Are You Going to Locate or Create?

One of the main decisions you’ll take when starting an internet business, or even developing an internet business is:

Should I locate or create?

What do I mean?

When I refer to locate, I am referring to locating a valuable product to offer to your market as an affiliate. When I refer to create, I am referring to the creative process of product creation. This is where you create a product of value and market to the people that want your product with the assistance of affiliates and JV partners.

Affiliate Marketing

The process of locating other people’s products and matching them to highly qualified traffic is known as affiliate marketing. It’s easily possible to locate products that are suitable for your market, offer them and make a full time income from the commissions alone.

The process of affiliate marketing involves starting out with doing some niche research. This involves finding a group of people that are willing to spend money on whatever it is you’re going to offer. The group of people should have a good level of disposable income and the market for your offers should ideally be expanding rather than declining so you can build a business with a high degree of sustainability and longevity.

Once you’ve decided on your target niche, you’ll want to find out where they ‘hang out’. What forums do they visit? What are their favourite websites? Whose email lists are they on? These sort of questions will enable you to put together a customer profile of the people you are serving. From this point, what are their desires, their fears, their needs, their wants.

Once you put together a customer profile of a typical customer in your niche, then you’ll need to uncover what solutions they are looking for to solve their problems. This is not always the same as the solutions that you consider they need for you to resolve their problems. People will often pay money for things they want rather than for things that they actually need.

Once you understand your customer well including their entire psychology, you’ll be able to market more effectively to them. You’ll understand the things you need to communicate for your customers to take the action you want them to take. This persuasion should always come from a place of service rather than a place of manipulation.

Now you need to look for a valuable product that you would like to offer to your customers to help them in their own quest for online success. The acid test you should use when assessing whether or not you should promote a product is to ask yourself the following 3 questions:

Do I personally use and benefit from the product?

Would I put my own name on that product?

Does it deliver value in excess of its asking price?

If the answer to these questions are “yes”, then you can consider that it’s OK for you to refer it to the people on your list.

The next stage is to move qualified prospects from one place on the Internet to your affiliate offer.

Most affiliate offers are sales pages where the desired action for the product owner and affiliate is for the prospect to order the product which of course results in a sale and a commission for the affiliate.

Nowadays, CPA marketing is gaining some momentum with Internet Marketing newcomers and seasoned professionals alike being drawn to it. The attraction is it offers the opportunity to earn lots of small sales because the action attached to the commission is usually something much smaller for a payment to be released. These desired actions from the CPA networks are often capturing leads through the submission of email addresses, registering an account, completing surveys or other suchlike actions that can be easily measured and monitored with online tools. The advertisers are willing to pay per lead because they understand the lifetime values of their customers.

The next stage of affiliate marketing is traffic. There are literally hundreds of ways of driving traffic which is beyond the scope of this post, however you should bear in mind the questions to ask yourself that I shared earlier. Where do my prospective customers hang out? This is where you need to be building relationships and posting your links.

Product Creation

This process is much more difficult than affiliate marketing but is also much more rewarding. I guess that could be a matter of opinion depending on what you want from an internet business and the level of effort that you want to put in for your business. If you enjoy being creative and teaching or training others how to do things, you’ll love this process.

The process of product creation requires you to:

OK, even after that little list of things to do during the product creation process and launch phase, there are still other things that must be done. The starting point for you to to consider is whether you actually want to go through the process of creating your own product.

Do I Locate Or Create Then?

Affiliate marketing can be lucrative enough if you can master the art of driving traffic. Product creation is usually more lucrative when you have a list of JV partners, some credibility for your product, an army of affiliates helping and you’ve gone through the launch sequence properly.

Whichever strategy you choose, make sure you have the fundamentals in place. Does the market have disposable income they’re willing to spend on the solution you’re offering? Is the market growing with a promising long term future outlook?

I wish you every success and feel free to get in touch if you have any queries.