Internet Marketing For Newbies (Part 5 of 10)
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006Part 5 - Mapping Your Online Business Strategy
What business Strategy are you going to adopt to make money online?
For example, after you selected a certain niche, say dog food recipe. These are some of the questions you can start asking yourself:
- Are you offering a digital or physical product?
- If it’s a physical product, who will be handling the issues like logistics, stock, despatching, customer service, etc?
- If it’s a digital product, will it be just a ebook or audio cD’s or video’s?
- Are you creating a software as a product?
- Are you going to develop your own product?
- Are you going to sell your own product through e-Commerce?
- Will you be marketing your own product through affiliates?
- Are you going to auction your product?
- Are you going to look for some products and be an affiliate marketer?
- Are you going to create a niche site and monetize through AdSense publishing?
- Will you rather create a membership site instead of making a one time sale?
As you can see, there are many strategies to consider and it can really be all too confusing for a newbie. In fact, your ultimate decision will depend on many factors like what you really want to do, and on how much budget, time and effort you are willing to commit to build your business. Again, the key here is to build an online business, not trying to get rich quick online.
The best thing to do now is to research by studying similar sites so that you can choose which model suits you best, with your current resources and limitations. Just go ahead and type your keywords into your favorite search engines…
Since this is just a short article, I’ll restrict our discussion to three popularly used business models:
- Affiliate Marketing
- E-Commerce
- Ads Publishing
Affiliate Marketing
This seems to be the perfect model to entice the newbie. Look at these benefits:
- No product
- No web site
- No payment gateway
- No autoresponder (if you don’t build a list with an autoresponder)
All you have to do is to find some affiliate programs, then focus on promoting and marketing the products online. You basically promote someone else’s products or services to make a commission without having to learn so much as to writing sales copy, email marketing, setting up websites, creating products, etc.
However, it’s not wise to just jump into the first affiliate program you find. There are some very important things you will want to know about these programs before you decide which one to join.
Visit the major affiliate marketplaces like:
http://www.clickbank.com/
http://www.commissionjunction.com/
http://paydotcom.com/
There are literally thousands of programs to join. Depending on your niche, look for something you have affinity to and check out factors like:
- how much sales are achieved through affiliates?
- how much commission is the program paying you?
- how are they paying you - by check or Paypal or other means?
Once decided, you would obtain an affiliate link and then start promoting via some form of online (or even offline) advertisement and driving traffic there.
However, if you have acquired the skill level, it is highly recommended that you create a simple opt-in page so that you can do some follow up via emails. In fact, it’s most important that you start building your own list as you market your affiliate programs.
That’s because I’m sure you have heard gurus say this in common: “The fortune is in the list!” And to do that, you need an autoresponder which is a software that automates your follow up emails to your potential customers. (More on that in the E-Commerce section below.)
E-Commerce
This refers to the selling of goods and services via the Internet.
As opposed to affiliate marketing, you would create your own product. It could be a simple ebook on any of your areas of expertise. Many newbies started out not knowing what their expertise are. To know more about that, you may want to refer to Part 3 at: http://rogerloh.com/index.php/2006/08/08/internet-marketing-for-newbies-part-3-of-10/
Apart from creating a simple ebook, you may instead want to create audio’s or video’s which have a higher perceived value. For more information, refer to Part 4 at: http://rogerloh.com/index.php/2006/08/17/internet-marketing-for-newbies-part-4-of-10/
Once your product is ready, you need to set up a few things below. Let’s assume that you are dealing with a digital product.
- Web site that comprises your main sales letter
- payment gateway
- web page that comprises your download page once an order is made. (This is known as the ‘Thank You’ page.)
- a sequence of emails to ‘load’ into your autoresponder
Many people find writing a sales letter a pain. In fact, people don’t like or even hate to write! Now, not only they have to write, they have to write in such a way that the reader is motivated to take action - for example, to purchase their products or join their membership sites.
As a side note, some letters incorporate an opt-in box or a fly-in (which cannot be blocked by a popup blocker as in http://www.rogerloh.com/mlmblog)
One alternative is to engage a freelance or ghost writer but a good copywriter is going to cost you an arm and a leg! In fact, it can cost you thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.
So, here’s another alternative: Use a sales letter generator software. All you need to do is to run the software, type in the answers to the questions that the software will pose to you. And voila! At the end of it, it will generate a beautifully written piece - your dream sales letter 
(Currently, I’m reviewing a software that generates the entire sales letter for you. I received feedback that its GREAT! However, my policy is to test it out first and recommend only if it’s good. So, watch out for this at this blog: rogerloh.com which focuses on helping newbies to get started in Internet marketing.)
Once your visitors read or browse through your sales letter and clicks on your order link, they should be taken to your payment gateway and then to your ‘Thank You’ page. For your payment gateway, you may wish to check out 2CheckOut which is highly recommended in the Internet mareting industry.
Your ‘Thank You’ page is just a simple web page that you express your appreciation to your visitor and give them their links to download your digital products. Nowadays, some marketers are including a One Time Offer in their ‘Thank You’ pages to upsell other back end products. After all, your visitors are in that ‘purchasing’ frame of mind when they are at your Thank You pages, ready to pull out their credit cards from their wallets anytime
Last but not least, here’s the part that makes you a fortune. Not only the “fortune is in the list”, have you heard the saying, “The fortune is in the follow-up”? That’s exactly what your autoresponder should do for you.
An autoresponder is a software that automates your follow up emails to your potential customers. All you have to do is to write a sequence of emails and ‘load’them into your autoresponder which will despatch to your list of subscribers at the intervals that you specified. (More on that in Part 8 of this series.)
Thus, I consider the autoresponder to be the most important software! And I use what many gurus used - AutoPilotRiches, a private label of 1ShoppingCart, which has most of all the features we need. There are several packages but I suggest that newbies sign up for just the ‘Autoresponder’ package. Anyway, you can click here to start with a 30-Day Trial for just $3.95!
There are also other autoresponders around like Aweber which is pretty good too. I’ve used it for awhile personally. It’s just that it is not integrated with shopping cart and affiliate management modules like AutoPilotRiches. So, I prefer to start with something that I can easily upgrade as my business expands.
Ads Publishing
Would you like an online business strategy just like this?
- No product
- No payment gateway
- No autoresponder
- No sales
What? No sales? Are you kidding?
Heck no!
If you think these benefits appeal to you, consider this strategy called ‘Ads Publishing’
Of course, money cannot drop from the sky. You need to do one thing though: To build content-rich sites. This are sites where you offer good information to readers or viewers.
By building a readership, you can publish ads on your sites such as from big companies like Google AdSense. (There are also plenty of other similar ‘pay per click’ companies.)
These ads are mostly ads in the form of a few lines of texts that are content sensitive. For example, if you have a site on car accessories, then ads pertaining to car accessories will be fetched from a pool of ads and displayed on it. And when the reader or viewer clicks on any of these ads, you as a ads publisher gets paid!
In the case of Google AdSense, it is a sister company of Google AdWords, which is a pay per click advertising company. Say for instance, you created a sales letter and want to drive traffic to it, you could advertise on Google AdWords and your ad could be fetched by Google AdSense to display on someone else’s web site. When a reader or viewer gets interested in your ad and clicks on it, you will be charged a certain amount for that - that’s how the term, ‘pay per click’ came about.
As a side note, a similar concept is that of a membership site where your income comes from the subscription fees paid by your visitors in exchange for some products or services delivered on a regular basis. One example is the 3 ready-made WordPress niche blogs I receive (which I can set up for Affiliate marketing or Adsense publishing) monthly for just a small fee at: http://rogerloh.com/index.php/wordpress-niche-blogs/
In conclusion, so far, we’re just discussing on how you “package” your business. We didn’t talk much on how to market your product or in Internet marketing jargon, how to generate traffic to your site. This we will be doing in the next part.
