Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

Anyone who has spent time researching an online business niche and what they can do to make a living online will have come across sites and pages offering you the opportunity to make more money than you thought possible. Usually the sales page will have one or more of the following elements:

• Fonts in about 4 different type faces and 6 different colours
• Pictures of someone standing next to a very expensive car or boat (with their face blurred out)
• Copies of cheques, bank statements or Paypal statements
• Testimonials from people who go by only one name
• Statements like “As seen on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News” etc

Too many times, people can be tempted to look for quick riches online, and unfortunately these types of programs seek to profit from them. The reality is that those selling them aren’t using the methods. They are making the money from selling them to others, and having affiliates do the same – ultimately, the program they offer may have no proven results.  Read more...

Anyone who has been in business longer than 5 minutes knows that no two customers are created equal, and can’t be treated as such. But in a truly global medium like the internet, how can you make sure that all of your customers feel like they are getting one to one service?

One of the most effective ways of communicating with them is email marketing, and should form a major part of an online marketing strategy, for the simple reason that if if you’re not doing it – your competition are.

Depending on your online business niche, your use of email marketing will be different. Affiliate marketers will use it as a means of communicating an affiliate offer that they will reap a percentage of. Finance and business marketers will use it to convey the latest state of the market, and retailers will use it to communicate special offers, coupons and the like.  Read more...

I’m just back from the first Affili@SYD conference, and wanted to share what I considered some of the highlights and point you in their direction, as I think there was some incredibly valuable content that anyone starting an online business should know.

The keynote was from Jay Berkowitz, the CEO of www.tengoldenrules.com, and was certainly one of the most engaging presentations I have heard on online and affiliate marketing. Jay spoke on 10 Super Success Strategies for Internet marketers, which covered effective SEO, blog building and the importance of personal brand and what tools you can use to build it. One such site was PeoplePond, which allows you to aggregate all of your online presences and manage your reputation, something I will be covering in depth soon. Jay’s advice is incredibly practical, I recommend checking out his site TenGoldenRules.com  Read more...

As I covered in my last post, affiliate marketing can be a difficult area of online marketing to navigate for someone just getting started in online business. So I thought I would talk more about two programs that I think could work well with pretty much any model, and how you go about finding more to suit your business.

eBay Partner Network

I’ve mentioned eBay’s partner network before, as I believe it is one of the most widely applicable available. Considering that eBay offers such a breadth of products and categories, it is difficult to think of a site that it would seem out of place on.

Virtually every version of eBay will have a partner program (with the exception of Hong Kong and Singapore whose programs were recently closed), and you have the option of applying to join one or all of them. US and UK approval can take a while to come through, but when they do you have access to Geo-targeted ads and links that will link through to the appropriate site depending on where your visitor comes from.  Read more...

While your key product offering on your site should always be your main consideration, as a supplemental revenue stream, you should consider some form of affiliate marketing.

Basically affiliate marketing is the webs equivalent of a referral – where other sites will pay you to drive traffic to theirs if that visitor buys something. Many of the world’s biggest companies have some form of affiliate program, and one of the oldest is Amazon.com’s, called Amazon Associates. eBay also has one, which pays based on new users who purchase goods, and the adult entertainment online universe probably has more than anyone. Overall, commissions always vary widely depending on who it is, and there are certainly some out there that are dodgy that you need to watch for.

As an online business owner, affiliate marketing could be a great opportunity to generate some extra revenue from your site. There are a few key points to think about here:  Read more...