Frank’s Corner

This was at the time intended to be the first of possibly 8 or 9 posts on monetorizing our web site through means other than our core business, however life in the form of medical problems intervened and its taken this long just to get back to really feeling alert enough to attempt catching up with most of what I left undone for a month and a half.

AFFILIATES
Posted by frank at 9:29 pm, October 10th 2007.

First things first – Why Affiliate? Of course the obvious answer is “to make money!”, why else would I put my time and effort into it? To overly simplify it, the principle which allows us to make money by becoming affiliates is real easy; when someone else sells something to someone else, or gets the information they want from someone else we get paid. The principle really is that simple and that is why there so many people out there clamoring to get in the business of “monetizing” their internet space through affiliates. Of course, it’s also why there are about a zillion other people out there telling us all how easy it is and how they or their service can just do it all for us, sadly its this last group of unknown person (s) making the majority of the money, mostly from selling their products to the rest of us.
We, as affiliates, must make the hard decisions for ourselves; If we already have a site of our own and have been researching and studying how to get people (Traffic) to come to our site one of the things many experts are telling us is that we should become affiliates in order to capitalize on the links they’ll give us to other sites.
If we don’t already have a site, but want to make money on the internet those same experts tell us we should – you guessed it – become affiliates, because that’s how to make money without ever having to have or touch a product.
And then, if we’ve become affiliates to make money on the internet what do those same experts tell us to do – guessed it again – get your own web site (which of course they will design and/or host for us ,at a small fee.).
Now mind you, most of these experts are trying to do what? SELL YOU a package to either set you up with affiliates or build you a web site, which they pretty much guarantee well be in the first page of the search engines. Either way they are GIVING you the information that you can make money on the internet (the carrot) but that you need a product like theirs, because it’s the best, in order to make that money (the stick being you must pay them for it).
Why do “we” get taken , after all we’re all smart enough, at least deep down,to understand if it were really that easy these experts would be making those millions themselves and not be giving away all the secrets. Right? Well yes, but its only $20, $30, $50 or even $100 and if it works I can make 100 times that back in a day and then just think how much good I can accomplish. Never mind that the original outlay is only the start – you need to teach yourself or pay someone to
1. Get you a domain (the name can be very important, as can whether it is or isn’t a top level domain)
2. Find some place to host your web site, unless you have your own servers and plan on leaving them on 24/7, you’ll be paying monthly for this.
3. A program if free you usually must acknowledge whose software you’re using on your page, in other words advertise for them. Or you buy a program. Or learn HTML just to building a simple page. Or you’ll be paying someone to a good deal of money to build your site. This will be an on going expense unless you learn FTP and how to properly write your updates and anchor your copy.
Once you have your site its still not all sunshine and roses, you now have to be concerned about where your site ranks with the search engines, which leads to a whole new experience learning SEO (search engine optimization) which leads right back to among other things affiliates, key words, meta tags, keyword density, and many other such goodies.
Please, before you jump into anything, do your homework. When it comes to being successful making money “on line” its no different then any other endeavor; the more quality time and effort you put into the project, the better you plan it and the harder you work that plan the luckier you’ll get which increases the probability you’ll reach your goal.
Next time maybe something on that old traffic problem, the paradox of in order to get traffic, you need traffic.
Frank

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.