Internet Income… Affiliate Marketer or a Business Opportunity Seeker?
There are a lot of people who, when they become interested in making money online, turn to Affiliate Marketing
. This is not surprising as it can be a fairly easy entry into Internet income; at least it seems so at first. In going the Affiliate Marketer route, there is no need to have your own product and, in some cases, you can even get by without a web site. There are some affiliate programs that actually provide each of their affiliates with their own replicated web site to sell the products or services. Others running affiliate programs have sales pages that the marketer can send potential customers to. The mechanism, like email, for sending the prospect is encoded with the affiliate marketer’s unique affiliate ID number so that the proper marketer gets credit for the sale and receives the resultant commission.
A high percentage of people who begin affiliate marketing don’t make enough money to continue in it very long. Often, they end up spending more of their own money advertising and promoting affiliate products and/or services then they actually make. This is truly unfortunate because a lot of these people are already in a precarious financial position and that is the reason they are looking to make some money online. They get so excited about promoting and hopefully selling someone’s product or service that they don’t do adequate investigation before getting involved.
Selling anything on the Internet is normally a very difficult proposition. Anyone considering affiliate marketing should take a serious look at that term “Affiliate Marketing.” Sometimes they are referred to a “Affiliate Programs” or something like that. Trust me on this, the most important word in Affiliate Marketing is Marketing. Even if it does not appear in the phrase, it is the key word. If people don’t know immediately that they are in the marketing business, not the affiliate business
, they are destined to fail. It is all about marketing. If you are not into marketing you should not be in Affiliate Programs.
People considering any type of Internet business must be very, very careful. We live in an age where there are a lot of charlatans and unscrupulous people on the internet who are preying on the “newbies” (those new to Internet Marketing). Once one starts looking for an appropriate online business the liars and scam artists seem to come out of the woodwork and have but one goal… to separate you from your money. You have probably seen some of the hype: Make $40,000 by noon tomorrow; Do nothing and make $500 an hour; How I made $1,000,000 in three months. There is no end to these claims, but I can tell you, except in very rare instances they are lies. Think about it for a minute… If I really had a way to make $150,000 per month, would I share it with anyone for $47.00? Not unless it is all of those $47.00 payments that makes me the $150,000. But then, after you pay the $47.00 how will you make that kind of money? You won’t.
Please understand, there ARE legitimate opportunities out there. But it seems to me the crooks outnumber the honest businesses about 10 to 1. So be careful.
If you want to go the business opportunity route instead of (or along with) the Affiliate Marketing I suggest you start small. Keep your required up front investment small enough that if you lose it all it won’t hurt much. Make sure you are comfortable with the program and you can see yourself promoting it. Once you are in, remember it’s all MARKETING!
Wayne C. Weeks — Wayne is a published author, writer, blogger and Internet Marketer who spent more than 30 years in the mortgage industry. Wayne is also a Christian, Businessman, Award Winning Winemaker, Lay Minister, Private Pilot, Husband and stuff like that… Low Investment Affiliate Program: http://hotshorturl.com/wo47
A Layman’s Guide to Twitter
So, no doubt you’ll have noticed that Twitter is in the news a lot lately. Celebs and the web 2.0 set are signing up in droves and with all that increased publicity has come a definite surge of new people looking for an alternative to Facebook’s increasingly cluttered world.
More people than ever are now answering that question that has come to mean so much over the past few years – what are you doing?
So, what is Twitter?
This is a bit of a tough one to nail down, it’s been referred to as ‘the SMS of the internet’, a social networking site and a micro-blogging site. In reality, it is all of those things. It also functions as an interactive RSS feed, you can follow your favourite companies, newspapers and celebrities and keep up to date with all their news, new products or general ramblings.
At its most basic, Twitter can best be described as the ’status’ bit of facebook displayed in a continually updated list. Posting a message on your page is known as ‘tweeting’ and tweets are limited to 140 characters each. The tweets of the people you are following appear on your feed (equivalent to Facebook’s wall) and your tweets appear on the feeds of people following you.
Every tweet posted appears on the main feed, for all of Twitter’s estimated five million users to see. It’s worth bearing in mind that with five million people tweeting, the posts disappear from the communal feed pretty rapidly. If you choose, you can protect your updates so only people you approve can see (handy if your mum or boss is a Twitterholic).
It’s a very VERY simple little setup but painfully addictive, especially because (thanks to smartphones) tweeting can be done via text message or specific applications for iPhones or Blackberrys.
What’s with all the squiggles? @tag and #tags.
Depending just how into Twitter the people you follow are, you’ll encounter a different amount of bewildering add-ons to their tweets. The most common of these is the @tag. This simply denotes that a single tweet is directed at one person. When mentioning someone on Twitter it seems to have become standard to replace their actual name with an @tag to their profile.
By using the @tags it becomes far easier to discern which tweets are aimed at you and which are just the general musings of your followers/followees. There’s even a tab allowing you to view just the tweets with @tags directed at you. Be careful though, using too many @tags to have a instant messaging style conversation with one person can lead to you losing followers. If you want to have an extended conversation then it’s probably best to just use the more private ‘direct message’ tab.
#tags are another simple but very useful part of the Twitter experience. When mentioning common subjects like Barack Obama or a particular gadget #tags are often used so it becomes easier to search for and find tweets that interest you. The sentence ‘I can’t believe Barack Obama is allowed to keep his blackberry’ would become ‘I can’t believe #obama is to keep allowed his #blackberry. These tags make it easier to use Twitter’s search function to find people talking about common topics.
#tags can also be tacked onto the start of tweets to show their subject. For example many people who tweet for large news companies such as CNN or BBC start their tweets with #news.
What about pictures and stuff?
We’ve all been using Facebook for ages now, we’re used to quietly trawling through our friends’ albums at lunchtime and giggling to ourselves at their drunken antics. On the surface, Twitter lacks these hilarious and embarrassing photos. However, some clever soul invented twitpic.com which allows you to upload a link to a picture hosted elsewhere. By using this service not only can you publish pictures of what you’re up to but you can do it live, as it happens. Surely that’s more appealing?
Admittedly the games, plug-ins, gifts, superpokes, pokes, hatching eggs and quizzes are absent from Twitter but honestly, who cares? Remember when MySpace started to get all messy and stuffed with spammers and adverts, remember what happened next? Everyone switched to Facebook, who knows, maybe we’re about to see the next big social networking exodus.
Why?
This is the hardest question to answer when it comes to social networking, I was a dedicated Facebooker for years but it’s always nice to try something new. The micro-blogging style of Twitter suits me. It’s not for everyone and there is something just a tiny bit self-involved about publicly narrating your life online but it’s satisfying, it keeps you connected with friends and loved ones and above all else, it’s a good way to see what Lily Allen has been up to.
About the Author
Samantha is an expert Research and Theatre consultant. She is currently writing for Show and Stay and is very excited about the upcoming West End revival of Oliver!
A Good Reputation: Priceless
by Lauren Hobson
With so many ways to market a small business today, it’s more important than ever to protect your reputation – especially your online reputation. The web today has become very conversational, with users of all types contributing to the overall picture of your business. It’s very likely that whether you currently have a social media presence or not, people are already talking about you, your products and services, or your employees online. With blogs, social networking sites, link sharing sites, etc., just about anyone can be involved in forming your company’s reputation, so you need to know what is being said about you online.
Here are five reasons you should monitor the conversation online:
1. If you don’t follow what’s being said online, it will be impossible to counter anything negative or untrue. Your reputation will be defined by what other people are saying about you, even without your knowledge.
2. If a reporter or a blogger has a negative impression of your products or has experienced a bad customer service incident, it could end up at the top of the Google search results. Even if the information is untrue or inaccurate, news sites often have lots of authority with Google, and also a large readership with lots of links. Your reputation could quickly spin out of control without an opportunity for you to clear up a misunderstanding.
3. “You ARE What You Publish,” according to online expert and best-selling author David M. Scott. Whatever you publish about your company, combined with what others online are saying about you, becomes your online reputation. Make sure you are intentional about what you do and say online, since it will become part of your company’s online story.
4. Things can change almost instantly online, so just because you did a Google search on your company’s name a month ago and everything looked good doesn’t mean that it still looks good today. Monitoring the conversation can help you find out important information sooner rather than later.
5. Negative news tends to travel fast and far on the web, especially with the popularity of social networking sites. It’s incredibly easy for someone to post something negative on a blog, which can then get picked up and shared on Facebook, or posted to Twitter, where it goes out to countless customers and potential customers all over the web. Monitoring your reputation makes it much easier to intervene and combat the negative before it gets out of control.
So now that you know why you should monitor what’s being said online, here are five free tools you can use to monitor the conversation and help keep your online reputation intact:
- Google Alerts (www.google.com). This tool lets you set up certain words or phrases that you want to monitor, like your company name, product names, key employees, etc. Then each day Google sends you a report of each time it found these phrases online, including the links to the place where it was found.
- Twitter Search (www.twitter.com). Twitter’s search feature enables you to find mentions of your company, brand, or products in almost real-time, enabling you to take swift and immediate action if necessary.
- Monitor This (www.monitorthis.info). Lets you monitor mentions of your brand in 26 different search engines feeds at once. Simply enter the phrases you want to watch, then paste the list of feeds into your feed reader.
- Twilert (www.twilert.com). Twilert is a Twitter application that monitors daily tweets and emails you a list of those that contain mentions of your company, brand, products, etc.
- Who’s Talkin (www.whostalkin.com). This social media search tool allows you to search for relevant terms and phrases related to your business on 60 of the most popular social networking sites on the web.
The best way to protect your online reputation is to pay attention and monitor what is being said about you online, so you can be proactive if necessary to fix problems early or set the record straight. You obviously cannot control what other people say online, but you also cannot solve problems or defend your reputation if you don’t know what’s going on in the first place.
About the Author
Lauren Hobson, President of Five Sparrows, LLC, has more than 16 years of experience in small business technology writing, marketing, and web site design and development. Five Sparrows provides high-quality, professional website and marketing services to small businesses and non-profits at affordable prices, giving clients access to customized services that meet both their needs and their budgets. More at www.fivesparrows.com.
