The Merchant

Any business can use affilates to promote and sell their products with considerable benefit and no risk. Affiliates are paid by results, they are not empoyees or even contractors paid for their time. If the affiliate doesn’t produce results she/he  doesn’t get paid. This way the business (the merchant) is guaranteed the result they specify in the affiliate agreement, unlike most forms of marketing where the business has to pay whether the promotion is successful or not.

The Affiliate

Any person or business can become an affiliate. You just need to recognise that you are being paid to deliver a specific result to the merchant business. Successful affiliates can make a lot of money from their marketing skills without having the more tedious tasks of product production, delivery, customer service and administration. It is quite possible to build a full time business just promoting and selling other people’s products.

Payment

The merchant is effectively sharing profits with the affiliate and, because of the much lower risk, is able to pay a significant share of the profit on each sale. There are several ways to be paid according to the required result:

• Payment for each visitor delivered to the merchant’s website (Pay per Click)
• Payment per lead generated e.g. a completed enquiry, quotation request or email address
• Payment per sale i.e. a specified amount for each sale, either a fixed sum or a percentage

The most common of these is the payment per sale though the others are growing in popularity.

Benefits

The merchant benefits by getting an independent sales force generating guaranteed results at much less risk than paying for advertising or employing  salaried sales people.

The affiliate benefits by being able to build a good income without being tied down to a business. Affiliates are able to work when, how and where they wish and thus have much more freedom than in running a conventional business of their own.

Learn more about affiliate marketing

But websites are expensive and difficult to manage, aren’t they? They take a lot of programming and other techie skills like graphics and stuff, don’t they? Well, not any more!

WordPress Websites

For quite some time now those in the know have been using a program called WordPress. Unlike Dreamweaver or Front Page or the myriad of other website design programs which are expensive and difficult to learn, WordPress is quick and easy to set up. It runs from your website, not from your own computer and, with just a little practice, anyone who can use a computer for simple email, text editing etc. can build and manage their own website. Best of all, WordPress is completely free of charge.

Some of you may have heard of WordPress before but think it is only for blogs and other personal websites, but this is not so and hasn’t been for some time. I have been building WordPress websites for myself and clients for much less cost than a conventional website, and teaching them to do it themselves for a few years now, and it’s getting easier all the time.

You will need a few things to get started. First you will need a domain name, this is your business name and address in ‘cyberspace’. You can get one of these from around £3.00 (under $5 US) a year upwards, not a great business expense. You will also need some webspace on the internet to put your website onto, if you didn’t already know this is known as ‘hosting’. This costs from £5.00 (around $8 US) a month upwards, again not expensive. Everything else you will need for a basic website you may already have or you can get free of charge.

You will need some content for your website, a mix of text, graphics, photographs etc. If you are really ambitious you can add audio and video, also for free. If you already have marketing literature such as brochures, flyers, leaflets etc. you can resuse this content on your website. If you have a digital camera, or even a camera phone, you can take a few pictures to add to your website. You will also need a design layout – there are thousands of these available for WordPress either free or for very little cost.

WordPress Training

Although WordPress is about as simple as it can get, a complete novice will need a small amount of training to get started. Please don’t be put off by this, and don’t go buying expensive training courses either. I have decided to convert one of my own WordPress websites into a training ground for my readers. It is currently being used to market my website building services but I am retiring from active client business now so I thought I would put it to use to help businesses who would like to set up their own website.

You can find the site at www.wordpresswebsites.co.uk. The training material is not there yet but I will be setting it up over the next few weeks.

Bookmark this page as I shall be updating progress on the project here as I go along.

As this is probably of interest to a lot of people and my reply was rather lengthy, I decided to answer it as a blog post here:

One of the biggest problems I have faced over the years is having too many business ideas. The world is so full of opportunities that you can end up jumping from one thing to another and ultimately getting nowhere.

Your second question helps to answer the first, if you cannot get access to start-up capital then you need to narrow down your ideas to those that you can start without capital – at least in the beginning.

Generally speaking offline, real world, businesses that can be started without capital tend to be service businesses that you can perform yourself and that don’t need business premises or selling other people’s products on an agency basis. That’s how I got started.

Online it is much easier as you can set up a website with very little money, around $10 US for a domain name and around $5 or $6 a month. If you are really short of money it is possible to start with a free website from Blogger.com or WordPress.com, until you have made enough to set up your own website. You can then use your website to sell other people’s products online as an affiliate – similar to the agency business above.

Now, down to the choice of business idea from your list. If you don’t have a list and your ideas are just floating around in your head, then write all your ideas down in a list before you forget them. Next look at each idea using the following criteria:

1. Is there a market for what you are proposing to sell? Is it big enough to sustain a growing business?

2. Are there any other people selling the same thing and making money?    If you don’t get a YES to both 1 and 2 then put the idea aside for now.

3. If you get YES to both 1 and 2, then consider if this is really something you want to do. In the beginning you will be spending long hours and days setting it up and if you don’t enjoy it, you will not be able to keep going. A question I have often asked myself during my career is “do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life?”

4. Think about the kind of people who will be your customers. Are they the kind of people you will want to spend your working life dealing with?

5. If 3 and 4 are both YES, ask yourself, “Can I really be of help to these people? What can I do for them to make their lives better? Can I do it better than someone else who is already in this business?” The only way to build a successful business is to create happy customers who will recommend you to others.

6. If you are still getting YES’s, Can you produce the product or provide the service at a price that people are willing to pay and that will cover all your costs and give you a good profit? Can you sell enough to ensure that profit will give you the personal income you want and leave some over to reinvest in growing your business?

7. Can you easily and inexpensively communicate the benefits of what you are selling to your prospective customers and easily deliver the product or service to them?

If you have got this far with all YES’s, then you are already ahead of 90+% of people with business ideas! You will have narrowed down your list of ideas considerably, possibly even down to one.

If you still need more deciding factors then carry on with the following:

8. Once the business has been successfully launched, can you give most of the work to other people to do, either by outsourcing or employing people full or part time? If so you will be able to grow your business as large as the market will take. If not you will be limited by your own time and energy. Some people are quite happy to keep the business small enough to do everything themselves but others need to grow.

9. Is it the kind of business you will be able to get someone else to manage? If so, you can then look at other business ideas, if you have that kind of ambition.

10. Does the business have the potential to be sold as a going concern to someone else in the future or is it too dependent on you? If so you can sell and retire or start another business.

ABOVE ALL, once you have decided which business to start, give it your full and undivided attention until it is running successfully or it fails completely. Let nothing distract you from building your business and do not be tempted by other ideas not related to this business until it is capable of running almost by itself.

This is not a complete blueprint on how to run a business, but it should help you to choose the best idea from those you already have.

I hope it helps

John

I’ve mentioned Information Product Publishing in a couple of earlier posts as being a potentially good choice of business. For many years it has been popular as a choice for mail order and more recently it has emerged as a top earner as an internet based business.

Information products lend themselves readily to the internet, which is a perfect information publishing platform, because the products can be produced electronically in a downloadable format. This means that production and distribution costs are extremely low giving a good potential profit on even modestly priced products.

A couple of the early pioneers of information publishing online produced a course several years ago to help others to get started with simple little websites producing information products on a variety of specialist topics, they called it Underachiever Mastery. Why underachiever? Because each website, being narrowly focussed on it’s own topic, didn’t make a great deal of money. But a whole network of these little websites collectively made quite a large amount of money.

Times have moved on and this product has been off the market for a long time. But now another prolific information publisher, Russell Brunson, has picked up the baton and is launching a revised and updated version of this course, together with the necessary software tools to make it work more easily. It’s called Underachiever Secrets and it launches today at 2pm EST (7.00pm UK time).

I’m helping Russell with the launch promotion of Underachiever Secrets and I’ve set up a new website to do this. It gives the history of the product and the concept together with launch information.

If information publishing is of interest to you, and remember many mail order millionnaires made their fortunes selling information products and they are a huge seller online too, take a look at my new site at:

www.underachieversecrets.info

Starting a new business or growing an existing one is particularly challenging at the moment. In all my years of business I have never seen such an uncertain economic outlook. Yes we have been through a number of past recessions, this is my fifth, but there was always a degree of certainty – albeit not always positive!

However, uncertainty creates opportunities for those who can see past the present negative press reports. In my experience an economic downturn can provide as many opportunities as boom times and sometimes even with less risk. Yes, I did say less risk. In a downturn people take more care and are more alert to risk whereas during an economic boom they can be careless, as we have seen all too clearly in the last couple of years or so. But the key business factors never change:

• Clear and specific business objectives and business plan
• A hungry market with specific needs or wants
• A quality product that delivers exactly what they want at an affordable price yet still produces a profit
• Customer service and reliability that gains trust and a good reputation
• Active and consistent targeted marketing
• Fast response to enquiries and systematic follow-up
•  Sound cashflow and financial control
• Minimal borrowings relative to cashflow
• A positive attitude to your market place and your business and a willingness to ‘go the extra mile’ to satisy your customers

So, where do you want to be at the end of this year? How do you propose to get there? Whose needs can you best serve? What can you do for them that will please and delight them and ensure that they will tell all their friends?

Somewhere out there are people who need what you have to offer, all you have to do is find them and tell them what you have and how it will help them, then over deliver to the best of your ability.

Good luck and have a great year.

Being so reserved actually stops you from being the kind of aggressive or ‘pushy’ salesman we all hate, and that’s a good thing. People are becoming very resistant to the traditional ‘the more you talk, the more you sell’ approach, especially when it’s over-hyped! What people are looking for is answers to questions, solutions to problems and how to achieve eternal happiness . And they’ll happily pay whoever can supply what they want.

Now, I used to be shy too, I guess I still can be reserved sometimes. When I first started out selling, friends and family were aghast! “How is John ever going to sell anything?” was the question they all asked. But I had learned that the best conversationalists do more listening than talking.

Most people love to talk about themselves if you press the right button. You do that by asking targeted questions that get them talking. Questions about their interests, problems, dreams etc. then listen, I mean really listen, because they are going to tell you what to sell them. If they start to dry up ask a question about something they’ve just told you, something that will tell you more about what they want out of life. After a while they’ll think you’re their best pal and will listen to your recommendations. Use this technique in conversation, in selling, even in dating (boy, does it work well there  )

It doesn’t have to be face to face, but it works really well in that form.  You can do it over the phone, in a sales letter or on a website. This is really what Geoff (the guy who’s post I was reading) is doing with his blog. He listens to the ‘online conversation’, posts a comment or a question here and there and people answer him, so he learns what he needs to keep the conversation  going and the sales coming in.

When you know what people want, you don’t have to ‘sell’ them anything, you just have to let them know where they can get it and that’s from you. Everyone is good at something and usually that ‘something’ is being sold profitably by someone, somewhere. If you are good at a particular thing, they might just as well buy it from you, especially if you are better than wherever they are getting it at the moment. Or better still, if they can’t find it at all.

But you do have to join the conversation, go on, just do it!

Good selling!

John

PS  I  got a great product idea just from reading the comments section and by listening to and  understanding the readers’ concerns. So I’m really glad I joined in the conversation.

If you don’t know Ian Traynor, that’s a shame because Ian is one of the online world’s ‘Marketing Gentlemen’, as is well known in webmaster and internet marketing circles. A shame also because you have missed one of the best internet marketing newsletters online, the Marketing Update newsletter, now in its final issue. I have been an update subscriber since January 2006, though I had seen Ian’s name around the web before then. Then I found him following me on Twitter, presumably because of this blog so I followed him back.

I consider Ian a personal friend even though we’ve never met in person, but that’s the internet for you:-). Though I hope to change that now that he, and shortly I, have both retired and have more time. We both have a lot in common Ian and I. We’re both 65 this year and we live in  adjoining English counties, he in Yorkshire and I in Lincolnshire. We’ve both been webmasters for 15 years and internet marketers for 10 and we’ve both been teaching small businesses to market online. I have been teaching groups of entrepreneurs offline in seminars, workshops and conferences; Ian has done it via his newsletters, websites, ebooks and marketing tools such as his legendary Internet Marketers Cheat Kit!

Ian has helped countless people to market online, not just by teaching but also by providing some great marketing and website tools. And he has delivered, in my humble opinion, some of the best quality and best value material anywhere. He is also one of the most approachable people in our business, he deals with his emails personally rather than using robots and has always welcomed contact from his readers.

I wish you and your good lady a very happy, healthy and fullfilling retirement Ian

John

Reader Opportunity

I mentioned an opportunity for you at the beginning of this post in connection with Ian’s retirement and that is his ‘Grand Retirement Sale’. He has put a huge quantity of his best products into a single package which is so good I’ve already grabbed it, even though I already had some of them! The opportunity to grab the rest while they were still available was too good to miss and a real snip at the price. Many of the top marketers in our field have also chipped in with some of their own stuff as free bonuses, and good products they are too. The sale is on until 21st July, so go take a look at his webpage and see what you can pick up for pennies on the dollar.

Update 22 July…

Ian’s sale finished yesterday. Sorry if you missed it but I have some good news. Ian is keeping on one of his projects, the Private PLR Club – of which I have been a member from the beginning, and ‘beefing it up’ even more. I’m personally relieved at that as some of my best products come from that particular source. I’ll keep you informed of this as it develops further.

If you are not familiar with Private Label Rights (PLR), it is a form of product licensing and is a brilliant way of sourcing information and software products for both online and offline businesses. I’ll put up a post here soon to explain further how to use PLR to set up a simple business.

The interesting thing though is that, throughout all this, at any moment, someone was making money and someone was losing money! A boom can be a crazy, scary place to be and a bust can throw up some amazing bargains and opportunities, and right now is no different.

The true entrepreneur knows his/her market and is constantly on the lookout for opportunities to serve that market. They can help their customers to enjoy the boom years and help them survive the bad times. Keeping a focus on what you can do to serve your customer well at all times and in all conditions will ensure not only business survival, but growth in both good and bad times.

So, how can I use my experiences to help you?

Tell Me Your Troubles, Your Hopes, Your Fears and Your Goals

If you are trying to start a business, what is stopping you?

If you are trying to grow a business, what is holding you back?

If your business is struggling to survive, what are your problems?

If you are achieving your goals and doing well, chip in with what’s working and what’s not and help those less fortunate readers.

Throw me some challenges and see what we can come up with. Click the feedack link below to join in…

The eBay For Beginners Video Course comes from Francis Ochoco, the first ever ‘eBay Entrepreneur Of The Year’. This course will be available for download soon for around £29.99 UK or $47 USA. You’ll get the complete set of 28 videos in top quality AVI format to view on your own computer.

Watch the videos now free!

For the moment though, I’m letting my Be Your Own Boss readers have a Free preview of the full course. The preview will take the form of 28 daily lessons all the way from setting up an ebay account to shipping your product to the customer. Each day you will be sent an email with a link to that day’s training and a password to watch the video online. You’ll need the password as I can’t give this away to just anyone, this is just for you.

If doing business on ebay is something you’re interested in you can get more information and enroll here. Your first lesson will be sent to you as soon as you confirm your enrollment.

As you would expect we value and protect the privacy of all our readers you can check out our Privacy Policy here.

Once again I would greatly appreciate your feedback on this course. I’ve reviewed it and believe it delivers excellent content, but your opinion is far more important than mine.

Check it out and let me know what you think via the comments below.

This is way overdue but I’ve intended for some time to produce a series of online training courses for new businesses or even those just thinking of starting a business. With two businesses of my own to run and a growing number of consulting clients finding the time has been a little tricky. Now I’m semi-retired and cutting back on my full day business training workshops the time has come to put my courses on auto-pilot.

First up is a simple six day small business crash course via email, one lesson a day. This is intended for those just considering starting their own business or anyone struggling to get started. It answers the key questions about “how do I get started?” Things like:

• The ins and outs of starting your own small business along with some of the basic steps you will need to take to get up and running.
• Some of the different options available for financing your small business, so that you can choose the one that is right for you.
• An overview of how to create a professional business plan for your small business.
• Some of the basic information that you must know when it comes to paying taxes for your small business.
• Some of the common mistakes that small business owners make, so you can avoid making them yourself.
• The importance of having an online presence and developing an internet marketing strategy for your small business

There will be more short courses to come in future but in the meantime find out more about my Small Business Crash Course. You can enroll for the course from that page.

Oh! I forgot to mention, this one’s FREE!

If you take the course, come back here and let me know how you get on. I would really appreciate your feedback on the course. You can also let me know what else you would like to know about starting and running your own business.

Use the comments form below to give me your feedback, or just click the comments link.