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The Marketer Personality in Home-based Business
A Fascination with Levers
Internet Marketing is about traffic; they buy traffic or generate it themselves then they on-sell to those who need it. If the Producers were early on the web, the Marketers followed rapidly behind. Producers rapidly discovered that putting a product out there was not enough. As the web became busier, the need for professional traffic generation became more urgent and opportunities opened up for entrepreneurs of all kinds, including the home business person.
The primary opportunities are in affiliate relationships, micro-advertisers, lead companies, and email list companies.
Affiliate Relationships: Under an affiliation, the home business entrepreneur becomes an ‘affiliate’ of a product company receiving income for promoting sales (usually to completion) receiving a commission of anything from 2% to 70%. Affiliates typically just ‘sign-up’, though some product companies charge fees. Affiliate income can be of two types: straight commission on the sale and/or recurring commissions on follow-on sales. Follow-on sales are associated with subscription services, indeed any repeating sale or more occasionally where someone simply comes back and buys more. Recurring income can build what’s called ‘residual’ income.
Micro-Advertisers: Google has created a whole business opportunity for home-business entrepreneurs with their development of AdWords in 2000. AdWords is an approach to advertising that allows an individual without a web site or any other web presence to act as a promoter of third party products. The vehicle is Google’s pay-per-click sponsored links. An advertiser forms a relationship with a company under its affiliation program then buys positions on Google. When you or I click on the advertisement it takes us to the product company. The advertiser would receive income from the product company for any sales that result and (rarely) for the traffic. This opportunity is primarily associated with Google but is available from other search engines.
Lead companies: This has moved out of the range of the home business crowd. Lead companies generate names and contact details of individuals who are willing to be (usually directly) contacted by a company – so called warm leads. An example user would be sellers of nutrition and diet products as well as sellers of MLM opportunities. Generating these focused leads requires an advertising and web infrastructure out of the reach of the home player.
List Generators: Like the lead companies this is moving out of the range of the home player. Email list companies build lists of email addresses and sell them to third parties for email campaigns. The lists are typically generalized to some degree and the leads are cold. With the advent of spamming and anti-spam laws this is becoming a tougher industry requiring more structure to keep the lists clean and the users out of trouble. Individual home business owners can, do and indeed must generate ‘opt-in’ lists of potential clients for their own use, but getting into the list resale business is now a risky proposition and increasingly out of the reach of individuals
There are then two primary and overlapping opportunities for the home based player: affiliate marketer and micro-advertiser.
Affiliate marketing is perhaps, currently, one of the most attractive of the opportunities for home-based entrepreneurs. It offers the opportunity of taking a significant commission without the risk of being tied to any specific product. Most affiliate marketers will promote a range of products. There are literally thousands of products out there that can be promoted – though like anything else some are more likely to sell than others.
The role of the affiliate marketer is to create traffic for the underlying product company. This means that the primary skills lie in understanding how traffic is created on the web. The tools and techniques have obvious counterparts in the offline world – creating a storefront, advertising and promotion, listings in directories, joint ventures, and direct mail. Others like viral marketing are concepts that have flowered in the web world.
The micro-advertiser is a sub-set of the affiliate opportunity. But over the last few years it has become a skill set in its own right with a band of enthusiastic devotees.
The micro-advertising opportunity depends entirely on the existence of Google (and other search engines). It is a child of their marketing strategy and facilitates thousands of people who want to risk small amounts of money in trying to build traffic for Producers.
The basis of the opportunity is Google’s AdWords offering. Originally set up to help companies advertise on a pay-per-click basis it became an opportunity for individuals who run micro-advertising campaigns at their own cost for product companies and recover commission under their affiliate programs. In the hands of the micro-advertising entrepreneur the pay-per-click is really a cost-per-click and the trick is to recover more commission than cost. The margins are typically very narrow but if you do enough campaigns the accumulated returns can be significant
What it Takes to be Successful
Affiliate Marketers
Process
The process is straightforward:
Select the product set you want to promote and form the affiliate relationships. When selecting the product be aware of the issue of payment. You can be certain of being paid by the big, reputable companies – Amazon, Yahoo, IBM – it isn’t worth their while to cheat you. But when you tie up with smaller operations read their Terms and Conditions carefully and keep a close watch on the payment stream
Develop a web site that is attractive to the potential traffic and which guides them toward the products they want. This can range from a daunting experience at great cost to something relatively simple. A lot depends on the selection of any supplier and on the software you use. This site is built in XsitePro, which along with Site Build It we have found about the best on the web for the non-technical person
- Develop and implement a comprehensive marketing and promotion plan. This will include tools such as:
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- Search engine placement: this is a significant skill and one of the least expensive and most effective traffic building tools. The aim is to get your site listed as high as possible in the search list – that takes real skill. You can do it yourself or you can hire an ‘expert’. If you do go the expert route be sure they aren’t doing anything that will get you in trouble with the search engines – for example using Link Farms to increase search visibility.
- Direct advertising using tools such as AdWords, Google’s sponsored advertisement program. This pay-per-click program is tricky to use initially and there is a whole body of knowledge around getting proper placement and minimizing the cost
- Email campaigns. These are done using opt-in lists of names taken from people who are willing to receive your emails. The trick is to avoid accusations of spamming. If you use a supplier have great care.
- Associated with email campaigns are ‘give away’ programs where (typically) information products are given away to encourage individuals to join up. You need not be restricted to information products there are all kinds of companies giving away ‘stuff’ and travel as promotions
- Joint ventures where you form reciprocal relationships with others can be very powerful. The intention is to create (inbound) links on your web site. If you do and the link is a respected site the search engines allow each of you a little reflected glory. As you build up your link density the search engines take increasing notice of you.
- Similarly, viral marketing campaigns where e.g. articles or free e-books are placed with others on the web and contain links that point back to your site or your affiliates accounts.
- Measure performance in all aspects of the process and undertake tweaking of methods.
- Continuously review the portfolio of offerings and replace those that do not yield suitable returns.
Critical Success Factors
Affiliate marketing started out as a shotgun affair. Grab a bunch of relationships and find ways of promoting access to them. In practice, sites that simply list opportunities do not get much time from the customer.
- Bring subject focus to your efforts: Know what your target market is and create an experience for the site visitor that adds value to his/her visit. If someone is interested in gardening they will react far better to a site that deals exclusively and knowledgeably with their passion. The rule: add content. This site is an example of adding content. It is NOT necessary to be as in-depth as this site – after all it has a primary role as research site and disperser of knowledge – but you must do SOMETHING.
- Build trust through content: The web is a visual and typically text-based medium. It is difficult for the visitor to develop a sense of trust in you. Trust that will bring repeat visits and multiple buys. The way to build trust is to bring honest value. Give away information. Be open about competitors (they will find them anyway) and never ever add technology stress to their lives (irritating pop-ups, sites that freeze the back button and so on). This is really a business where to give is to receive!
- Maximize the opportunities for income from the traffic you generate. If you bring people to your site you want to maximize their opportunity to find something to buy, yet keep your site uncluttered enough that they can find what they came for. A way of doing this is AdSense. These are ads placed on your site automatically by Google that are relevant to what you sell.
- The mechanics of running your business must be smooth. You need to be sure your affiliate links work, that upgrading your web site is easy and low cost, that the server and all auto-responder systems work. Your role is to look after the portfolio, design promotional approaches and react to measured results. You are not a technician. Keep out of that side if you can.
- You get paid. One of the banes of this opportunity is the risk that your affiliating company doesn’t pay you. One of the best ways to avoid that is to use an intermediary like Clickbank. Clickbank deals with all the payment hassles and you can be certain of getting your money.
- Avoid the spam trap. Be sure your lists are clean. If you buy names (not recommended), be sure they have strong anti-spam policies and that they stick by them. Spam complaints can get you frozen out or kicked off your service provider – not to mention prosecuted!
- You must measure your progress and act on the measurements.
Concluding Remarks
Like the information product area discussed earlier, there is a rapidly increasing supply of people willing to help you become an affiliate marketer. Some will even do it all for you. They put together the whole package and you simply plug into it – our experience is that the big winners from those programs are the program vendors! There are others who will support you with top grade infrastructure so that you can focus on your role. The big resource you need is an understanding of how to promote your site – web marketing techniques.
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The Rich Jerk
A phenomenon on the web, the Rich Jerk is well worth going to for knowledge on how to be successful withor without affiliates. If you haven't visited his site, you've missed one of the experiences of web business.
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