Ash Summerville – Internet Marketing

Building Successful Businesses Online

Posts Tagged ‘Beginners’

Website Or No Website…That’s The Question

September 30th, 2009

Do you want to make money through the Internet but you don’t have enough experience or capital to start your own online business? You don’t have to worry, for a lot of online marketing options exist for you to start with. One of these options, and shall I say the best, is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing provides first time online marketers like you the chance to market something online even without having your own product to sell. All you have to do is to sign up with an affiliate marketing program, which is usually owned by an online merchant or retailer, and start picking the products you want to promote. As an affiliate, you are paid by the merchant for your services on a commission basis, that is whenever you have directed a visitor to the merchant’s site and the visitor actually buys something.

Becoming an affiliate in an affiliate marketing program is often quick and easy, and for most affiliate programs, signing up is also free. But despite these and all the benefits being promised by affiliate programs, many people are still hesitant to get into affiliate marketing. One of the reasons why a lot of people remain hesitant is the lack of a website to start marketing his affiliate products with. This now leads us to the question of whether a website is required or necessary in affiliate marketing or not.

Many people say that one can do affiliate marketing even without a website to start with. Actually, one can really start promoting and marketing his affiliate products even without a website; and there exist a lot of ways on how this can be done. In fact, many affiliate marketing strategies that leads to success can exist without actually needing a website. Among these strategies are email marketing, offline promotions, writing e-books, writing ezines and engaging in online discussions like forums, chats, message boards and others.

*Email Marketing

Email marketing, or maintaining email lists, is actually the most popular affiliate marketing strategy that doesn’t require the affiliate to maintain a website. In this affiliate marketing strategy, what you basically do is maintain a list of the email ads of your prospective customers and provide them with articles that are relevant with the affiliate products and programs you are promoting. Articles that you provide your contacts with need not always be promotional, for many individuals find such types of email annoying. Rather, it would be better if you provide them with something informative and just add small text ads that link to your merchant’s site.

*Offline Promotion

There are many ways on how you can promote your affiliate products offline. Among the common medium used for such promotions are classified ads, brochures and flyers. Classified ads would generally work better compared to the other two because classified ads in periodicals often get a wider audience.

*Writing Free e-books

If you have a knack in writing, writing an e-book can be the best way for you to promote your affiliate products in the absence of an actual website. Just like in emails and newsletters, your readers would better appreciate your e-book if it is not too promotional but rather informative. Be sure, however, to make the contents of your e-books relative to the actual affiliate products you are promoting. And just like in email marketing, you can just place text ads or banners somewhere near the end of your e-book that links to the merchant’s site.

*Writing Free Ezines

Ezines are publications or articles that aim to inform individuals about a particular topic. If you don’t have a website and yet want to be an affiliate, you can well use ezines to promote your affiliate products or to insert links to your merchant’s site. If you have a website, your ezine article may actually work well as content for your site. But since you have no website, you can just submit your free ezine articles to various websites that hosts ezines, like goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com and others.

*Online discussions (Forums, Chats, Message Boards, etc.)

With or without a website, you just can’t ignore online discussions because they are great venues for marketing your affiliate products. In chats, forums, message boards and discussion boards with topics related to your products, you can easily find people who may be interested with the products you are promoting.

With all these strategies, it may appear that one really doesn’t need to have a website to start marketing his affiliate products and promoting his affiliate programs. Well, starting in an affiliate program without a website may be easy, but getting successful in affiliate marketing without a website is another thing. While one can actually gain enormous success in affiliate marketing even without a website, it is a rare instance that “newbies” like you can reach the same levels of success.

Having a website is not really a pre-requisite in entering into an affiliate program, unless otherwise the program owner would require you to have one. But while this is so, I would still recommend that you have for yourself a website, if not now, then maybe at a later time. Having a website creates a lot of advantages in affiliate marketing. For one, it provides you a place where you can creatively promote not only one of your affiliate products but all of your affiliate products. With a website, you can also advertise your affiliate products to a wider market.

Again, having a website is not a requirement in affiliate marketing. But with the advantages that a website can provide, I’d rather have one for myself and make affiliate marketing a lot easier for me.

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Tags: Affiliate Marketing Articles Beginners Blogging Web Pages

Affiliate Marketing – An Introduction For Beginners

June 8th, 2009

Affiliate marketing. Two simple words that have the power to change your current financial situation so that you never again have to struggle to pay the mortgage, take a vacation or save for the future.

Two words that form the basis of a strong foundation that hundreds of the Internet’s most successful marketers have used as a springboard to creating their own online wealth.

Affiliate marketing, one of the only ways that you can make a full time income being paid to LEARN as you consistently generate income from multiple passive campaigns running on complete autopilot.

Above and beyond all other opportunities that I have ever explored, affiliate marketing has been the easiest and most profitable of endeavours.

Best of all, if you are unable to create your own products, or you can’t afford to hire freelancers or outsource project development, you can exploit the power of affiliate marketing to start making money instantly, while using it to fund all of your future business projects, so that when you finally do go out on your own, you are not only equipped with the experience and knowledge that is required in order to be successful online, but your affiliate marketing efforts can fund EVERY single one of your projects!

There are so many reasons why affiliate marketing is the most lucrative opportunity to get involved in and it’s no surprise that it’s one of the most common methods that new and seasoned marketers use to make money online, while exploring niche markets without ever having to develop a product of their own.

Here are just a few reasons why affiliate marketing is an exceptional business to be a part of:

a) Potential To Earn Millions
There are affiliates from all walks of life, who have earned millions of dollars a year just by being an affiliate marketer. The profit potential is nothing short of incredible, and with a solid action plan featured within this guide, you will be able to join the ranks of the most successful affiliates yourself.

b) You’re The Boss
As an affiliate marketer, you work when you want to setting your own schedule and being able to spend more time with friends and family, as you work from the comfort of your own home. No deadlines to meet, no boss dictating your schedule, it’s completely up to you.

c) Very Easy To Do
It doesn’t matter if you are brand to online marketing or not, you really can become a successful affiliate marketer. There’s no difficult learning curve involved, and no expensive software, tools, resources or training needed.

d) Low Cost Start Up
With affiliate marketing, the costs are minimal. You aren’t required to outsource product creation or pay for development and testing. Your entire focus is to choose profitable products to promote, and drive targeted traffic to your landing pages so that you are able to generate a commission from every sale made as a result of your efforts.

You can get started with nothing more but a domain name and a hosting account.

e) Earn As You Learn
As an affiliate marketer, you will learn everything you need to know to create high converting landing pages, research niche markets, generate targeted traffic and communicate with responsive email subscribers. This knowledge and information will not only help you with your current affiliate campaigns, but can be directly applied to your own business in the future.

With affiliate marketing, you can dive into mainstream markets; niche markets and micro niche and determine, without any monetary investment of your own, whether it might be feasible to create your own product for that market later on.

If you discover it’s not, you’ve saved yourself time and money by ‘taste testing’ the different markets using third party products rather than spending time and money developing your own.

It just doesn’t get better or easier than this.

If you have absolutely no experience marketing online, becoming an affiliate marketer will provide you with the opportunity to learn the ropes, rub elbows with established merchants and online marketers and prepare you for the online business world so that when you are ready to create and market your very own product, you will be more than ready to tackle the industry and give it all you’ve got.

Affiliate marketing is also one of the easiest opportunities to get involved in because you don’t need to invest funds in advertising, build networks of websites or deal with customer support.

All you do is promote a handful of high quality products and for each one sold as a result of your promotions, you will earn commissions.

Think of it like this. Macy’s is having a 50% off special on Black Friday.

Instead of being the store owner who has to manage inventory, process orders, deal with returns and exchanges, promote the sale, or deal with both staff and customers, all you have to do is stand outside of the front door and introduce the merchandise to hungry customers.

Each time someone purchases a $50 item, you are paid $25.

Now, would you rather be out front selling products for $25 a pop when you can walk away at any time, with no responsibilities or obligations to the business, or would you want to be the store owner who is making the SAME amount as you are, but who has all this extra stuff to deal with?

That’s what affiliate marketing is all about. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are reasons why you’d eventually want to consider going out and building your own product line, but as an affiliate marketer, you can make money promoting other people’s businesses while growing your own business, simultaneously!

I can show you exactly how in my new ebook, Operation Super Affiliate, but for now, your focus should be on laying down a strong foundation as a beginning to your affiliate marketing career, so that you are able to consistently build your wealth while building your business.

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Tags: Affiliates Beginners

How To Make Money During The Economic Downturn.

June 2nd, 2009

We just can’t escape from it. Turn on the news it’s there, open a paper and wham! Its there too! The recession. Another story of who’s and how many are losing there jobs. Another headline about the car industries, banks and housing turmoil.

Greed helped us arrive at this point. Greed! We want bigger, better, faster and shinier.

So you are reading this questioning how to make money during the recession when all this bad news is around you.

Lets start with how you’re not going to make money during the recession. You see if you can avoid the things that won’t help, you will be closer to discovering the things that will.

1st… Avoid all things shiny. Seriously. If you are searching for a way to make money online, and typing your question in a search engine you will run across many shiny websites. Glamorizing the flashy lifestyle, cars and houses.

Why? Because in the end, most of the people behind those sites need to make money. And how do they accomplish this? By making money off of you! So take time, research, ask questions then if you must go back to the shiny website and give it a shot.

2nd…You aren’t going to make money by not taking action. Sitting there, yeah you.. On your couch, chair or floor… you’re not going to make money during the recession because you aren’t taking action!

Now let’s talk about how you can make money during the recession.

1st… Determine how you want to make money. Do you really want to go out and compete with the thousands of others who are now looking for jobs? Or do you want to make money online?

How will you put together the puzzle pieces of your dreams? I make money online, and yes I am making money during the recession! The next 2 points will outline 2 free ways I make money online! You got it, Free!

2nd… Article Marketing. You see this, this page your reading.. It’s article marketing. You see I find something I have a passion for and write an article around it. If you are reading this thinking I can’t do that, let me ask you how many conversations do you have in a day? How many e-mails do you send a week? It’s easier to complete those two tasks because you are making conversation with friends. Treat article marketing the same. Find something your passionate about and write about it. If you work hard, you will make money.

3rd… Blog. That’s right!… This one is so easy, and there are plenty of sites that help you set up a blog that are free. Why is this one easy? Because the conversations that I convert into articles… well I just mash them up a bit more and put them on my blog.

If you are someone who needs a bit more direction, attend some seminars. The best thing you can do is invest in your eduction. Yes, it will take time, but an hour a day would be a great start. Stop using the excuse that there is something on TV that you must watch. This will not get you anywhere. You must take action.

Maybe you need to get involved in a coaching program or get a mentor to help you through the piles of information that is available on the internet. Geographical location is not a boundry anymore. So many educational courses are now delivered on line.

Remember.. Stop buying into the shiny things online, start investing in something real! No one can promise you how much you will make, but in the right community with the right support many will help you get there!