There are many ways of making money on the internet. The best way (that I know of) is to sell your own products and services.
That, of course, assumes that you have your own products and services to sell. If you are just starting out, there is a good chance that you don’t have any of your own stuff to sell just yet. So what can you do in that case?
The answer is to sell other people’s products for a commission. That’s called Affiliate Marketing. Bear in mind that Affiliate Marketing is not Multi-Loser-Marketing. There is a critical difference between AM and MLM, namely, you can reliably make pretty good money with Affiliate Marketing, and about the only thing that 98% of MLM participants get is membership in the NFL (No Friends Left) club.
One of the things the typical beginner in Affiliate Marketing will do is locate a product he or she thinks is interesting, then build a “mini-site” around it, and try to get either free (SEO) or paid traffic to it. This is basically a crap-shoot. Following this recipe might get you some income, but is more likely to cost you money (want to know how I know?). This is precisely the recipe recommended by Google with their AdWords product. You want to know why Google promotes this approach? It’s not because it will make you money, but because it makes them a fortune.
It really is possible to make a very good living with Affiliate Marketing, if you avoid some of the common pitfalls. How do you avoid those pitfalls? I’m glad you asked.
I know remember who said this, but a smart man makes mistakes, learns from them, and doesn’t repeat them. The wise man, on the other hand, finds a smart man, studies his mistakes, and avoids making them the first time.
At this point, it’s time to introduce you to my second “guru,” Sarah Staar. If you’ve have been following my posts, you have already been introduced to my first “guru,” Martin Avis. Martin is the person who introduced me to Sarah, and I’m very grateful to have had that introduction.
I’ve already mentioned some of Sarah’s products, some of which are free, and others which are very inexpensive. All of them contain valuable information.
Sarah is a very interesting person who overcame some pretty severe handicaps to achieve the success that she has now. She is the daughter of two violin teachers, but she had enormous trouble with her own music study. Years later, she was diagnosed as dyslexic, which is probably why she had so much trouble with the violin.
Like many other beginning Affiliate Marketers, she started out with exactly the recipe that I described above, except that she added a bit of market research to the mix, which enabled her to make some pretty decent money right from the start. But because of her dyslexia, she skipped one of the most important steps in building an internet business. Skipping that step cost her dearly.
But she did not give up. Being a smart woman, she learned from her mistakes, and gained the wisdom to study other people in the business to avoid making new ones (well, mostly – if you aren’t making mistakes, it’s probably because you aren’t accomplishing anything, which is probably the biggest mistake you can make).
She went on to achieve a high 6-figure income from just Affiliate Marketing, and it remains her favorite form of Internet marketing even now that she is selling her own products.
Sarah has just recently introduced a course called Affiliate Formula X, in which she goes over in detail the best ways to make money with Affiliate Marketing. The course sells for $197.
Whoa! Did I just hear moaning? $197 spent on Affiliate Formula X will save you many hundreds of dollars, and more importantly, it will save you several months of learning from your own mistakes. If you really can’t afford $197 for this course, you probably need to be in a different business.
One of the things I have learned from my own experience is that trying to “poor-boy” your way through this business actually costs more than just setting a budget and working on getting the most for your money. I started with a budget of $1000 — and that worked quite well for me (I have in the past spent many times that amount to start a business, and lost nearly all of it!). Out of that $1000, you have probably already spent $130 or so just on getting your domain name and hosting service (along with Blogging 201, but that was only $4). If you got the right kind of hosting, you have spent a bit over $250 already. If you do it right, you will get that $1000 back in 3-4 months, after which you will have a decent and growing income.
I have personally spent about $600 on Sarah’s products. And I have gotten solid value for my money.
If you are really convinced that you can’t part with $197 right now, you can click on the photo of Sarah above to sign up for a completely FREE course from Sarah, so that you can get a sample of her teaching style, and the value of her information. But I’m serious about that $1000 starting budget. That’s actually a pretty modest budget for starting a business, and if you haven’t got that much to invest, you need to start working on getting it together, even if that means just getting a “real” job and saving it up. Granted there are some methods available for starting an Internet marketing business with much less money, but you will basically be trading a lot of time for that “saving.”
If you are on the fence about that $197, here are two incentives for you: 1) It comes with a money-back guarantee. If you decide you don’t like it, you can get a 100% no-questions-asked refund. 2) The sooner you join, the sooner you can attend the free mastermind sessions that come with the course. The next live session (as I write this) is Wednesday, March 12th. I will be on that call myself.
So do it now! Here is the link again: Affiliate Formula X
