The Home Based Business Opportunity You Can Start Tonight.
Submitted by: John LeeWorldWideReviewshttp://www.worldwidereviews.com/blog/Archive.htmAdmit it ... selling something online, from the comfort of yourown home office, would be great. More specifically, sellingsomething from your own home office that you don't have tostock, that you don't have to ship, and where you don't have todeal with customers would be great. This sounds like the perfectjob, doesn't it? But what if you have nothing to sell? Let's say you're not anauthor, a...
...nd you are not a professor, nor do you manufactureanything. Can you still make money by selling things part timefrom home?Yes, and it's called Affiliate Marketing. And it workssomething like this:A person registers with some company's (merchant's) affiliateprogram (retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Vonage, etc).This person then "drives" or "refers" Internet traffic to thesemerchants. When a referred visitor purchases some product, say abook or piece of software, the person who referred the visitoris paid a commission for generating the sale.The person or company that owns the product will be responsiblefor stocking it, getting it to the customer and dealing with anycustomer service issues. You, as the affiliate, have nothingmore to do with the transaction except cashing your check.What a job!You're first step is to decide what to market.Deciding what to market has been made a lot easier by theemergence of Affiliate Networks. Affiliate Networks are alsoknow as "Pay for Performance Networks" or "Marketing SolutionsProviders". They all provide basically the same service, whichis to allow affiliates to search for and market the products ofthe companies ("merchants") in their network. The process works basically like this: 1. A person who wishes to sell something signs up with anAffiliate Network. They now become an "affiliate". 2. The affiliate searches or browses the Affiliate Network forproducts that they think they might be able to sell. 3. When the affiliate finds a product they want to sell, theyare given their own "affiliate link" to the website where acustomer can purchase the product. This link is encoded with theaffiliate's uniquely identifying number. 4. The affiliate sends or "drives" potential customers to thecompany's website via their affiliate link. 5. If a customer purchases the product then the affiliate getscredit for that sale and earns a commission. 6. At the end of the pay period (defined by the AffiliateNetwork) a single paycheck consolidating all commissions for allproducts sold is issued to the affiliate. "Driving" customers to the company's website is where thereal fun resides. There are two main methods for driving onlinetraffic to these companies:* Build a large or small website. Place various links, banners,and products on this website. When your visitors click throughon these links and purchase a product you will get a commission. * Send potential customers directly to the companies usingPay-Per-Click (PPC) networks. When these people purchase aproduct you will get a commission. It takes more time to build a website with all of the affiliatelinks. However, you can use your website to "pre-sell" thecompany and/or products that you are promoting. In addition, youcan capture the email addresses of your visitors. These can beused later to offer more products and generate even more sales.Luckily, there are software programs available that can makebuilding a website a breeze. Affiliate Networks are free to join.They make their money by charging the merchants a percentage oftheir sales. Some networks will allow just about anyone to join,while others are more particular ... maybe requiring that youown a website that receives a certain number of visitors eachmonth. Some of the most popular Affiliate Networks are: * ClickBank* Commission Junction * LinkShare ClickBank is one of the easy ones to join. They offer mostlydownloadable products (i.e.; ebooks, software, etc.). They alsoallow you to browse their product directory before you signup.In addition, affiliates are not required to even own a websiteto join. That makes this a perfect starting point.You can do affiliate marketing full or part timeOne great aspect of this business is that you can put as littleor as much time into it as your schedule allows. Many peoplestart by just doing a few hours a week after work or onweekends. Just have fun with it and the money will come!Much, much more...This has just been a very basic overview of affiliate marketing.For those people who want to grow this into a full-time"at-home" business there is much more they can learn to do.Topics such as ad placement, search engine optimization, linkbuilding, auto-responders and other are very important, butbeyond the scope of this article. For more information or resources pertaining to thisarticle, please visit WorldWideReviews Work at Home Archive at http://www.worldwidereviews.com/blog/Archive.htm Copyright © by John LeeStaff@WORLDWIDEREVIEWS.COM -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-John Lee is owner and publisher of the acclaimed consumer reporting website WorldWideReviews.A free product review and watchdog service. Work at Home Archivehttp://www.worldwidereviews.com/blog/Archive.htm-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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