What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you drive traffic to someone else’s website and help them sell their product.Affiliate programs work in different ways. Some will pay you commission on the sales that you are directly responsible for. So if you send a prospective customer to the merchant’s website and the prospect makes a purchase (becoming a customer) you are paid a commission on the product sale.

Commissions are usually a certain percentage of the purchase price. The percentage is extremely variable and depends on the product and the merchant and probably the profit margin. I have noticed that the percentage commissions are usually more generous with digital products than with physical products and that is probably because once a digital product is created there are no further costs involved. Whether you sell 20 copies of a digital product or 20,000 the cost involved in producing the product is only the initial creation and time costs of the product owner. Digital download can be completely automated and doesn’t incur any extra costs. Physical products, however always have a cost per unit. Merchants can get discounts for purchasing from wholesalers in bulk but in general there is a fixed cost per unit and therefore a fixed profit margin.

Lead Generation

Another type of affiliate program is essentially a lead generation or lead capture business model. In some industries or niches where the product or service is expensive even a prospective customer is valuable. Rather than paying you, as the affiliate marketer, a commission on any product that is sold to that prospect, the merchant can set up their affiliate program so that they pay you a smaller sum of money just for the lead. I think that this is definitely a win-win situation. You, as the affiliate, win because the prospect just has to be interested in the product or service and you get paid. In this situation the affiliate gets paid whether or not a product sale occurs. Read more »

I am no longer an internet virgin! I finally made my first sale of an affiliate product. So now I have achieved step 1 and step 2 of the Internet Marketing Plan and I’m really to take on step 3. It will be even better when the money hits my PayPal account – then I will really believe it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make the sale from the affiliate product that I have been concentrating on – it was one of my other sites and frankly I’m not too sure how my customer found it but that doesn’t really matter.

Emails and Auto Responders – Keep It Simple

I also found out that I have had 2 people subscribe to my “10 Newbie Mistakes to Avoid” free report. I would have found out sooner had I not made yet another newbie mistake!  This one is about  email accounts. When you set up your auto responder to notify you of any new subscribers to your list make sure the email notification is sent to an email account that you regularly check.  Although it is a nice surprise to find new people on my list (welcome if you are reading this post and thanks for joining me on my journey) I would have preferred to have been  notified by email at the time. Read more »

One Project at a Time

Many people tell you that to become successful in any field, not just internet marketing you need to remain focused on your goals. You need to concentrate on one project at a time. You need to complete one project before you start on the next, especially when you are an internet marketing newbie. I agree with this but only to a point.

Staying focused on one project at a time in the beginning will ensure that you don’t miss any critical steps in the planning and execution of the project. Each individual step will take much longer to complete the first time that you do it than it will in any subsequent project and the first time you do something will definitely be the worst that you ever do it.

Why is Multi-Tasking Better?

Multi-tasking to me, means having several projects on the go all at once. The key is to have them all at different stages of development.

Why do I think having several things on the go at once is better than concentrating on one thing at a time?

Well, the reality, is that sometimes things take time to be resolved. For example, if you buy a domain name and make a mistake assigning the dns nameservers then it can take up to 24 hrs for the changes to propogate through the web. If you want to start generating traffic on this site then you have to wait the 24hrs or so until it is live on the web before you can implement traffic generating strategies such as submitting RSS feeds, pinging, social bookmarking etc.

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In the last few posts I have discussed he first couple of things that you need for your website. You need a domain name and you need a server(hosting)  to store the files that you need for your website. The next thing you need to know how to do is …

FTP.

What is FTP?

FTP stands for file transfer protocol.

This is the way that you transfer the files that you need for your website from your computer to your server so that your website can be displayed when someone types your URL into their internet browser program (eg Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari).

The process of FTP is done using a special software program. These programs are called FTP programs or FTP software. If you type “FTP program” into the Google search box you will find over 9 million results so let me help you narrow it down a little. An FTP program must be easy to set up and easy to use. If it is inexpensive or free then that is an added bonus!

The program that I have found which is the best free FTP sofware is called Filezilla. When you go to Filezilla you will see a couple of options:

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Internet Marketing Business

Is internet marketing a business to you or is it simply a hobby?

Even if you are not making any money at present online, if you are learning about internet marketing so that you can one day be a successful internet entrepreneur then you need to treat internet marketing like a business and that means systemization.

Working on your internet marketing  business in your spare time when you still have all of the other things in your life to worry about (work that pays, family responsibilites etc) can be extremely challenging and at times even frustrating.

Sometimes you just wish you had hours alone to figure out some internet challenge (there always is one isn’t there?) but the reality is that if you are trying to squeeze in a few hours of internet marketing in an already full day this won’t be the case. You will have to do things in bits and pieces whenever you can grab a small chunk of time.

So how do you keep moving forward using only the small amounts of time allotted to you?

I guess one option is no sleep – but this one doesn’t work long term (Luckily I’m a bit of a night owl and can survive on less sleep than most)

Organization is the Key

I suggest that the first thing to do is sit down and really think about how much time you want to spend on your internet marketing business per day or per week. Then work out how much time you can actually find in your day.

For me, I’m aiming for about 20 hours a week. I’m actually hoping that I’ll never really have to work more than 20 hours a week!

Next you need to look at what tasks need to be done to move forward with internet marketing and finally you need to decide what proportion of your allotted time you want to spend on each set of tasks.

Task No.1 – Content Creation

I think that for me, at this point in time, I need to spend about 5 hours a week on content creation. Read more »