14
Jul
2010
Creating Or Locating Value
One of the main decisions you’ll take when launching an online
business, or even developing an internet business is “should I locate or create?”
What do I mean?
When I refer to locate, I am referring to searching for a solution to offer to your market as a partner. When I refer to create, I am talking about the creative process or creating an information product to offer to your people and the market of an army of affiliates and strategic partners that you have on board.
Affiliate Marketing
The process of locating other people’s products and matching them to highlyqualified traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s easily possible to locate products that are suitable for your niche, offer them and make a full time income from the commissions alone.
The process of affiliate marketing involves starting out with doing some niche research. This involves uncovering a group of people that are willing and able to spend money on the offer you’re going to offer. The group of people should have a good level of disposable income and the projected requirement for your offers should ideally be growing rather than declining so you can grow a business which has a high degree of sustainability and longevity.
Once you’ve made your decision on your target niche, you will want to discover out where they ‘hang out’.
What online forums do they visit? What are their favourite websites? What subscriber lists are they on? These type of questions will enable you to put together a customer profile of the market you’re serving. From this point, what are their desires, their fears, their needs, their wants.
Once you put together a personal profile of a typical customer in your niche, then you’ll need to find out what products they are looking for to solve their problems. This is not always the same as the solutions that you consider they need for you to resolve their problems. People will often pay money for things they want rather than for things that they actually need.
Once you understand your customer well including their entire psychology, then you will be able to market more effectively to them. You will understand the emotions you’ll need to target for your customers to take the desired action. This persuasion should always come from a place of service rather than a place of deceit.
Now you need to look for a valuable solution that you would like to offer to your customers to help them in their own mission for internet success. The acid test you should use when assessing whether or not you want to offer a product is “would I put my own name on that product?” and “does it deliver value above its asking price?” If the answer to those questions is “yes”, then you can consider that it is OK for you to promote it.
The next step is to drive traffic from one place in the internet to your affiliate offer. Most affiliate offers take the form of sales pages where the desired action for both the product owner and affiliate is for the prospect to buy the product which of course results in a sale and a commission for the affiliate.
More recently, CPA marketing is gaining some momentum with internet marketing newcomers and seasoned professionals alike being drawn to it because it offers the opportunity to earn lots of small sales because the action attached to the commission is usually something smaller for a payment to be released. These desired actions from the CPA networks are often capturing email addresses, registering an account, taking part in questionnaires or other suchlike actions that can be easily monitored with online tools. The advertisers are willing to pay per lead because they know the metrics of their customers.
The next stage of marketing as an affiliate is traffic. There are literally hundreds of ways of
generating traffic which is beyond the scope of this article, however you should consider the questions to ask yourself that I shared earlier. Where do my prospective customers hang out? This is where you need to be relationship building and posting your links.
Product Creation
This process is much more complex than affiliate marketing but is also much more rewarding. I admit that could be a matter of opinion depending on what your goals are from an internet business and the level of effort that you want to put in for your business. If you enjoy being creative and demonstrating to others how to do things, you’ll enjoy this process.
The process of product creation requires you to:
- Find a need in the marketplace which you can resolve, and crucially, which other people consider you to be able to solve.
- Make a digital product that is an answer to the problem that you’re solving.
Contrary to popular opinion, you’ll be marketing a solution NOT just offering a product. There is a huge difference and if you can grasp the fact that you’re marketing solutions and not just products, then you’ll be way ahead of the high majority of people out there in the internet marketing game. When you market solutions, you’ll need to communicate the benefits of the solution, the feeling that the solution will give and the pain that the solution will spare your market from. This may be in the form of:
- an eBook which is usually a simple PDF document which contains valuable textual information.
– a series of audio recordings a book. It could also be recordings of interviews. A tool like Pamela with Skype is a popular choice with the internet marketing community.
– screen capture recordings which can be easily produced using video screen capture tools like Camtasia Studio.
– a membership site that offers time sensitive and high quality information that serves your market continually. A membership site can be relatively simply produced using WordPress with a plugin called WishList Member.
- Make a minisite with web graphics, compelling sales copy, persuasive testimonials and a rock solid money back guarantee.
- Create an area for affiliates complete with promotional tools to make it as achievable and inviting for the partner to drive traffic to your product. You should remember that you are offering your solution alongside other product owners for your affiliates’ attention, and therefore their traffic sources. The more tools and training that is provided, the easier you make it for your affiliates and the more likely
they will be to promote your product.
- Go through a pre-launch sequence for both the sale of the product and for affiliate recruitment. This process involves raising awareness and anticipation for the launch as well as finding affiliates that would like to partner with you for a share of the profits from the product’s sales.
- Find JV partners in your network of contacts to promote your product.
- Set up a customer service system for returns and possible customer queries.
OK, even after that lengthy list of activities to do during the product creation process and launch phase, there are still other things that must be done. The starting point that you must consider is whether you really want to go through the process of creating your own product.
Marketing as an affiliate can be profitable enough if you can get to grips with the art of driving traffic. Product creation is usually more lucrative when you have a list of JV partners, some credibility for your product, an army of affiliates helping and you’ve gone through the launch sequence effectively.
Whichever strategy you choose, make sure you have the main
principles in place. Does the market have disposable income they’re willing to spend on the solution you’re offering? Is the market expanding with a promising long term future outlook?
Fetch practical info in the sphere of web traffic – please read the publication. The time has come when concise info is truly only one click away, use this possibility.
Related posts:
- Creating Sites That Are Unique For Your Affiliate Marketing
- Creating Cash Online With Affiliate Marketing Is The Best Strategy – Vi Reasons Why
- 10Cpanel Hosting Decision Making Tips For Locating The Top Web Host For You
- Affiliate Marketing – An Easy Work From Home Business
- Creating Cash With Articles: Turning Into An Affiliate