The Affiliate Truth

I know things here at The Affiliate Truth have been a little quiet in the past few months and with very good valid reasoning. We have been looking at a number of opportunites where we can sell actual physical products though our own websites.

We have purchased a family business to test the process. Now over the past few months we have been pushing a blog that has now over 13,000 monthly readers and 2500 subscribers. The business we have invested in is in the same industry but has no online presence what so ever. Basically what we have purchased is the stock and contacts for suppliers and regular customers. We have tried to keep it as simple as possible but I can tell you buying a business anywhere is a royal pain in the butt!

Our outlay for the business is close to $45,000 but it is a fully functioning business that we have a lot of potential new customers for.

So the plan is in the next few weeks to launch their website as a shop and tie in our blog to link to it in such a way that it starts to pull customers over. Of course we have done a lot more work than just a blog there is also, facebook pages, articles and social bookmarking to take into consideration but we are certain that using the methods we have been perfecting that the physical business can work just as well if not better than the affiliate side of the business. We will be keeping you up to date as the weeks go by!

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Over the past few days I have been getting ready for the next website launch and getting all the content ready so that I know I can launch without any hitches. When I do my market research for different products I not only check to make sure there is an online market as per taught in the Thirty Day Challenge, but I also like to check with people who are actually looking for the product what they think and what they are looking for. Oh how I got burnt……

So while doing some research for children’s toys for Christmas I was talking to a friend and her children about what they wanted from Santa Claus (putting my best parental head on as you do) leaning down asking a 5 year old “What would you like Santa and his elves to bring you for Christmas?” the reply I got wasn’t one I was expecting, “MONEY!”

Wasn’t quite the answer I was looking for when I was trying to find out what the toy of the year is going to be for the children to send their parents sweating over a hot keyboard for. Her mum quickly explained that she had worked out that if she got money for Christmas then she would be able to get more in the January Sales or off Ebay.

I started to wonder if I am aiming at the wrong area!?!

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Having been through a good number of websites today looking at how people advise those just starting out to get themselves started in making money online.

Don’t get me wrong there are people out there who really have cracked the method and got the technique off to a tee and they do very well out of getting other people started, one of these is Ed Dale who teaches a very effective method in The Thirty Day Challenge.

So why am I having a dig at the new people starting out with telling other new people how to do it? Because they miss the important factors by just skimming over them. What do I mean? OK I have just been on a blog post of someone who is telling others how to start making money online and it was an 8 point method that went something like this:

1. Find a niche
2. Keyword research
3. Get hosting
4. Find or Create a Product
5. Create your Site
6. Set up and auto responder
7. Marketing
8. Wash, Rinse, Repeat

Now there was a little more to it than that but basically that was it. Here is the thing on point number one there were three lines about going to Yahoo answers and to be quite honest yes that is a good place to do some niche research but if you leave it at that your going to find it hard going to make money online.

Research isn’t just about your keywords. You need to know a whole host of things before you go ahead with your campaign. For example if you were thinking about getting involved in the niche of Dog Training you will come up against some of the masters of internet marketing, if you want to get involved in the make money online niche then you will be committing online marketing suicide and most of the people who are desperate to get you involved in internet marketing do not tell you this.

Research is where the game is won or lost and making sure that you know your niche, know your audience and know the product that you are selling. Test to see if you have an audience that wants to buy something within that niche. Imagine you were looking for information on sausage making and someone sold you something on roast dinners! Wouldn’t be happy would you! This is why you research everything completely before you start.

It would be criminal of me to say that the third point in this 8 point technique that I found was correct, there are literally hundreds of Web 2.0 websites such as Weebly, Squidoo and Blogger where you can set up a site with content about your niche. These are all FREE no need to get hosting until you are sure that you are getting a good return on your product and you are then looking to create and promote your own product.

These are just a few of the points that worry me when people advise others in getting involved in internet marketing and affiliate marketing. I call it the field of dreams unfortunately the internet is not a farm in Iowa with a baseball field.

Make sure you get good advice when you are researching getting involved and don’t think just because a website tell you its a great idea it is.

Good luck

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Its true this internet marketing game can be one that will pull you from pillar to post for very little reward unless you do it all properly and get yourself mentally prepared for it all.

What do I mean? OK for example I was working on a project with a buddy of mine a few months ago and the infamous Digg front page happened because of the type of project that it was and we hit the front page! Fantastic loads of traffic a fried server and no revenue because Diggers don’t buy and they certainly don’t click on adverts. This and I do mean all of this I can cope with not a problem, however then you read the comments the the clientèle  of Digg leave behind them when they have visited the site. “Why put this crap on digg **** **** ****!” and so on. Why bother reading it in the first place? Why waste your own inferior lives by involving me in what you have to say, I don’t care move on abuse yourself in the mirror instead.

Social book marking means that others can see what you are doing what you are looking at what you are promoting and how you are going about it. The power of it has been unleashed in Ed Dales 30 Day Challenge which if you haven’t taken a look at yet then please feel free to do so there is thousands of dollars worth of free information in there. However the challenge was a little tarnished as unfortunately any moron with a computer can get to these free resources and mess things up for everyone else. I am talking about Spammers and Diggers, yes I class you both in the same breath because I think that between the two of you I have wasted enough hours of my time over the past year or so.

Internet marketing is a fantastic way to make money full time or part time but it only takes a few things to get you down a little. However this is why I have named this post “You need thick skin to be an internet marketer!” because I care about my customers, my readers and my family (this includes those in my extended family) there are thousands of nice people online but those who wish to think of themselves as nice only to come online and make nasty comments or SPAM the living daylights out of a blog or a forum because they can’t be bothered to look for their market they hope it finds them, I am sorry I don’t have time for you anymore.

Your comments will be deleted and please feel free to Digg the hell out of this post because I have a cunning plan to undigg it quicker than you Digg it! My thick skin is now as thick as well lets just say its thick before I start throwing comments about Diggers and Spammers heads!

For those of you that this little rant of mine does not apply to my apologies and I hope that you are well and happy!

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My inbox is once again this morning filled with complete tosh from certain marketing Guru’s that are offering to reveal their secret to me for a price! Well you will never guess what……….it’s nothing new and it sure as hell is no secret.

There are thousands of people online offering to give you all the information you will ever need to be able to move forward with your online internet marketing business! Let me tell you this, only one  I have ever found offers to answer all the questions! The rest charge you for he extra information!

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Over and over again I see products appear on the market that are just repackaged trash!

Look out for the words “Revolutionary” “Ground Breaking” “Get $100,000 in 30 days!” and if your mind doesn’t scream at you SCAM! Then drop us a comment and we will do it for you!

Chances are if it is a massive breakthrough in internet marketing then the forums will buzz like mad about it with solid non bias reviews that will give you a good insight if you know the information that is in the product or not.

If a product looks good wait before you buy it and then research a few days to a week after it is released to get an honest review rather than buy it and get ripped off by some marketing techniques that are designed to trick you into buying something on false promises!

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A few weeks ago I posted about a new ebook called Who Loves Money at the time I was a little angry about the fact that people who had not seen it were posting articles on the internet saying how great it is. This bugs the hell out of me.

What I didn’t know at the time was there would be an Internet Marketer that would make a massive mistake in relation to this product and the soon to launch product of his own. I am not going to name this particular marketer but over the past few weeks he has done a great deal of back tracking in order to try to repair his reputation but I have to say with me it isn’t working.

The mistake this marketer made was to put a testimonial for the product on the launch website praising it for being a good product (which it is) and saying it was a “Real Page Turner with some Gems” then he proceeded to send out an email to everyone who was on his email list backtracking on what he had said.

This is a major NO NO if you do something then it is a planned, calculated and well thought about move, Research, Research, Research and then Plan what you are going to do, don’t do it and then backtrack.

Reputation is important. Here at The Affiliate Truth we give you all the information for free. Why because that is what information is FREE!  Our reputation is that you get the information for free and that it is accurate and helpful.

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We have today added a keyword research tool for you all to use. This is the one that we use to get our results and it is provided by Arron Wall over at SEOBook which we have found priceless in our site promotion.

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Having spent a long time looking how Internet Marketing can be done for free, one of the most important things that we have come across is the importance of research.

There are a number of different areas to look into:

• The Niche that you are going to be selling to.
• The Keywords that you are going to use to sell to the niche.
• The Product that you are going to sell to the niche using the keywords.
• The Method you are going to use to sell (PPC, Article Marketing or your own dedicated website)

With these in mind you have to factor in that time is money and your Return on Investment becomes more important. The people that do their research convert much more than the people who do not. Getting it right first time is very difficult but if you have studied the area that you are going to be promoting then you will be in a better position to make adjustments very quickly to your favour.

More on this in future posts.

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