Why Affiliate Marketing is Superior to MLM

As you may or may not know, I am personally against any and all form of MLM (multilevel marketing), but proponents of it often ask what other opportunity is there to make money online besides through this method? The answer is affiliate marketing and in my honest opinion/experience, I feel this alternative is far better. 

What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting someone else’s product through your website/email/social network. With affiliate marketing, you are essentially a middleman. Here’s how this works in the most basic example:

People look for things on the internet, often products/services. They hop onto places like Google and do a search for such things. If you own a website which appears to these people and they visit it, you can sell them something related to their interest. What you sell is a product/service and you act as an affiliate, meaning if they buy it through you, then you earn a commission.

Example:

• Someone looks for ways to stop their dog from barking, so they hop on Google. 
• Your site appears and they decide to visit it in hopes of finding an answer to their problem.
• Your site shows them ways to help dogs stop barking, as well as promotes a book on disciplining dogs.
• They like the information you have to offer and decide to buy the book you are promoting. 
• Once they buy the book from your site, you earn a commission. 
• Now take that person and multiply it by the hundreds, thousands and many more who also look for similar things on a weekly basis, then multiply the potential to earn money from these people and you have yourself the potential of a strong online business.

Here are some pros of affiliate marketing:
You can sell pretty much ANYTHING as an affiliate. One of the most popular ways affiliates make money online is through product reviews. Since there’s millions of different products available online, there are also millions of different opportunities to promote them.

Generally if you do things correctly, you don’t really have to sell much since people already know what they want. As an affiliate, you just make it easier for them to buy it, thus there’s no typical sales process necessary. 

Cons of affiliate marketing:
1. In 99.9% of cases, you need to have fundamental things in place before you become a successful internet marketing: 

• A niche.
• A website.
• Traffic (visitors).

This takes time to amass, but once you do, the rewards and profits can come in on autopilot. Get training on how to do this properly.

What is multilevel marketing? 
Also known as MLM, this is a business model which in has similarities to affiliate marketing, but goes deeper and grey area territory as far as I’m concerned. MLM in general is a process of marketing in which you usually get people to sign up to a program you’re promoting.

The more people you sign up, the more you can make in commissions. In that sense, it works exactly like affiliate marketing, but one key difference is this:

If the people you refer start to refer others into the business, you can make money of those secondary referrals. Now on paper this may seem like a much more profitable opportunity than affiliate marketing, but as you’ll find out in the cons, theory and realism are 2 different things. 

The pros of multilevel marketing:
1. Considering you are either a VERY good salesman or have a large list of leads at your disposal, you can make a lot of money through referring people into an MLM. This is something most people lack and thus fail in the business (among other reasons).

2. You can potentially make a lot of money with an MLM vs affiliate marketing.

The cons of multilevel marketing:
1. Generally, many MLM programs get a bad rep because often times they are accused of being pyramid schemes. mlm pyramid scheme

2. It is VERY difficult to sell an MLM program/product to someone. Unlike in affiliate marketing where people come to you, with MLM programs, generally you come to them and it is VERY rare that you can sell an idea to someone. Most of the time, people are sold on a business idea of how they can make a lot of money through an MLM, only to find out the hard way it’s just a dream.

3. Many MLM programs come and go (often because they are pyramid schemes) so it is very difficult to find stability. Even if you have a strong list of people who follow you everywhere you go, it’s difficult to keep hopping from one MLM to another and maintaining credibility within your list’s eyes, at least from my point of view. They are however people who keep doing this and make a very successful living doing so. I am personally not for that sort of business because I feel it is basically a wild goose chase for many.

4. There are a lot of MLM programs which have their own products to sell to others. They recruit people, sell them these products and allow them to re-sell it. Usually the process of re-selling is difficult in my experience because the products being sold have other competitors on the market, often times more popular, making it even more difficult to sell.

Affiliate marketing vs MLM. And the winner is…
I have to say affiliate marketing. I have tried MLM before and did not succeed. What I can absolutely say without a doubt is this:

If you want to succeed in either industry, I suggest doing it online and if that’s the case to get proper training on doing so. Personally I advise against getting involved with MLM’s because I feel they are more difficult to sell to people, not to mention their business model can be VERY questionable. 

With affiliate marketing, there is massive potential to not only make a lot of money, but also genuinely help people as well as materialize a success online business which is built upon YOUR personal passion. 

I know I am a bit biased towards MLM programs, so if you agree/disagree with my position on this, let me know in the comments section below!


Source: http://howtomakehonestmoneyonline.com/why-affiliate-marketing-is-superior-to-mlm

You Only Need These 3 Things to Be an Entrepreneur

Do you have the skills to become an Online Passive Income Entrepreneur?

Earning Multiple Streams of Income

How to Create Additional Sources of Income in Your Home Business

I first came across the concept of multiple streams of income in Barbara Winter’s book, Making a Living Without a Job, in which she recommends creating multiple profit centers. Robert Allen, the real estate entrepreneur, also wrote a couple books promoting the idea of multiple streams of income. Creating more than one income stream sounds overwhelming, after all, you already have one source of work, now you need to create more? The short answer is yes. The benefits of having of several sources of income include:

1. It’s easier to create several small income producing streams over one large one. For example, it’s easier to create three streams that earn $1,000 than one stream that earns $3,000.

2. It reduces the risk of being left without any income. If you’re laid off or one source of income drops, you have other sources to help you get by. Especially in home business, which has an ebb and flow, you can offset the ebbs through having more than one source of income.

3. It helps you avoid boredom in work by having different things to do every day.

4. You can create income streams based on your interests, talents and passions.

Of course, there are a few challenges with multiple income streams including:

1. It’s difficult to keep on top of all tasks that need to be done for every income stream.

2. It’s a balancing act to give enough attention to each income stream to keep them growing and profitable. Barbara Winter likens it to plate spinning.

3. The start-up time for each income stream is time and energy consuming.

Even with the challenges, I recommend developing more than one income stream. The easiest way to create multiple income streams is to build streams related to your home business. Here are tips to adding more income streams to your home business.

1. Take out a piece of paper and write your main business product or service in the middle to start a mindmap. If you’re a virtual assistant, you’d write VA in the middle of the paper.

2. Create four spokes titled “Products,” “Services,” “Advertising/Affiliate,” and “Other” off of your main product or service.

3. Create spokes off of each of these options with ideas on how you can make money at them. Earning sources include books, courses, merchandise, coaching, freelancing, speaking, training, selling advertising and affiliate marketing. For example, a virtual assistant can create tangible or digital products, such as books, courses, and videos that teach others how to be a virtual assistant in the “products” spoke. For services, she can offer additional services, coaching or speaking (i.e. How a Virtual Assistant Can Save Businesses Time and Money). Under other, she can expand her business by bringing on contract virtual assistants and become a manager of a VA company. Not all businesses will be able to come up with ideas for each spoke, but every business should be able to develop extra income streams from their home business idea.

4. Focus first on passive income streams that you create once but they continue to generate income. For example, writing a book is a passive income stream. You write it once and sell it over and over. The word passive is a little deceptive because you need to market the book. Nevertheless, compared to non-passive sources of income, which you need to do over and over to make money such as providing a service, passive income streams require less time once they’re created. Other forms of passive income include other written (i.e. courses), audio or video creations, affiliate marketing, licensing your idea, franchising or continuity programs (i.e. memberships).

5. Next, focus on income streams that can expand your business. For example, public speaking or teaching can create additional income, as well as generate new clients.

6. Wait until one income stream is up and running before starting the next. Putting your focus into many areas at once dilute your efforts and slow you down.  

7. Drop an income stream if it isn’t working. You want to give your additional income streams the time and effort needed to get them running, but if they don’t start generating income or if you hate it, drop it. For example, I don’t like having appointments. While I enjoy coaching people, to do so requires appointments, so I don’t do much coaching.

Although adding income streams takes time, creating them within your current business is faster and easier than starting completely new income streams from scratch. This method of generating extra sources of income works well for any size business in any industry. For example, Amazon.com started by selling books. Today it sells thousands of other products including its own product, the Kindle, and is a print and digital publisher. Originally, my website, Work-At-Home Success only provided information and resources about working from home. Today, through the site, I offer ecourses and print and digital books, and I speak in-person and via phone or web to groups all over the world. Plus I sell advertising and promote affiliate programs. With creativity, planning and focus, you create additional sources of income for your business, as well.


Source: http://homebusiness.about.com/od/growing/fl/Making-Multiple-Streams-of-Income.htm

Passive Income

How to Earn More and Work Less

Image: http://www.thetrafficpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bigstock-Passive-Income-8203106.jpg

Do you want to continue working 50, 70, 100 hours a week the rest of your life?
Good! Neither do I.

Do you want to be able to take time off whenever you want to, without worrying about what's going to happen to your business?

So do I!

There's a saying in the corporate world: "Don't make yourself irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted." As an entrepreneur, this is still true in its own way. Let's think of "being promoted" as earning more and working less. You can raise your prices, but until you can remove yourself from being directly involved in doing the work that generates the income, there's always going to be a limit to how much you can earn, and it can only increase very slowly.

Passive income, on the other hand, is income that does not require your direct involvement. Some kinds of passive income you may be familiar with include owning rental property, royalties on an invention or creative work, and network marketing. If you want to earn more, work less, and have a decent retirement, you're going to have to start creating income streams that do not require your direct involvement. Whether you're just starting your business, or you've been running it a while, the sooner you start thinking about how you are going to shift your business model to create more passive income, the sooner you can achieve personal and financial freedom.

Let's look at two basic types of passive income, and a third type of income that, while technically not passive, is a key strategy for earning more and working less.

Residual Income

Residual income is revenue that occurs over time from work done one time. Some examples include:

• An insurance agent who gets commission every year when a customer renews his policy
• A network marketing or direct sales rep's income from her direct customers when they reorder product every month
• An aerobics instructor who produces a video and sells it at the gyms where she teaches
• A marketing consultant who creates a workbook and sells it in e-book format on the Internet
• A photographer who makes his photos available through a stock photography clearinghouse and gets paid a royalty whenever someone buys one of his images
• A restaurant or retail owner who has grown to the point of hiring a trustworthy manager

As you can see, there are many different ways to generate residual income across a wide variety of businesses. It may be recurring income from the same customers, or the sales of a product to new customers. It may require no personal involvement whatsoever, such as an e-book sold on a web site, or it may require some personal interaction, such as the insurance agent calling the customer to remind them about their renewal and ask them if they want to change any of their coverage. Often, it's something that you can delegate to an assistant.
Note that this is different from merely recurring income. Recurring income may still require your involvement to earn the income, e.g., a coach or consultant on a monthly retainer, or a caterer who delivers lunch every Monday to the local school board. While this "active recurring income" offers welcome stability, it also tends to tie you down, and you still have limits on your earning capacity based on your own personal production capacity.

Leveraged Income

Leveraged income leverages the work of other people to create income for you. Some examples of leveraged income include:

• An e-book author selling her e-book through affiliates who promote the product
• A network marketer who builds a downline and receives commissions on the sales made by people in his downline
• A general contractor who makes a profit margin on the work done by sub-contractors
• Franchising your business model to other entrepreneurs (the ultimate leveraged income)

Again, there are many different models in many different businesses. The key is that you are making money off of other people's labor, rather than primarily your own. Note that leveraged income may or may not also be residual income. When you combine them, that's even better.

Active Leveraged Income

This is a term I use to describe income that requires your direct participation, but that you can make more money by having more people involved. This generally involves a one-time event, such as:

• A seminar or class
• A conference or convention
• Concerts and dance recitals
• Raves and other parties

Although these require your direct participation, your earning potential is much higher than if someone were just paying you a direct hourly rate. Fill a room with 1,000 people paying $50 each and you can cover your facility cost, promotional cost, and staffing fees and still have a nice chunk of change left over.

Applying It

Now is the time to think about how to apply this in your business. Can you create a product that people will buy over and over again? Can you engage others to sell your product? How could you make money off the work of others?

The sooner you answer these questions, the sooner you'll have financial and personal freedom.

Source: http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/gettingstarted/a/passiveincome.htm

How to Start an E-mail Marketing Business

Are you interested in starting an email marketing company? Do you need a sample email marketing business plan template? If YES, then I advice you read on.

According to Wikipedia, researchers estimated that about US$1.51 billion was spent on e-mail marketing campaigns by companies in the United States of America in 2011. This amount is also expected to grow to about $2.468 billion by 2016. This shows just how much e-mail marketing is gaining relevance in the business world today.

E-mail marketing involves sending out promotional messages to clients/prospective clients through e-mails. Such messages could be advertisements, updates, brand awareness campaigns or requests.

E-mail marketing seeks to build a relationship between a seller and his clients or to preserve an existing relationship and further build trust and loyalty between a seller and his clients.

What are the types of e-mail marketing services?

• Direct emails

Direct e-mails are sent to promote a particular product or sales offer. Companies who offer e-mail marketing services gather the e-mail addresses of people they wish to send such messages to by buying prospective leads from companies who offer lead generation services. Sometimes, an e-mail marketing company may offer both services.

• Transactional e-mails

Transactional e-mails are sent to complete or confirm a transaction initiated by a client with the sending company. For instance, if a prospective client visits your sales website and fills a registration form asking for further details about a particular product, transactional e-mails would then be sent to such a client to further engage the customer and trigger his interest in the products.

E-mail marketing service companies have become relevant over the years as many companies have discovered their effectiveness and how they can help to increase sales compared to other methods of advertisement.

Most companies would rather outsource their e-mail marketing services to professionals who possess the necessary skills and expertise to achieve an effective e-mail marketing campaign. It would also allow the company focus on other aspects of the business.

You can begin a career in e-mail marketing by starting your own e-mail marketing company. Below is a guide to help you get started.

Starting an Email Marketing Company – Sample Business Plan Template

• Write your business plan

The first step in setting your own e-mail marketing company is to draft your business plan. In your business plan, you should be able to identify your target customers and how you will reach them. You should also identify all the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the business.

• Decide on the services you want to offer

You should also decide on the category of e-mail marketing services you would be offering. E-mail marketing involves several aspects. There are those who specialize in developing good e-mail marketing content that would help to sell products, there are also others who specialize in building e-mail lists and lead generation for their clients.

Therefore, you have to decide on the services that you are willing and able to provide to your clients.

• Observe your competitors

Going into a business like this requires that you carry out a thorough research on the business and those who have been in the business before you.

This would help you understand the opportunities and challenges that exist in the e-mail marketing business. You would also be able to devise means of overcoming those challenges when you start your own business.

• Purchase E-mail Marketing Software

To effectively run your e-mail marketing business, you would need to invest in a very good e-mail marketing software.

E-mail marketing software are used to send bulk e-mails, build e-mail lists for your various clients, develop e-mail marketing content and to track the e-mails sent to see how many were opened and how many were converted to actual sales. E-mail marketing software makes the work faster and easier.

• 5. Determine your prices

The next thing to do is to figure out how much you should charge for your services. You have to take into consideration your business expenses as well as the time and efforts you will invest in your business before coming up with a competitive price that would justify your efforts and expenses.

• Devise a sales and marketing strategy

This is a kind of business that needs effective and strategic marketing. You would need to carefully decide on how you want to promote your services and build a customer base.

• Create a business website

As an e-mail marketer, you can hardly do much without a professionally designed business website. Your website would serve as your landing page where your own clients can check you out. You would also need a good internet service provider and host server that would be able to handle a large volume of data that you would most likely be dealing with.

In conclusion, I want you to know that E-mail marketing is a smart business idea especially now that it is increasingly becoming popular among many companies.

Over the next few years, the usage of e-mail marketing as a means of advertising is expected to rise and you can position your own company to take a large share of the market by starting your own e-mail marketing business now and offering your clients first class services with proven results that would keep them coming back and referring others.


Source: http://www.mytopbusinessideas.com/starting-email-marketing-service/

Happy New Year!

Image source: http://www.anyfoo.com/happy-new-year-2015-hot-colors-on-black-background/

Five Internet Marketing Trends That Will Rock In 2015

In 2014 we all saw that business marketing emerged as a roller coaster ride. There were plenty of new things that people saw such as new platforms, new roles and channels, tools that popped all over the place, etc. Innovation is speeding up and thus we all are surrounded by opportunities now and these can really help businesses in meeting with their potential clients. 2014 is going on in a pretty exciting way and now all are looking forward for 2015.

Here are five trends for 2015 that you would like to have a glimpse of. With these marketing trends people will get huge marketing advantage.

Smart things will take over

You might have heard about the web of things, but the point here to consider is that, are you participating on the internet as a marketer or consumer. If you are for the marketing purpose on the internet, it is vital that you keep an eye on the things that are changing in terms of consumers expectations. New gadgets are going to come up in 2015 and these gadgets can play a vital role in reaching your audiences effectively.

Content marketing still in the game

This is one of the trends that have never changed despite the fact that some transformation can be seen. In 2014, many businesses tried to come up with the new content marketing strategies. Many of them succeeded as well. From this, new tools are going to emerge in 2015. This is also going to increase plenty of resources that will help businesses. New forms of the content will keep on growing the next year and they will gain huge amount of opportunities.

Beyond responsive designs

In 2013 and 2014 we saw a huge change in the mobile marketing as well as mobile analytics. This means that a new Omni channel benefits are waiting for the webmasters in 2015. In 2015 people will have to think beyond responsive web designs. Supplementary apps are going to emerge. All this raises a question that how businesses are going to face the mobile challenges? The answer is compatible cross devices you will have to learn taking advantages of the feedbacks, capturing data and personalizing it.

Influencer marketing

We all know how powerful social marketing can be if used in the right manner. Marketers will have to come up with something new such as things that can really catch the eyes of your customers. According to the experts hand written thank you gifts are going to build a strong relationship in between the companies and customers.

Visuals still dominating

Beautiful web designs are going to flourish in 2015. Every internet user feel delighted seeing beautiful web designs. Consumers expect amazing experiences when they are browsing the internet. Functional web designs are no more in trend. People desire something new and businesses will also have to focus more on their web designs if they really want to stand out of the crowd.

These are the five trends that we can see emerging in 2015. Technology is also advancing and so are the trends.

Source: http://www.weblineindia.com/blog/five-internet-marketing-trends-that-will-rock-in-2015/