Will You Locate Or Create?

One of the main decisions you’ll make when starting an internet business, or even developing an internet business is “should I locate or create?”

What do I mean?

When I refer to locate, I am referring to searching for a product to offer to your market as a partner. When I refer to create, I am referring to the creative process or creating a digital product to offer to your market and the list of an army of affiliates and JV partners that you have on board.

Affiliate Marketing

The process of locating other online marketer’s digital products and matching them to highlyqualified traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s possible to unearth products that are suitable for your niche, offer them and make a full time income from the commissions alone.

The process of affiliate marketing involves starting out with doing some market research. This involves finding a group of people that are willing and able to spend money on whatever it is you’re going to offer. The selected market should have a good level of disposable income and the projected requirement for your products should ideally be growing as opposed to declining so you can grow a business which has a high degree of sustainability and longevity.

Once you’ve made your decision on your target niche, you will want to discover out where they ‘hang out’.

What forums do they visit? What are their favourite sites? What email lists are they on? These type of questions will enable you to put together a customer profile of the people you’re serving. From here, what are their desires, their fears, their needs, their wants.

Once you assemble a customer profile of a typical customer in your niche, then you’ll need to uncover what products they’re looking for to solve their problems. This is not always the same as the solutions that you consider they need for you to resolve their problems. People will often pay money for things they want rather than for things that they need.

Once you understand your customer well including their entire psychology, then you will be able to market more effectively to them. You will understand the things you need to communicate for your customers to take the desired action. This persuasion should always come from a place of service rather than a place of deceit.

Then you’ll need to look for a valuable product that you would like to offer to your customers to assist them in their own mission for internet success. The acid test you should use when assessing whether or not you want to promote a product is “would I put my own name on that product?” and “does it deliver value over and above its asking price?” If the answer to both of those questions is “yes”, then you can consider that it is OK for you to refer others to it.

The next stage is to drive traffic from one place in the internet to your affiliate offer. Most affiliate offers take the form of sales pages where the desired action for both the product owner and affiliate is for the prospect to order the product which of course results in a sale and a commission for the affiliate.

Nowadays, CPA marketing is gaining some momentum with internet marketing newcomers and seasoned professionals alike being attracted to it because it offers the opportunity to make lots of small sales because the action attached to the commission is usually something much smaller for a payment to be released. These desired actions from the CPA networks are often capturing email addresses, registering an account, taking part in questionnaires or other suchlike actions that can be easily measured with online tools. The advertisers are willing to pay per lead because they understand the lifetime values of their customers.

The next stage of marketing as an affiliate is traffic. There are literally thousands of ways of
generating traffic which is beyond the scope of this article, however you should bear in mind the questions to ask yourself that I spoke of earlier. Where do my market hang out? This is where you need to be relationship building and posting your links.

Product Creation

This process is much more difficult than marketing as an affiliate but is also much more rewarding. I admit that could be a matter of opinion depending on what you want from an internet business and the amount of effort that you want to put in for your business. If you enjoy creativity and teaching or training others how to do things, you’ll love this process.

The process of product creation requires you to:

- Find a need in the marketplace which you can solve, and crucially, which other people believe you to be able to solve.
- Create a digital product that is a solution to the problem that you are solving.

Contrary to popular belief, you’ll be marketing a solution NOT just offering a product. There is a massive difference and if you can grasp the fact that you’re marketing solutions and not just products, then you’ll be light years ahead of the high majority of people out there in the internet marketing game. When you market solutions, you’ll need to communicate the benefits of the solution, the pleasure that the solution will provide and the pain that the solution will save your market from. This may take the form of:

- an eBook which is usually a simple PDF document that contains valuable textual information.
– a series of audio recordings that[spin] can be a spoken version of [spin]an eBook. It could also be recordings of interviews. A tool like Pamela with Skype is a common choice with the internet marketing community.
– screen capture recordings which can be quite simply be produced using video screen capture tools like Camtasia Studio.
– a membership area that offers time sensitive and high quality information that serves your market on a continual basis. A membership site can be easily produced using WordPress with a plugin called WishList Member.
- Make a minisite complete with web graphics, excellent sales copy, powerful testimonials and a rock solid money back guarantee.
- Create an affiliates area complete with promotional tools to make it as simple and inviting for the partner to drive traffic to your product. You should remember that you are positioning your solution alongside other product owners for the attention of your affiliates, and therefore their traffic sources. The more tools and training you provide, the easier you make it for your affiliates and the more likely
they will be to promote your product.
- Go through a pre-launch sequence for both the sale of the product and for affiliate recruitment. This process involves raising awareness and anticipation for the offer as well as finding people that wish to partner with you for a share of the profits from the product’s sales.
- Find JV partners in your own network to promote your product.
- Set up a customer service system for returns and possible customer queries.

OK, even after that little list of activities to do during the product creation process and launch phase, there are still other things that must be done. The starting point that you must consider is whether you actually want to go through the process of creating your own product.

Affiliate marketing can be profitable enough if you can master the art of generating traffic. Product creation is mainly more lucrative when you have a list of JV partners, some credibility for your offer, an army of affiliates helping and you’ve gone through the launch sequence effectively.

Whichever method you decide, make sure you have the fundamentals in place. Does the market have money that they’re ready to spend on the solution you’re offering? Is the market expanding with a promising long term future outlook?

Obtain helpful information about free traffic – please make sure to study the web page. The times have come when concise info is really only one click of your mouse, use this chance.