Diversify Your Income!
If
you've been following
the instructions in this mini-course, your website is turning into a
super tool
for attracting, sifting, sorting, and pre-qualifying prospects in your
target
market. I'm sure you're excited
about the growth possibilities this has for
your network marketing business. You can expect a growing
team of
enthusiastic leaders, which of course will mean a growing income for
you.
Those dreams of firing your boss and buying the beach house in Jamaica (or was it Maui?)
won't be quite so distant anymore. You
already know your income will
increase as your downline grows, but did
you know that your site itself can make money for you? Even when a
visitor decides not to join your business? In this
lesson, we'll get into ways that you can "monetize" your website. I'm
talking about
establishing multiple streams of income. Diversifying
in this manner has been a sound business principle since…
forever. No
really successful
company would dream of relying entirely on one source of income.
Why
should you? Won't
this distract from your primary goal of building your network marketing
business? Actually,
earning extra money with your website will ENHANCE your business. Suppose you
could spend whatever
you need to get yourself off the ground – without dipping
into the family
budget? How would that feel? How would you
like to be able to
invest a few hundred dollars a month in advertising and marketing
without going
into debt? Fly to all your company events? Sign up
for workshops
and teleconference classes without agonizing over the
tuition? Basically,
just not feel limited by a lack of cash. One
of the biggest
reasons 95% of network marketers drop out before they break even is
because
they're underfunded. They just
don't have enough money
to do what they need to do to become successful. Affiliate
Marketing. If you've
read Ann Sieg's ebook, The
Renegade Network Marketer, (see my review in the
Useful Tools
section) then you know that if you "pre-sell" her book to others by
sending them to her site, you'll get a 50% commission for every book
they
purchase. This is a good example of affiliate marketing. As an
affiliate, you don't need a shopping cart, or catalog pages, or even
your own
products. There's
no handling transactions, no credit cards or PayPal accounts.
You'll
never have to maintain an inventory, fill orders or ship
anything. In
fact, once you set them up, your affiliate accounts will run completely
on
their own. You'll just get checks in the mail. It
usually costs nothing to sign up as affiliate, although
occasionally a company will want you to
purchase their product first. The way it
works is that each
company you're dealing with will issue you a link to their website with
your
unique affiliate code embedded in it. Then when you send your
prospects
to the company site using your link, the company computer automatically
knows
they're your customer and gives you credit for it. In most
cases, the
site will place a cookie (a small piece of computer code) on the
customer's
computer so that any time they re-visit the site, you'll still get
credit for
it. Almost every
ebook and software
tool sold on the Internet these days is attached to an affiliate
program.
The benefit
to the publisher is huge! Suppose
you're a publisher,
selling an ebook you've written for $30. On your own efforts,
you sell
ten of them, making a total of $300. But what if you had ten
affiliates
also selling your ebook for you? For each book they sell, you would pay
them a
$15 commission, leaving you with a profit of $15 per book.
Let's suppose
that those ten affiliates also each sell ten of the books.
Now you've
moved a total of 100 books (10 x 10). Multiply that by your
$15 per-book
profit and you've made $1,500 (100 x $15). That's quite a bit
more than
$300! Online
publishers
would be leaving huge amounts of money on the table if they didn't have
affiliate programs. So
what's the benefit to you, the pre-seller? If
you were one of the affiliates in the example
above, you would have made $150. All you had to do to earn
that was
register for the publisher's free affiliate program (10 minutes, max),
write a
review and post it to your website with a link to the publisher's
website (an
hour, maybe?), and promote your site, which you were going to do
anyway.
So for a little over an hour's effort, you made $150. But the ebook
happens to be full
of valuable information for anyone wanting to do business on the
Internet, and
you wrote a very informative review. You actually ended up pre-selling
30 of
them in just one month, making $450. All still for a time
investment of a
little over an hour. And that's
not all. This
particular e-book is only one of several valuable products that you're
promoting as an affiliate. You may be earning money on every
one of them. Can you
see how this can add up? It's
possible to earn some really significant amounts – possibly
in the thousands –
with affiliate programs. People are doing it. As
you can imagine,
there's a right way and a wrong way to approach this. The wrong way is to simply put a link somewhere on your website and hope your visitors are telepathically led to find it and click on it. The
right approach is to write an informative review of the product, giving its
features and benefits
and making it clear why the reader would want this product instead of a
competitor's. It'll help tremendously if you've had
experience with the
product yourself, and can write from your own point of view. Then you
want to post the review to your site and make sure there are plenty of
links
pointing to it from other pages. For
example, if you had a page explaining the
importance of building your own website, you could include a link to
your
review of your web host. (In fact, I did just that in Lesson
#3.
Did you notice it? You can go back and look by
clicking here
Adsense. When you do a
Google search, you
may notice a column of small ads on the right side of the search
page.
These are called Adwords. They are pay-per-click advertising
that relates
to the keyword you searched on. (I'll get more into Adwords
in Lesson 6
when we go over promoting your site.) You may
have noticed similar ads on other websites with the caption, "Ads by
Google." These
websites are participating in Google's Adsense program.
Adsense ads are
exactly like Adwords and are also pay-per-click, the difference being
that
Google splits the click fee with the owner of the site on which the
Adsense ads
appear. Google allows
the site owner to be
selective. For instance, the owner can disallow ads from
certain
competitors. Site owners can also specify exactly on which pages they
do and
don't want ads to appear. Adsense,
like Adwords, uses a bidding process to determine ad
placement. The more the
advertiser is willing
to spend per click, the greater the chance of getting the ad in a good
spot. In fact,
once a website becomes very popular, Adsense advertisers will often bid
just to
get on it. In
this case, the bidding can run quite high – sometimes several
dollars per click
– and both Google and the hosting website (that would be you)
will do very well. The
downside of Adsense ads is that they can distract your visitors and possibly
lead them away from
your site prematurely. I definitely don't recommend placing
them on a
landing page or any other page where you are trying to encourage your
visitors
to take a particular action. So far, I
have chosen not to run
Adsense ads on my site. This is because when I do a Google
search for
network marketing-related keywords, I always review the Adword ads that
come
up. Most of them appear to be competitors, and for some
reason, I just
don't want them on my site. You may see
it differently, and I
encourage you to research this possible additional income stream for
yourself. Here is the
link to the Adsense home
page:
Google Adsense.
Banner Ads and Classifieds. These are pretty much what you think. Advertisers pay you
directly for running
their ads. Ads can
definitely bring in
some extra money IF your site gets lots of traffic. My advice if you're just starting out: Put this on the back
burner until your site
gets well-established. Without
a high
level of traffic, it would be more hassle than it's worth. As
I mentioned
already, Lesson #6 will be about driving traffic to your site. We'll talk
about some different
promotional strategies, including a very effective method that's
completely
free! In
the meantime, here's
your action assignment for this lesson: Research
affiliate
programs you might want to promote on your website and sign up for the
ones
that seem like a good fit. |