If you are looking into starting or expanding an online business, in my opinion and the opinions of many other successful marketers, there is no sane reason why this would exclude an affiliate marketing component.
In fact, this is the sole center-piece of many successful internet businesses, and it is also the best business to start for a number of reasons:
- You can have an affiliate account setup within just a few minutes (I recommend using roboform to make applying as fast as possible.)
- You don’t need to create a product on your own.
- Professional salesletters and marketing materials are provided, which is a HUGE benefit.
- You don’t need to track sales or commissions, or anything like that at all.
- You don’t even need to have your own website (though I would personally strongly recommend that you do.)
- If you use pay per click marketing, you can have an account and ads up and running within just half an hour.
Oh, and other than the costs of setting up a website (which are minimal: just domain purchasing and hosting), and possibly marketing expenses (which you should carefully track and optimize), you really don’t have any expenses or overhead. The only other component that you might want to consider is having an autoresponder service to keep in touch with potential customers that have visited your site. And that cost is only $19 per month or so.
But, the upside potential is HUGE. Especially when dealing with information products or digitally delivered products like membership sites, downloadable books, or software, the mark up is huge, which means you often get paid more than the creator of the product.
With all of the great potential and upside there, what is the downside? Well, the field is definitely getting more competitive and sophisticated. But mostly, it can be a little confusing at first to get set up and going in the right direction to give yourself the best chance at success.
The trick is, you need to know how to do proper research to give yourself an edge by only marketing products that are hot sellers and in demand. You need to know how to test quickly in order to kill the losers and scale up and expand on the winners. And you need to know how to most effectively use pay per click search engines like Google’s Adwords.
So, where to start? In my opinion, starting out SLOWLY and VERY CAREFULLY with adwords is the best place, and using reasonably popular clickbank products are the best places to start. (Of course, once you are having some success there you will definitely want to expand to Yahoo and MSN as PPC traffic sources, and there are literally THOUSANDS of additional affiliate networks to choose from, just do a little research at affiliatescout.com to see.)
If you can master Adwords and Clickbank (which there are some marketers who STRICTLY use those two resources and generate $100,000 plus monthly incomes), you can go on to master any other place you want.
The reason I love Commission Blueprint so much is that they focus solely on those 2 places. They assume already having a little knowledge of Adwords, but really you can get this for free just from checking out Google’s free learning center resource, and understanding the basics really isn’t that hard.
Where Commission Blueprint really shines is laying out a literal blueprint and overall strategy for you to follow. There are few products that I’ve gone through that BOTH take you from A to Z of a business model AND expand your mind to really seeing the big picture of the business too.
Plus, I just really love Steve’s casual and non-chalant delivery of the material. I’m also a student of his Niche Blueprint product (closed now), and his teaching is really down to earth and high quality.
If you are either just starting out, or have already tried your hand at affiliate marketing and are floundering around a little (we’ve all been there), you need to grab Commission Blueprint right now and absorb the material. There are about a dozen or so videos, so it is really easy to follow and learn by watching Steve actually do what he is talking about, rather than just read it in an e-book.
If you are looking for additional study material behind this, and I strongly believe in really massively educating yourself in an business area that you are going to attempt to give yourself as much of an advantage as you can, then I would also look at these two resources also: Google Cash review and Adwords Exposed review.
I hope you’ve found this helpful, and if you order any of these through my links above shoot me an e-mail. As a bonus, I will do a quick market report of whatever market you are looking at getting into first. I will include the top 10 longest running advertisers, their most successful ads, and their entire list of keywords they are advertising on in that market. This is extremely valuable information that I would normally charge $300 for, but I will give to you free if you order one or more of the products listed here that I STRONGLY recommend you get if you want to have a legitimate shot of success.
In short, just buy Commission Blueprint here, and e-mail me your receipt! You’ll be very glad you did!
Looking forward to helping you build your business in any way I can,
Sincerely,
Mike Rutkowski
