LinkedIn’s Ad Specs & Advertising Guidelines

You launched your first Company Page, and we’re sure that your fingers are itching to start making some cool ads to start promoting your content. That is great news, and we have made room to give something special to you before you start.

In this article, we will teach you how to apply some ideal ad specifications in advertising with LinkedIn, as well as how to follow and comply with the LinkedIn guidelines.

LinkedIn’s Ad Specs

For LinkedIn Advertising Specifications, my advice for you is to go straight to www.linkedin.com/help/lms/topics/8154/8155 and right here you will be able to see all the advertising specifications for each one of the Ad Types LinkedIn is actually offering you.

First, take a look at the Sponsored Content and the Text Ads Ones.

Sponsored Content Ads are updates that promote your content to an audience beyond people that are following your profile or your company. You can use them to target a specific audience, and help you reach LinkedIn members wherever and whenever they are engaging on the LinkedIn platform across desktop, mobile, and tablet.

For Sponsored Company Content and Direct Sponsored Content Specifications, we find: Link sharing, Embedded Rich Media, Ad policy notes, tracking capabilities, and Click flow. Text Ads are a tailor made for reaching any type of potential audience on desktop devices on any type of budget.

For Advertising Specifications for Text Ads, we find: Links, Text, Image and Placement.

You can also take a look at the other Ad Specs, depending on your plans for advertising with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Advertising Guidelines

The following advertising guidelines have been created by LinkedIn to protect their users and the integrity of its platform. Failure to comply with these guidelines will get your ads removed from the platform.

LinkedIn can also restrict you from further advertising on it, so take note:

  • Your in-ad content must be accurate and true to the actual content being promoted. Do not ever deceive or lie to LinkedIn members through advertising.
  • Keep your in-ad text concise and well formatted. Do not use non-standard grammar, spelling or capitalization.
  • In-ad contact information must be kept to a minimum. Add only one link, one email address or one phone number per ad.
  • Do not ever use inappropriate, suggestive or outright offensive language in your ads.
  • In-ad links must lead to clean and non-deceiving sites.
  • Do not use trademarked material that you are not legally allowed to promote.
  • Do not promote sensitive content such as adult and dating websites, gambling related material or websites, hate related or violent content or religiously inflammatory content.
  • Do not promote prohibited products and services such as multi-level marketing schemes, affiliate advertising, alcoholic products, animal products, counterfeit goods, copyrighted content, private data, drug related content and paraphernalia, fake documentation, cracked or pirated software, tobacco related content or products and weapons or firearms.

IM Business Models:Blogging

Of course the first thing that comes to mind for many people when discussing ways to make money online is blogging. A successful blog is an incredibly valuable tool because it essentially provides you with a platform through which you can promote any other type of business model. For instance, if you chose to become an affiliate marketer, then building up a popular blog with a large, regular readership is one of the very best ways to sell those products.

Likewise, if you want to be a drop seller, then you can really benefit from a blog by simply creating an e commerce store and using the blog to promote that. We’ve already seen that you actually need to have a good website or blog in place if you plan on CPA marketing. The same goes double for subscription sites. There are more options with blogging too. One is to use PPC advertising such as AdSense. AdSense are ads from Google that pay out each time someone clicks on them.

You simply add some ‘ad script’ to your website and then it will show different adverts at different times. Or perhaps you just want to use display ads? Get big enough and many brands will pay you monthly to feature their adverts on your site. Likewise, you can use a blog to launch all kinds of other business ventures or you can get paid by sponsors to recommend products.

A website can even be used to sell a service – if you provide web design or writing services then your website can be a great place to demonstrate your talent and your knowledge. There are countless examples of people who have become very wealthy through running a blog. Pat Flynn who owns (www.smartpassiveincome.com) is one such example. Pat is a guy who talks about making money online and who actually owns several blogs and websites including one aimed at food trucks which he publishes his earnings from.

Pat’s blog is very easy to read and provides a ton of great information and as a result, he has achieved almost superstar status and is invited to big events. This is just an ordinary family guy! Pat makes his money mainly through adverts on the sites and via sales of information products. Another great example is The Art of Manliness (www.artofmanliness.com). This blog was founded by Brett McKay in 2008 and focuses on a range of topics relating to what it means to be a man in the 21st century.

It’s a unique niche that allows him to cover diverse topics ranging from beard trimming, to weightlifting, to how to smoke a cigar and drink whiskey. The site is now highly successful and provides far more than a full time income to Brett and his family. He makes his income through various types of advertising, possibly commission on physical products and through sales of his own products through an e commerce store.

How to Get Started, And Succeed!

The problem with running a blog is that it’s not easy. In order for a blog to become profitable, it’s often necessary for you to be getting hundreds of thousands of views a day and to have a smart form of monetization in place.

The question is, how do you get to this point?

Setting Up a Blog

Thankfully, actually setting up a blog is a relatively easy process. To do this, you’ll need to find a hosting account and a domain name and you’ll probably want to use a CMS such as WordPress. A hosting account is basically what gives you the ‘space’ to store your files on the web. You’ll be paying a monthly or yearly fee in order to rent space on a ‘server’ which is a giant computer that remains constantly connected to the web at all times.

You place your website files on that and it ensures they’re able to be served up when someone wants to find them. In order to find those files though, your visitors will need to use your domain name or URL. This is the address that people will type in order to find your website and this address is going to point at the specific directory within the

server so that people are shown your website when they navigate there.

Fortunately, finding hosting and a domain name are both relatively easy tasks and shouldn’t set you back too much more than $200 a year to begin with (tops). This is where creating a SaaS business would be much more complicated as you’d need a lot more space and speed from the server in order to let thousands of users upload and edit files as they needed to. A great example of a hosting site that also offers domain name registration and web hosting is Blue Host (www.bluehost.com).

A quick search on Google though will yield many, many more. Next comes the CMS. CMS stands for ‘Content Management System’ and essentially what this is, is a tool that will allow you to easily change the look of your website and to add and delete pages of content. The best known CMS is WordPress and it’s highly recommended that you go this route. WordPress will allow you to create a website in minutes rather than months, it will manage your files and it will look highly professional.

WordPress is not a ‘beginners’ tool by any means but rather is a professional piece of CMS software that is actually used by many of the biggest brands on the planet. Huge websites like Forbes, the BBC and Mashable use WordPress, as do the aforementioned successful blogs we mentioned. Using WordPress also ensures your site will be compatible with a ton of useful tools and features including the aforementioned WooCommerce and Amember.

It also means you’ll have a community of people out there who can help with any technical troubles you may be having and that your site will be easy for most web developers to understand and edit. In short, WordPress makes

life much easier for you and also makes your site far more professional. It is tried and tested and known to succeed… so why go with anything else?

If you choose a prominent hosting service like BlueHost, then the option to install WordPress will even be right there in the control panel meaning it takes literally just one click. All that said, there are other CMS options if you would prefer. One is Joomla! (www.joomla.org) which is similar to WordPress and offers a lot of flexibility. It’s a lot more fiddly though and there’s less support available mostly it is used in house for companies creating backend software.

Another popular choice is Drupal, which is again much more complicated.

Of course, you could always create your own CMS or forego having one at all, but either of these choices will drastically increase your workload while actually putting your business at more risk. Be very limited in terms of space, bandwidth and the other elements of your website. Blogger is also highly limited in terms of the features it offers for building your own web design.

In other words, if you want to create a proper website with the potential to grow and scale into something that will

earn a lot of money, you can’t use something like Blogger.

CPA Marketing

CPA marketing stands for ‘Cost Per Action’. This is an interesting alternative to affiliate marketing that is similar in many ways. Basically, what ‘cost per action’ means is that you get paid every time someone carries out a certain action. Now, in many cases this might mean that you get paid when someone buys something – in which case it is

working similarly to affiliate marketing (except that you’re getting paid a flat rate most likely). In other cases though, the ‘action’ might mean subscribing to a mailing list or joining a membership site.

Another difference is that CPA is often managed more similarly to PPC or display advertising. In other words, rather than promoting a product you might simply place adverts on your website. Instead of being paid for every click though, you get paid when someone clicks on the advert and then takes the required action.

Getting Started

Similar again to affiliate marketing, the first thing you need to do to get started with CPA marketing is to find yourself a platform where you’ll be able to track down the different offers and start promoting the adverts/links.

Currently, CPA marketing isn’t quite as big as affiliate marketing which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it means less competition for you but it’s a bad thing because it’s a little harder to find good options.

Likewise, there aren’t as many networks that have quite risen to the top of the heap like JVZoo or Clickbank. Some CPA networks are actually a bit poorly made and in some cases even disreputable. Make sure you do your research then before choosing one to go with! That said, some good CPA networks to choose from include Max Bounty (www.maxbounty.com), PeerFly (www.peerfly.com) or Clickbooth (www.clickbooth.com).

Make sure to read the reviews and browse through what’s available in order to find the right products and deals that you want to promote. What you’ll find when looking at these is that the whole process is a little simpler and more automated versus affiliate marketing. You simply sign up as a publisher and then post the ads/promotions on your site without having to deal directly with the brand that is offering the CPA promotion.

In other words, this system is a lot closer to using AdSense or other ‘Pay Per Click’ adverts.

How to Get Accepted Into a CPA Network

One of the tougher parts of CPA marketing is that you need to be ‘accepted’ into the network and into the specific deal. In order to make sure that they are offering their clients the very best service, CPA networks make sure to vet the publishers they work with closely. They want to make sure that you are representing the offers you’re

promoting well and that the brands they work with will be proud to be associated with your business.

All this means that if you have a website that looks like it was made by a 13-year old, you’re going to struggle. Likewise, if you have no prior experience or examples of your work then you may also struggle. So the solution is to make sure that you have a good website that you can demonstrate to those networks that you’re delivering good value and you’re reaching a larger audience.

This does mean that CPA might not be the best choice for those who are starting out with their first online business model – as they’ll need to build up some traction first. Another tip for getting accepted into CPA networks is to pick up the phone and give them a call. Ask to speak with an affiliate manager and this way you can put forward your strong case for why you think you should be accepted. This essentially fast tracks you and it’s certainly much quicker

and easier than waiting for lots of emails to come through.

 

Irving

 

Internet Business Startup Guide -Some Things You Should Do

Step 1: Register Your Business Name

It will benefit you in the long run to register your business with a legal business name to ensure everything is legal. By doing this you will also keep other people from using your business name and benefiting from your hard work.

Do a little research on the tax benefits of being incorporated (INC) or being a limited liability corporation (LLC) versus the disadvantages and see if either of those will give you an advantage for your business.

Get a second address for your business for privacy and to keep your personal and business mail separate.

Consider renting a mailbox from your local post office to use as your second address. Make sure you get the best size for the mail you will receive. You may also have the choice to pay in 3, 6, or 12-month incremental payments.

Step 2: Open a Business Bank Account

Open a separate business bank account to keep your personal and business expenses separate.

You can open a business bank account anywhere, but having a local branch nearby can be helpful, especially if problems arise and they can only be resolved in-person.

Explore different merchant accounts to take credit and debit card payments.

There are several options: Traditional banks, PayPal, Stripe, etc. • • Banks will require more information about your business (including a business plan and forecasts) to grant you access to a merchant account.

Virtually anyone can apply for and get a PayPal or Stripe account (without providing the level of information a traditional bank requires), so you will be able to take payments more quickly.

Step 3: Open a New Google Account and Services

Set up a Google account to take advantage of Google services such as:

Gmail

Google Analytics

YouTube

Head over to JVZoo and set up a free account.

You can set up a free JVZoo account to sell your own products and to promote other marketers’ products as an affiliate.

Step 4: Get Your Domain

Name and reliable Web Hosting To set up your own business website, the first thing you will need is a domain name.

Here are a few domain name registrars:

GoDaddy

Namecheap

Don’t forget about reliable Web hosting

HostGator

HostGator Web Hosting

BlueHost

You can forget about web hosting if you use my method.

Try to register a domain name that has your main topic or keyword in the domain name. Doing this will help with your site’s ranking in the search engines and be easier for prospective customers to find.

Try to register a .com, .net, or .org domain name if possible – arguably, the three most-recognized domain name extensions.

Be sure your Web hosting provider provides good customer service whenever you have an issue via online chat, email or phone.

Also, be sure your Web hosting provider has reliable up time for your site. You can’t afford to have a provider that can’t always keep your site up and running.

Step 5: Create Your Website and Graphics

Decide which website creation software you plan to use to make and edit Web pages. Most web hosting providers have website creation software you can use or use a content management system (CMS) like:

WordPress

Drupal

Joomla

Doing it yourself will save on costs and time in the future if you learn how to effectively work with the software you decide to utilize. When adding products to your website, be sure to create cover graphics to give a nice visual representation.

When doing this, people will be more likely to click on them and check out the offer. Most Internet marketers provide their affiliates with graphics and sales copy to promote their products – use them in your promotion of such offers and place them appropriately on your website.

Step 6: Send Some Traffic to Your Site

Traffic is the lifeblood of your business because no traffic equals zero sales. Quality traffic is especially vital. There are free and paid traffic-generating methods. You can use any combination of them to get quality traffic to your site.

Here are a few to get you started:

Social media marketing

Viral marketing

Content marketing

Facebook advertising

PPC advertising

Solo advertising

Step 7: Count Your Profits and Pay Your Taxes

Don’t spend your early profits frivolously because the tax man will come knocking before you realize it.

Remember: Be sure to put enough money aside to pay your yearly business taxes. It will always benefit you to invest some of your earnings into yourself. Increase your knowledge of current marketing methods so you can stay profitable.

Irving

Mindset and Wealth – How to Grow Your Wealth

Can you really ‘think yourself rich’?

I’m here to tell you that it is not only possible, but that it is also actually the best chance you have of making a lot of money. Many of us dream of living in a large luxurious house in a sunny country, we imagine wearing smart suits that exude power and confidence and we wish that we didn’t have to make so many hard choices because our funds can’t support the lifestyles we want to lead.

If that sounds familiar, then you need to make a change. And as with ALL things, that change starts with you and your mindset. If you want to be wealthy, then what are you doing about it? And is there any chance that you may, in fact, be going about it the wrong way?

Wealth and Your Career

Ask the average person in the street what they would hypothetically need to do in order to become richer and 99% of them will tell you the same thing: get a better job. Okay, fair enough. They are not wrong per say. Indeed, getting a better job won’t hurt their income and that in turn will likely mean they get richer at least a little.

But in fact, this is not the whole story. And what’s more, be that this isn’t even the main part of the story. Wealth and salary are not inextricably linked. They are related sure, but only to a small degree. If you wanted to see an equation telling you how to get wealthy, then it would really look like this:

Wealth = Income – Outgoings

So, let’s say that your income is determined solely by the amount of money you are making at work. Even in that scenario, you still have another, equally important factor. That is your outgoings. If you are earning a cool million dollars a month but you also waste a million dollars a month of lavish trips and on nights out and clothes, then you are ultimately not going to be very well off. Rather, you’re likely to lose money over time.

But if you are earning a more normal $2500 a month but you only spend $500, then suddenly you are saving $2000 per month. In 12 months, you’ll have $24,000 saved away. That’s a decent down payment on a house! So, you now have two options. Two ways to get richer. One be that you seek to get a better job and increase your income and the other be that you save more money and spend less.

How to Spend Less

When I was at university, my summer job was working at a yacht club. Specifically, I was a waiter in one of the restaurants there that was actually paid for and owned by the clientele of the club. The club was in Sandbanks, England – an area that is also sometimes referred to as ‘millionaire’s row’ because it has among the most expensive real estate in the world along the seafront.

So, these are people who own yachts and who belong to a club that is situated in one of the wealthiest parts of the world. Suffice to say that they were not struggling for cash. And of course, what many people would point out to me be that this should likely result in pretty big tips!

Except that’s not what happened. In fact, I received some of the worst tips I have in any job. I had a lady call me over to secretively give me 20p (around 30cents) for my hard work. She literally told me to buy myself something nice. And this is bearing in mind that it is standard practice in England to tip 10%. The meals usually cost close to $150.

I told my Mum this and her response was: how do you think they got rich, dear?

Makes sense

Look, I’m not here to tell you should become stingy with tips. But what I am telling you be that the wealthiest people recognize that every little bit adds up and makes a very big difference in the long run. Your aim now is not to fritter. That $3 coffee you have every morning on the way to work is $15 over the course of a week. $60 over a course of a month and $720 over the course of the year.

That is a tiny amount and that’s before we have even considered all those other things you likely pay for that you don’t really need. Maybe your Spotify account, Netflix, 100+ TV Channels, gas for the car for all those trips you don’t really need to make. It adds up. Worse are all those larger purchases we make on an impulse.

These are things like clothes that we think will make us look smart, games consoles, PCs, overly advanced phones. How much did your phone cost you? If you’re on a contract, then chances are you’ll be paying $700 or more for it. Now ask yourself how much more that phone really does than something for $300. Do you really need the fastest processor around? Considering that even an old phone can play everything in the app store?

Do you really need a 30-megapixel camera? Or a 4K screen? Can you even see the difference between 4K and 1080p? The real problem here is marketing, the internet and other people. We have unfortunately been conditioned to associate these items with success and to find them highly desirable. We want to get the latest phone, car, computer etc. because it looks so sexy in those adverts. But the reality be that these things don’t really bring us happiness.

Likewise, we are told that we need to buy a large house, go on lavish vacations. Is this really for us? Or is it so that we can look successful to others? I’m not telling you to cut back on all the things that make you happy here. There is no point in having wealth if you aren’t going to enjoy it and have a better quality of life for you and your family.

All I’m telling you, is to make sure you are certain of what it be that does make you happy. And that often means deciding what you don’t need and what you should be prioritizing. Have you always dreamed of a beautiful big house? Then why not stop going on those big holidays for a while? Why not stop buying widescreen TVs? And how about considering getting that big beautiful house in a less expensive area?

Heck, if you move to Spain, then there are places where you can live in a five-bedroom home with swimming pool and roof pool and it will only cost you $200,000. You could almost buy that in cash and think about how much money you would start making then once there was no mortgage!

Conversely, if all you want is to travel the world, then you can change your accommodation to something less glamorous. How about moving to quiet neighborhood and living in a spare bedroom for a while? Your outgoings will be low, so you can enjoy going on more holidays and still save up that wealth. Know what you want to achieve with that money. Know what wealth means to you and then you can focus on being more efficient with your money.

Financial Modeling

This will also help you to set up a budget and/or a plan. If you know how much you have coming in and how much you’d like to be making per month, saving per month and spending on things that make you feel wealthy per month, then you can create a budget that will help you to reach that point within a specific time frame. This then is where you can look at those small things you can cut out to save money.

If you have a spreadsheet that contains all your income and all your outgoings per month, then you can look at what kind of impact cutting coffee from your routine would make. You’ll be left with a total profit at the end of each month and you can decide how much of that you want to put into savings and how much you intend to spend on other things.

You can even set up standing orders in your accounts so that money saved automatically gets transferred to a savings account. With such a spreadsheet, you can then multiply the savings you are making by any given number of months and see projections of what your finances are likely to be at certain points in the future. Need more money for an upcoming expense?

Then look at something else you can do to cut your expenditure. This is called ‘financial modelling’ and it’s a powerful tool for building your wealth rather than just letting it ‘happen’ without your direction or input.

A Couple More Ways to Save Money

And what if you have run out of things you can cut in order to save money? What if you are living on as little as possible? A few other options include changing your providers for bills, selling off old items, or even moving money between accounts in order to receive bonuses. A friend of mine does this religiously and will even take out credit cards with 0%APR, just so that he can put all that money into an IRA and then make profit on it.

If he gets a cash incentive to signing up for anything then he will sign up! And he never buys a new piece of tech or even clothing without taking one of the older items to sell and thereby offset the cost. Something else to note be that if you have a dream of a wealthy future, then you might need to ‘be okay’ with living a little more simply for a while in order to get there.

You need to put the work in now, to reap the rewards in the future. And this is hard because it often once again means forgetting the conventional signals of wealth and success. Once again, you must do this for you and not be worried about what others might think. So, for example, if you want to someday have a beautiful home, one of the very best things you can do is to live with your parents if they will let you.

Sure, it’s not glamorous and it’s not fun, but if they charge a small amount of rent, you’ll be able to save so much per month that it will help you to get on the property ladder MUCH faster. You could then buy a smaller home in a less attractive area but flip the property to make a big profit. You need to put in the graft and have an eye on the future.

Likewise, you might need to learn to stop trying to demonstrate your wealth and stability to friends. Have you ever met up with a friend and eaten in a restaurant that you can’t really afford because you want to see them and because it is embarrassing to suggest eating somewhere cheaper? As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly conducive to getting wealthy quickly! Again, you need to be willing to tell them that you can’t afford it and to go elsewhere.

How about you suggest they meet you at your house?

Setting Up Revenue Streams

Next come the revenue streams. We’ve seen how you can become richer without changing your job, simply by spending less. The other strategy is to become wealthier by having more than one income stream. Once again, your salary isn’t determining your wealth! So, what might this mean? One simple option is to take on another job, such as a weekend job.

If you are happy to work on a Saturday, then you will have potentially $150 extra to spend each week! That’s $600 per month or $7,200 per year! Save that and in a couple of years, you can be living in a nice house – or you can use it right now to feel that bit wealthier and wear those fancy clothes. This is a big sacrifice though granted. So, what would be better for most people would be to earn money online for instance.

Tim Ferriss describes creating a ‘muse’ in his book The Four-Hour Workweek, which is a small online business that generates a passive income. This can be as simple as finding an affiliate product (a product that you sell for commission) and making a simple website recommending it, then sending people there with ads. This is very low maintenance but can potentially make a fair amount of money.

You could try matched betting alternatively (a form of betting that ensures you can’t lose – it uses only the free bonus amounts that you get given for signing up) or you could look for a simple online job. How about selling photography online? Working as a writer or a web designer? Or, like a friend of mine, try commentating on sports for websites? You could create niche websites. Here’s how I do it.

You can also make money from arts and crafts of course and sell some things you make on the side, or you can buy and sell items in bulk on eBay! Then there are the other options that work offline: these include such things as renting out rooms to students, such as mowing the neighbor’s lawn, cutting hair, teaching an instrument etc.

All these options will help you to make an income that will be additional to your current income.

Not only does this of course give you a better total, but it will also help to make you more ‘resilient’ so that if anything ever happens with your main job, you’ll of course still have some money coming in. Another tip? The more you make, the more you’ll make. Try to look for investment opportunities, whether that means buying a second house and letting it out to someone else, or whether it means moving to an area that you know is up and coming.

A strange thing to think of here is board games. If you’ve ever played Monopoly, or any other game where you must amass a kind of resource, then you might have found that it pays to invest wisely early on. To get the card that will pay out just a little bit every round, or that will prevent you from losing a little bit every round.

These seem like small changes in the short term but over the course of the game, they ultimately put you in a position of great power and help you to win decisively! It’s the same in real life. Make a few right choices that will build up over time. Know what you want. Be patient. And avoid the temptation to splurge on the short-term gratification. That is how you get into a wealthy mindset!

Regards,

Irving

Selling Through Your Images Using Pinterest – Ways to get Your Brand Noticed

Using Pinterest for Online Growth

 

This still leaves us with one problem though. If your board is about great interior design ideas and your company sells furniture and decorative items, then it’s going to be very easy for you to include images of your products that people can click through to buy. But if you sell life insurance and your board is about ‘fun family days out’ then you still won’t be able to easily sell directly through the board. So how do you make sales from that?

Overall, your objective here is not going to be to sell directly. Instead, the aim will be to raise awareness for your brand and to build trust and authority. The hope is that your audience will come to think of you as an expert about families and life insurance and as such, they will follow your links when they do want to find out more about getting a policy.

This of course is not as direct a way to sell but in the long term it can be a lot more effective as you’re building a long-term relationship and as you’re establishing yourself as a thought leader in your field. At the same time, you need to think about the comments that you’re adding to your pictures. This is your opportunity to directly link the image back to your site and to promote your product.

For instance, if you’re uploading images of people doing home workouts to provide inspiration and ideas to your followers, then you can sell through those images by adding a note at the bottom explaining that they can find more similar moves in your eBook at THIS link. The great thing about Pinterest is that it really does leverage the viral power of social networks.

If your board is really delivering great value, then this fact alone will be enough to ensure that it grows naturally. People will repin your pins, they will comment, and they will discover what you’re posting through the search button. If you’re offering new content, if you’re staying on topic and if you’re providing real value by offering a genuine service of some kind, then people will gradually gravitate towards your brand and you’ll build your following.

But that is not to say that there aren’t also other things you can do to further accelerate your progress.

Here are some ways you can grow your following more quickly:

Post Regularly: The more regularly you post, the more often your images will be found in searches. At the same time, they’ll also come up in homefeeds more often, which means other users will be more likely to repin them and thereby share them with their audiences giving you more exposure.

Choose Your Tags Careful as on Twitter, choosing the right hashtags is one of the most important ingredients when it comes to gaining maximum exposure for your images. The tags will dictate which searches bring up your images and this means that they’ll be directly responsible for the number of people finding your brand.

When choosing your tags, make sure that you think about the types of things that commonly get searched for on the platform. Remember the kinds of things people use Pinterest for and remember that the audience is 85% female. Remember to that people are looking for images. ‘How to’ isn’t as applicable here (‘life hack’ is a more suitable string).

Write Comments: If you upload an image without any comment then you give it no context. This means you won’t be getting the very most from it, simply because people won’t know what you’re trying to say with the image. If it’s a bodyweight exercise, then explain how to do the exercise!

If it’s a decoration for the home, then explain how people can use it, what it’s made from and where it can be bought. Make sure to link your brand to the image, otherwise people might just appreciate the image but never engage with your profile as the person who uploaded it!

Interact with Others: On social media, reciprocity is a very underrated tool. This is still a social network and therefore, it should be used as a communication tool. The more you talk to people, the more likely they will be to check out your profile and to look at your boards. So, make sure that you’re interacting, following, repining and more. If nothing else, this helps to build good will as you’ll be helping those users to promote themselves too!

Integrate Your Website: One of the most important ways for you to spread your brand across Pinterest and to get found by more people be to properly link your website and your Pinterest account. There are a few ways that you should do this. One is by adding a link on your homepage to your Pinterest account.

This way, someone who lands on your website for the first time and decides that they like your content, can decide that they want to follow you on social media as well and can then decide to check out your Pinterest and follow your account or your boards.

Another tip be to use ‘Shareabolic’ or a similar social sharing tool on your website. If you have a WordPress site, then these can be installed very easily, and they will then allow people to quickly and easily ‘Pin’ an article that they found interesting along with an image. This then means there will be more people sharing your images and you’ll gain more exposure as a result.

Cross Pollinate: You should also make sure that you occasionally try to cross pollinate between your social media channels. If you have a very successful Twitter account for instance, then occasionally tweet about the ‘inspiring boards’ you’re creating at Pinterest. Likewise, you can share your pins to Facebook for people to see. Do this occasionally to help grow all your accounts at once.

Think About Pinterest When You Create Content: If you’ve heard of ‘clickbait’ then you’ll know how a lot of website owners are now creating content specifically to encourage shares on Facebook. This is content that uses an obtuse title in order to make people curious and to encourage more clicks as a result. It’s frustrating but it works and sites like Buzzfeed have built their business off the back of it.

So, the point is, that thinking about how you’re going to share you content before you create it is a good move. The same goes for marketing on Pinterest. If you’re going to make an article successful on Pinterest, then what does it need?

Simple: it needs a great image that will make the article more compelling (this will also help when other people share your images and your pages). Make sure that you are creating unique images for your site and that they’re designed in such a way as to really sell the content of your article or blog post and to encourage people to follow the URL.

Some things that can work well are tips that can be portrayed through a single image, memes or inspirational quotes. Note as well that certain images automatically attract more attention than others – we are psychologically hardwired for instance to notice pictures of faces!

To learn how to fully use Pinterest to grow your online presence, I use the following:

CLICK HERE

 

Irving

Please feel free to comment on this article.

The Best Keyword Research – A Necessity for Creating Your Site

Keyword Research – Where to Start

There are a lot of market opportunities that will certainly fit your requirements. When you discover the marketplace that you intend to get into, you will certainly need to construct your key phrase or crucial expression listings.

For blog or WordPress Sites, long tail keyword’s are key to getting you ranked well in the search engines. Don’t pick keyword’s like “Weight Loss” in which you would have too much competition, pick something like “Weight loss for beginners – A guide to losing pounds Quickly”.

If you bypass this phase, you might end up doing a great deal of work and falling flat on your face. There are some markets that simply are not worth the effort going after. You do not want to get into a market that isn’t going to be successful.

In this short article, I think that you will have a target audience in mind. I will certainly offer you a high degree review on just how to do appropriate keyword study. I’ll begin with the advantages of keyword study.

You will need to choose what the customer is seeking as well as bring on your own products to the marketplace. Several small company proprietors do simply the contrary. They think of a service or product they assume the marketplace requires and after that attempt to pursue and also encourage the marketplace the worth of their item.

If you wish to place on the first page of Google, you definitely need to recognize exactly how to do marketing research and also develop your keyword’s checklists. Why? Since keyword research study identifies your market’s success and also evaluates competitors.

I use the following Keyword Research tool, which I find to be top-notch.

Try it here:

The Benefits of Keyword Research

What are the advantages of doing a correct keyword study? Noted are 4 advantages of the power of keyword research study:

1. It drives organic traffic to your website; simply by merely utilizing words your target market makes use of in their searches.

2. It helps you to create a lot more reliable duplicate (sales duplicate) for your website; understanding what terms to integrate right into your site will enable your target market to relate to you immediately.

3. It helps with material growth; it assists you to produce web content that your target market requires as well as prevents squandering your time on pointless subjects.

4. It helps you comprehend your target market much better: you will certainly understand exactly how as well as what your target market is looking for.

5. It helps you determine the dimension of your market: simply by identifying the variety of searches, you can target substantial swimming pools of untapped possible as well as prevent numerous pitfalls.

6. It helps you to create as well as expand income streams: by utilizing keyword study techniques that uses preferred key phrases, you can be influenced to introduce as well as develop brand-new services and product suggestions.

7. The lower line: the outcomes of keyword study are that your site duplicate, service approaches, as well as internet marketing will certainly succeed tremendously.

Keywords study is the structure to correct customer connection. They think that considering that they are an authority on a subject they must recognize what their target market is looking for.

The only proper method to understand what your target market is looking for is to do appropriate keyword study. What you believe your target market requires or is searching for might be totally inaccurate. I can ensure that you will certainly be amazed by the key phrases your target market searches on to try to locate your subject matter.

95% of internet sites are captured in the catch of poor keyword option. High relationships of the key phrases you utilize on your site as well as words your target market utilizes in their searches in fact relocates the site towards the target market and also draws in much more targeted site visitors.

Search phrase web links + keyword web content on your website + keyword phrase searches = strong internet search engine website traffic.

 

Structure Your Keyword Lists

Tip One: Understand Your Target Audience

To begin an efficient key phrase checklist, consider your prospective clients’ inspirations as well as intents.

What sort of inquiries will they ask? What are they attempting to achieve? What issues are they trying to solve?

There are two kinds of purchasers. The very first sort of purchaser is the rational customer. They will typically ask “exactly how” and also “what” concerns them when considering acquisitions.

Tip Two. You Must Understand the Types of Buyers and also Your Target Audience

70% of all purchasers are psychological customers. These sorts of purchasers are typically a lot more spontaneous and also worried with the customer experience and also outcome when thinking about a purchase. They asked the common question, what’s in it for me?

Utilize the psychological angle to encourage this kind of purchaser. Use psychological key phrase support in your message.

Tip Three. Assume Like Your Target Audience

Keep in mind: website traffic expenses is cash out the door! You do not simply desire website traffic, you desire transforming web traffic!

If you do not have conversion information, you’ll need to make sure your ideas match which search terms you believe will be of top quality.

Tip Four. Believe Broad and Wide for Your Target Audience

Begin with a wide checklist of key phrases about your subject. Ensure they closely match your target market.

Tip Five. Prioritize Your Keywords Based on Conversion

Take into consideration these factors:

1. Make your services or product’s objective clear. Do not conceal what you’re attempting to market.

2. If your keyword’s expression is “blue high leading basketball footwear”, make certain a site visitor can purchase “blue high leading basketball footwear” on your website. Even better, make certain you connect to a web page where your customer can purchase the footwear they are looking for.

3. Consider how your product ranks against the competition.

Think about the quantity of web traffic you will attract utilizing your search phrases. If you’re utilizing an economical hosting service provider, you might want to upgrade to something that can accommodate greater web traffic. It’s irritating to have a website go down because the web traffic cannot be handled properly.

4. Take into consideration the chance of conversion. If you are very knowledgeable in your niche as well as understand exactly what keyword phrases or keyword expressions your target market is looking for, after that utilize every keyword phrase from your search.

If you do not understand what the possibility of your conversions will be, you should track this information so you can get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Make certain you recognize the details.

Keywords Research is one of the most Important Steps in your Online business.

It makes no sense to drive a huge quantity of website traffic to your website and not have the ability to remain organized.

In time, your website will certainly go up in search ranking but go up based upon the keyword phrases that YOU picked. Do not succumb to the misconception that even more website traffic you obtain the better off you are.

If you desire to rank well in search engines, after that you definitely have to comprehend exactly how to do market research study as well as develop your search phrase checklists. The only right method to understand what your target market is looking for is to do appropriate keyword study. I can assure that you will certainly be shocked by the keyword’s your target market searches on to discover your subject.

If you are very into niches and also recognize specifically what keyword’s or keyword expressions your target audience searches for, after that utilize your extremely strongly researched keyword’s.

Relocate down your search phrase listing, each time advertising as well as connecting with the following keyword’s expression.

Emphasis on high quality NOT amount. Begin with your ideal keyword/phrase and also start your connecting projects. Relocate down your search phrase checklist, each time advertising as well as relating to the following keyword’s expression.

Take control of your website traffic as well as obtain rating well for the search phrases and also expressions that are most rewarding for your online experience.

One of the most vital actions you can do for your internet site is keyword research study. You need to understand the keyword phrases you intend to obtain ratings for but also search for phrases that will transform your site into one of the very best.

Final Thought

In my opinion choosing the right Keywords is one of the most important aspects in creating online sites, and therefore time has to be put in to this effort to make your business a success.

Please fill out comments below or send to support@weaffiliatemarketing.com.

 

Regards,

Irving

A way to get started. Click Here.

Try this Keyword Research tool here.

10 Leading Traffic Generation Techniques

Leading Traffic Generation Techniques

There are various strategies to market your product or your site and also drive lots of certified web traffic.

You will certainly obtain even more clients and have a lot more sales if you produce even more web traffic to your internet site. Therefore, you need to work consistently to create very targeted site visitors that would bring higher sales of your items or products or services.

Outlined below are 10 leading Free or affordable traffic-generation methods:

 

1-Search Engines

The totally free online search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are just one of the many key resources of totally free targeted traffic. In order to break out website traffic from the internet search engine, it is essential to take into consideration the following of several key factors: Create a search phrase targeted content-rich website. Optimize your website to obtain a high position by online search engines and also get your website indexed in the search engines as well as on-line directory sites.

2- E-mail Marketing

If you have an opt-in List, you can utilize it to keep in constant contact with your clients as well as keeping them educated regarding the newest updates for your products and services, which can create more sales.

Site visitors that are passionate about your service or products are prospective clients. Opt-in customers are a great source of becoming repeat visitors to your site, which can also trigger them to become repeat buyers.

3-Article Marketing

Composing write-ups as well as having them released on Article directory sites is one method of advertising your website. Creating excellent informative articles will certainly excite the visitor’s passion, leading to consistent driving of web traffic to your internet site.

Keyword phrase enhanced Articles are also key, and they create continual targeted cost-free web traffic as well as supply an effective method for creating one-way web links, which aids your Yahoo and Google online search engine page position.

4-Forum Marketing


Among the greatest errors individuals who make use of online forums is to coldly promote their item or website. When you publish to online forums, make sure you provide your link to your site to drive more traffic in your website’s direction.

Discussion forums are also one of the primary places where individuals seek totally free guidance, ideas and also advertise their websites. Therefore, if you appropriately make use of these discussion forums, you can obtain some wonderful direct exposure, and also extremely targeted site visitors.

5-E zine Promotion

Composing short articles and also having them released on Article directory sites is another great way to promote your website. Consisting of a great information with each post will certainly glimmer the viewers’s rate of interest, resulting in constant driving of website traffic to your internet site. Keywords enhanced Articles assist in many ways. They enable continual targeted complimentary web traffic and also supply an effective way for producing one-way web links, which assists your Google as well as Yahoo search engine page position.

E-Zines are among the very best means to obtain very targeted site visitors to your website. You have various choices to promote in e-zines, including Solo Ads, Article Marketing and also Joint Venturing with authors or other website owners.

6-Blogs and RSS Feeds

Search engines like Google enjoy blogs and RSS feeds on your web pages which are then indexed consistently due to them constantly having additional content on your site. That is why blog sites have become one of the most effective means for marketing products or services, and provide excellent information for your followers.

To gain advantages when blogging, you need to consistently post new content to your blog site, and also include with your new posts, relevant products to be purchased. Don’t forget, people come to your site to gain knowledge and information when they are researching or ready to purchase a product.

7-Create a Digital Publication

Another way to get more traffic is to create your own electronic book, which your reader can enjoy at their leisure. The information you provide in this document should be helpful to your audience and provide a tool for you to get more traffic. You can also provide some product links in your book which are relevant to your subject matter. You can also allow free distribution of your e book to create additional interest to friends and acquaintances of your readers.

Viral advertising and marketing is also a good way to spread the word about your site, and with the many social media sites available today, advertising on these forms of media can be very lucrative. Your electronic book can be an extremely useful tool in this social media environment we have available today.

8-Link Exchanges

Trading links with excellent quality web link sites is another means of introducing prospective clients to your site or your item. It can assist you in obtaining excellent web page ranking by the search engines by enhancing web link appeal of you site and also attract additional clients.

9-Tell a good friend Script

“Tell a Friend” Script is also another way to drive website traffic to your internet site. This is a reference you have on your site where the visitor can use it to refer friends to a certain web page by clicking on your internet site.

10-Pay-Per-Click

Pay per click (PPC) is one of the fastest and also the easiest means to drive targeted web traffic to your internet site and can be really affordable. With a PPC promotion, you will certainly obtain targeted site visitors to your website after minutes of creating your advertisement. When using PPC it is also a good idea to track which ads are most effective, and will therefore assist you in getting the best bang for your buck and in keeping your expenses down.

To take complete advantage of Pay per Click marketing, you need to recognize just how PPC promotion works and track your costs and profit margins all the time.

Final Thought

Making routine as well as likewise everyday techniques along with comprehending simply exactly how to drive licensed website visitors to your net website by including these techniques will really boost your on-line presence.

Please feel free to comment on this or other articles on this site below:

Regards,

Irving

This brand new starter program is tops.

One of the best traffic sites I have used.

Affiliate Marketing Tips For Beginners – Making Progress

Affiliate Marketing Success – Affiliate marketing Strategies

Well folks, I am now just two weeks into my new online venture. Although, this is my second time around at online marketing, and with substantial knowledge from my previous ventures online, I am able to, and will pass some more tips along in this article. But before I do that, I just want to update you a little on what I’ve learned in the past two weeks.

I’ve actually established three sites to date, one being a test site, which I use prior to adding information to my major sites, and to try things out before posting. I find this way is very useful and stops yourself from screwing up your main sites.

As the Affiliate Program I’m using allows you to have 50 sites included with your membership, with hosting also part of the membership fee, my plan is to set the sites up first with the free domains. Once I’m satisfied with the layout and content etc., I will transfer them over to a domain which is totally owned by me. Domain names are also very inexpensive in the whole scheme of things, and gives you your own URL.

I have learned to research niches, and specifically niches with associated keywords that will assist in getting you ranked in the search engines. No point in have a great looking site, if you don’t pick the right keywords to get you ranked.

Following the keyword research, comes the choosing of a domain name. The training I have taken delves deep into both of these subjects, and it is extremely important to pick out these items very carefully. You can then start and manage your Affiliate marketing campaign.

I have been able to add plug-ins to this site, as well as download an image and Amazon book advertisement. In addition, I have linked my site to Google Analytics, which allows for the tracking of results and timing of people visiting your site. A good free tool to use.

I am still working on the menus at the top of my site, but have learned how to insert them. I also have been creating an affiliate network of people to whom I can ask questions, and have posted information on Facebook and Twitter. Social media is also of great benefit for getting the word out about your affiliate marketing sites.

So, I’m moving along, and I am here now to add more content, which I am now outlining.

Getting Into Affiliate marketing – For the first time

I have described many ways to get you up and running in your own Affiliate Marketing business, some others are outlined below:

As you continue to add extra content to your website, add products, drive extra traffic to your website, and construct your e-mail advertising list, you will continue to develop the affiliate internet marketing aspect of your business and help people to learn about affiliate marketing.

In the affiliate internet marketing equation, affiliates are the companies or individuals that promote the merchant’s service or product and provide information to the folks who visit your site. They may also make you some money from products purchased on your site.

Affiliate advertising is one way to make money on-line with your website, but to be able to achieve success and construct yourself as an authority in your niche, you should create useful content material and build a relationship with your viewers.

 

Related Affiliate Marketing Techniques

With this type of online marketing, there may be some sort of online presence you create with hand-picked affiliate links related to a line of products related to your area of interest, although you may not have personally used those products or services.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the many, quickest and most cost-effective, but perhaps not the most simple of ways to start earning money online. However, you don’t have to create any merchandise yourself. You are simply providing excellent content for your reader, who then may decide to purchase something from your site.

You will need to position yourself as a professional in your niche, (Important to choose the right niche – something you have a passion for.) and being able to promote products by way of affiliate marketing niche sites means readers depend on you for regular contact and updates which will include useful information.

 

Affiliate Marketing Site Content

You will need to provide well written and helpful articles, then add affiliate links to your site where appropriate throughout your content.

Your loyalty needs be to your readers first and foremost, and you will need to continue to add useful content material on your site and promote it to increase readership/following. It may also be useful to provide the possibility of collecting your visitors’ email address while they are visiting your site, which you can use to contact them later with more information, if they request it. We will explore email options in future articles.

Deciding A Niche – Do’s and Don’t’s

When picking out a niche, or several niches, you will want to know something about that niche, or have a great interest in that subject. If you don’t have knowledge in your subject matter, you will not have readers reading your articles. People visiting your site are looking for good information, and if you don’t provide that, they won’t spend much time on your site.

When you start to think about niches, there are so many that the average person could choose, that it will normally be fairly simple to create sites with knowledge you mostly already know. All you need to do, is be willing to share that knowledge or information.

There are two main ways to promote niche products. One is to provide a review of a specific product you have used or are interested in. The other way is to conduct a review of several competing products and provide a conclusion as to which is the best product.

If a product is then purchased from your site by the way of an Affiliate Link, you will obtain a portion of the proceeds in the sale of that product. This is commonly known as a commission.

You will sometimes also have the opportunity to promote an Affiliate Marketing Program. The program I am associated with does have this option and more information is provided in this affiliate program.

Once you partner with an affiliate network that provides products within your niche, you will need to post content to your site outlining details about that product. Your goal is to make any visitor viewing your information, to become a customer.

You may get your visitor to provide a comment on your site. In which case you should reply promptly with informed information.

You could also offer a free informational eBook which they can read at their leisure, and could also bring them back to your site to obtain more information you provide in your future articles.

You can also use social media for affiliate marketing, where you can create a network of like-minded people with who to communicate with about your niche. You may be able to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

As an affiliate marketer, there are many ways to attract customers to your products, and with a little effort, an online career may be just around the corner.

Driving Traffic to Your Affiliate marketing Site

There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, the simplest and free method is through Search Engine Optimization, (or SEO ) This method requires your careful choosing of keywords which will allow you to get your site ranking high on Google, Bing or Yahoo.

There are many other ways of driving traffic, which are normally of the paid variety. These ways can be really expensive, but can increase your sales. What needs to be decided is if the advertising costs warrant the expenditure. To have a successful website, lots of traffic is the most necessary part of building your following.

Affiliate Marketing – Content Degradation

Once you start compromising your content material to cater to affiliate programs or any of the other ways to generate income online, you stand the chance of losing your readers. The idea of online marketing is to advertise other individuals’s merchandise through your website and earn commissions if people are interested and really want to purchase a product as displayed on your site.

Affiliate Marketing Profits – Through hard Work

As an affiliate, you will be able to earn money depending on your own marketing efforts, so if you wish to make money from affiliate internet marketing, you’ll have to promote the product or the service constantly to be able to entice people to purchase through your affiliate link.

However, if you decide to only depend on individuals utilizing the affiliate links in your evaluations, that implies that you need plenty of visitors to actually start making an income. This is a useful method to evaluate your potential affiliate-advertising niches to see if there are services and products that folks really want and are willing to pay for.

As many website owners will agree, online marketing has grown to become an extremely large source of income for many people, and can produce revenue in the thousands per month. Income can be generated from recommending useful products, tools and services that can be bought after clicking links from websites or blogs. You will need to build a good website or weblog, publish high quality content material, promote great merchandise.

Affiliate marketing offers the potential for significant earnings if you are willing to work hard and learn all the tricks necessary for success online. Taking the time, energy and cash to create an affiliate internet marketing website scares away many would-be affiliate marketers, however I assume if extra folks merely tried to affiliate market, they might find it’s easier and more profitable than that they had ever imagined.

Marketing Affiliates that fill their sites with heavy-handed selling and sub par content material will have a tough time getting useful prospects on board, so focusing on your content material is essential. I know I have mentioned this many times throughout this article, but I must stress it is the most important part.

Maybe you start a website and put up affiliate links throughout it. Maybe you run a weekly podcast to talk about and sell the services or products. Before you begin advertising any affiliate product, verify that the seller has their very own affiliate web page as well as advertising information which you can use. (saves you time from creating any content by yourself.)

There are so many companies now that have Affiliate programs, it’s hard to find one that doesn’t. So there are millions of products available for you to market, so just choose a niche, and get to it. High value products can be one way to earn an income, but smaller items, especially if you have additional monthly re-orders, can also add up to create reasonable profits per site.

Before deciding on your niches and what type of sites you want to create, a lot of research needs to be done. It is worth spending the time and effort in making sure the niche or niches you are looking at promoting will have the desired outcome, and you have the necessary knowledge to write great content.

Products that you are familiar with, will provide you the best opportunity of writing the best content. Also, other interests you may have, such as sports, fitness, health etc., are all good topics to pursue.

Final Thought.

The program I am using, even though I am relatively new to it, has more than enough information, training and assistance to make anyone successful at Affiliate Internet Marketing. You can start for free here. You won’t be disappointed. Please feel free to download and read the free eBook below, Give and Take WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS.

 

 

 

 

Give and Take_ WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

If you wish to make any comments about the information about this article, please leave them below.

Regards,

Irving

p.s. Just came across this one.

How to Get Started in Affiliate Marketing – Step by Step

afiliate-marketing-step-by-step My Online Experience A Brief History

I first got acquainted with the online business market several years ago after researching the opportunities that existed at that time. (there are many more now)

It’s funny, well not so funny, but after looking at all the different ways to create an income online, it appeared that only a few of the so-called “Gurus” ever made anything at all, and when they made money, it was usually at “YOUR” expense.

After paying out literally thousands of dollars creating websites, hosting, advertising and building your list with an autoresponder, and with the great learning curve to overcome, I finally called it a day and gave up. Looking back now, it was probably the wrong decision at the time, and I’m sure if I had stuck at it, and been a little more patient, everything would have worked itself out.

I would wonder from program to program, buying every new thing that came into my mail box, with not much that actually worked. Splash pages told you that with this little tool or widget, you would be making mega bucks in no time at all, only to be stymied at every turn when more money was required to move on to the next level.

The Present

Well a few years later and a few years older, guess what, I am giving it another try. Whoopee I can hear you say…..
However, this time I’m not starting from scratch as I did the first time, and with the insights and knowledge I gained from the last go-around, I am going to be taking this much more slowly and methodically this time around.

I am seeing more and more, to be able to help people get what they want and coach them, it a much better way to conduct oneself get through this life that each of us goes through.

My New Direction

So, what have I decided to do you ask?

Well, I’m going to be involved in the really open field of “Affiliate Marketing”. I am entering this field to primarily assist others in their endeavors, and make a little added income if things work out.

Affiliate Marketing, for the people who do not know what that is, is the promotion of other companies products with you making a small profit from anything that gets purchased from your site(s).

New Company

After doing quite a lot of research, I came across this site, which is free to start, but if you upgrade, charges a small monthly fee to be a member.

I first joined this site as a FREE starter member, and I then spent a good few days evaluating what was on offer, and finally took the plunge and signed up for the upgrade.

As a starter member you do get two free websites, which gives to a chance to get a feeling as to what is available and the tons of additional information, in mainly the form of training you get after you upgrade.

I am now in the process of working my way through the rest of the training, which is extremely informative and extensive, and to be honest does take a long time to go through. But along the way you are tasked with things to get done as you work your way through the lessons. In fact, I am issuing this first article, and I am by no means finished with the training. So, have still a long way to go.

What I am finding as I go through this process is that when you do things incrementally, things come together, and with the help of the others using this site, gives you a good feeling about where you will be 12 months down the road.

As I am not completely operational using this information yet, I will need to reserve a final judgment on using this site, but at this stage, I am very optimistic as to where I will be going forward.

This is the first of many articles I plan on adding to my site and it is housed on a WordPress site, and it has been set up with my own .com domain name.

Conclusion

So here is my opinion at the moment. I believe that with a lot of effort, a willingness to work, with the millions of niches you can promote, there is really no reason why anybody couldn’t make this work.

In closing, I will be issuing much more content on this site, and I welcome you to visit as much as you see fit.

If you need further information from me at this time, please leave a comment at the bottom of this page, or you can email me at support@weaffiliatemarketing.com.

Irving Armstrong

p.s. If you need information about the program I am using please click here.

Try this too.

 

For real earning