Ethical Internet Marketer – Make More Money Online… Ethically!

A joint venture in Internet marketing is defined as, “A mutually beneficial cooperation between web site owners” according to the Internet Marketing Dictionary.

Many times joint ventures in Internet marketing are entered into between a person who has developed a new and innovative product or service but has no Internet marketing history and no list to market his product or service to and an established Internet Marketer who has spent years developing his list and his reputation.

This is the kind of agreement that can be described as a win-win situation. The joint venture gives the developer of the new product or service access to potential customers that he would not otherwise have access to and the experienced Internet Marketer gains access to new product or service that the members of his list can benefit from.

Both the product/service developer and the established Internet Marketer make a profit that neither of them would have made without the other… and that is the very essence of the joint venture. By joining forces and pooling resources and talents, a joint venture allows all parties to accomplish more than any one of them could have accomplished alone.

The fact is that the joint venture is one of the better kept secrets of successful Internet Marketers. You can have been trying to break into the Internet marketing game for a very long time before you have ever heard the term. Joint ventures are certainly not a new concept, however. They have been around since Internet marketing began.

For the new Internet Marketer, the joint venture is the quickest way to making a profit. The old pay-per-click advertising way is expensive and not near as effective as the joint venture. By entering into a joint venture agreement with an established Internet Marketer, a newbie can get his product or service offered to those most likely to buy it at almost no cost quickly and efficiently.

How Does a JV Work?

Often, even very well established Internet Marketers will enter into a joint venture… even those who are in direct competition with one another. Why, you ask, would competitors ever agree to a joint venture? The answer is simple: Joint ventures are just simply good business and even competitors can both make a profit by using them. Neither marketer is entering into a joint venture for the purpose of helping his competition. He is entering into it to help himself.

At first glance, the joint venture agreement looks a bit daunting but actually it is pretty simple. A joint venture just joins the customers, advertising, products, services, knowledge, skills, etc. of one website owner with those of another website owner for a specific project. Joint venture agreements can be between two or more website owners.

Let’s say that an established Internet Marketer develops or acquires the rights to a product or service that would be beneficial to his own list of potential customers. He could sell that product or service only to his own list and make a nice little profit. However, by entering into a joint venture agreement with other website owners who have lists of potential customers that would be interested in the same product or service, he could multiply his sales many times over. The owners of the other websites get the opportunity to recommend the product to their own lists and make a profit as well. Everybody wins.

The joint venture works for established Internet Marketers, as well as, for new comers to the Internet marketing field. Established Internet Marketers are always on the look out for new and innovative products and services that would help their customers. Bt approaching established Internet Marketers with a joint venture proposal, many new comers have gotten their start.

Types of Joint Ventures

A joint venture is an agreement between two or more individuals or businesses whereby both contribute to a joint business endeavor. They share in the expenses associated with the project and they share in the profits realized. Joint ventures are very common in the brick and mortar world, as well as, in the online world of Internet marketing.

There are basically two types of joint ventures… the Insider Joint Venture and the Outsider Joint Venture. Both kinds are profitable the difference is who the partners in the agreements are.

The insider joint venture agreement allows all parties to it access to the same private areas of the business such as the administration panel, accounting, sales records, and other insider’s knowledge. The product or service that is the focus of the agreement is usually developed as a joint effort by the parties to the agreement. Ownership of the product or service is jointly held.

The Outsider Joint Venture is the kind that is most common in the Internet marketing arena. In this kind of joint venture, there are no common administration panel, accounting or sales records. Each entity remains separate. Usually an individual or company has developed a product or service but has no customer base to market it to. The individual or company will approach an established marketer who does have a customer base, list or market share that would be interested in the product or service. They enter into a joint venture agreement where costs of marketing and profits made are shared. Sometimes there is an even split and sometimes the split is on a percentage basis other than 50/50.

The joint venture can be profitable to all parties of the joint venture agreement and the cost of advertising is minimal. The joint venture is an old idea that is being made new again via Internet marketing.

Again and again, I keep getting asked how someone can start making money without having to make big investments in expensive software or without having to buy big home study courses worth thousands of dollars, first.

These people usually have no money to invest and need money coming in quickly (sometimes, in as little as 7 days or their “house gets sold”, they “lose their car”, the “electricity gets cut off” or whatever other emergencies you can imagine…).

Below, you can read my answer to that:

Step 1: Find a niche

I guess, you’ve heard that before, haven’t you…? But how do you actually know WHAT you should sell…?

In the beginning, with your first project, I’d recommend selling stuff that you’re familiar with. Products which are related to maybe a hobby of yours or something that is related to your current job if you still have one. Not all hobbies or professions can be used to make money online with (e.g. if your hobby is “stamp collecting” and your job is “bath attendant” then I’d say better search for different niches to get into…) – so it really depends.

If it’s not possible to make money from your hobbies or job then go into a niche that you have at least some knowledge in e.g. you tried to stop smoking or you have tried so many diets and none of them worked and you want to share your experiences with other people in these areas.

There’s tons of stuff in the big affiliate networks on “stop smoking” or “weight loss” products. You should not try and sell Internet marketing related products just because there are other people out there who are making millions with it. If you don’t have any in depth knowledge in this area or any interest at all, you’re just wasting your time! (In case you have absolutely no idea which niche to choose, you could also try a tool called Niche Inspector by Myleena Phan – it’s an excellent tool for uncovering niches.)

The more you can be an authority in your chosen niche, the better. Because even though you can outsource a lot of stuff, you’ll do much better if you can write your own content because of the experience you have in that area. Freelancers do nothing but rewrite content that’s already available on the subjects. They’ll hardly ever write any groundbreaking news – unless they are real experts in the niches themselves…!

If you have a natural tone and you’re writing from your own experience, your readers will recognize that and connect with you. This will make it easier to sell them things at a later stage. You should try to become friends with them rather than trying to push every product that comes along your way. There’s a time for giving and there’s a time for selling. Try balancing it as much as you can and provide more content than pitches. It’s not always easy but that’s what you should be aiming for.

After you’re done deciding on the niche to get into, you should do your keyword research .

And no, you don’t have to buy any expensive keyword research tool because there’s a free one which got even better than it was before:

Google’s very own keyword tool

It’s now displaying the number of searches per month as well plus it’s showing this for the previous month, too. So if you’ve chosen “stop smoking” or “quit smoking” as your niche, then just enter it there. It will show you exactly how many times people have been searching for this word.

But what’s more important: It will also show you related keywords you can use to drive traffic to your pages. Because you won’t stand a chance to get listed for the main keywords – those usually are highly competitive! All you have to do is to check out the competition for these related keywords which are usually called the “longtail keywords” because in most cases, these less competitive phrases consist of 3 or more words.

And what can you use to do competition research, you might ask…

Google again! Just head over to their main page page and do a search for e.g. “how to stop smoking” in quotes like shown in this sentence and click on “Google Search”. You will then get the results for that query. You will see something like: Results 1 – 100 of about 801,000 for “how to stop smoking”.

And that’s your number of competitors . Usually, it’s even lower once you click on the last numbers of the other linked results pages but you get my drift.

So how competitive can it be and when will it be too competitive?

When I get into niches and I’m creating web pages for these longtail phrases, I try to avoid keywords that have more than 1 mio. competitors – although sometimes I’m making exceptions to that as well. I aim for keywords that have less than 100,000 competitors and I love keywords which have less than 10,000 competitors because these are quite easy to dominate.

If you’re a complete beginner, I’d go even lower: Choose keywords which have less than 1000 competing pages but which are getting at least 25 searches per day. They are not easy to find but they are there. It just requires some intensive keyword/competition research.

Step 2: Create a Squidoo & Hubpages account

Squidoo is an excellent platform for creating your own websites even if you have no idea about designing web pages. The only difference is that they call their individual, keyword based pages, “lenses” instead of web pages. But the basic SEO rules still apply and can be put into practice even more easily. Once you’ve got your content ready to go (my tip is to write it in Word or Notepad, first, I don’t recommend writing it in their editor because the text area is too small in my opinion), then it becomes just a matter of pasting your written review or article into the input field and clicking the save button.

You can also add YouTube videos, RSS feeds, Ebay, other related products etc. – they call these things “modules” and they’re very easy to add since you basically just have to add the keywords and they are doing the rest. Moreover, your Squidoo lens will automatically have Adsense on the page (using their Adsense ID) of which you get your share.

But your goal should be to get the clicks on your own ads because what you’re making from Squidoo itself will usually not be worth it. Squidoo works best for pre-selling your affiliate products. Once people click over to the salesletter, they are already in a buying mood because of what they read on your pages. At least, that’s how it should be…! Go ahead and sign up for Hubpages and make some cash

Alternatively, you can do the same thing on Hubpages.com. I repeat: This requires no knowledge about this techie stuff like designing web pages with HTML or PHP – you don’t even need a web editor. All of that is done online through a simple click and point process and maybe adding some info into forms. The resulting page(s) can be spidered and indexed just like regular pages. The whole process works quite similar on Hubpages – the only difference is that they provide less modules than Squidoo.

Step 3: – Sell digital or physical stuff

Affiliate Networks are the places where a lot of product sellers are showcasing their products and where they try to find affiliates to sell stuff for them.

You probably already know that affiliate marketing is much easier to start with than being a product owner. Because all you have to do as an affiliate is to do the pre-selling for the merchant’s products and then sending your visitors over to his website where the actual selling is done (hopefully, you’ll be doing it AFTER having collected their email addresses!!).

Affiliate marketing works best if you have a way to contact those highly interested people. That’s why almost every Internet marketer out there preaches that you have to build your list. You’ll simply be missing out on a lot of additional profits you could have made by collecting email addresses – if you’re not doing any list building activities.

Because if you don’t, you only have one shot at getting a sale while if you’ve got their email address, you can follow up with them and keep building a relationship and sending them useful content and promotions. Your chance of making a sale from repeat visitors using followups is at least 10-25 times higher than without it…!

Here are 2 of the biggest affiliate networks for digital products:

Clickbank
PayDotCom

Clickbank & Paydotcom sell digital products like ebooks, software and e-courses. The great thing about promoting digital products is that they have the highest commission rates – many times it starts at 50% and goes as high as 75%! Simply go their marketplaces accounts.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm or paydotcom.com/marketplace.php and search for suitable offers related to your chosen niche – or you can even use the marketplace as your starting point if you’re not sure what to sell!

And here’s how you do it:

Sign up for Clickbank and sign up for Paydotcom and get your affiliate IDs (free with both). Then, you find products to promote and you simply create your affiliate links (this is done via their marketplaces, too) and promote them on Squidoo/Hubpages using review pages or simple articles about the topic of the product e.g. about “killing spyware” if you want to sell an anti-spyware tool.

That’s a much better place to start than in areas where you can only make 1-25% on physical products (like with Amazon), although it depends on the product prices. 10% commission on a $2250 plasma TV is still a good amount of money. So it depends. Generally, you can say that digital products pay better but are more competitive while with lots of physical products, there’s less competition out there.

With that said, here are the biggest affiliate networks if you want to specialize in selling physical products instead:

Commission Junction
LinkShare
Shareasale

Commission Junction, Shareasale, and LinkShare sell stuff you can actually touch – real physical products like books, perfume, furniture, car accessories etc. – you name it and they’ll certainly have it. Of course, it’s dependent on the products but commissions are seldom higher than 25%.

Personally, I prefer selling digital products since the whole sales process usually is smoother and the salesletters are converting better. With physical products, there are too many chances that the visitor gets confused or has too many choices to click away as the selling usually isn’t done on a salesletter type of site (direct response).

This can be different for certain types of products e.g “i-Pods” or “i-Phones” because of the high demand but generally speaking I’d say that you need more visitors to make the same number of sales as with digital products.

In conclusion: Once you know what niche to get into, there should be nothing left that’s holding you back. There are tons of products on all of the different affiliate networks I’ve just mentioned. I’ve given you a complete action plan on how you can make money without having to do any paid advertising and without you having to create your own HTML pages using some kind of web editor.

Now is the time for acting on it. Will you…?

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There are hundreds of Internet marketers and even newbies who are making thousands per month from these tactics and they don’t have to make any monetary investments – not even for hosting (only for an autoresponder account if they do list building like they should)! If you still need more in depth info on affiliate marketing using platforms like Squidoo and Hubpages plus a few other platforms then I’d recommend John Child’s excellent Hinge Marketing Magic ebook

… or The Secret Cash Machine on Squidoo by Karl Pemberton if you want to be focused on Squidoo (works in the same way on Hubpages, too, though):

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( These strategies also work great in combination with Chris Rempel’s Conduit Method since his ebook can tell you what kind of products you can promote and what content works best for them.)

That’s it for today… Whatever you do… make sure you finally get active!! There’s no excuse for not making a great income every month – only laziness.

…. What’s your excuse for not taking action?

I received an email by top Internet marketer David Bullock today. He gave a link to a video presntation by a guy called Richard St. John – whom I didn’t know before, I must confess.

But I found this video so inspiring that I’ve wanted to share it with you, too. It’s all about how to achieve success in life. And if you have followed my latest blog posts in the last few weeks and months, you know that I am a big fan of self-development stuff. I don’t think it’s possible to achieve great success in Internet marketing without knowing the basic principles of success and then putting them actively into practice.

You might be using some of these principles already but I think if you can combine them, the power to achieve something in your life is unlimited!

The video is a precise summary of the most important factors which lead to success.

I’m sure, you’ll like it:

As usual, don’t be shy and post your comments about the video

Why so many people fail in affiliate marketing

It all starts when some well-meaning (yet misdirected) person encourages a budding internet entrepreneur to “start in a niche they know alot about”, or base their business around “something they’re passionate about”…

As horrible as it may sound – they’ve unknowingly sent the hopeful entrepreneur down a path of false expectations, poor results and eventually – failure. In fact, the myth of “do what you love and the money will follow” has been responsible for more failure than likely any other influence – perhaps even more so than laziness or a lack of perseverance.

Because the simple truth of the matter is that the only way you’re going to make real money on the net is if your business is based around two crucial things:

1.) Large Demand

2.) Buyers

In other words – you aren’t going to get rich selling a $15 ebook about growing square watermelons – even though that might be a great passion of yours.

The demand just isn’t there. Maybe there’s a few searches a day on Google for the topic, and perhaps there’s some interest in the online “gardening enthusiast” communities – but you’d be hard-pressed to make even a few hundred dollars a month from ebook sales.

Similarly, you also aren’t going to have a particularly easy time getting rich by building websites about some seemingly “popular” topics like humor, jokes, funny pictures and so on. And while there are a few ways to “monetize” your site (with AdSense, CPA Offers, CPM Banners, etc.), it takes literally millions of website visitors to make even just a few thousand dollars in markets like that.

The demand is huge – but the visitor value is extremely low…

Instead, if you want to make it big online – pulling down an impressive six-figure income – you need to tap into markets with tons of demand, where the majority of the visitors are valuable.

You need to capture tons of traffic that wants to buy something. If you take this approach, you’d practically have to hijack your own order links (or affiliate links) not to make a sizeable income.

In fact – did you know that some affiliates make several thousand dollars daily just by promoting a single product in hot markets? (Just imagine what the merchant is making…)

In some markets there’s actually so much demand that the vendors are quite literally selling over a thousand units – or more – per day. Digital products, with practically zero overhead/delivery cost.

But it all comes back to tapping into valuable demand. In most cases, it takes no extra effort or “skill” to market to a valuable market than it does to struggle along with something you’re passionate about.

These two factors – demand and buying traffic – are what seperate the “wannabe” marketers from the millionaires. Because there’s no real secret – you just need to sell what thousands of people are already buying.

The ball is now officially in your court. Are you tapping into markets with massive, valuable demand?

Or are you struggling to simply make a few dollars occasionally with a business that’s based on your own passionate interests?

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Chris Rempel, author of “Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate”, reveals 5 of his most effective traffic strategies and niche-targeting tactics in full detail at www.quickanswers.info/LazyMarketer . He’s also the author of the Conduit Method, one of the best strategies for making a lot of money from little traffic and without a list…

What usually happens when an affiliate marketer goes to Clickbank or Commission Junction and signs up as an affiliate marketer for a particular product or service that is relative to his affiliate marketing business topic?

The first thing this affiliate does is usually to place a logo for the product on his website and send out a marketing email to his list recommending the product or service he discovered. If this average affiliate marketer has at least some motivation, he will make his email as good as he can.

It will address each member of his list by name and there will be bullet points listing the advantages provided with ownership of the product or service. Then he will sit back, cross his fingers and toes, and hope to make a few sales. Well, that IS a plan but it isn’t a very good one.

If this average affiliate marketer happens to get lucky and be included in the launch of a new product, he does pretty much the same thing. He notifies his list of the upcoming launch (the average affiliate marketer usually only sends one preparatory email) and then he sends out the marketing email at the launch.

He will make a few sales…very few. Of course, he won’t be working very hard either and maybe he is very happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem, however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place.

Average! Why would anybody want to settle for average anything? Doesn’t ‘average’ mean ‘common or ordinary…nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an average affiliate marketer, then you need to keep reading.

What puts one affiliate marketer above the average affiliate marketer? The answer is uniqueness.

Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all of others. If you want to be better than just average, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing techniques that will set you above just an average affiliate marketer.

Average affiliate marketers just don’t grasp the idea that in order to sell tons of products, their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers their competitors are making. Most affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product from them rather than buying the same product from someone else.

Some affiliate marketers will offer some bonus incentives but they will be pretty ordinary and things that are really not of much value or even unrelated to the product that is being promoted.

The really GOOD affiliate marketer will offer bonus incentives which are BETTER than anything that is being offered by any other marketer and are directly related to the product that is being promoted. The really GOOD affiliate marketer will give his customers a very good reason to buy from him.

Actually, the whole idea of offering better incentives to customers is just plain old common sense. If you can buy 2 ears of corn from vendor A for 20 cents or 2 ears of corn from vendor B for 20 cents and vendor B throws in some butter to go on the corn free of charge, which vendor are you going to buy from?

Affiliate marketing is the very same thing.

You have to offer bonuses and you have to offer better bonuses than those that other affiliate marketers are offering.

For example: Let’s say that there is an E-Book about Email Marketing that you’re an affiliate for. It’s a very good book that has been written by an Email Marketing Guru. It is selling for $100 and your commission is going to be $50 per sale that you make. There is an elaborate live launch for the product. Your competitors are offering an additional E-Book or two as bonus incentives.

How can you get an edge here? The only way that you can possibly get an edge is to offer something that your competitors are not offering. You could have set up a free teleseminar that will take place within a few days of the launch for those who buy from you or you could offer a free 30 minute downloadable audio tape that further explains certain points in the E-Book.

The people who buy from you will be getting a better deal than they could get from your competitors. The product will always be the same…but the bonuses that are being offered is where you can get the edge.

Tip: Never underestimate the power of ‘free’. Everybody loves getting something for nothing or getting something extra. They especially love getting something that others are not getting. And that brings me to another, finer point of offering bonus incentives.

If you can offer something such as a free teleseminar that is related to a product launch, you need to limit the number of people who will receive the bonus. That makes it more exclusive and thus more desirable.

This is tricky.

You don’t want to make customers mad but you do want to make those who get the added bonuses feel like they have gotten something others have not gotten. You might phrase your offer to say that the first 200 people who buy the product from you will be allowed to join the teleseminar live and others will receive a transcript of the teleseminar. Like I said, this is tricky but it can be done.

The bottom line is just this: If you want to be a better than average affiliate marketer you are going to have to offer more and better bonus incentives than your competitors are offering. All affiliate marketers for any product are all trying to sell to the same basic customer base and that base is not unlimited.

In order to get an edge and rise above what is common, ordinary and average you will need to get really creative with the incentive bonuses that you offer with your affiliate product or service.