Make the first cut – Taking Action in Internet Marketing

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One of the phrases that you will hear over and over again as you start in the business of making money online is “Take Action”. If your chosen guru has had any experience of training others to succeed, they will probably repeat the phrase many times as you listen to them.

Why is that? Simply because the vast majority of people stepping out into a new life are feeling ever so slightly as if they are out of their comfort zone. That feeling of being adrift in a sea of possibilities allows our natural, human inertia to take over and as a result NOTHING HAPPENS!

I am as guilty of this as everyone else. I dithered over sorting out my first domain name, I tiptoed around the idea of having my own hosting account and even now, I am prevaricating over setting up a proper public company (here in the UK), to get all my legal and financial steps in order.

Now, as I was thinking about this post, I was reminded of what you might call a “life-situation” that happened to me just last week. The year has been pretty harsh so far, with a period of being out of work and my mother dying all at the same time. However, I am finally getting her house sorted out for sale and that is where my blinding insight comes from – well, maybe not blinding, see what you think!

As I was sorting out the flooring in the rather small kitchen, I had to put down some new floor covering (lino as we used to call it back in the Twentieth century).  The trouble was, that I had to buy a wider, longer piece than I needed and then cut it to size, around all of the cupboard and pipes that were already there. Imagine, if you will, a tiny space where the roll could stick out through two doors at one end of the room and then everything getting narrower and narrower towards the other end of the kitchen.

This left me with a strange origami-type problem, with folds and curves in every bit of the new covering (while trying not to crease it).

As I sat there in dismay, I realised that I had to make the first cut with my knife to just make it fit the length of the room. Not so bad to start with, as I could drag a bit down to cover my mistakes if it all went wrong, but as I got to the cupboards, cutting in and out of the shapes around them, I reached a point where there was no way out. I looked at it twice, then folded and cut (and swore slightly as it wasn’t 100% perfect!) and I was committed.

From that point on, I couldn’t turn back without buying a whole new piece of covering and I put everything I had into making it as good a fit as an amateur flooring expert could manage. Now, if I look at it and ask myself if it is a perfect solution to my potential customer’s flooring needs, I would have to say it’s probably only 95% there. However, if I ask myself if it provides a new, clean platform for them to work with when they first move in and if it is better then the existing solution then I have a real success on my hands.

And there in a nutshell is the reality of what we do when we take risks. Try to create something that helps your customers and is better than anything they have ever seen and they will be grateful for your assistance. They may help you to spot holes in your work and potentially your next attempt will be even better as a result…..that’s just called practice.

My next step here is to get you the materials you need to get started as a “newbie” IM expert and my commitment is that I will be out of my comfort zone with a new UK Ltd company before my next post.

So, your turn, get out out there and cut that lino!  Get involved, comment, join me on twitter or facebook, whatever, but make a start today.

Create Nothing! – Affiliate Marketing Explored

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The third main route to internet cash is intimately tied in with the last. Affiliate marketing flips the idea of product selling on its head.

Rather than creating your own product and making it available through Clickbank with all the perceived difficulty of making your own material, you could take the products already created by someone else and sell them for a cut of the profit.

Now, Clickbank is not the only game in town here. Amazon is a company that most are familiar with and they run an affiliate program of their own. Interestingly, they will credit you with a share of any sale made whenever you send someone in their direction. So, for example, your link may target a very specific product on Amazon but if the customer then browses the shop and buys other items, you share in the commission for those products as well.

At this point you can also get involved with other affiliate programs that “drop-ship” real, physical items to customers. The main marketplace for finding this kind of program is Commission Junction, where you will find campaigns run by end vendors for hundreds of different kinds of product. Commisssion Junction have a rating system, so be careful to stick  with those with a good reputation here. In fact, the products here are so varied, that you may find exactly what you need to become a full-time online vendor of one particular kind of goods – effectively creating a standard e-commerce website. If that is your passion, CJ may be just what you need.

The biggest complaint about affiliate marketing is not that you can’t make any money, many affiliates prove that wrong every day. No, it is the idea that you do all the hard work of generating traffic and then you give your potential customers names and email addresses straight to the final vendor. For some people this is acceptable, but for others, the idea of building a list of real buyers is the main reason for generating traffic. In this case, going back to having your own products is really the way forwards.