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The Lists of Reasons Why People Would Be Interested Buying Your Product

Mr Success — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:54:11 +0000

Here they are :

To make money
To save money
To achieve comfort
To enjoy health
To live longer
To be popular
To satisfy curiosity
To gain pleasure or enhance enjoyment
To feel clean
To be praised and admired
To be in style
To satisfy an appetite
To own beautiful possessions
To attract the opposite sex
To be an individual, independent
To emulate others
To take advantage of opportunities
To get a surprise
To make work easier
To gain prestige
To be sociable
To express creativity
To be efficient or more efficient
To protect oneself and family
To protect the future of one’s family
To be a good parent
To be liked
To be loved
To express a personality
To be in fashion
To fulfill a fantasy
To be up-to-date with the latest trend
To own attractive things
To collect valuable things
To satisfy the ego
To be “first” at something
To enjoy exotic tastes
To live in a clean environment
To be strong and healthy
To renew vigor and energy
To find new and rare things
To be more beautiful or attractive
To win the affection of others
To satisfy sexual desires
To bring back pleasant memories
To be lucky
To feel important
To gain knowledge
To improve ones own appearance
To be recognized as an authority
To enhance leisure
To do things well
To get a better job
To be your own boss
To gain social acceptance
To keep up with others
To appreciate beauty
To be proud of possessions
To resist the domination of others
To relieve boredom
To gain self-respect
To win acclaim
To win advancement
To seek adventure
To satisfy ambition
To be among the leaders
To gain confidence
To get on the bandwagon
To get something for nothing
To gain self-assurance
To have safety in buying something else
To protect reputation
To “one-up” others
To relax
To replace the obsolete
To add fun or spice to life
To be in style
To conserve natural resources
To protect the environment
To make others happy
To find love
To feel intelligent
To be benevolent
To be part of a group
To prepare for the future
To feel wanted, appreciated and valuable
To work less
To save time
To have security in old age
To overcome obstacles
To avoid shortages
To avoid criticism
To avoid loneliness
To take their mind off their troubles
To avoid personal injury
To avoid damages
To avoid physical pain
To avoid loss of reputation
To avoid loss of money
To avoid trouble
To prevent unemployment
To avoid embarrassment
To get rid of aches and pains
To escape drudgery
To gain freedom from worry
To escape shame
To avoid effort
To protect possessions

Writing All About Buyer Benefits in Sales Letter Is The Key to Success?

Mr Success — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:16:58 +0000

Anyway, What Exactly Are Benefits ?

Think of benefits as advantages to the customer. It’s what your product ‘does’ for buyers… rather than what it ‘is’. Benefits give value to a product — value that exceeds the cost of the product itself. Benefits make your product appealing, causing others to willingly shell out their hard earned cash in order to get the perceived benefits.

Benefits are the real reason your product exists and has a chance in the marketplace. Without major benefits, you have nothing to sell and will not success.

Benefits are what prospects get as a result of buying your product. They’re all about prospects and answer the foremost question on every visitor’s mind

Benefits give meaning, significance, and value to a feature and make the product more appealing in the prospect’s eyes. For example, a desktop widget that’s available in 43 different colors enables buyers to suit any imaginable office design and décor.

What About Features?

Features on the other hand, are actual product details. It’s all about your product and what it is and may include details about the product color, size, shape, and materials used among many other things. Features are facts and characteristics.

Used alone, they offer little in terms of selling power. But when employed as the reasoning behind a benefit, features can act as effective supplemental sales tools.

The most effective way to use a feature is to align it with a compelling benefit where the exclusive feature creates in essence, an exclusive benefit. Make the feature a valuable characteristic because of what it does.

Always use benefits first and foremost. Benefits influence, persuade, and sell prospects on your product or offer.

Features play a secondary role, if they play one at all in your sales letter.

Every feature has at least one corresponding benefit and it’s up to you as marketer to uncover it, dust it off, and present it in a way that gives the product added value. The idea is to build a credible and realistic bridge from a product’s feature to an appealing benefit.

Which Benefits Should Be Included?

Everything that represents a genuine helpful advantage or benefit to your prospect should be included in your sales letter. List every conceivable benefit. Prioritize and deliver your benefits in the order from the most relevant and important to the least. Omit any single benefit and you might be leaving out the one advantage that could sway an undecided shopper.

The more benefits you stress in your copy, the more opportunities you have to sell others and the better will be your response. In fact, your sales letter should consist of one benefit on top of another.

Launch your sales letter with a big benefit in your headline. Expand on this major benefit in your subheading. Continue along with a string of benefits throughout the body copy of your message. Repeat your main benefit in your close or on the order form. The more benefits you present, the more convincing, persuasive and effective your sales copy is as a decision-making tool in the hands of prospects.

The Easiest Way To Turn Features Into Benefits

Simply take any feature and ask yourself what it means to customers or prospects.

Since features are about products, you need to give it a new twist, making it about the prospect.

Here’s an easy way to convert any ‘fact’ about your product into a prospect benefit. Simply take a feature and add the words “You get”. When you think in terms of ‘You get’ — you’re thinking about how the prospect/customer is greater advantaged by having or using the product.

Here’s an example…

Fact or Feature: Fax machine prints on regular paper
Benefit: As a result, you get clearer printouts on standard size paper. No need to buy costly fax rolls again. In addition, there’s no cutting required. Plus, never again will you ever have to deal with unsightly oversized pages that jam your filing cabinet and make a mess of your files.

Another way to phrase it is “so that you get”. State the feature and follow it up with “So that you get…”

“How To Get More Done In Less Time is a concise, 21-page tips booklet so that you get only the most crucial, hard-hitting, time saving information — without any filler. Read it all in a single sitting and put these time saving ideas into practice immediately. No need to read hundreds or thousands of pages to uncover the key ideas – you get it all in just minutes!”

Think the answer through from your prospect’s point of view. See it how he’s likely to see it. What’s the advantage from their perspective? What is it about that particular feature that makes it valuable and advantageous to the audience? That’s what you need to think about… and that’s what you need to communicate to your prospect.

Why Benefits Are So Important

Meaningful advantages sustain and build reader interest. Lose interest and you’ve lost any chance for a sale. Benefits focus on prospects and address human wants, so they naturally attract and hold the interest of readers.

Your prospect has a problem he’d dearly like to solve, or a goal he desperately wants to reach. He wants less pain in his life and more pleasure. Suddenly, he discovers your product. But it’s not the product itself he’s most interested in; it’s the perceived benefit he’ll get to experience as a result of buying.

But how does your prospect know if your product is the ideal answer he’s been searching for?

If you merely reveal descriptive details about your product in your sales copy, it won’t have much appeal. You can’t simply present your goods in a ‘here it is’ approach and expect prospects to figure out the advantages for themselves. That’s lunacy. Yet, many do try this approach. A much more effective strategy is to paint a glorious picture of the kind of results that are possible with your product. Make it absolutely clear and utterly obvious.

If you don’t unveil all the benefits, they’ll never figure it out for themselves, nor will they waste a minute of their precious time in trying to do so. If your message doesn’t reach out and grab them because of its magical appeal – due to the benefits expressed – you don’t stand much of a chance in an increasingly competitive online marketplace. Benefits tell prospects where to go in search of the answers.

They have magical, emotional appeal and offer hope and promise to those in want and need. Benefits are solutions to problems, cures to symptoms. Few purchases are made without a strong reason. The reason prospects are even remotely interested in your sales message is because they have a problem they’d like to solve, a symptom they’d like to cure, or a desire they’d like to attain.

When you communicate benefit on top of benefit, your words cut through the noise and directly trigger your prospect’s hot buttons.

Features are about things – specifically your product. Benefits are about feelings and it’s these feelings that control human actions. If you want to communicate effectively, you’ve got to arouse feelings consistently throughout your body copy. Emotions give life and passion to your words.

Since benefits are explained in self-serving terms (self-serving to the prospective customer, not the marketer) they immediately strike a chord with the audience. To prospects, perceived benefits are reasons for paying attention ultimately buying.

Without appealing benefits your product or offer has little value in the minds of consumers. They haven’t yet been ‘sold’. But stack up a huge list of benefits and suddenly the perceived value of the same product goes sky high.

It’s the relative value that ultimately determines the prospects decision to buy. Benefits build value and make the purchase decision an easier one. Prospects add up the perceived value of your offer – the sum total of all the benefits. Mentally, either consciously or subconsciously, they attach a figure to the list. At the same time, they look at the real cost – the actual dollars and cents required to purchase.

So, successful your sales copy is all about product’s benefits. And if you write of sales copy must included all benefits, not only features.

If you want to be a success in adsense, you must implement this 3 things!

Mr Success — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:13:12 +0000

I know, I know…this “secret” really isn’t all that secretive. Still, it’s so important that I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t write in this article.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people complain that they aren’t making any money with Adsense, and when I ask then how many markets they’re in or how many domains they have, their answer is usually 15 or 20 markets and only a domain or two per market.

Like I’ve already said, you can’t make any money with Adsense unless you are in A LOT of markets. But even more than that, for each market you need to have A LOT of websites if you want to really penetrate your niche. (The days of creating those 1000 page websites are long gone. These days you need to have a lot of smaller sites, all linking to one another to achieve maximum results. But that’s another report…)

To accomplish all this you need three things:
1) Systems
2) Goals
3) Help

By SYSTEMS, I mean you need to have procedures in place to crank out websites on a large scale. If all you’re doing is building websites onesy-twosy I can promise you won’t get very far.

What you need is an assembly line. So for example, if you were to go into 10 markets, you would want to do the keyword research for all 10 markets, then purchase your domain names, then setup your hosting accounts, and finally build and upload your webpages. See how it works? Your systems enable you to do things in batches which is much more efficient then building them a domain at a time.

By GOALS, I mean just that…you need to set daily, weekly and monthly production goals to keep yourself on track. So if you’re just getting started out, you might set a monthly goal of 10 markets, with 3 domains per market. You would then set weekly and daily goals to ensure that you meet (and even exceed) the goals you set.

Without goals you can’t keep score, and if you can’t keep score you don’t know if you’re winning or losing in business.

And lastly, by HELP I mean you need to outsource as much as humanly possible. In this business, your mission is to perform a task only until you know it well enough to teach someone else how to do it. The faster you can duplicate yourself, the faster you can expand your business as you focus on the most profitable actions.

In fact, not many people know this, but my entire page generation business is 100% outsourced. I have one person who selects my markets, another person who does the keyword research for those markets and another person who actually builds and manages all my pages.

This frees me up to concentrate on the markets that are truly profitable, and even expand BEYOND ADSENSE.

Keyword research is one incredibly tedious task that could and should be outsourced as quickly as possible.

I found a guy on Elance who pulls keywords for my markets from WordTracker, Overture and Google. And best of all, he only charges me $0.80 per 100 keywords, so to have him compile a list of 1000 words only costs me $8. Not bad, especially when you consider how profitable that list could be to me. Oh yeah, and he also de-duplicates the list so I don’t pay double for keywords. (That’s an important thing to consider should you decide to outsource this task.) )

And here’s another quick tip…

When you outsource jobs, try to tie their compensation into their performance, rather than just establishing an hourly wage. This way, you only pay for work that gets done, and your workers are encouraged to do their jobs faster not slower.

For your success in adsense business, you must implement and have systems, goals and help. And treat this business lke…a business.

5 Things For Success In Affiliate Marketing

Mr Success — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 01:10:01 +0000

The following five points are things that I found I must be willing to do in order to achieve the level of success that I was expecting in affiliate marketing. I will explain each of these in detail.

1) Willing To Change:

Get out of your comfort zone!

We all have them… comfort zones! I know that I do. We do what we are used to doing because it comes EASY to us.

However, as you have probably heard before. You can’t expect to have something different by doing the same thing tomorrow that you are doing today.

With the internet things change pretty quickly, and what works today may not work tomorrow or in a year from now. So if you are going to get involved in online marketing, you need to get out of your comfort zone and be quick to change.

2) Create Relationships:

In any business, relationship is vital to success. Relationships will take you a lot farther in a much shorter time than if you try to get there all by yourself.

Ways to create relationships online is through forums, groups, social networking, email lists, seminars and any other way that you can think. You see, when you become part of a forum or group, you are joining a community of people that are involved in the same type of business as you or have the same interests as yourself.

You create relationships. Don’t try to sell to these people. Treat them as friends that you care about. The same thing goes when you join a social network, or when you send emails to your list of subscribers, or when you attend a seminar.

Then if by chance you are talking to or emailing people that you have a relationship with and they want what you have, they are going to by from you much quicker than they will ANYONE else on earth!
So get used to it because you will be hearing me say this time and time again throughout this book…

YOU HAVE TO CREATE RELATIONSHIPS!!!

Creating relationships is possibly the most important thing I can say.

And guess what? This is where I lacked the most in my internet marketing efforts. I had never been much of a socializer and therefore I didn’t create many relationships, but now that I have realized the importance of it, I have found relationships to bring me the most happiness and success.

And really, when it comes down to it, the most important thing inside or outside of business is our relationships with others. Right?

3) Have a plan:

Why a plan?

Because you have to know where you plan on going in order for you to get there.

You don’t go on vacation to a new place you have never been to before without getting the directions first do you? You have a plan to get there!

This is even more important in a business. A plan is REQUIRED!

And you can’t just say I plan on being successful.

You have to be specific!

You have to have a plan on making it happen. The plan might have to change in one way or another along the way, but you still have to start out with a plan.

For example, for the first few years as an online marketer my plan was simple; to put up as many web sites as I could and market as many products as I could so that I could earn as much money as possible.

I figured out what I needed to do in order to make that happen and I did it. And guess what? It paid off really well for me. As a matter of fact, a lot of the work that I did then is still earning me money.

So, in order to achieve your ultimate goal and have the success that you know is yours to have, then you must have a plan…

I’ll say it again…

If you really, really want the success that you say you do and plan on reaching your ultimate goal… YOU CAN!

But you MUST have a plan!

Think about it. See the end goal of what you want before you start. Think it through and write it out.

An example business plan might be something like this:

A) Find a Product
B) Get Traffic
C) Capture Emails
D) Product Pages
E) Email List for Future Sales

Now that would be an overall business plan. You would find a product to promote, get traffic or visitors to come to your webpage, on your product page you could capture your visitors name and email addresses, and then you can create a relationship with them through emails resulting in many more sales over the course of time.

There are many different ways to go about it. That was just a sample business plan.

For instance, lots of people prefer to send their traffic to a squeeze page to capture their visitors email information. Others prefer to send them to a page with a drop in form for the people to fill out to join their newsletter. And others would rather send them to a webpage with a form on the side of the page that allows the visitors to join a newsletter or ezine if they choose to do so.

Lots of people insist on one way or the other being the best way to do it. I say that you have to test yourself and find out which way is best for you and your product.

However, we will discuss that more later.

For the moment let’s act as though the above example is our plan. In that case you would still need to break each step into lots of smaller steps to create your entire business plan.

Let’s sort of do that here:

And yet that list could be broken down even further such as creating a keyword list, creating pay-per-click accounts with ads and campaigns, posting the articles in article directories, and on and on and on.

Now I’m not trying to overwhelm you.

I just want you to see the importance of having a plan!

You can’t just jump into something blindly and expect everything to go wonderfully. But with a plan you can evaluate each step and see what is the most important things that should be taken care of first and so on.

And just so you know, I am going to simplify it by giving you a simple five step plan that you can use over and over again.

But as with anything, I encourage you to modify it and make it yours because there is no one size fits all theory. And by trying different things you will find things that work for you that may not work for others.

4) Build my list

Ok, you may already know what I mean by building a list, but just in case let me clarify. When I say “build my list” I am simply referring to building a list of subscribers… people that have visited my web site and signed up for my newsletter or ezine.

Building a list of subscribers is not mandatory to your online success, but it is a very smart online strategy. The reason why I say that is because it is much easier to market to people that you have a relationship with than it is to market to
a complete stranger.

Moreover, it is much easier to market to people that you have already done business with before than it is to attract new visitors to your website every day.

I have heard and read for years the saying, “having a list is the most important thing”, and yet again I have heard it said, “the money is in the list”.

However, for my first 4 years I did not build a list at all! Well actually I did have people to sign up for a newsletter from one of my sites, but in a 2 or 3 year span I only wrote them a handful of times.

But… since I didn’t utilize the strategy of a list, I was leaving money on the table.

The reason being, it is a fact that it takes most people being exposed to a product six or seven times before they actually buy the product. And if you just so happen to be number 3 in the sequence, then you may have lost that sale
forever!

However, if they happened to sign up for your newsletter, then you could provide them with more information about your product or service thereby positioning yourself as the expert in this field. And then, when they get ready to purchase, it is most likely they will buy from you because they trust you.

Another advantage of having a list of subscribers is not only will you have the opportunity to sell them your initial product, but you can market to them and sell to them over and over and over again… sometimes for years down the road.

You see, when you write your subscribers on a regular basis, you are building a “Relationship” with them. And it’s just a fact that people will buy from people they know and trust before they buy from a total stranger.

Let me repeat here what I said above because this is of high importance!

You want to create a “RELATIONSHIP” with the people on your list.

For instance, your main purpose and goal should be to help those on your list in anyway that you can. You want to always be thinking… how can I be of service and help to you. If you do that, then when you present them with an offer, many of them will buy from you because we have created a relationship.

People value relationships!

5) Seeking The Advise Of Others

This is a very important aspect of internet marketing and one that you have already taken advantage of by buying this ebook.

For instance, in my case when I started out I had Rusty there for me who showed me everything from beginning to end, but not only that, every time I had a problem I would call him up and he would help me out.

One thing I know for sure, I might could have studied and figured out how to do what I do if I had gotten lucky and ran across the right material. But it is much better and easier to get help from someone that is already a success at it.

I have found out in more than one instance that by getting the right help you can save hours, days, months or even years that you would have spent trying to figure out what they could show you in a minimal amount of time.

There are other ways that I also suggest you seek out the advise of others. The first two cost nothing and are highly effective ways for getting traffic to your website (which we will talk about later) and for getting and giving advise related to a specific product or resource.

A) Forums and Groups
B) Social Networks
C) Seminars

A) Forums and Groups

Forums and groups are free to join and are like communities where people with the same interests hang out and discuss things together. For instance, if I was a guitar player and I wanted to associate with other guitar players, I would go to a community (forum or group) full of guitar players.

If I was an affiliate marketer, and I am, and I wanted to see what other affiliate marketers were doing and talking about I would go to a forum full of affiliate marketers.

By joining one of these communities you can ask questions, answer questions and discuss different subjects together. You can find answers to pretty much anything pertaining to your subject and you can see the latest things that everyone is talking about in that particular industry.

If something is changing or if there is a new way of doing things, other marketers in the forums are going to be talking about it.

B) Social Networks

Social networks, like forums and groups are free to join. They are websites like MySpace, Facebook and FriendWise. There are many others as well and these go right along with the same principal as forums and groups.

People hang out in social networks for the sole purpose of creating relationships and talking with other people that have the same interests as themselves such as affiliate marketing in this case. And just by talking with other affiliate marketers you will learn of things they do that you don’t and vice-versa.

C) Seminars

Seminars on the other hand are not free but are highly recommended whenever you can attend. Lots of the people that you meet at seminars you will see again and again if you attend many of them because these people go mainly for the relationships that they build there… and that is invaluable.

Also, besides the relationships that you will build, you will also learn of the latest strategies that other internet marketers are using to explode their businesses and which you may have never heard of unless you were there.

Sometimes these things that you learn could possibly even DOUBLE your business or more in a very short time… sometimes almost overnight.

Whenever possible… attending seminars are a must!

6 Ways How to Build Your Content

Mr Success — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:00:01 +0000

I write almost all the content for my own sites – only because I’m a control freak. If I were smarter, I would outsource most of my writing and take more holidays! ? So, don’t worry if you are not a writer. There are 6 options for content development, 4 that don’t involve writing. Each is discussed in greater detail in this section.

1. Create Your Own Content

I like to write. Actually, I really enjoy writing. When people ask me what I do for a living, I don’t say that I’m an affiliate marketer. I tell them that I’m a writer (or a blogger), and then I explain how I make money from my writing as an affiliate marketer.

The best thing about writing your own site content is that you can inject your personality and create your own brand. You can portray yourself as funny, curmudgeonly or sweet – it’s up to you. In time, your visitors start to recognize your ‘voice.’ If they like you, they look forward to hearing more of what you have to say.

Eventually you build rapport with your readers and develop friendships through your correspondence. That, more than commissions, is what makes this business so sweet.

2. Hire a Ghostwriter

If you are allergic to writing, then hire a ghostwriter through Elance or Rentacoder as so many webmasters do. The screenshot below shows 356 job postings returned on Elance when I searched for “articles”. Note some of the subjects include time management, fitness, relationship, etc.

3. Buy Resale & Private Label Rights

You can buy articles, ebooks, and reports, etc. with private label rights – meaning you buy the right to use the content in almost any manner you choose.

Note: Most PLR sites specify that they do not want the content re-posted on article directories, so check the terms and conditions carefully before you purchase.

Typically content is supplied as unformatted text files or Word documents, to which you can add or modify content, including the title and authors name… meaning you can put your own name on the article.

PLR packages are quite inexpensive compared to ghostwritten articles, with most articles averaging 10 to 20 cents a piece.

Consider using the first paragraph or two of each article in your autoresponder series and include a link to the complete article on your site to bring your visitors back to your site.

4. Obtain Works in the Public Domain

Public domain works are books, poems and articles for which the copyright has expired and therefore have NO copyright protection, meaning that anyone can copy, modify and use or sell them.

Once you modify a public domain work it becomes your property. The modified work receives an automatic copyright just like it would if it were an original work.

5. Use Other Authors’ Content

GoArticles.com, EzineArticles.com and a number of other article directories allow you to use the material that authors post to those sites, free of charge. The stipulation is that you will respect authors’ guidelines and those of the article directory managers. In almost all cases, authors require that you place their resource box at the bottom of the article, which invariably includes a link back to their site.

Therein lies the drawback, however. That link out of your site is not usually an affiliate link, and I don’t recommend that you post any ‘leaky’ links (links that don’t make you money) on your site.

You’re much better off using PLR articles which you can claim as your own and have no linking requirements.

6. Repurpose Your Content

Repurposing content means taking content that you have created – or paid to have developed for you – and using it in a different way.

By repurposing your content and creating new formats for your material, you can extend your reach and increase the size of your audience. Those who read your newsletter but not the articles on your site will derive the benefit of the information in that article which before resided only on your site.

Here are 6 ideas for ways to reuse your content:

2. Articles can be recorded to audio files and uploaded to your site for those who would rather listen than read.

3. Articles can be combined into a report, booklet or full-scale ebook and offered as incentive to sign up for your newsletter. You could also turn them into paid content!

4. Turn your autoresponder series into a downloadable report.

5. Interview experts in your field and upload the audio to your site. Have the audio transcribed and turned into an ebook or a series of articles. Use quotes from the transcripts in a variety of different articles.

6. Modify your content to suit different audiences. For example, an article entitled “6 Strategies for Successful Online Dating” could easily be re-written as “6 Online Dating Mistakes to Avoid.”

Use your imagination to find new and different ways to reuse your existing material.

Not only will you increase your reach and your profits, but you’ll also save time in the process!

How to Optimize Your Blog Content

17 Benefits of Being an Affiliate

Mr Success — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:53:57 +0000

When I started my affiliate business, I knew nothing of the benefits of working as an affiliate, nor did I even think to consider them. In retrospect however, I’m thrilled that I chose the affiliate marketing path primarily because of the benefits.

No Production Costs

Low Cost Set-up

No Fees or Licenses

Sell Almost Anything

No Sales Experience Required

No Employees

No Merchant Accounts

No Inventory

No Order-Processing

No Shippin

No Customer Service

Make Money While You Sleep

Worldwide Marketplace

Work from Home

Work Anywhere in the World

Minimal Ris

High Income Potential

That’s why affiliates LOVE affiliate marketing.

With my almost insatiable wanderlust, my favorite thing about affiliate marketing is the ability to work anywhere I am in the world.

What will yours be?

How to Brainstorm Your Best Niche for Affiliate Success

Mr Success — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:12:48 +0000

Do what you love and the money will follow.

If you don’t already have specific ideas about what you might like to sell, consider the following questions and suggestions carefully. It will soon become clear that you are more inclined towards some avenues than others.

Do you feel especially passionate about any subject in particular?
Are you an expert in anything?
Do you have hobbies or interests that you pursue regularly?
Are you active in a sport?
Ask your friends and family what they think you might be especially good at doing.
What have you learned from your jobs, hobbies and general life experience? Do a skills and knowledge assessment.
What problems have you solved in the past?

Brainstorm as many ideas as you can. Look at the following list. Are you knowledgeable in one or more of the following subjects?

Did that list spark any ideas?

Here’s another list. It’s Commission Junction’s merchant category list. There are products and services in each of the categories that can be sold by affiliates.

Accessories – Cosmetics/Fragrance, Handbags, Jewelry – Shoes
Art/Photo/Music – Art, Music, Photo
Automotive – Cars & Trucks, Motorcycles, Parts & Accessories, Rentals, Tools and Supplies
Books/Media – Audio Books, Books, Magazines, News, Television, Videos/Movies
Business – Business-To-Business, Marketing, Office, Productivity Tools, Travel
Careers – Employment, Military
Clothing/Apparel – Children’s, Malls, Men’s, Women’s
Commerce – Auction, Classifieds, E-commerce solutions/providers, New/Used Goods, Telephone services, Utilities
Computer & Electronics – Computer HW, Computer Support, Computer SW, Consumer Electronics, Peripherals
Education – Children, College, Languages, Professional
Entertainment – Memorabilia
Family – Babies, Children, Entertainment, Teens, Weddings
Financial services – Banking/Trading, Credit Cards, Investment, Loans, Real Estate Services
Food & Drinks – Gourmet, Groceries, Restaurants, Tobacco, Wine & Spirits
Games & Toys – Electronic Toys, Games, Toys
Gifts & Flowers – Care Packages, Collectibles, Flowers, Gifts, Greeting Cards
Health & Beauty – Bath & Body, Cosmetics, Health Food, Nutritional Supplements, Pharmaceuticals, Self Help, Vision Care, Wellness
Home & Garden – Bed & Bath, Construction, Furniture, Garden, Home Appliances, Kitchen, Pets, Real Estate, Utilities
Insurance – Commercial, Personal Insurance
Legal – Services
Marketing – Business-to-Business, Network Marketing
Medical – Equipment
Phonecard Services – Online/Wireless
Recreation & Leisure – Astrology, Betting/Gaming, Communities, Events, Matchmaking, New Age, Outdoors, Party Goods
Shops/Malls – Virtual Malls
Sports & Fitness – Exercise & Health, Professional Sports Organizations, Sports, WaterSports
Travel – Accessories, Air, Car, Hotel, Luggage, Vacation
Web Services – Advice, Banner ads, Domain Registrations, Email Marketing, Internet Service Providers, Intranets, Search Engine, Web Design, Web Hosting/Servers, Web Tools

You will spend many hours developing, nurturing and maintaining your business. It’s therefore important to choose a subject that you are keen to pursue if you want to succeed.

Make a list of all the topics that make you smile or cause your heart to beat quicker when you think about them. Don’t concern yourself whether or not there’s a market for your topic yet, just make your list. I’ll cover how to research demand for your topic in the following chapters.

So, for example, your list of interests may look like this:

wine and wine making
running
Asian cooking
golf
Internet marketing
motivational methods
teddy bears
singles and dating
shawls & wraps
cats
yoga

15 Fabulous Reasons to Affiliate

Mr Success — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:40:43 +0000

There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own homebased Internet business. Let’s look at 15 of the best.

1. No Production Costs – The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren’t an issue. The product has been developed and proven – all on the merchant’s nickel.

2. Low Cost Set-up – Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need.

3. No Fees or Licenses – I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate’s ability to promote his web site.

4. Sell Almost Anything – What isn’t sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site.

5. No Sales Experience Required – When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

6. No Employees – Employee salaries are the biggest business expense. Although you may need or want someone to work for you on occasion, you’ll never have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees while working as an affiliate marketer. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employeerelated benefits and deductions.

7. No Merchant Accounts – Setting up a merchant account is time-consuming and costly. However, affiliate marketers don’t need merchant account. Merchants bear all the costs for payment processing. As an affiliate, you’ll never lose sleep over chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account.

8. No Inventory – As an affiliate marketer, you can sell large items without storage concerns, even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment.

9. No Order-Processing – Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that!

10. No Shipping – The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates.

11. No Customer Service – Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don’t worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers.

12. Make Money While You Sleep – What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night?

13. Worldwide Marketplace – The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than a small-town merchant will sees in his or her brick and mortar business in a year.

14. Minimal Risk – The product you chose isn’t making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It’s that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don’t sell.

15. High Income Potential – If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there’s not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination.

No other business is so inexpensive to start yet offers such high profit potential without investing years of labor.

How To Succeed Online As An Affiliate For Under $100 – Part 11

Mr Success — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:00:48 +0000

Step 10 – Reinvest Profits for Future Growth

Although success in any venture is never guaranteed, the nine steps outlined above are a proven formula that has worked online for years.

Once your site produces a profit, take half of that profit and reinvest it in your success. Keep a journal of your progress and look for places where a small investment of money would yield a large return of free time. Boost your pay-per-click budget. Go from one solo ad a week to three.

By reinvesting half your profits consistently you will reap a true reward in the way of more customers, more profitable sites, more of what you hoped for when you began reading this report.

While the years ahead will undoubtedly bring change, the most proven path to success for people starting a new Internet business will be as an affiliate for other people.

Mastering the basics of Internet marketing is the key to success online. And you now have a roadmap to chart that success for yourself.

Let me encourage you to use these steps to create a series of successful sites, all earning a regular income. When this happens for you, you will experience a level of freedom unknown before, as well as a peace of mind from knowing that your sites, well established and profitable, are creating a dependable and steady passive income that no longer requires your involvement.

And that is a beautiful thing!

My best hope for you is that you achieve what I call ever-expanding success.

My hope is that this ten-step formula helps you achieve that and more!

How To Succeed Online As An Affiliate For Under $100 – Part 10

Mr Success — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:00:13 +0000

Step 9 – Get Traffic From Search Engines

So far you have selected a great product, have your own site, have a resource page, are offering visitors a gift and following up with them. You’ve done well!

Now it’s time to list your site with the search engines.

The Search Engine Optimization business is confusing to say the least. It’s all too easy to find sites that offer us that juicy “top 10 position” if we will only pay them a fee.

WARNING: These are often a scam. Do NOT give them your money!

There are some very legitimate things you can do to improve your search engine position and begin getting some traffic from surfers interested in the topic of your site.

Best of all, they won’t cost you a dime. Here are three things you can do today to help your site get noticed.

Register with the search engines for free. So many people skip this step, focusing instead on quick fixes like software programs or “cloakers” that offer temporary results at best.

The thing to do is to submit your site to Google, Yahoo and the DMOZ yourself, and then let time and the quality of your site improve your ratings.

While this is a very basic step (you will want to do more in time) it’s a great place to start, especially if you do not have spare money to spend on books, membership sites, or software for search engine positioning.

You can submit to Google here

You can submit to Yahoo here

You can submit to the DMOZ here

Keep the content on your site current. Search engines love content that changes. Add new products to your resource page and change the wording on your home page once a week and you will do well with most search engines.

Ask for meaningful reciprocal links. While you could spend hundreds on programs like Arelis or Zeus, and spend huge amounts of time as well, using common sense as you surf will pay huge dividends and cost you nothing.

As you travel the Internet, stay on the lookout for sites that compliment your site. When you find one, take a moment to dash off an email proposing that you link to them and they link to you. Then let time become your ally as you build a list of links that really mean something, the type of link-backs that search engines respect, and reward with higher rankings.

Best of all, each of these techniques is effective … and free!