If you’re on a tight budget and looking to start an internet business, you can do it at low cost. When I started out online I had very little money to invest and started with a couple of how to videos which I found on YouTube. The first ever product I bought was Robert Evan’s Rich Monkey’s guide to making money online. The reason I bought his product was that he had already given massive value to me in the form of free videos which taught basic money making techniques using the internet and selling products. This is the very same principle taught by Stuart and Jay in their course the Six Figure Mentors - give massive value and over deliver, in effect give first before getting, something Stuart Ross calls attraction marketing.
What is affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is simply selling other people’s products for a commission. As an internet marketer we send our visitors to another website where they can buy a product. The product can be a physical product or a digital product such as an online video course or a downloaded file. It can literally be anything. As an affiliate your job is to create content or list adverts which bring visitors to a website where the customer finds the product which meets their needs.
Do  I need to sell?
You can earn from a website in another way too from either using Google’s adsense program or letting other advertisers place banners on your website or blog.
Your biggest problem as a start out business is to attract visitors to your site. You can do this through advertising if you have a budget but to do it for free you will need to rank your site on Google or find visitors through your blog. Ranking a new website on Google is becoming much harder since there are literally millions of websites competing for any and every keyword available. You can still find the niches and slip through the gaps however but it can be time consuming and it will take time before you start earning.
Starting a blog
Starting a blog is the quickest way to develop a free source of traffic from the internet. Sites like hubpages.com, ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and squidoo.com allow you to write articles and create content to generate visitors. You can join Google’s adsense program and place adverts on your blog to generate revenue. Hubpages.com allows you to then place your adsense code within your account platform and adverts are shown automatically on your content. You then need to write interesting and informative content to bring visitors to your blog. You will only earn a few pence for every time someone clicks on the adverts but if you have enough visitors this can turn into a nice income trickle which is completely automated. Enough of theses and you have a stream!
I spent weeks writing articles and placing adsense on my blogs and it took a long, long time before seeing any results – and even then the results were very small amounts into my adsense account. If you want to earn money from using adsense you will need to have either a lot of websites or a huge following. You need thousands of visitors every day to your website or videos to make a reasonable amount from them.
Adsense is a great program, don’t get me wrong, but it is a different tactic to affiliate marketing and it can be difficult to get enough visitors unless you really know what you’re doing. Added to which you are at the mercy of Google and if they decide you have broken their guidelines for some reason they can ban you for life from using adsense. So if you decide to go down this path carefully read their terms and conditions. I know of people that this has happened to and it can be very upsetting when one week you are earning hundreds or even thousands in passive income and then it all stops permanently. One friend of mine was earning a regular passive income from having created film reviews on YouTube. It all stopped when Google decided they didn’t like something and disabled his account.
Recommended Strategy
One of my early successes from writing a blog was advertising Xsitepro – a website building platform which I had used. They had an affiliate program so I joined it and wrote an article recommending their product. I placed their banner with my affiliate link within my article on the free blogging site – I think it was hubpages.com. Someone bought the program after reading my article and I got a commission. I earned more from this than I had done with months of adsense earnings.
In fact one of the best tactics to start earning from the internet is to recommend products you yourself have bought and which you would genuinely recommend. Write an honest review of the product and link to the product within your review. Make sure you put your affiliate link to the product so that you will get credit for a sale.
If you have a hobby or interest which you are passionate about it is well worth writing or creating videos about this topic. People are far more likely to be interested in a topic if they catch a sense of your enthusiasm about it. If you can then find a related product to review or promote which also has an affiliate program, you can link to it through your blog or website and start earning commissions from it.
The downside to this is that you will need to sell many of these products in order to create a sustainable business model, depending on the price of the item and your average commission from a sale. One of the things that Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek teach in their course is to find affiliate products with a high ticket sale value. What this means is that for each sale you stand to make a far larger amount and so you are gaining a greater reward for the same efforts.
If you want to find out more about The Six Figure Mentors and how to generate an affiliate income from home take a look at this no obligation course which offers a free video boot camp series. You can unsubscribe at any time and there is no obligation to buy anything.
