Welcome to Part II of How to Start an Online Business — A Step by Step Blueprint. The journey to starting your own successful online business is a multi-step process and is rather formulaic. But once you understand and implement the various components, you’ll be ready to forge ahead with your online ventures!
Unleash the Power of Leverage: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an extremely popular model to start your own online business because it doesn’t require inventory or setting up a shopping cart system. In fact to start out, you don’t even need a website (although once you start earning some money you should explore owning your own website.)
If you opt to promote other people’s products through affiliate sales then you’ll definitely want to get familiar with ClickBank and Commission Junction. Both sites are platforms that connect vendors (product owners) with publishers (you via a website or your affiliate link.) ClickBank focuses on information products and systems, while Commission Junction lets you partner with some of the world’s best known brands to promote their products.
Marketing Your Product and Building Your Brand
Once you’ve selected your product you’ll want to choose the methods you want to utilize to promote it. Article marketing – where you write an article about the product or company and then embed your affiliate link inside the article — is a cost-effective way to start, especially at the beginning.
If you’re able to put up your own website immediately as you start your own online business, then you can promote products from their via blogging about product reviews and displaying affiliate advertising.
The great thing about having your own site is that you can then leave comments on related blogs with your website in your signature line (most blogs don’t allow direct affiliate links), as well as creating a Facebook Fan page for your online business’ website.
Grow Your Business by Measuring Your Results
Measuring your results is a critical component to growing your business. It’s what separates the professionals from the amateurs.
There are numerous tools that let you measure your site’s performance (such as Google Analytics), and performance reports are available through your affiliate sites like ClickBank or Commission Junction. Take the time to delve into these reports, you can try this outand see where your clicks and conversions are coming from.
You’ll also want to do split-testing of your product offers, and measure which headline or call to action converts better than others.
The important thing to remember about measuring is that it is one of the tools you’re using to build a real online business, with assets and metrics that give it real marketplace value should you decide to sell it at some point down the road.
The Most Critical Step to Starting an Online Business: TAKE ACTION!
Ahhh, the proverbial line in the sand — between wishing and wanting, and actually doing and succeeding!
You’ve come this far in your journey to become educated about how to start your own online business, and now it’s time to take action. No more excuses, no more “I need to learn one more thing before I start.”
Planning without action is just wishing. Commit to your course of action, then do it! The sooner you stop wishing, the sooner you can start succeeding!
Leave a Reply