Tag: affiliate marketing

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How To Make Money Selling Other Peoples Products Online

Wondering how to make money selling other peoples products online? Anyone can learn to make money from the internet by selling other people’s products and services. What’s more, you don’t even need to directly sell anything personally; or even speak to any customers! But how does this work?

The business model which lets you do this is known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing lets anyone earn commissions by selling products and services on the internet through a unique coded link. Affiliate marketers use their link to ‘track’ their sales. For example, some links on this website lead to certain products and services which I recommend to people who might benefit from them. If a product gets sold, I earn a commission.

How To Make Money Selling Other People's Products Online

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products Online

Not all affiliate marketers use the same products or the same strategies to get those products in front of customers. Some bloggers use affiliate marketing to monetise their content. Some affiliates find products which are suitable for their own particular passions and interests. There are so many affiliate products on the internet, you can pick a product in most topics you can think of.

Here’s a few strategies which affiliate marketers use to get their products in front of customers:

  • Blogging – Bloggers typically have a passion for what they blog about. By finding suitable products they can earn money from blogging about their passions and interests.
  • Pay per click – Other affiliate marketers just use paid marketing strategies to send traffic (website visitors) directly to products and services on the internet.
  • V’logging – V’logging, or video blogging involves creating interesting and useful videos and uploading them to YouTube. As a v’loggers following increases, they can suggest various affiliate products to their audience.
  • Businesses – small business owners can also use affiliate products to add another product to their range which can be sold directly from their website. Digital products are especially good for this and typically offer larger commissions.
  • List Building – Many affiliate marketers build email lists which grow over time. Some have lists which number into the tens of thousands of subscribers. An affiliate can send out a single affiliate link and make multiple sales if they have built a good list of active subscribers.
How To Make Money Selling Other People's Products Online

Why Choose Digital Affiliate Products?

As an affiliate marketer you can choose any product you can find which you’d like to promote online. Ideally choose a product which you would purchase yourself. Amazon, for example, has thousands of products on it’s website which affiliates can promote and earn money by selling. Typically though, physical products pay much less than digital products. That’s because there’s more cost involved in manufacturing and distributing physical products which need to be stored and physically posted out to customers.

Digital products on the other hand can be accessed over the internet from anywhere. This makes them very easy to sell globally and it allows their delivery to be made completely free – through the internet. Savings made on postage, storage, manufacture and handling costs can therefore be passed on the the affiliates who promote them. Affiliate marketers can earn up to 50% commissions on some digital products.

Don’t You Need Experience To Do This?

As with many things, technological advances have made learning affiliate marketing and profiting from it much easier over the last few years. It’s still a business and of course there’s still much to learn. However, much of the technical skills you needed 10 years ago to launch an online business are no longer necessary.

You can also benefit from programs and software which allow you to build websites and create landing pages very easily and quickly. Click on the image below to see a short video which shows just how easily you can create a monetised website, for example:

How To Make Money Selling Other People's Products Online

What Are The Best Products To Sell Online?

As mentioned, digital affiliate products offer the best value for affiliates in terms of commission – up to 50% of the cost of an item can be earned by the affiliate promoting it. Compare that to about 3-10% for physical products. In addition, you can also earn more by promoting membership and software type products. These kinds of products are subscription based. As long as you join a good company, you will be rewarded for lifetime commissions of membership sales.

Subscription based affiliate programs are things which offer lifetime value. They can be things like software packages and memberships. The benefit of selling subscription products is that they continue to pay for the lifetime of the member. As your membership sales grows, so does your income.

How Do I Get Started?

To learn more about starting with an online program you can sign up to my email list by clicking here to access a 7 day video series.

To get started immediately, you can access the app for $29.95. This gives you access to module 1 of the SFM business system and you can access a consultant who will answer any questions you might have. The app comes with a 30 day money back guarantee and no quibble refund policy.

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Clickbank affiliate marketing tutorial

Below I have shared a recent Clickbank affiliate marketing tutorial. Scroll down to get to the video. Clickbank is where many affiliate marketers begin with their own online businesses. It is a marketplace for digital products and allows anyone to promote and sell other people’s products to earn up to 75% commissions on the sale. That is more that the creator of the product earns on each sale! Not all products offer this amount of commission however but it is usually upwards of 40%. The vendors or creators of these products need affiliates to market them and get people to see them. You can also create your own products and market them on the site, allowing affiliates to promote your product or service.

One of the attractive reasons to become an affiliate marketer is that it enables you to work solely from your laptop and of course this can be a completely portable business. What is most important to affiliates is traffic. Affiliates use websites, blogs and advertising to put their affiliate link in front of prospective online shoppers. The recent growth in online spending means that more companies now offer affiliate programs and so you can promote thousands of online goods, services and digital products. Although Clickbank is known for its digital products, there are also many websites such as Amazon and Ebay, (to name a couple of the big players), which also offer the opportunity of selling goods without holding any stock, having any employees or sending anything out. All of the customer service is carried out by the vendor so the soul responsibility of the affiliate is to direct buying customers to a website or webpage.

Selling digital products through Clickbank is one thing, but the average price of an item on the site is around $100. If your average commission is 50% that means you can make $50 on each sale. This is great if you can sell hundreds of items through a busy website or a larger email list. However selling high ticket items is a completely different level. Imagine you could sell products which offered 40% commission on a price tag of up to $20,000. Well you can! Check out this page to see how. (You can’t do this through Clickbank).

Starting an account with an affiliate marketing company is easy. Simply ‘Google’ a service in your niche with affiliate program in the text. For example if you run a pet shop do a search for “pet shop affiliate program” on Google. You should get a few results. Choose the product you like the best and join their affiliate program (there is usually a link on their homepage either at the top or bottom). You can now sell their products on your site for commissions.

Take a look at this quick 3 minute video which gives a brief overview to clickbank.


 

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Why I Do Affiliate Marketing And Why You Should Too!

Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest way for a beginner to start to earn an income from the internet. Being an ‘affiliate’ simply means that you are working for a company whose products you sell.

You are effectively a salesperson selling someone else’s products. However you are not doing any cold calling or person to person selling – you will never meet your customers. What an affiliate does is find customers through the internet and direct them to the sales page.

Amazon, for example, has an affiliate program. Anyone can sign up to it and start to promote any product from the massive website. Most large sales platforms now have an affiliate program.

Think of the last thing you bought from the internet. They probably also have an affiliate program. What you do as an affiliate is simply refer customers to these kinds of products.

marketing

What is so appealing about affiliate marketing?

One of the best things about affiliate marketing is the potential for scaling your business model up. It can eventually become a ‘passive’ income and the income potential is huge. There are affiliates who earn millions without even having their own product to sell or any customers to deal with.

Once you have set up one income stream selling affiliate products, you can set up several more and they can all work more or less on autopilot, generating sales around the clock. You can work from anywhere in the world providing you have an internet connection and you are you own boss. Not many business models offer this amount of flexibility without a huge price tag attached.

What are the downsides of affiliate marketing?

Creating a model which works and creates sales takes time and effort. Just like building a normal ‘bricks and mortar’ business, your affiliate marketing business won’t create itself. You will need to invest in learning some new skills and implementing a few techniques on a regular basis.

You are effectively the ‘sales team’ for another company and not having your own product you need to build a value into your business which continues to bring in new customers. Affiliate marketing is a competitive industry and open to anyone who has the time and energy to devote to attempting it. There are thousands of affiliate marketers on the internet some of who are successful and some who are not.

Even if you manage to sell something, you are not building a relationship with your customer for future sales since you have referred them to someone else’s product. With the right products though, you can potentially benefit from lifetime commissions from each individual sale. See subscription affiliate programs.

How much can I earn from affiliate marketing?

Because the internet allows you to leverage your time and generate many income streams which run on autopilot, there really is no limit to the amount you can earn through affiliate marketing.

However that doesn’t mean that earning money is easy. You will need to implement certain tactics to get your business up and running first. See how much do affiliate marketers make and how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing.

Nuts and Bolts of an affiliate business

nuts and bolts

So what will you do on a day to day basis as an affiliate? Your main job as an affiliate is to find customers and refer them to a product. You can do this is several ways. Firstly it is better to create something of value which people want – no-one wants to be ‘sold’ to. Some affiliates create product reviews and give their opinion on particular products and services.

Blogging is one specific way to find potential customers and refer them to products. If writing isn’t your bag you can also pay for advertising on sites like Facebook and also through the Google Adwords program. Youtube offers another platform where affiliates can find customers by creating videos.

List building

List building is what the highest paid affiliates generally do. They collect emails from subscribers who are interested in their particular brand or service. Once their email list grows they have a huge audience to which they can send their affiliate products to.

Of course they need to offer something of value first or they won’t get any subscribers. Think about what sort of email service you would subscribe to and create a similar service. Then find products and services which have affiliate programs which you can offer to your subscribers.

Top affiliate marketers have email lists with thousands of subscribers. Just sending out a single email with a good affiliate offer in it can earn them thousands! Over time, as their subscriber base grows, so does their income; providing they collect well-targeted subscribers, offer the right products and services to their subscribers and provide valuable content within their emails.

Learn more about how you can become an affiliate marketer to either complement you current income or completely replace it. Access this free 7 day video course.

 

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Why I came to be working as a digital marketer

I left school shortly after my A-levels and went straight into dead-end jobsville! I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do so worked for warehouses, supermarkets and had several driving jobs into my 20’s when I was signing on unemployed in between jobs. I knew there was a time limit to this lifestyle so I tried to make the most of it and trained in new things as much as I could. I did several ‘stage A’ and diploma type qualifications but didn’t really have a career focus.

My main interest was in martial arts at the time and so I pursued it with all my might. Of course money was the main problem and I worked as a delivery driver, building site hand, and pretty much anything that came my way. In my early 20’s I met a stuntman and it lit a fire in me. I sent off to Equity – the Actors Union, and found out the qualifications I needed to become a Equity registered stunt performer. There was a lot involved and I set about doing my training which covered 6 disciplines to pretty much instructor level. I also needed to gain experience in front of the camera so I worked as a TV extra for much of the time.

enduring lovepic (On Enduring Love)

After 4 years of training in various disciplines, including my martial art – Wing Chun Kung Fu and several other styles also, I managed to join the Equity Stunt Register. It had been a long slog and during all of which time I had been pretty much broke. The constant issue with money had led me to try pretty much every vocation I could lay my hands on and I discovered the internet around this time. I was using ebay to sell items I had picked up in charity shops to help subsidize my training and the extras work which paid very little.

After joining the stunt register very little changed for a while and my fist job didn’t come in until 2 years later. I worked as a taxi driver earning just enough to get by. The first job came in and I managed to get about a week’s worth of work which paid off my credit card! It was a great experience on a film called Enduring Love doubling Rhys Ifans. After that it went quiet again and I turned to the internet as a source of income.

Peter O'Toole (With the late Peter O’Toole on Casanova)

Still to this day the work is sporadic but the income I have made has allowed me to look into other career paths of which affiliate marketing has intrigued me more than all the others.  The main reason I took to working online was the flexible nature of the work. I had had many jobs to fit around the stunt work but employers are never too pleased to allow you to drop your job at a moments notice and disappear for several days or weeks at a time.  The internet allows you to do this. You can drop it and pick it up whenever you like.

Only recently after joining the SFM have I really seen the huge potential of affiliate marketing and how it can change lives. To find our more and join the 7 day video course sign up here.

I still do the Stunt work and also teach Kung Fu which I balance out with working as an affiliate marketer. To anyone who doesn’t have a career focus I would say do what you love and you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life!

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How I made money with ebay first starting out

When I first started out using the internet to make money it was quite a few years ago. I began using my hobby browsing charity shops and I could easily spot a bargain. I would find designer jeans for a few pounds and then put them on ebay to sell for a profit. I had one or two early successes with this with G-Star and Levis jeans doing the best. I also purchased a few courses from ebay itself which taught how to make money from the auction site.

One such course taught me to find items which were hiding in the thousands of items in ebay’s massive site. There are several ways to do this. One of them is simply looking through the listings in any given category for items which have been carelessly listed with a bad title. It’s amazing how many people list valuable items for sale with a title like ‘bike’ or ‘coat’! Since people are finding and bidding on these items mainly through the searches they are doing, it makes sense to list them with as many keywords in the title as possible. I would find items which were badly listed and which I knew were worth more than they were selling for and re-list them with a much better description in the title. I would also take much better photographs and make a bigger effort listing the items description.

To hone in on these bargains I found a useful tool: www.bargainchecker.com. Bargain checker and also www.misspellsearch.com allow you to look for miss spelled items listed on ebay. You can use this tool to look for items which are small but high in value so would be easy to post. I used to look for branded items which had common miss spellings such as berghaus, timberland, panasonic and other such items. I even found a Tom Tom sat nav listed as TmTom which was going for half its value. Quite literally you are finding the diamonds in the rough. Once you have done the search and found some items click through to ebay on the miss-spell site and then click on the tab for ‘Auction’. This will narrow down the search and cut out all the ‘buy it now’ listings to leave you with the bargains!ebay auction button

ebay mispell

 

Some of the items will have a ‘reserve’ on them and these are worth avoiding. Really you want to find ones with no reserve and only a few bids if any. The advanced search feature on ebay allows you to search for items with any amount of bids and this is really useful to find those items which haven’t yet been discovered. The advanced settings tab is at the top on the right as you are searching through the items.

advanced search ebay

ebay advanced settings

 

Once you have found your bargain item don’t just rush in and bid like crazy since this will only push up the price and is more likely to start a bidding war.  Particularly if there are other savvy shoppers out there! Use this website instead to plan your maximum bid and avoid getting drawn into a ‘must have’ frenzied attitude: www.auctionsniper.com. If there are no bids at all it is worth putting a low bid in just to secure the item and this also means the seller cannot withdraw it or change the description should they notice their mistake! 

Auction sniper allows you to set and forget your bidding strategy so that ebay will bid on your behalf up to your maximum amount in the last few seconds of the auction. Remember that there may be other snipers out there who are doing the same thing so it pays to research how much you can expect to get for your item should you win it. This will give you an idea of what you should be placing as your maximum bid. Don’t get drawn in to a bidding war and exceed your maximum price since you are buying to make a profit remember! 

To do this go to ‘advanced search’ next to the search bar at the top of the ebay platform. Enter a description of your item and click on the tab for completed listings. This will give you an idea of what you expect to get for a similar item when re-selling through ebay.

ebay selling

 

It is also worth having two accounts if possible since this is a sneaky marketing tactic and people can get rather upset when they see their items being sold off at twice what they got for them! You don’t want this to affect your feedback as this is important when it comes to selling your items.

I successfully doubled my money on several items using this method and obviously it pays to go for the larger value items to maximize your earning potential. I did find that there were also several people doing this and I would notice this as the price would fly up at the end of the auction with other ‘snipers’ putting their bids in at the last second – obviously using auction sniper!

After a while I decided there had to be a better way of making money from the internet and that ultimately led me to learn affiliate marketing. With the help of my marketing mentors I have now found something which is far better. Click here to learn more and to access the 7 day boot camp series which explains how you can do the same. 

 

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What is a high ticket sale and why should I care?

Whether you are new to the internet industry or have been working in an ‘online’ capacity for some time, you may have heard about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is the fastest way to earn from an internet business without having to have your own products or services. You are effectively selling someone else’s product for them through your content. When a sale goes through a marketplace such as Amazon or Ebay, for example, and that sale has been referred through a third party website, the person who referred the sale makes a commission.

What that means for bloggers is that they can recommend products and services and write about them on their blogs. When their visitors go through their blog post and buy a product, they make a commission on the sale. With affiliate marketing the commission can be up to 40% of the products value. 40% for selling a product which you don’t even see. You never have to deal with any customers or speak to anyone to do this. The service is provided by the company and you are paid. Your only job is to create content and drive visitors to the product that they already want or need.

It’s a great business model. There are two basic ways to drive your visitors to the end product. You create useful and informative content either through blogging or creating videos or a website, and you can pay to advertise. If you are paying to advertise it is important obviously that you pay less in advertising than you are making in sales so initially you would need to start with a small advertising budget and slowly increase it as you obtain a good spend to sales ratio.

Here is where high ticket sales comes in. If you are using paid advertising to market products worth $100 you would only receive $40 should you make a sale (assuming a 40% commission rate). So your advertising spend to make a $40 commission needs to be less than this. You may have to send 100 visitors to a website before you make a sale and for each referral you are spending money. If each visitor costs $0.40, for example, then after 100 visitors you will have spent $40 on advertising. Assuming you make a sale you will have made exactly no profit! Obviously by ‘tweeking’ your advertising or getting 2 sales per 100 visits it slightly changes things. You would make $40.

For smaller value items it is a very difficult proposition to organize a realistic advertising budget which works and so many affiliates go for free blogs and websites and avoid advertising altogether. Or they spend a huge amount to make a little and then increase their advertising spend.

To rank a site on Google and get free visitors via the search engine’s results takes plenty of time and commitment. This is a tactic I used for quite some time but the main problem with this method is getting enough traffic or visitors through your website or blog to make enough sales. You need to create a lot of content just to get a modest amount of traffic through your site. You also need to pick a niche which enough people are interested in and which isn’t too competitive.

High ticket sales however is a complete game changer and I was lucky enough to be introduced to the idea by my business mentors. Sign up for their video course here. With high ticket sales you can make commissions on products worth $1000 and above and this means that you have much more flexibility with your advertising expenditure. Using the same example as above on expenditure let’s say you spend $0.40 for each visitor you send to your site. If after 100 visits you make a sale you will have spent $40 and made $400, again assuming the same commission and buying rate you are up by $360.  Even if only half as many people buy the end product you would still make 1 sale for every 200 visits – so $400 for every $80 spent. That’s $320 profit. That profit can then be used to increase the adverting budget and scale the amount of visitors you send to your product/s. Of course you may get more or less sales depending on the quality and targeting of your advertising.

With a small value item for sale you are forever battling with your advertising expenditure or attempting to get ‘free’ visitors to your site by spending time creating content. With high ticket sales you are in a much better position from the start and any sale immediately puts you in a better position to either take a profit or scale your business or both!

For more information on how to become an affiliate marketer and on high ticket sales get your free bootcamp video course by entering your details here. 

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If you keep doing what you’ve always done….

There’s a saying that “if you keep doing what you have always done you will keep getting what you have always got!” It is true that we all complain from time to time about our current circumstances but we often forget that it is ourselves who hold us there! We can get up and change our lives if we really want to and if we really believe we can.

The problem is that we are addicted to complaining so much so that it becomes our identity! Think about your conversations. Are they always about how wonderful life is? Probably not. Why not though? We now live in a world which allows us to live in almost anyway we can imagine. The problem is in our own limited thinking we condemn ourselves to a smaller life than that which we are capable of. How many of our friends and relatives would support us if we decided to radically change? We want to be part of a community or a family but often it is our heritage which limits us by this very need.

Who is framing your world to you?

We look to others for advice when perhaps we shouldn’t. Ask yourself who are your top ten influences. Who would you ask for advice about a new venture? It is an odd thing that we always ask the wrong people for advice. Would you ask a fishmonger for advice about your health? Or a doctor for advice about your teeth? But we often ask those closest to us for advice about decisions which could affect our lives which they are not qualified to answer. We trust and believe them because they are the closest people to us and then go on with our nagging doubts and suffer as a consequence. We need to learn to trust ourselves first. Imagine if you asked Richard Branson and your cousin (for example) the same question about starting a new business. How different would the responses be?

How the digital world has changed our opportunities

Because of the internet we now have many more opportunities in life than were possible before. The world is going digital. More money is being spent online on things which were previously unobtainable or very difficult to find. We can now purchase something from the other side of the world and have it delivered to our house with a few clicks of our mouse. We can buy our food shopping online and have it delivered to our house. We can learn new skills from our laptops with online tutorials and talk to people thousands of miles away for free from our home computers or laptops.

Affiliate marketing makes it  a possibility for everyone to capitalize on the digital age by learning just a few new skills. Thousands of people are making a living or an extra income by doing affiliate marketing. It allows the possibility to work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a laptop. The lifestyle possibilities are endless and this can be intimidating for anyone used to a particular set of parameters in which to live. Traditional businesses have a set format of a 9-5 Monday to Friday work pattern. But this format is no longer necessary in this new digital age. The power of affiliate marketing means it can match and exceed most people’s expectations as far as income is concerned. The leverage which is possible through internet marketing far outweighs what is possible through traditional methods.

See this video for more information on learning about how to leverage your income through digital marketing. 

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How I Wasted So Much Time Trying To Build An Internet Business

I wasted a lot of time trying to build an internet business. When I began, I was pretty overwhelmed with information. I found several “get rich quick” courses which promised the world but proved to be fruitless in most cases; at least for me.

One of the problems with internet courses is that by the time they are produced and sold the internet has already evolved past them. If 10,000 affiliates are doing the same thing for traffic generation and optimising ‘tactics’, or trying to ‘trick’ Google, it doesn’t take Google long to figure it out and update their algorithms accordingly. Google ultimately wants quality and that’s what you have to give.

trying to build an internet business

Trying To Build An Internet Business – Overwhelm

By the time I had learned much of the material and implemented the ‘plan’, the internet had evolved beyond the system I was copying. I built several websites with a certain keywords in mind in order to rank them on Google. By the time time I figured out it wasn’t working, I had spent hundreds of hours working on it.

I would then ditch the system and try something else; signing up to a new course or ‘system’ which would “hopefully” prove more productive. Some of them had sound ideas but ranking quality sites on the organic search engines takes time, particularly now. To make money this way you have to work hard for a long time before you even see the results. If your belief is uncertain it is almost a given that you will give up before you see any tangible results.

Trying To Build An Internet Business – Blogging Is Slow

The thing to keep in mind and what kept me going is that trying to rank a site on Google’s organics search results, ultimately can give you an income source for life! Not only that but a passive income source which has almost no costs attached – apart from hosting and domain renewal. Not many businesses offer such a possibility. And if you can achieve a passive income from one website you can create multiple websites all doing the same thing – giving you a potentially unlimited source of income.

Trust Is Rare Online

The main problem is trust. It took me a long time to figure out what works online and by that time I had already learned several skills which ultimately I didn’t really need. If I had found the SFM years earlier, I would be much further along the road.

One of the main problems with the internet business is overwhelm. There are simply thousands of ‘Guru’s’ and ‘experts’ charging you for their advice. If you only follow a certain method for a short while before giving up and looking for another ‘magic bullet’ of internet success, your long term results will be zero. Unless you stick with something long enough and put enough effort and time in, you will never really get anywhere. Ultimately your belief has to carry you forwards. You have to want the end result badly enough to keep pursuing it.

An Online Business Course

What the SFM course has taught me was the missing piece of the jigsaw, ultimately my own limited thinking. I was reluctant to spend any money on my online business at first. So I simply put in loads of time because, well that’s what I had. I went for the organic searches method which took a long time. I now earn a small trickle income from this method from a couple of websites which I managed to rank on Google. What I have learned through Stuart and Jay’s mentorship program far surpasses this in terms of income. I have already earned in a month what I get from 3 months of my other top ranking sites.

The method they teach is still affiliate marketing, which I have been doing already, but they taught me to opt for high ticket sales and use paid advertising instead of trying to rank immediately through Google’s organic search results. Organic search is a longer term strategy. This tactic seem so obvious to me now but for a long time I was trying to sell items like books on Amazon and rank in the organic searches. I make about £0.20p for a book sale through one of my sites if someone buys it through my link. It’s hardly even worth my effort.

Paid Marketing Works Fast

Yes, if I had thousands of people visiting my website it might pay off but I don’t have anywhere near enough to make that kind of commission work. Also if I was to advertise my site in order to sell these books I would be paying more in advertising than I could possibly make in book sales.

However if I had a product worth 1000’s or more then it would make sense to pay to advertise it. Not only that, but once I had figured out how to make a sale by spending less than I earned, I could simply increase my advertising spend. I wouldn’t need to wait for more traffic by writing articles forever and hoping that one day my site would move up a place or two. This was a lesson hard learned.

Learn more about the SFM by entering your email in this page. You will gain access to a FREE bootcamp series of videos which will explain in detail how Stuart and Jay have developed and implemented what is probably the quickest and most efficient way to earn money from the internet. You can unsubscribe from this list at any time and you are not obliged to make a purchase.  

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Why list building is so important for an online business

There are many ways to make money with an online business and I have tried many of them – some with success and some not! One of the courses I took was based on making money from Google’s adsense program and this is a rather long term strategy. It basically requires you to rank an authority type site on Google’s organic search results and make money from people clicking the adverts placed on your site. You need a lot of visitors to make money from this method and Google can change their algorithm at any time (and frequently does), and also they can close your account for any number of reasons at any time, (and frequently does!). If you are earning a living from this method and get closed down this can be potentially disastrous as you can lose your income overnight.

Then there is affiliate marketing – selling other people’s products or promoting products from ebay or Amazon, for example. This is a good method again and you can either find your customers through the organic traffic of Google or pay for advertising to get visitors to your products/services. The main factor really is finding enough customers or visitors through to your site. The organic search results are of course free but it takes time and effort to rank a website on Google and find customers. Advertising costs money and you need to make sure you are paying less than you are making to turn a profit.

Even if you have the best website in the world you still need customers and this is the major commodity when it comes to making money from an internet business – visitors.

List Building

listbuilding-report

You will have seen many email capture pages throughout the internet and maybe even entered your details in one or two of them in exchange for a free e-book or some other tit-bit of ‘free’ information. If so, you have subscribed to a bloggers/company’s email list. The reason why list building is so important in building a long term sustainable internet business is that you are building an audience and a relationship with your customers/visitors. Once you have built this list you are no longer relying on advertising and free search results for ‘passing trade’. You can then communicate with potentially thousands and hundreds of thousands of people by the click of a mouse.

Imagine that you sell a product from which you make a small commission. With a list you can sell thousands of items in one day with one email sent out to your list. This is without having to pay for advertising and without having to rely on Google ranking your site. You already have a list of subscribers who are hungry for you products or services. Without a list you are relying on the ‘passing trade’ through your business either from the organic searches or paid advertising. This is why list building is such a powerful strategy which has the potential to skyrocket your business.

When visitors come to your website they may click away and you have lost that customer forever. When you start building a list you can potentially connect with your customer for years to come, offering them valuable information and valuable products which they are really grateful for. List building turns a ‘flash-in-the-pan’, occasional sale online business into much more a sustainable and profitable business model.

Grab your copy of listbuilding for profit and take advantage of this internet marketing phenonenum now!!

listbuilding-report

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10 Mistakes Newbie Online Business Owners Make

When I started out online I spent far too much time and effort doing things which didn’t produce any results. Over the years I have leaned through my own mistakes to concentrate on the activities which produce the greatest results. So here I have complied a list of the top 10 things to avoid when starting out online.

1. Creating your own product

10 mistakes newbie online business owners make

I spent weeks and months building my own e-books and downloads to put on my website thinking I was going to become rich from the sales. After spending several weeks building the book, converting it to a pdf, copyrighting it, uploading it to my website, building articles on my website, guess how many sales I made? Yes none!

I wasted all that time and made no money at all. The main problem was I was a no-body. No-one will buy from someone they don’t know or trust. Trust is the number one commodity on the internet and if you can build trust you are much more likely to be able to sell a product. If you don’t have any customers or traffic to your websites you can have the best product in the world but you still won’t make any sales.

Using someone else’s product like Stuart and Jay’s SFM will free up all that time you could have spent creating your own product and already has been developed with all the systems in place.

2. Getting distracted

There are so many people and companies in the online world who are telling you how to make an online business work that it becomes impossible to discern the good ones from the bad ones. I jumped from one course to another always looking for the ‘magic bullet’ of internet income and wasted valuable time.

You need to stick it out long enough to see the results but choose a company whom you can believe in. Believe in yourself and that you can make it work, whatever your ‘results’ look like at any given time. Don’t expect miracles straight away but once you have chosen a path, believe in it and stick to it.

Making an internet income is absolutely a possibility and you need to hold onto your belief without becoming disillusioned. It was my lack of belief in some of the ‘systems’ I bought into which made me lose interest and get drawn into another ‘fast buck’ idea without seeing the previous one through. If you keep doing this you will never gain any momentum in any direction.

3. Thinking you need to be an expert

There are plenty of ‘experts’ on the internet and for a while I tried to be one of them. The problem is people know if you don’t know what you’re talking about! It is better to be your genuine self and be ‘real’ than to try and be something you’re not. People don’t buy products from websites or people they don’t trust. If you are a ‘real’ person then people will trust you and are more likely to buy from you or believe in your products. If you try and fake it people will know. Instead of trying to be an expert just be yourself and build trust.

4. Thinking you need to do everything yourself

When I first started out I thought I was going to make a huge amount of money just by writing articles and building a few websites. The truth soon dawned on me that it wasn’t going to happen. I leaned lots of new skills but the work I put in was certainly far greater than my financial reward. I built site after site, watched hours after hours of instructional videos over and over, learning how to build websites, back link, create content and email capture pages.

The problem was I was on my own. I was piling my time into learning skills and tools for a business and not looking at the business itself. As a business owner it is your job to see the wider picture. Don’t get caught up in the details as I did – and wasted a huge amount of time.

5. Not developing yourself as business owner.

As a newcomer to the affiliate marketing industry I thought I could learn quickly and profit from an easy ‘quick fix’ solution. I obtained a small amount of knowledge and then piled my time and energy into implementing what I knew. I thought I knew enough to move things forwards and to make money online but my knowledge was flawed and all my activity was based on this knowledge. You need to continue to look at what you are doing and focus on your most productive activities.

Initially of course you will need guidance but your work as an online entrepreneur is to continually self assess. It is very easy when you are the boss to fall into unproductive habits and spend your time checking emails and browsing social network sites. Before you can even see any results, focus on your activity – the one thing you can control. Don’t look for results but your regular productive habits.

As the owner of a business you need to be more aware of yourself as a limitation in the business. As Stuart and Jay highlight in their course, you can’t grow beyond your self image.

The internet offers a means to hugely impact your income potential. However if you only see yourself as a small earner or as unsuccessful or incapable, your business cannot grow beyond this limiting belief. Beliefs are invisible but are a huge part of the results you are capable of. Ultimately they determine what is possible for you. You need to become more aware of your beliefs and question them in order to change.

6. Working all the time

how to get more leads from your website

The whole point of an internet business is to allow you to free up your time to pursue a better and more enjoyable lifestyle – in my humble opinion anyway! I got so lost in the pursuit of making an internet business work that it took over my life to the detriment of my personal and social life.

Despite the total flexibility an internet business allows you, this can also be a danger as you can find yourself working continuously without a break, taking your laptop everywhere you go and neglecting other aspects of your life! Particularly if you have become accustomed to a working environment where your breaks and lunches are set, it can be difficult to give yourself the structure needed to operate in a productive and balanced manner, taking other commitments, work and social life into account.

It is a good idea if you are new to working for yourself from home to set aside some working hours and a proper desk space in which you can get into a good working frame of mind. Make sure you are actually working in this space so you build a productive ‘anchor’ to this setting. That way when you sit down you will automatically trigger your working frame of mind. Should you get distracted or need a break move away from your work station.

7. Allowing interruptions

Working for yourself brings with it some extra distractions which you won’t find in the workplace. Especially now with the increasing number of people using social media, work places are clamping down on these distractions because they know it can reduce productivity.

When you begin to work for yourself things like friends calling round, social media sites, messenger and mobile phones will all help to distract you from building your online business. If you permit it to happen this can eat up much of your day. Make a point of only checking your emails twice a day at the most and avoiding social media unless it is business related and you will get a lot more done.

8. Being a ‘busy fool’

Ask yourself if you are concentrating on the important and necessary things for your business or simply distracting yourself with activity to avoid the important. If so you are being a ‘busy fool’! Make a list of your top 3 most important activities for every day and make sure you do them before you do anything else.

It is easy to become distracted when working on the internet – especially when you are your own boss. Keep asking yourself ‘is what I am doing at this moment helping my business or simply entertaining me?‘. Make sure you are not just entertaining yourself on the internet because your time will slip away and you will have achieved nothing.

9. Building Rome in a day

When I first started building websites and creating content I thought that by rushing at it I could earn money faster. Is was in quite a lot of debt at one point and desperate to make it work for me. The trouble is I was only becoming more agitated and out of balance with the other aspects of my life.

It takes time to learn how to build an internet income and then it takes time to implement that knowledge. If you rush at it there are greater chances of making mistakes and of burnout. If you spend 12 hours staring at the computer one day you might find you simply can’t tolerate doing another 12 the next. I often would work day and night when I was inspired to but then would be exhausted and burnt out for the rest of the week. Keep your life in balance and don’t let your business take over.

It is after all just a business and it will take some time. Don’t rush but enjoy the process and you will find you are more productive over the longer term.

10. Not setting goals

Goal setting is a hugely important part of moving your business forward and by not setting them you are wandering off into a vague land of the unknown! Not having them means you are unclear about where you are going and you are likely to find yourself working on a whim, following your gut instincts and getting distracted and drawn into your most enjoyable activities – which probably are not your most productive ones!

Worse still you can easily become dismayed and disheartened when things are not going as (un)planned! By setting a goal for your business you are creating something concrete which you wish to obtain at a certain time. It should be a desirable and achievable goal which you truly wish to obtain within a set time-frame. You should also be in control of the steps needed to obtain the goal and be able to break everything down into achievable smaller steps.

Probably the best book I have read on this topic is Stuart Lichtman’s How to get lots of money for anything fast which is recommended in Stuart and Jay’s course and offered at discount through their site.