Similterra

Today the Internet is much more than a simple document storage/retrieval
system. It is a great vehicle for anyone who wants to setup an online business
with little or no money and a want-it-now attitude.

I have a programming background but it was not my technical know-how that
allowed me succeed in this area but my trials and errors as an online
business owner.

I have tried many opportunities and techniques but it was through my failures
I’ve learnt and consolidated a simple technique to succeed as an online
business owner.

I can assure you that, although you will need to acquire some basic technical
skills, your success will depend not on your programming or typing skills but
more on what you have between your ears.

Below is my list of what you’ll need and have to do, to succeed as an online
business owner.

1. Have a dream and persistence. If you haven’t got a dream and the persistence
to follow it through then you will fail, guarantied.

2. Have a mentor. Find someone who has gained the experience in this field. Beg,
crawl, wash their car, do whatever takes to become their student. Listen to
their advice and learn from their failures and successes. You’ll save yourself
a lot of time, effort and money not to mention heartache and disappointment.

3. Find a hobby, a ‘pet’ project, something you are interested in and would do
without payment or rewards. If it gets you excited, keeps you awake at nights thinking
about it, it will provide you with opportunities to make money from it too.
For example, once you have a project/activity that you live for, be it surfing,
stamp collection, video games, mobile phones, you could start a local club.
Once the club is established you can start a club website. Once the website is
up and running you can introduce products to promote the club and your
project/activity. You get the picture? You probably have seen the film
‘Pay it forward’. Well, you can use the same principle in establishing an
online business. Give something valuable first and then you’ll get your
opportunities to reap your rewards.

4. Promote and automate your project website. Once you completed step 3 above
and your site is up and running you want to be able to promote your club site to
‘outsiders’. You don’t have to get technical and bogged down in programming or
writing strings of HTML code. There are brilliant software out there to do a
lot of ’skilled’ tasks with the push of a button (both free and commercial
products). Learn to use them well! Promoting your website should be your
priority from now on. Get as many people to come to the site as you can and
automate this activity. Start a newsletter to keep in touch with your
members and provide them with free advice, tips and news on the subject of
your project/activity. And again, automate this too. Get software to automatically
distribute your newsletters and automatically sort any emails you get in reply
to your posts. Set up autoresponders signup new members and to respond to email
queries; automate, automate, automate…

5. Once you have enough members and you have an established, loyal group of
followers, you can introduce your promotional products and other services that
you now want to sell and make money from as a business. You’ll have to be
gentle and do this bit by bit. You may also find it useful to have another,
separate, commercial site for this purpose and simply direct your members there
from your ’signature files’ or ‘letterheads’ you send out as part of your club
newsletter. By now you should have enough experience in setting up and running
a website from step 3 above. If you did have a separate commercial site you run
a smaller risk of offending ‘purist’ club members.

6. Review the operation of your site, experiment and test the effect of site
layout, content, headlines etc. Review and look for opportunities to further
automate anything that you can to make your site ’self-sustaining’. If you do
this you should be able to get yourself more free time to actually enjoy your
hobby/project and to go out and look for more new material (advice, tips and
news) that you can send out to you members. Once you have a website running
and are making money out of it, it is very easy to forget that without new
content and looking after your members your business will not survive. So
make sure that the time you have freed up by automating your processes, you put
back into searching for and providing fresh content and keep on provide a
service to your members and keep in mind that they are members because they
share your enthusiasm for the hobby and not for your business. Find a gentle
balance between that hobby and your commercial interests.

Wishing you success in your new adventure,
Ference

If you really want to start a Web-based business, but really don’t know where to start, then listen up. If you have no product of your own, the best thing that you can do is investigate affiliate programs.

What is an affiliate program? It’s basically a commission-only sales arrangement. Someone with a product or service will offer to let you sell it for them in exchange for a cut of the selling price. Typically with a hard product you’ll be lucky to get 10% commission on sales. The good news is that downloadable products such as ebooks and software will often pay you 50% of the sales price as an affiliate – you can even find deals where you get 75%.

If you’re just starting out you are certainly advised to begin your affiliate selling career by selling downloadable products because they are the ideal in our ‘instant gratification’ society. Your customers don’t have to wait around after paying their money they can immediately download their purchase over the Internet. If you go to www.clickbank.com, you’ll find they have several thousand different downloadable products you can sell as an affiliate, and the majority offer you at least 50% commission. Signing up is a simple one-time process and you’ll then be able to use your Clickbank ID to sell any of the products in their online catalogue.

You can browse the Clickbank catalogue by subject area to find something that interests you. In any given subject area you will usually find that there are several related products that you could sell from a tightly-focused Website where you could set up pages to pre-sell the products you have selected and then place a link that your customers can click on which will take them to the affiliate site to place their order – and if they do that, you get your commission.

One of the best types of site you can build using the above ideas is a review site. Set up some simple pages on your Website comparing and contrasting the features of several related products that you’ve picked out to sell. All you really need to do is go along to the vendors Website which will basically be a sales page for their product. Here they’ll list the features and benefits of their product. You can adapt this information to highlight the similarities and differences between two or more of the products to help your customers to choose which product would be the most suitable for their own particular circumstances.

What is the easiest type of Website you can set up to achieve the above? You’ve probably heard the buzz by now surrounding blogs and blogging. One of the main reasons blogs are recommended for setting up tightly-focused niche topic Websites is that they are usually easier to get traffic to from a standing start than conventional Websites.

Another good reason for choosing a blog as your site-builder of choice is that they are comparatively easy to set up if you’re a Website building novice. Once you’ve carried out some pretty basic setting up, the software behind the blog handles most of the major house-keeping chores, like making sure all of your pages are properly linked together. All you have to do is to keep adding on-topic content regularly.

Two good choices if you want to experiment with blogs for your niche affiliate review sites following the above model are WordPress and Blogger. WordPress is free open source software that resides on your own Web server – so you’ll need some hosting of your own if you want to go this route. This is certainly the preferred way to go because if you’ve got your own domain name and hosting you’ll present a more professional image to your customers. You will also have more control over the look and feel of your site.

If you are a complete novice and you just want to test the waters to see if this niche marketing with affiliate sites thing is for you, then the cheapest (free) way to get involved is to go to www.blogger.com, sign up for a free account and make use of the free Blogspot hosting.

Whichever blogging route you choose, once you have your blog set up, just put your review articles on it comparing and contrasting the affiliate products you’ve chosen, as detailed above. To bulk out the content on your blog, just look around the Net for news items and information on the subject area you’ve chosen and write some articles based around these.

Once you have one blog set up with a decent amount of content on it, just rinse and repeat. Find some more subject areas that interest you and put more blogs together on these subjects, based around more good affiliate products that you can promote.

There are people out there right now who are making very good money using nothing more than these, and similar, ideas. How will you know whether you could join them if you don’t give it a try?