Want to Start Your Internet Business?

Learning how to start an online affiliate business can be a real challenge for anyone who’s new to the industry.  There’s a lot to learn and if you aren’t careful there are some major mistakes you can make—but for the most part starting an internet based business is simple and a great way to earn extra income online.

 

Start an Online Affiliate Business

 Building a business online as an affiliate is the practice of promoting other peoples’ products or services and making a commission off each sale. Marketing online as an affiliate you can earn money promoting high quality, high priced products that will earn you big commissions.

The first step is to identify what you want to promote and how large you want to grow your business. Try to find out what you’re interested in selling and make sure there’s a market for it as well as decent commissions to be earned.  I often suggest starting with something that you are already somewhat familiar with.  For example,  maybe you know more than most people about weight loss.  Start your research into products and services that you think work and that others will buy.  Check the bottom of the company website to see if they offer affiliate services.

Once you find what you want to promote and decide how serious you are about building the business. Is this something you’re doing for extra income to buy that new car or is this your new sole source of income? Outlining how large you want to shoot for will help set your goals and give you a better chance at succeeding.

Next, consider how you plan to promote the affiliate products or services. Do you want to simply send traffic to a small blog or do you want to have a local authority website that will eventually have thousands of pages? The advantages of going small with a blog site will be that it requires less risk and effort on your part, plus you can rank easier and target less competitive keywords. An authority site is a lot more like a long term internet marketing business plan. If you want to start off with an authority site you’ll have a significantly more difficult uphill battle but the reward is often well worth it. That being said you can also go the safe route and build more modest sites that can fund future projects like authority sites.

If you are starting with a simple blog site there are many "free' blogs available that are easy to set up and get started. Two of my favourites are Blogger and Wordpress.  Now you have to fill it with content.

Create unique, quality content

One of the most important aspects of website creation is content. Generally speaking, website content is what you have on your website. It can be articles, posts, tools, videos, audio or links to interesting or entertaining resources - anything that a visitor can use to his own information.
The key to website success is quality content. Quality content is something that your visitors will enjoy reading, watching or listening to and will refer their friends, colleagues, family members and others to it. By building quality content on your site, you get not only search engine traffic, but trust, reputation, greater conversions and incoming natural links.

General principles for creating quality content it has to be relevant to the main topic of the site (about product or products, services, etc),  it has to provide value to the potential customers and the content should fit in the general industry of the website (about related products or services)

Increase Blog Traffic

 Once you create your blog you will need to learn how to drive traffic. Traffic generation is literally the blood of your business. If you can’t get new traffic to your sites you won’t make sales and you stand no chance at growing your business into a successful one. Start by sharing your blog with everyone you now, think of it as the new age tupper-ware party, you are trying to earn extra income by promoting these great products that you think everyone else can use.  You will be amazed at how fast your following will increase if you provide interesting articles and opinions. If you don't already have one, create a business profiles on Google +, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.  Driving traffic to your website is not complicated, start with the basics and work from there.

Now Your In Business

Once you begin making sales from your website you’ll be on your way to building a “true” business. keep tax records for any employees and make sure you write off appropriate expenses like an office or transportation.  Once you reach your desired size and profitability you have options to expand even further to make more money by eventually buying your own products or service and keep 100% of the commissions and actually recruit your own affiliates to do the legwork of promoting it.

Conclusion

Remember to keep it simple, don't try to be something to everyone, there is a great article by Brian Clark that I will share with you titled;

Five Ways a Minimum Viable Audience Helps You Create a Successful Startup

In this article he says;

Start with a simple process, knowing that there is room to improve and improve constantly based on the feed back that you get.

He goes on to say;

Start with a viable product, see if people are willing to buy it, use feedback from those buyers to rapidly evolve the product into something better that will appeal to a broader audience.

As the old adage goes KISS ( keep it simple stupid )

 http://entreproducer.com/minimum-viable-audience/