Start a business

YOU CAN START AN ONLINE BUSINESS TODAY AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE AN INTERNET WIZ KID!

If you're looking at ways to start in business then the internet is the future. I believe that the best way to make money without holding thousands of pounds worth of stock is through affiliate marketing.

What are affiliates?

Let me tell you about a business that will blow your mind, read more - watch the video

Is this a business for me?

The great thing about being an affiliate is once you have your site up and running you can make money 24 hours per day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. I wake up in a morning and check my affiliate sign ups to see how much I have made in the night. I’m not tied to a shop or worried about staff not turning in; believe me that is worth a great deal. Go on holiday your site will still be on, your customers are still being referred and you’re still raking in the cash. Shop rent, rates, insurance, forget it, your now in the internet era where money can be made with the click of a mouse.

How much will I get paid? (Important question)

This varies a great deal from 40p to £150 per transaction. I was promoting free puppy food and getting 49p for every sign up, this doesn’t sound like much but I was getting 100s of takers in a very little time. The big money can be made on phones, gambling, broadband, sky, credit cards and loans. Companies often have an incentive month where they will offer you an extra special deal, for example Sky was paying us £150 for every new customer we sent them.

So how much do the richest affiliates earn? One popular reputable well know affiliate program has openly admitted that they recently paid their richest affiliate slightly in excess of £85,000 in a single month. Then you get the super affiliates who make millions of pounds profit a year, like moneysupermarket.com whose revenues increased 27 per cent to £99.4m in the first half of 2008 while pre-tax profits more than doubled to £14.4 million.

What do I promote?

I have always promoted ‘free stuff’ as people always want something for nothing. This can open up so many opportunities. Phone companies give away free TVs, laptops, PSPs with their handsets. Online casinos offer free sign up cash. Travel agents give free child places. Online competitions are free to join, as well as opinion sites who will all offer you big commissions to put a banner on your site.

You could start a specialist site; here are a few examples; dating site, free SIM cards, travel, phones, gadgets, electrical offers, health & beauty, sports and fitness, loans, books & magazines, fashion.

Remember your not having to buy stock so you can start any sort of site you want without having to have a warehouse full of goods.

Will I need to be a computer wiz kid?

No, I’m no wiz kid. You will need a website; they can now be built so easily with instant build tools that are available free. All you need to do is choose the ‘Instant Site’ links at your chosen web hosting site and pick which package suites you. Most all have one page sites, free with your domain name, to full pro packages that cost about £70 a year. Remember this is a business you are starting and £70 can be made in one transaction, so don’t skimp.

Sites with ‘easy build tools’.

UK2 Net has a fantastic easy to use tool

Site name!

While choosing your site name always go for a site name that is relevant to what you are promoting; you will find that most simple site names are already taken. This can be overcome very easily by adding a hyphen or the odd number, for example; dating.com has been taken so try dating-uk.com or dating2u.com. There are so many domain names that can be used now you will have no trouble in finding a great site name e.g. .org, .co.uk, .biz, .me. If you have the site name bobsplace.com, this tells your visitors nothing about the service you are offering. Mobile-phone-bargains.co.uk tells the whole story in one line.

Get some site content first.

You should build a site before you apply to join the affiliate sites as they will want to make sure your site is up and running. Put some content on your site that is relevant to what you’re going to promote. For example if you’re going to start a health & beauty site find some articles on the latest moisturizer or lip sticks, for some good ideas search Google for relevant sites to give you a feel. You want people who visit your site to get some interesting information, not just loads of adverts.

How do get the links to make money?

There are affiliate companies that you can join for free. They provide you with the free links and banners to put on your site, payments are collected for you and sent direct to your account.

www.affiliatefuture.co.uk

Affiliate future is one of my favourite affiliates and I would recommend that you start with them first. Once you’ve been approved all the merchants on the site are available straight away, no waiting to be approved by individual companies. Join Affiliate Future's network to earn more revenue from your visitors. It works by allowing Merchants to advertise on your site, and Affiliate Future pays you monthly when these adverts generate visits, leads or sales.

There are no set-up fees for becoming an affiliate with Affiliate Future. It‘s simple to get started, enter your details, subscribe to the programs offered by Merchants, add them to your site and start earning today.

www.tradedoubler.com

Tradedoubler is one of the biggest affiliate companies with some of the high streets key players on board. Each company has to approve your site, some great banners for promotion and helpful links.

www.buy.at

Buy.at like Trade doubler is a big player and is known for having some very supportive staff. They regularly email us with better deals and promotions; you know they want you to succeed.

Money per click

Google is a great way to make your website some ‘easy’ money. www.google.com/adsense is again free to join and gives you the opportunity to place different size banner adds on your site which display relevant material to what you are promoting.

What is Google Ad sense? Watch the video and read free information that would cost you money somewhere else.

When will I get paid with Google?

Once your account reaches $100 (approx £50) in revenue, Google will, depending on your location, send payment by electronic transfer at the end of the following month. Your bank will automatically turn those dollars in pounds if you are in the UK.

How do I add the links to my site?

When you join a merchant you will be able to choose from a range of banners to use on your site, next to the banner you will see a HTML code that will look a bit like this;

Don’t worry.

While you’re building your site decide where you want your banner, click a position and then change the view to HTML (the curser should still be flashing)

Choose the banner that you want, copy all the HTML code. Now paste the code into your website. Your banner or link should now be visible on your website and ready to start earning you some money.

One of the easiest and cheapest sites I’ve seen to get your site is www.doyourownsite.co.uk, choose your design, add your content and publish your site on the net.

Site promotion

You should start your website promotion by listing your site at the most popular Internet search engines, Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN). They can send you massive amounts of web traffic for free so it’s best to get your site listed as soon as you have some good content on. This can take a few days to register, one way to check if they have picked up your site is to put in your full web address into a search and see if it comes up.

Email marketing without spamming

A great way to keep the visitors who have been to your site is offer them a chance to join a free email alerts list, you may want to give them a chance to win a prize if they opt in. I have found that this works a treat as they are interested in your site for a reason, maybe for the latest gadget or the launch of a phone. You can be the one to tell them about it first and make the all important commission.

I use Aweber as they have a double opt in system that if someone subscribes to your email alerts they send out a conformation email, this stops spam and they can also opt out at any time.

Features include;

Email opt in templates for your site

Create and send your newsletters now, or schedule them if your away.

Pick from over 75 pre-made templates, use your own, or create messages with the built-in editor.

Segment subscribers, send split tests and track your response

Fast and reliable delivery (they have never let me down)

Banner exchange

www.ukbanners.com. Every 10 times you show a banner on your web pages your banner is shown 8 times on other member’s websites. This is a free service where your banner is made in-house.

Free Adverts

www.pagerank10.co.uk. Page rank 10 will let you place free unlimited adverts on their site or you can pay for a full page advert which you can link directly to your pages.

Paid advertising

www.google.co.uk, uk.yahoo.com and www.live.com all make their money from the adverts you see at the top and right hand side of the pages. I do promote my sites through ‘paid per click’ adverts and the amount of traffic or money you spend is totally up to you. When you sign up you set the amount your willing to pay per click, plus your daily budget.

Link exchange

www.uklinkexchange.co.uk. Register for free; find suitable sites to link to in their directories and exchange links.

Leaflet drops

I’ve done this and it does work if you’ve got an outstanding offer to promote. I did this at a very low cost after getting a very expensive quote from a printer. My advert was just size 6 text right in the middle of a white A5 piece of paper with the words:

Get free stuff at www.our web site name.com

Keep it to yourself!

This was cheap to print on our home computer, printed out very fast and we got a very good response. I paid a news agent 2p per insert to put them in every paper that went out of his shop, again this was much cheaper than going through an agent who would obviously want their cut.

Link to us You can link to us for free. All you have to do is visit or 'link page', copy and paste a link on your site first, then email your site details to us and we will put you on our page. This is a great way to get free exposure as we get thousands of hits per week.

Can I really do it?

I believe that anyone can become an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs focus on what they want in life like a flash house or a Ferrari, I’d say focus on financial freedom and the goodies will come in time. Could you become a millionaire in a year’s time? Could you become a millionaire in a year’s time if your life depended on it? I bet the answer is yes to the second question, it’s all about motivation. This is also a feel good business that you will be proud to promote to family and friends, how many of them will be promoting online companies for a living?