Social And Business Networking: A Fundamental Requirement For Internet Marketing Success

Internet Marketing Success Takes Time and Determination

Regardless of thousands of instant money making proposals and offers you may receive on the internet, I am prepared to put my head on a block that it is not possible. Internet marketing success comes with time, research, acquiring skills and knowledge, perseverance and determination.

For people like me who want to embark on a road of affiliate marketing, the confusion with all the junk and rip-offs thrown at you, and with all the processes and techniques to implement can be so overwhelming that you take on the hit-and-run approach or simply throw in the towel.

It took me several months to sort the wheat from the chaff and to get process and structure into my activities. Focus, structure and process are vitally important or you will get swept away by a tide of confusing and haphazard affiliations and activities.

For anyone serious about earning online: It is all about Internet Marketing and Internet marketing requires knowledge, skills and tools. Get training first! There are some excellent online courses and learning sites available requiring a nominal expense, which must be regarded as an investment rather than an expense. I owe the jump-start to my success, as far as fundaments knowledge and skills go, to the Profit Lance Course. It is excellent with a treasure trove of online resources, tools and training modules. Ideal for beginners.

Once you have mastered the initial and fundamental essentials, subscribing to membership sites offering more advanced training and resources, with tools to tap into as they are required, is as important. Learning to earn online is a progressive and never-ending process. Membership sites can provide peer support, guidance and a wealth of resources, as well as opportunities to enter into joint ventures with other Internet marketers.

The training resources I referred to above will also teach you about the importance of NETWORKING , or interacting with people to be successful. Networking online with other people so that you can become known and trusted.

Regardless of your knowledge and skills, get people to know about you!

You might have heard this before: The Money Is In The List. That’s true, but not any list! It must be a list of people YOU have established a rapport with, people who know about your online identity, people who trust you sufficiently to receive information from you about whatever you want to inform them about. So, fundamental to your success, even if you have the greatest products/services to sell, is networking with people, getting them to know about you.

The Money is In The List You Have Built!

So, unless you want to bankrupt yourself with pay-per-click advertising with the hope that one in a hundred visitors to your site will buy from you, start networking. (That’s correct, you cannot expect to get a conversion at a rate of more that 1:100 and unless you are a Google PPC expert you will can pay between 50c and $2 per click.

You can network with people for free and get them to know you and build up a list of top quality leads. People who know about you, people who are keen to listen to you and who have an interest in what you are promoting. Then you can email them with peace of mind and without having to worry about spamming people.

Network and List Building Sites

The largest and oldest business and social networking site in the world is available to you with free membership. Direct Matches has hundreds of thousands of members where you can be matched with people who are interested in YOU and what you have to offer. Direct Matches is huge and reputable and established in 1994. If you click on the link above, you will see my picture welcoming you to the site!

I am also mesmerized by a new and very FRESH site allowing you free advertising on the site and generating free business leads opportunities. I’s called Orange Leads and they have alive chat room where you can get known AND publish your website with a “shameless” add while you are in live chat with others looking for business opportunities. This is an awesome site and you will know what I’m talking about just by visiting the site.

That’s it for today!

To your networking success!

Orange Leads. Unlimited Free Business Opportunity Leads and Advertisements.

Direct Matches Direct Matches Direct Matches

Online Advertising

Choosing An Affiliate Network: Essential Selection Criteria

The Profusion (and Confusion) of Affiliate Marketing Opportunities on the Internet

About three months ago, as I started exploring Internet marketing opportunities, my first experiences can be best described as total confusion and getting completely lost in a very murky labyrinth of hundreds of big-money-from-home opportunities flaunted on the Internet.

Along with the confusion and exacerbating my disillusionment, came the shocking realisation that many of these “quick-rich” affiliate marketing opportunities were  scams  and rip-offs

In my quest to find Internet related opportunities to earn a living, I have been conned more than once and have also lost money in the process of buying in on some of these “opportunities” in the belief that that the sweet sales talk in which these “products” are wrapped, couldn’t possibly all be lies! It must be due to my nature, which perhaps is somewhat gullible, but more trusting the innate goodness (also implying honesty) of humankind.

After my three months sojourn of exploring Internet marketing opportunities I am a wiser, less gullible person. Still believing in the goodness of my fellow human beings, I am now more wary of the vulnerability of human nature, particularly when it comes to the temptation of greed.

To cut my somewhat lengthy introduction short, I have extensively read and studied and researched Internet marketing opportunities, strategies and techniques to the present point where I can say I am marketing and succeeding in Internet marketing. My home business is working and it is growing. I am no guru, not by a long shot, but I know the essential basics about Internet marketing, affiliate marketing and, alas, network or multi-level marketing.

Network Marketing: The Internet’s Cinderella

Network marketing is frowned upon by many and spit on by some Internet marketers and even avoided by some Internet directories and because of this, I initially shied away from network marketing opportunities. “They are pyramid schemes”, I thought. I thought multi-level or network marketing was a typical example of a scam scheme, an Internet rip-off. I avoided familiarizing myself with some affiliate network marketing opportunities because I was under the impression it is about enrolling people into the scheme without a product/service or a dubious product or service and that it was all about building layers of people joining and earning commissions from their enrolments rather than from earning revenue from the sales of the company’s product and/or service. To me this was like contributing towards blowing up a bubble and because the network had nothing to sustain it, the bubble was bound to burst or, at least, deflate, sooner or later.

These would indeed be pyramid schemes and it is because of illegal pyramid schemes and dodgy network marketing companies with dodgy products or services that network marketing got its bad name.

Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath Water!

It was only later that I discovered (out of curiosity about people’s testimonies about the leveraged income possibilities with network marketing) that network marketing opportunities offered by reputable companies with real, substantive and marketable products and services offer the enhanced income generating opportunities for an affiliate Internet marketer.

The reason network marketing offers increased income earning potential over regular affiliate marketing opportunities is because of the network or down-line of people enrolling under you through whose sales you will also earn commission.

The implication of this multi-level income generating model is that once your down-line is firmly established and successful, your business goes onto auto-pilot and your income becomes passive income, like the passive income from an investment. Hence, a carefully selected network marketing enrolment offers an income opportunity into retirement.

Essential Selection Criteria for Choosing an Affiliate Network

1. The company whose affiliate network you consider to join must have credibility and reputability. Don’t rely solely on their sales pitches and other promotional material, Google the company and search for them in forums and blogs on network marketing.
2. Don’t join before you have established exactly what the products and/or services are. If there is vagueness about what they expect you to market, be skeptical. To me total openness and transparency about the products and services is an essential prerequisite for affiliating myself. If you cannot establish this beforehand, chances are good the network marketing is more about building the network than centring on the marketing of the product. When the incentives for recruitment are greater than for product sales, again, be very skeptical.
3. Establish the appetite in the market for the products and services offered. How has the product been selling? Are their clear signs of growth? Is there a demand, preferably internationally, for what they are offering?
4. Can you identify with the products/services for sale? If not, how would you succeed in marketing these offerings enthusiastically and honestly?
5. Determine the level of support, the availability of promotional tools and process guidance you could expect from the company and your up-line.
6. Transparency about your marketing efforts. For example, would you be able to track visits and conversions to your unique affiliate website/s?
   

A Last Word: Assessing Affiliate Networks Calls for Greater Scrutiny than would be in the case of linear affiliate marketing products due to the potential pit-falls of multi-level marketing as I have alluded to earlier on in this article. The negativity with which network marketing is viewed by some in the Internet marketing community and broader society are compelling enough reasons not to compromise any of the criteria I have listed and to go for only the top-notch companies, like a Top 50 Inc500 Listed Company

If you make the right choice, to combine Internet marketing with network marketing presents you with a very powerful affiliate marketing opportunity!

If You’re An Internet Marketer You Can Even Sell Lingerie Online

An Internet Marketer Selling Lingerie…

I have been out of circulation for a while and have not posted a single blog or an article for about a month. The reason: I had to attend to lingerie matters. Yes, lingerie matters and now I am also revealing my interest and investment in something of a much more traditional and conventional nature; being an importer, wholesaler and retailer of…women’s underwear, or lingerie rather. My perception of the term lingerie as opposed to “women’s underwear” is that it denotes chic, class, sophistication, style, fashion, designer, etc., while underwear is just, you know – bras and panties…Some people are in the women’s underwear business, others in the lingerie business. My business falls into the latter category. You get the idea?

How come lingerie?

So yes, I am an internet affiliate marketer and a marketer of my own imported and exclusive lingerie. And I am a man, with the rationale for my involvement and interest in the lingerie business being firstly my admiration of feminine beauty and my appreciation of the importance of lingerie in enhancing femininity, feminine beauty and sensuality and, secondly, my identification of a market for broader and more exciting and exclusive lingerie ranges in my country, South Africa.

As you become knowledgeable about internet marketing, you realize the internet has no limit to where you can market

In exploring affiliate internet marketing opportunities and learning about the incalculable possibilities and techniques that can be applied with relative ease to bring in substantial income, it struck me how I could utilize and exploit the internet as a marketing platform and tool for my lingerie business and create an audience, a public visibility infinitely larger than my little boutique in Cape Town, South Africa could ever achieve. Hence, the re-focussing and re-alignment of my business from an importer/small-shop-retailer to an importer/large-scale-wholesaler with the world as my oyster…

Online auctioning and wholesale selling of lingerie

I have just started advertising and selling lingerie on the internet and it produced great results within one week. Not by selling individual items, but by selling in bulk at wholesale prices on a South African e-commerce and online auction site called Bid or Buy. And, hey, my profit margin is bigger than my expensive little boutique in a shopping mall, because it’s costing me almost nothing to sell over the internet and I turn over large quantities at a time. Compare this scenario with the overheads of the lingerie boutique with its staff salaries, rental, maintenance etc. with only the local community and seasonal tourists as my potential market. My lingerie business: Linda Mujer Lingerie (this site was designed to focus on the shop only and will soon change dramatically) is now being fully integrated into my internet marketing web-activities. You know what, I think I must shut the little shop…This is really how I feel now and only after my successes with one online site. I haven’t even touched eBay!

How to Get Started with Internet Marketing

Okay, so you want to get started with internet marketing, but like most people who want to start making a living off the internet or who want to earn extra income, you are simply totally confused. Well, that was my experience and I am convinced it must be the experience of the majority of people who are exploring the internet for opportunities to make money.  Let me put your mind at ease; it is perfectly normal to be confused, in fact, it is a logical consequence of an internet search for anything related to home-based or work-at-home jobs and businesses. The source of this confusion is simple: information overload.  As we surf the stormy waves of the information superhighway, we are being flushed down into all sorts of directions with innumerable ads and websites offering work at home opportunities, promising lucrative and sometimes instant financial benefits. So, again, it is totally natural to experience confusion to a frustrating and often paralyzing degree. The consequences of information overload or an excess of information are well-documented; you are at risk of shutting out (throwing in the towel), or storming frantically into the chaos.  

My goal with this lens as a newbie to internet marketing myself and from the lessons I have learned, is to prevent either of the two (throwing in the towel or storming into the chaos) happening to you. 

Here is how to go about:

Decide on the type of marketing and the nature of the product

Now, this is very important to help you sift through all the confusing offerings on the net and will steer you on a course. Once you have decided on the nature of the marketing and the type of the product, you can easily discard everything else that is not in sync with that.

Start off with Affiliate Marketing

At this point I take it for granted that you don’t have your own product and that you want to become a marketer for a company’s product, in which case you will become an affiliate of that company and help that company to market its product or products for a commission on the sales that can be directly attributed to your marketing. This is how I kicked off and is the route that I can recommend, especially if you are new to internet marketing and you still have to learn the ropes. 

The first beauty of affiliate marketing is that you can do marketing for an established company and market products that have already been tested in the market. In other words, you know there is a demand for the product. The ground work has been done and you simply become an instrument to help getting the word out about the product and getting people to buy the product from the links and ads you have placed on the internet.

A second major advantage of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need your own website, nor do you need to have a website hosted. This is all done for you by the company whose product you will be marketing and they will let you have you own link to their website.  This is how the sale from the company’s website is attributed to you – through your own unique link through which a client has accessed the company’s website from where he/she bought the product or service.

 The third good reason why I would recommend kicking off with affiliate marketing is that you will be guided by the company in the marketing process.  It is important to the company who you will be representing as their affiliate that you will succeed. Your success is their success and therefore they are going to provide you with the tools and procedural guidelines to be successful. What remains to be done by you is to work the system.

The first product and company that I joined up with as an affiliate I discovered on a Review Site of Internet related home businesses and jobs. From there on everything became clearer and I was ready to start marketing. All the information about how to market their product was set out clearly and step-by-step with invaluable information about free advertising as well as pay per click advertising. And if you think pay per click advertising is going to cost you an arm and a leg, not so. They have a comprehensive bonus module about advertising on Google included in their information package and if you know what you’re doing you can benefit tremendously from a Google ad campaign with a small financial investment. However, paying for advertising is not essential when you start off. The opportunities on the internet for free advertising are legion. I have started with free advertising only until I had enough seed funding to invest in a Google pay per click advertising campaign.

Market the type of information that people desire

Once you’ve decided that affiliate marketing is the route to follow, you need to decide on the nature of the product. It does not need to be something you personally like, but it has to be something that many people want. It’s got to be something with a track record of demand and you must have evidence of that.

Personally, I was not interested in a physical product to sell. Imagine the logistics involved in packaging and shipping etc. etc.  If you believe that information is a valuable asset and that it has a monetary value because it provides in a need, why not market and sell information that can be electronically transmitted?  I decided to go with such an information based product as I referred to above, which has not only opened new doors for me; it opened a new world to me.

Review Sites of Work at Home Businesses and Jobs

 

Perhaps you are looking for a different type of internet related marketing job, because of your special interests or circumstances. In that case the best way to go about is to read reviews of Work at Home businesses and jobs offered through the internet. I know of no better site than what is regarded as the No.1 Review Site Online. Jessica Miller’s mission is to review the work from home opportunities offered on the net and present us with the ones that come up tops as legitimate with real and substantial income producing potential.

A Last Word: You have to Work it

I am very sceptical of quick-rich programs and offers of easy money through internet marketing jobs. I don’t believe in easy money unless you are exceptionally lucky and have won the lottery or something similar. At the end of the day we have to work for an income and the internet marketing opportunities I have alluded to above are no exception. But it does offer relatively easy income opportunities and I can personally guarantee that if you work the system as it is clearly described for you in the programs I refer to, you will reap significant financial benefit. Moreover, once you’ve mastered the basic and initial steps of internet marketing, you learn of more and more opportunities the internet has to offer for free to enhance your potential for success and wealth.