This is because an Internet Business promises the things that we all want:

1. Leverage
There are close to 2 billion Internet users now with many millions more joining every single month. If we’re doing business on the Internet, the entire world is truly our oyster. We can reach out to many more people we never could otherwise.

2. Freedom
Anybody can now use the Internet to start their own business and make money doing so, in the comfort of their homes. We answer to nobody but ourselves and all we need is a computer, an Internet connection and the desire to do so.

Of course, we’ll also need some know how, which we can acquire along the way.

3. Cost-Effectiveness
It’s cheap. A domain name costs only $10/year, and hosting can be lower than $5/month. There aren’t many businesses we can start and maintain with that sort of investment. It’s truly easy to say goodbye to our bosses, although we want to be making our money first before doing so.

4. It’s A Part Of Life
That’s because the Internet links us to the latest information, and we all need to be updated all the time. It’s also a huge libary of knowledge and the vast majority of the information we want can be found for free. It’s also an entertainment outlet with millions of channels in the form of videos, created and uploaded for all to see by fellow Internet users. As such millions and millions of people use it every single day.

The Reality:
1. Many of us in fact have become successful Internet Entrepreneurs, in one way or another.
I have documented those ways in my classic Mini-Encyclopedia of Low-Cost, High-Profit Internet Business Models:

2. Many of us also failed to succeed as Internet Entrepreneurs
This can be due a number of factors. One of the main factors is the lack of knowledge or guidance. The other is the lack of proper IMPLEMENTATION of the things required to succeed.

In fact, I would rank the lack of implementation or improper implementation of best Internet Marketing practices as the main cause for failure, over and above a lack of knowledge since all the knowledge or guidance in the world is useless without the correct actions being taken.

The Success Factors For Freedom With An Internet Business
Note that we don’t just want to have a successful Internet Business – but one that gives us TOTAL FREEDOM from having to run, manage and maintain on our own.

Otherwise it’s no different from having a JOB – and that’s the very thing we’re trying to get away from.

There are many successful Internet Entrepreneurs who are tied to their Internet Business 24/7. They can’t take a vacation or even go to the movies during their waking hours for fear of missing a sale.

Or they’re overwhelmed with the multitude of roles they have to play that they get nothing done properly.

This isn’t how an Internet Business should be.

At the very least, not for me.

We should get leverage not only in how many people we can reach, but also in NOT having to do everything that is related to our Internet Business, on our own – and still make a handsome profit in the process.

With FREEDOM as the goal, let me now show you the essential elements of an Internet Business so that you know what’s involved to make money online, with the lowest amount of our money and with the least investment of our time.

To do this, I have to bring you back in time and see what are some of the most essential tools that we HAD to use to create a succesful Internet Business.

Then I’ll show you whether anything has changed along the way and if so, what we can do to adapt to the new Internet Business landscape – AND still maintain our freedom with our Internet Business working for us 24/7, instead of the other way around.

Let’s begin.

1st Generation Internet Marketing System
These are the components required:

Website + E-Mail

A website is basically our “permanent” online presence. We got a domain name and hosting account and we then uploaded whatever design and layout we wanted for our website on that domain’s host.

If we were selling products as a Merchant, we could also integrate an online payment system with our website so that we could accept payments directly from our customers via their credit cards, at the point when they decided to buy it after looking at our products.

If we were Affiliates for Merchants, we could set up a website providing useful information on topics related to the products sold by the Merchants, before recommending that they checked out the Merchants’ websites through our Affiliate Links or banners.

This would be our basic setup. We could get by with nothing else if we had lots of marketing money to spend on TV ads, newspaper ads and other places, to publicize our domain far and wide.

But we thought of using the Internet to market our websites too, since it was already being used by millions of people around the world.

The 2 Pillars
We knew Internet users then mainly used the Internet to check out:

1. Websites

2. E-mails

And because of that:

1. On Websites:
* Search Directories (like Yahoo.com, which started off as a Search Directory and later morphed into a Search Engine) and Search Engines (like AltaVista.com) were created to make the process of searching for information found on webpages much easier and quicker;

* Web Page Creators/Editors became an essential piece of software for Internet Entrepreneurs to create their own websites from scratch without needing to know HTML;

* Specialized FTP software to upload webpages to our host server became an essential tool for making our webpages seen on our domain;

* Web design and maintenance services were much sought after since most people didn’t have design skills even if they were willing and able to create the webpages themselves;

* Domain Names became hot assets to own since each one was unique and nobody else could register the same name once it was already registered by someone else

* The web hosting industry exploded and generated billions in recurring revenue.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization
Since search engines got millions of visitors per day looking for all sorts of information found on webpages throughout the world, and the engines didn’t want to create their own content but rather used software to find, index and show our webpages (without paying us a single cent to do this) to display to their visitors, who could see the results for free – we could tap into the Search Directories/Search Engines’ own traffic to get free prospects to our webpages.

And so SEO (Search Engine Optimization) became a popular topic ever since with the entire focus being on getting top rankings for our webpages for searches on keywords we wanted to target. The higher our webpages appeared on Search Engines’ results, the more free traffic we could get since Search Engine users checked out their search results starting from the top listing and moving down.

SEO companies started forming to offer SEO services to website owners who didn’t have the time or knowledge or desire to do SEO activities and tasks on their own.

Banner Ads
We could buy space on other webmasters’ websites too. We could put a banner that linked back to our webpages, and tap into the existing traffic those other websites were getting.

This marketing method required us to invest some money and while some of us did it, there were more of us who didn’t, preferring to rely on free Search Engine traffic and other free marketing methods instead.

2. On E-Mail:
Webmail services like Hotmail.com and Rocketmail.com were created to make the checking of e-mail possible through the same browser used for surfing websites instead of a separate e-mail software like Microsoft Outlook running on our computers.

This sort of simplified things for the Internet user and made things even easier for them to use, which in turn helped even more users to go online.

Mailing List Software
With e-mail being the first thing users checked when they were connected to the Internet, and being free to use, it became obvious to Internet Entrepreneurs that they needed to get their message into their visitors’ e-mail inboxes somehow.

We started asking for our website visitors to join our mailing list so that we could e-mail them offers to buy stuff, again and again. But of course, unless we were a big retailer of a range of products, nobody on our list would enjoy receiving offers from us in their e-mail boxes all the time.

And so we promised a free Special Report and tips on doing something better in our e-mail communication with them, so that they would continue to receive our e-mails. And we then interperse those e-mails with offers for our products from time to time.

This worked very well. Every time a promotional e-mail was sent out, there were bound to be sales made.

E-Mail Broadcast And Sequential Autoresponder Systems
Because of the need to constantly use e-mail, mailing list software became more and more sophisticated.

Rather than e-mailing our Prospects manually, we could use a special mailing list software called a Sequential Autoresponder System to AUTOMATICALLY e-mail our Prospects for us, with a series of pre-written e-mail messages uploaded to the Autoresponder System in advance.

So someone who just joined our mailing list would automatically receive an e-mail from our Sequential Autoresponder System, thanking him for being on our list and telling him what e-mails he could expect from us in the future.

We could also automatically send out a tip for helping him do something better (related to our topic) exactly 2 days later, and another tip on something else could be set to go out to him automatically exactly 5 days after this second automated e-mail had been sent to him.

We could also greet them by their first name in our e-mails (if we had their first name information in our database through their filling up the name field on our optin form), or have them remove themselves from our mailing lists via a single click on an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of our e-mails (which saved us from having to manually remove them).

We could also broadcast e-mail messages at any time to the same list, even as they were going to receive those pre-written e-mail messages from us as scheduled in the Sequential Autoresponder System. This would be useful where we had some new offer to make to our list or we wanted them to have information we didn’t have earlier.

Thus all Sequential Autoresponder Systems will usually come with a standalone Broadcast function as well – giving us the ability to both send out pre-written e-mails to everyone who joined our mailing list, and newly written e-mails on an ad hoc basis.

If we were Affiliates, we spent the time looking for new Merchants to represent so that we could refer the same Prospects we had on our lists to many Merchants selling complementary products – thus increasing our commission earnings even more.

The Affiliate Program

Then Amazon.com came onto the scene and brought with it the concept of the Affiliate Program.

Amazon wanted Internet users to be rewarded for referring customers to its online book store. So they programmed an Affiliate Program software that could create unique Affiliate Links for each Affiliate they had in their program.

Anybody could join Amazon.com as its Affiliate for free. And all the Affiliate had to do was to put up banners that linked to their unique Affiliate Links which in turn would redirect the visitor to Amazon’s bookstore, bringing information about the unique Affiliate Link with it. Thus Amazon would know who referred the customer and reward the right Affiliate accordingly. The reward would be a percentage of the selling price.

This masterstroke of an idea resulted in Amazon.com getting millions of Affiliates all working for it for free, until a sale occurred. By then the money was already in Amazon’s bank account and Amazon could pay its Affiliates their commissions from money it had already collected – thus making this arrangement an entirely risk-free one for Amazon itself.

Amazon’s Affiliates in turn set up their own webpages and relied on Search Engine traffic and other marketing methods to draw in the Prospects. With millions of Affiliates all over the world promoting Amazon’s products, Amazon ended up having a huge referral army it didn’t need to pay to maintain.

Smart Internet Entrepreneurs then started copying Amazon’s Affiliate Program system. Affiliate Program software then became all the rage among Merchants for the benefits it would bring them.

The Affiliate Program software became another important component for a Merchant selling products online and soon many of us had either installed a similar off-the-shelf system on our domain, or used a 3rd party Affiliate Program software provider where we run the Affiliate Program off their server.

To make things easier for Affiliates to market for us, we could create ready banner ads for them and as well as ready promotional e-mail messages that they could load up into their own Sequential Autoresponder System or simply to broadcast to their lists.

To get Affiliates to join us, we could also get our website visitors to sign up as our Affiliates right on our website itself. We would also register our Affiliate Program with all the Affiliate Program Directories we could find.

To serve our Affiliates with a minimum of effort, we would have an Affiliate login on a restricted area of our website where our Affiliates could go to get their marketing materials and check their statistics and sales.

The Affiliate Program could also be automated as we could use a Sequential Autoresponder System to train our Affiliates on what steps to take to properly market for us, including how to copy and paste the banners we had prepared for them to show up on their webpages, and how to link from those banners to our websites using their own unique Affiliate Link our Affiliate Program software had automatically generated for them.

This was in addition to putting up the steps within the Affiliate login area which could be seen all the time by Affiliates who were looking for some guidance.

From time to time, we could run contests for the best Affiliate to win something valuable, to create a spike in sales when we needed extra cash to come into our business quickly. We would broadcast an e-mail to our Affiliates (they would sign up to a separate mailing list for Affiliates) to let them know about the contest – and serious Affiliates would then do whatever they needed to do to get the sales for us.

So the 1st Generation Internet Marketing System for the Merchant looks like the following:

Website + E-Mail + Affiliate Program

With a website that didn’t require any updating, Search Engine traffic, banner traffic, an automatic e-mail system, an Affiliate Program and automated Affiliate recruiting and training systems in place, we had everything we needed to make lots of money with online – practically on auto-pilot.

And many of us did.

All we needed to do as Merchants was to focus on our product range, offers, Affiliate and Customer support.

All Affiliates needed to do was to look for more Merchants to represent. (Note they wouldn’t install an Affiliate Program on their domain as Affiliates wouldn’t be selling anything themselves.)

For years, life was good.

Until something else came along that sort of messed up the good life that we had.

Which led to something that I called the 2nd Generation Internet Marketing System.

More on that in my next post!

Cheers
Sen Ze
P.S. Click below to book a seat to my FREE talk on Automated Internet Marketing Systems. I’ll be revealing the 4th Generation Internet Marketing System and what its components are. You really don’t want to miss out on this, because nobody else talks about them the way I do!

I’ve managed in mega corporations with hundreds of people on its payroll working in huge business premises. And I’ve been on my own as a one-person Entrepreneur (where you basically take care of everything on your own).

There are advantages and disadvantages to both – but if you’re not planning on working for an organization any time soon, you really have only one choice.

As a one-person Entrepreneur, you’ll want a business model that doesn’t require a huge capital outlay, or any employees. You can outsource some parts of your work which can be on an ad-hoc basis (like doing up your accounts, for example), but by and large, you’re in charge of everything, and you’ll be doing all of them.

Internet Businesses appeal to individuals without a huge appetite for risks since a lot of leverage can be achieved with a computer, software and the Internet. Many of your tasks that you have to do to run your business can also be “delegated” or assigned to specialized software, like following up with your Prospects, for example.

Not only that, if done properly, Internet Businesses can also bring in HUGE returns which make the costs of running them quite laughable by comparison with other types of businesses.

Well and good – but what Internet Business should you start?

My recommendation is to sell products on the Internet, as a Merchant, not as an Affiliate for other Merchants.

Yes, even when you’re starting off, with absolutely no experience.

For it is only when you’re a Merchant that you can spot good Merchants that you can be an Affiliate for.

In other words, if you don’t know what’s involved in selling – how do you know the Merchant you’re an Affiliate for knows what he’s doing? You’ll want to maximize your efforts in referring Prospects to the Merchants so that you have the highest possible chances of success in earning your commissions.

The other reason is that once you’re a successful Merchant, other Merchants will be flocking to you to offer you their Affiliate or Joint Venture opportunity so you don’t really have to seek every single Merchant out to partake in their Affiliate Program (unless you wish to, of course).

Thus by becoming a Merchant, you’re really making yourself both a Merchant AND an Affiliate at the same time, with the Affiliate role being an automatic option.

Compare this to becoming an Affiliate first, where you seek out Merchants to refer Prospects to. You simply focus on referring, instead of building up your own range of in-demand products that are your ASSETS.

So the vast majority of Affiliates remain Affiliates, with just a fraction of them becoming Merchants themselves, because being a Merchant isn’t an automatic option for Affiliates, as Affiliates don’t learn the skills or acquire the knowledge on building up their own ASSETS that can generate a fortune for them for many years to come.

You may say that an Affiliate’s asset is the LIST of Prospects he builds up, on his way to referring them to the Merchants – and you would be right. However, a Merchant has to build up his own list too – so why not get 2 streams of income as both a Merchant and an Affiliate, instead of just becoming an Affiliate only?

Best of all – a Merchant can have Affiliates marketing FOR HIM too – whereas most Affiliates work for themselves only since most Affiliate Programs only pay on 1 level directly to the Affiliate where he can’t recruit other Affiliates to help him market for the Merchant.

Know what I mean?

To fit within the low-cost, high-profit boundaries you’re setting for yourself as a one-person Entrepreneur, I very highly recommend that you sell DIGITAL products as a Merchant.

Specifically, digital products that can be DOWNLOADED directly from your web site.

Downloadable digital products are automatically duplicated and delivered to your customers once they click on the link that leads to your digital product on your server, which also hosts your web pages selling your digital products.

This is different from selling digital products on CDs or DVDs where you’ll still have to deliver the physical CDs/DVDs to your customers through the mail. This means handling, packing and physical delivery at the post office – all of which will take up your time, and certainly add to your costs.

You can of course outsource the handling, packing and physical delivery to another outfit, with the costs being borne by your customers. But this will increase your customer’s cost of getting your product, and you’ll still have the usual customer support headaches associated with selling physical products. They could say that they “didn’t receive product, please send another one”, or the “product is damaged, please send another one”, or “one CD is missing from the set of 3 – please send it over”, etc.

With downloadable digital products, especially information products (which is what I suggest that you start with) – what’s your headache?

1. Customer couldn’t download product
Give him a direct link to your product in your e-mail to him. Or attach your product to your e-mail. End of story. Will take a minute or two. This happens only a fraction of the time.

2. Customer thinks your product is crappy. He wants a refund
Log into your PayPal account (assuming you use PayPal to accept payments online), and effect a refund. End of story. Will take you a minute or two. This happens only a fraction of the time, unless your product REALLY is crappy – in which case it’s time to make it better until you get very few refund requests. Refund requests will happen, whether your product is digital or otherwise, and no matter how good it really is. You can deal with it and move on quickly.

Is there anything else as far as customer support for downloadable digital product (information based) is concerned?

Right. There is NOTHING else.

Best of all, downloadable digital products can be taken delivery of by your customers even as you’re lazing around in your Pajamas at home, or you’re at the cinema watching the latest blockbuster in the middle of the day (when you’re escaping from the maddening crowd, and when most of your friends are at work in a conventional job) since a CLICK by your customer on the download link is all that is required to complete the sale.

Your web pages do the selling, your host server serves your web pages to anybody with a browser and an Internet connection and your domain name, your PayPal account accepts payment directly from your web site (via credit card or other PayPal accounts), and your host server automatically duplicates and delivers your downloadable product to your customers.

It’s the PERFECT business to do.

Lest you think selling digital products via a web site is for techies – relax!

I’ve figured out ways to make it possible for complete dummies who have only ever used e-mail up to now, to quickly create downloadable products of his own (sometimes this happens instantly!), quickly write a sales spiel for it, quickly set up this sales spiel and download page on his web site, quickly integrate his web site with an online payment system and finally quickly marketing his web site so that the selling can take place – all within A FEW DAYS!

Yes, it is NOW within the reach of MOST people with an interest to become a Merchant of downloadable digital products, FASTER THAN EVER BEFORE – whereas previously the majority of people can’t do it, no matter how much coaching they’ve received.

This isn’t a pipe dream. I’ve spent the last 4 or 5 years of my life trying to crack this code – and I’m proud to say I’ve finally done it.

Which is extremely good news for you, if you’ve always thought of making money online, but never got started, or never succeeded.

More in my next post!

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/digital-products/the-perfect-business.htm

Technorati Tags: internet business, internet marketing, digital products, affiliates, affiliate program, merchant, business strategy, e-commerce, make money online

See the Life Changing Party video below? Give it a minute or two to load, then click on the “Play” button for it to play.

Affiliate Video Brander

Now you can market the Life Changing Party as an Affiliate and earn 20% of all ticket prices sold, by sending your unique Affiliate Link to your friends. Any click by them on your unique Affiliate Link that takes them to the Life Changing Party web site and results in a sale will earn you your commission!

However, you can easily put the above video up into your own Blog post and earn commissions for every Blog reader of yours who purchase tickets through it by clicking on the “Click here to get your tickets and extra bonuses” link at the bottom left hand corner of the video player, or directly on the video itself (where a “Click Here For More Information” message will be displayed)!

If your Blog readers let the video play until the end, they’ll automatically be redirected to the LifeChangingParty.com web site, where your referrals will still be tracked.

You will earn 20% of all tickets sold as a result of this video sitting on your Blog and all you do is to show this video to your friends on your own Blog!

EMBEDDING THIS VIDEO IN YOUR BLOG

Embedding the video into your Blog is as easy as copying a short piece of code and then pasting it into your post, after which you will click on the “Publish” button.

There are 3 easy steps to get your own unique video code for your own Blog, and have your Life Changing Party Affiliate Link wrapped around it. Simply click on the “$hare Video” link in the bottom right hand corner and wait for instructions within the video itself!

This is quite a revolutionary way to market this event on the Internet as an Affiliate of the Life Changing Party, with very little effort. Video gives more impact, and it’s so easy to just put it up on your Blog and ask your friends to view it by getting them to go directly to it.

You can also urge them to take action quickly to get the huge bonus, which may help improve your results.

Try it out and see what happens!

Sen Ze

P.S. Don’t have a blog? Get one below that is installed at your own domain made up of your own name:

Personal Domain Name Blog

P.P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/life-changing-party/affiliate-video-rebrander.htm

Technorati Tags: affiliate program, affiliate, life changing party, law of attraction

Top Feature #9:
Supports payouts through PayPal!
========================

You can easily export a file to use PayPal’s “Mass Pay” payment system to pay your Affiliates through PayPal.

With PayPal’s “Mass Pay” system, you can pay multiple Affiliates at the same time by just uploading a .csv file containing the e-mail address of the Affiliate, the amount you’re paying him as his commissions, and the currency you’re paying him in.

AffiliteRising can create that .csv file for you within a few seconds, properly formatted, for you to upload to PayPal’s Mass Pay system for your commissions payout. Neat!

Major Benefits For Your Affiliates:
=======================

1. Your Affiliates get paid as soon as you’ve completed your “Mass Pay” activities
They save on a trip to the bank to bank in their commission checks from you.

2. There will be no “lost checks” in the mail
The money is transferred electronically directly into their PayPal account.

Major Benefits For You:
================

1. You eliminate paperwork and time
You don’t have to issue paper checks and then send them to your Affiliates by post (unless you want to, of course).

2. You will have more time to look for more Affiliates
Your Affiliate force will grow and grow!

There are many more top features that you must look at (you wouldn’t believe what else there is) – so make your trip there now by clicking on the link below – and setting it up for your own web site quickly!

Best Affiliate Program Software <=== Click on this link

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/affiliate-program/best-affiliate-software-program-4.htm

Technorati Tags: affiliate program software, affiliate program, viral marketing, mass pay, paypal

Top Feature #5:
==============

Affiliates Need Only Lead Their Prospects To ONE Web Page On Any One Of Your Domains Via Their Affiliate Links And They Will Get Credited For Any Purchases Made By Their Prospects On Any Of Your Domains Thereafter!

All your Affiliates need to do to have their Prospects tracked across your multiple domains selling different products is to get their Prospects to land on just ONE of your web pages set up with the AffiliateRising tracking codes.

This sets a cookie on their Prospects’ computers that will be activated when the Prospects later go directly to your other web pages on the other domains (for example, he types in the URL of your 2nd web site directly).

Thus it doesn’t matter if your Prospects do not follow a link to your second domain when he’s at your first. By going directly to the second domain, they’ll still be tracked at the second domain to the respective referring Affiliates who brought them to the first domain!

Major Benefits For Your Affiliates:
=====================

1. Your Affiliates will get credited for the sale of any of your products with just a one-time effort in getting their Prospects to one page on one web site of yours
This could be a Blog post on your site, which is easy enough to lead Prospects to! Your Affiliate Program is now in a class of its own, compared to your competitors’ – and if your Affiliates know about it, you’ll get more Affiliates!

2. Your Affiliates can now choose which of your web pages on which of your domains to promote to their Prospects based on what your Affiliates think are suitable for their Prospects
This will increase the number of Prospects visiting your web pages and result in more sales for you, and more commissions for your Affiliates!

Major Benefits For You:
===============

1. You’ll have happier Affiliates
They can refer more Prospects to any of your web pages without needing to track all of the products that you’re selling.

2. This will result in more sales for you over time!
This is due to increased Affiliate activity because they can link to any web page on your web site. If you put up Blog posts, and your Affiliates can link to individual posts, you’re creating many opportunities for your Affiliates to link to your site. And of course your Blog will be promoting your products that your Affiliates will be credited for if a purchase is made by their referrals.

Top Feature #8:
==============
Pay on more than 1 Tier!

One way to quickly grow your Affiliate force is to have your existing Affiliates promote your Affiliate Program in addition to promoting your products.

You will be rewarding your Affiliates for their efforts in finding other Affiliates for you, by giving them an additional commission when the Affiliates they found made a sale of your products.

This makes your Affiliate Program grow on its own since every Affiliate has the incentive to look for other Affiliates as the Affiliate will be able to leverage on other people’s efforts (the Affiliates they’ve found) as well, just like you are.

Your Affiliate Program effectively becomes a 2-tier Affiliate Program. If you have enough commissions to give away, you may even create a 3 or more tier Affiliate Program!

AffiliateRising enables you to an Affiliate Program of up to 10 tiers based on a forced matrix system!

Major Benefits For Your Affiliates:
=====================

They will be rewarded for finding other Affiliates for you, when the latter make referred customers to you
This is in addition to earning a commission for every sale due to the Affiliate’s own efforts, so they’ll be making more money overall.

Major Benefits For You:
================

1. Your Affiliate force can grow automatically
This happens through your Affiliates’ efforts in looking for other Affiliates for you

2. You will get more sales from a bigger Affiliate force!
More Affiliates means more of them going out to spread the word about your products and services. This inevitably means more sales for you!

Stay tuned for more top features in my next post!

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/affiliate-program/affiliate-program-software-3.htm

Technorati Tags: afffiliate program, affiliate program software, affiliate links

With SOLOBIS’s AffiliateRising Affiliate Program software:

Top Feature #3:

You can track ANY web page on your web site linked to by your Affiliates!

Now your Affiliates can link to an article of yours, or your Blog posts, or your forums, instead of directly to your product page!

Major Benefits For Your Affiliates:
=====================

1. They don’t have to link only to your products’ sales letter
Your Affiliates will have more flexibility with more web pages on your web site that they can link to.

2. They’re not seen as overly “commercial”
This is because not every page they link to is a sales page – like when they link to your Blog posts, for example. There are times when this is desirable, and your Affiliates can decide for themselves.

3. They don’t have to run out of excuses to link to your web sites
All they need to do is to just link to your interesting Blog posts. You Blog either links to your product page, or to another Blog post that talks about your product, with an order button – and any sales that eventually result will be credited to them!

Best of all, since you’ll be blogging on your own web site anyway (if not, you MUST start blogging for the huge benefits this will bring), why not have your Affiliates ride on your efforts, and have them become actively involved with your site by making it easy to do so? Their Affiliate Links can modified to easily link to ANY page on your site – which takes only a few seconds to do!

Major Benefits For You:
===============

1. Your Affiliates don’t have to link to your products’ sales pages only, because they can link to your Blog posts
They have more reasons to link to your web site now and still earn a commission should their referred Prospects buy from you at any time in the future.

2. When they link to your Blog posts, or articles on your web site, you will start building a relationship with your Affiliates’ Prospects over time
This can result in more sales from them since you’re not taking the one-shot approach of trying to make the sale from them the first time, every time.

But that’s not all.

Are You Ready For This?
================

Top Feature #4:

Track Affiliate Links On ANY Web Page On ANY Web Site On ANY Number Of Domains You Own With ONE AffiliateRising Account!

With AffiliateRising, you can track your Affiliates’ links across multiple web pages on multiple domains!

Best of all, you can do this with just ONE AffiliateRising account!

Major Benefits For Your Affiliates:
====================

1. They don’t have to join more than one Affiliate Program for all of your products sitting on different domains
This means that they can start promoting all of your other products immediately.

2. The reporting of all clicks and sales of all your different products are found in one Affiliate Program Control Panel
This is convenient for all of your Affiliates.

Major Benefits For You:
===================

1. There’s no need to for you to set up different Affiliate Program software or accounts for different products on different domains
You save lots of money, time and effort.

2. You’ll have more effective Affiliates who can focus on their marketing of your products
They don’t have to think about which Control Panel to log into to get their marketing materials for different products on different domains.

Stay tuned for more Top Features found in AffiliateRising, the best Affiliate Program software, in my next post.

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/affiliate-program/best-affiliate-program-software-2.htm

Technorati Tags: best affiliate program software, affiliate program, clicks tracking

It operates on just one simple principle that will help you the Merchant to achieve the most number of sales from your Affiliates.

That principle is as follows:

Go all out to put your Affiliates’ best interests first.

Yes, your Affiliates’ best interests first – not your own.

The reason is simple.

When your Affiliates are happy with your Affiliate Program and the way you’re treating them, they’ll promote your products far more than your competitors who don’t care much for them. And there are more merchants that don’t really care too much for their Affiliates than you think!

SOLOBIS’s AffiliateRising Affiliate Program software helps you achieve this goal with the following top features:

Top Feature #1:
Use Your Own Domain Name In Your Affiliate’s Affiliate Links!

With most hosted Affiliate Program software, you’ll have to rely on the provider’s own domain name for your Affiliate tracking links.

For example, your Affiliates could be forced to use the following long Affiliate Link:

http://www.AffiliateTrckSystem.com/s/t.php?aff_id=9330

Not only does it look odd, your Affiliate’s Prospects will be wondering why he is linking to a 3rd party when he’s recommending YOUR product at your own domain at, say, GreatStuff.com.

However, if your domain is GreatStuff.com, SOLOBIS’s AffiliateRising Affiliate Program software allows your Affiliates to use the following type of Affiliate Link to link to your web site and still get tracked for their sales:

http://www.GreatStuff.com?z=9ecd

See the huge difference in appearance when you have your own domain in your Affiliates’ Affiliate Links?

Major Benefits For Your Affiliates:

1. They link DIRECTLY to your domain, not to AffiliateRising!
Their Prospects’ minds don’t raise any “flags” before they get a chance to visit your web site.

2. Sales will likely increase from your Affiliates’ referrals
Since the Affiliate Link doesn’t raise any “flags”, the referred Prospect may be more open to see what’s being sold to him. When the product page views increase, the product sales will naturally increase!

Major Benefits For You:

1. Increase in Web Page Ranking In The Search Engines
Affiliate Links with the proper anchor text linking directly to your web site’s domain will help your web pages achieve a better ranking in the Search Engines over time – which will then bring you more and more free Search Engine traffic! You won’t get this benefit with a 3rd party Affiliate Link that re-directs to your domain, since all the Affiliate Links point to that 3rd party’s domain first – increasing that domain’s ranking instead!

2. Brand your site to the max
With your domain in your Affiliates’ respective Affiliate Links, your brand is displayed everywhere it’s seen. It’s one of the easiest and best branding methods available anywhere that also increases your traffic and sales at the same time!

3. You’ll look really professional
Your Affiliates will love their Affiliate Links since it’s made with their interests at heart.

Top Feature #2:
Affiliate Links Don’t Look Like Affiliate Links!

A link that looks like this

http://www.AffiliateTrckSystem.com/s/t.php?aff_id=9330

is obviously an Affiliate Link.

Because your domain is GreatStuff.com, what’s another URL with certain keywords like “Affiliate” and “Track” being used here, with something else called “aff_id” (which stands for “affiliate ID”), to refer to your web site?

Your Affiliates’ Prospects aren’t dumb – and in any case, this type of link practically spells it out for them.

With AffiliateRising’s style of Affiliate Links that look like the following:

http://www.GreatStuff.com?z=9ecd

there’s no obvious connection with an Affiliate Program! It could well be a product web page, or even a Blog posting. There’s also no “aff_id” tags anywhere in that link to immediately give the game away to your Affiliates’ Prospects.

Major Benefits For Your Affiliates:

1. Their Affiliate Links don’t look like Affiliates Links
And so they’ll get more visits to your web site, and consequently, more sales.

2. Because they don’t look like Affiliate Links, there’s less Affiliate Link Hijacking
Affiliate Link Hijacking occurs where a Prospect immediately signs up as your Affiliate once he knows that he’s following an Affiliate Link, and then buys from himself to deprive the referring Affiliate of his commissions.

Major Benefits For You:

1. Your Affiliates get more sales for their efforts
They’ll be happy that you’re protecting their interests with their unique Affiliate Links.

2. Your Affiliates will be more likely to sign up as your Affiliates
You get more Affiliates because you put their interests first.

Notice The Difference?
==================

Can you see the HUGE difference in the above approaches to 3rd party Affiliate Program software’s Affiliate Links? Your Affiliates will be some of the happiest puppies on earth – and consequently, you will be too.

But you can do much more.

Stay tuned!

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this URL with the following:

http://www.SenZe.com/business-blog/affiliate-program/best-affiliate-program-software.htm

Technorati Tags: Best Affiliate Program software, Affiliate Program, Affiliate Program software

It’s SOO much easier this time around, now that we know just what to expect and do with him.

I remember being exhausted every single day when we were taking care of our first baby but that hardship’s a distant memory now…

Ok – I was discussing Affiliate Programs for Merchants and Affiliate Program software in my previous posts…

Here’s a recap, to bring you up to speed for the next discussion:

1. Affiliate Program For Merchants <--- Click for full story
In this post I talked about the Merchant’s limited ability to reach out to his target market on his own or even with a team of marketers on his payroll, since they all have only 24 hours in a day. He would be far better off if he has a team of “Affiliates” all over the world working hard marketing his products with him, and pay only for performance. This way, he can have thousands of Affiliates helping him out and he needn’t worry about paying them until his products are sold from their marketing efforts.

Thus an Affiliate Program should be considered by every Merchant with products that have good margins for commissions to be paid out from. This is particularly so in the case of digital products where his profit is over 90% of the selling price, but it can also apply to physical products as long as the profit margin is enough to make commission payouts attractive to the Affiliate.

2. Affiliate Program Software Essentials <--- Click for full story
In this post I talked a bit about the imporance of an Affiliate Program software in tracking the sales of the Merchant’s Affiliate. Some of the most essential features of an Affiliate Program software were discussed.

An Affiliate Program that is available on the Internet for anybody to join needs to have a robust and good Affiliate Program software running it. This post also highlights certain important features of such a piece of software, which can also act as an automatic Affiliate recruiting tool.

3. Software For Your Internet Business <--- Click for full story
This post discusses the 2 different types of software available for the Merchant to use. He can install the software on his own server and run it from there (and pay a one-off fee), or he can be a client of a 3rd party Affiliate Program software provider and run his Affiliate Program off the 3rd party’s Affiliate Program software on the latter’s own server instead (and pay a monthly fee).

The better option for the Merchant is for him to run his Affiliate Program off a 3rd party’s Affiliate Program software since he needn’t worry about upgrading, maintaining or fixing the software (when bugs occur) and just focus on his business. The minimal monthly fee shouldn’t be considered as an expense but more of an investment for the marketing of his product.

4. Clickbank <--- Click for full story
This post then introduces Clickbank, a retailer who will buy your digital product from you and resell it to their Customers using their own credit card merchant account. This arrangement is great if you have difficulty getting your own credit card merchant account from your bank and have it linked to an online payment gateway so that your Customers can key in their credit card details at their computers anywhere in the world.

The other reason is that Clickbank has an Affiliate Program software installed on its own server. Thus if Clickbank accepts you as its Supplier (with some exceptions), you’re in fact riding on Clickbank’s Affiliate Program software – which is what I recommend that you do.

5. Clickbank Issues <--- Click for full story
However, Clickbank comes with its own issues, chief among them is the fact that its Affiliates really aren’t your Affiliates, but Clickbank’s. Thus if you were to promote your product linked up with Clickbank to your list, they’ll become Clickbank’s Affiliates instead of yours.

On top of that, its Affiliates are also not linking to your web site to promote your product, but to Clickbank’s using Clickbank’s Affiliate Link format. This does not help your web site gain better positioning in the Search Engines from the Affiliates’ linking activities, which is a major benefit of having an Affiliate Program.

6. The MOACA <--- Click for full story
This post discusses the “Mother Of All Clickbank Alternatives” (MOACA) where you can get the benefit of your Affiliates linking directly to your domain for Search Engine ranking advantage and have the same Affiliate Program software running off a 3rd party’s server for the benefits of such an arrangement.

You become your own Merchant, and you will pay your own Affiliates. However, you can dispense with payment by paper checks completely using an inexpensive electronic transfer facility that is available online in most countries in the world. You will only spend a few minutes on a particular day each month doing commissions payout – thus just about matching the advantages offered by Clickbank in paying its Affiliates for promoting your product (where you are not a part of this payment process at all since they’re not your Affiliates).

You’re Up To Speed!
==============

The above brings us up to date with the discussion on Affiliate Programs, their issues and their solutions. Make sure you click on those links to have a deeper understanding of the discussion – because they’re important to your profits.

In my next post, you’ll discover the best Affiliate Program software ever created that will enable you to have the “MOACA Experience“.

Its benefits are so mind-blogging, it’s unreal. But it is real – as you’ll soon see.

Stay tuned!

Sen Ze

In fact, you’ll be so far ahead of Clickbank that you wouldn’t miss it!

Here are the different components for MOACA:

1. Use PayPal to accept online payments from your customers
With PayPal, you’re acting as the Merchant, selling directly to your customers, since PayPal isn’t a Retailer and will not be selling your product for you.

PayPal charges only 2.4% – 3.4% plus $0.30 per transaction (depending on your volume).

For your customers to use PayPal to pay you, they must fund PayPal with their bank account or credit card (depending on which country they’re in), or receive payment from another PayPal user and then use that money to pay you. PayPal also accepts credit card payments from those without a PayPal account, so you’ve pretty much covered everybody.

However, PayPal does not come with an Affiliate Program software for you to use, so this brings us to the following….

2. Set up your own Affiliate Program to run off a 3rd party Affiliate Program software
The Affiliate Program software is the core component of MOACA. A great piece of Affiliate Program software will enable you to create opportunities for both you and your Affiliates where none existed before.

Now you don’t want to install the software on your own server because of the issues I raised in this post, but use one hosted on the 3rd party’s Affiliate Program software vendor’s server. This 3rd party will be maintaining this software for you to ensure you have the latest version running, and fix any bugs it may have when they surface – thus saving you the headache of having to do this part on your own.

Setting up with your existing web pages will only take a day or two, and then it’s up to you to upload all your marketing materials to it for your Affiliates to access them for their marketing efforts.

3. Ensure that 3rd party Affiliate Program software allows you to use your domain in your Affiliates’ Affiliate Links
Even though the Affiliate Program software is running on a 3rd party’s server and hence a different domain, it may have a feature where you can use your domain name in your Affiliates’ Affiliate Links.

You will only use this software if it has this feature.

This feature will help you with your web pages’ ranking higher in the Search Engines since now all your Affiliates are linking directly to your domain, instead of to a 3rd party’s before being re-directed to yours (like Clickbank).

4. Ensure that this Affiliate Program software allows you to link to any sales page for any other products you may have
If you have more than 1 product to sell, your Affiliates must be able to link directly to all or any of their sales pages, instead of just to your 1 Home Page.

This helps them focus on the product being sold, and reduces distractions. It also gives your Affiliates great flexibility to link to any web page of yours, if they think that would be a better option.

5. Pay your Affiliates’ commissions yourself, using PayPal’s “Mass Pay” feature
One thing you’ll have to do on your own is to tabulate all your Affiliates’ commissions and send them over. The tabulation is done automatically by the 3rd party Affiliate Program software, so there’s nothing extra for you to do here.

You can then use PayPal’s “Mass Pay” feature to send your Affiliates’ commissions directly to them from your own PayPal account to your Affiliates’ PayPal accounts. All you need to do is to upload a spreadsheet with 3 columns to your PayPal account Mass Pay section stating the e-mail address of the recipient, the amount he’s receiving from you, and the currency you’re paying out in.

The 3rd party Affiliate Program software may be able to help you generate such a spreadsheet automatically – so again, there’s nothing much for you to do except log into your PayPal account, upload the spreadsheet and click on “Pay”.

With PayPal being available in most countries in the world, you’re able to pay your Affiliates easily without ever having to write out a check and posting them. On the rare occasion when your Affiliates prefer to be paid by check, you can simply write out those few and send them over.

By using PayPal to pay your Affiliates, you’ve lessened the impact Clickbank has in doing all the grunt work in paying out commissions to its Affiliates for selling your product. All you need to do is to set aside a few minutes one particular day of the month to do the Mass Payment in PayPal, and you’re done!

Note: You must have a checking account linked to your PayPal account before you can use the Mass Pay feature.

And that’s the “MOACA” in a nutshell…

Neat, yes?

In my next post, we’ll take a look at the best Affiliate Program software ever created for both the Merchant and Affiliate, with some unique and outstanding features for the Merchant to make even more sales with less time and effort, simply by keeping his Affiliates very happy…

Stay tuned…

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/internet-business/mother-of-all-clickbank-alternatives.htm

Technorati Tags: Clickbank, Affiliate Program, Affiliate Program software, PayPal

You don’t have to apply to your bank for a credit card merchant account and integrate it with an online payment gateway on your own, in order to accept credit card payment from your customers. You simply become Clickbank’s Supplier or “Publisher”.

You can also tap into Clickbank’s existing Affiliate Program and Affiliate Program software to have Affiliates market your product for you without you having to set up your own Affiliate Program software for this purpose.

However, the following are some issues you may want to think about if you want to tap into Clickbank’s setup:

1. Clickbank doesn’t allow its Affiliates to route their Prospects directly to your different products’ sales pages
While Clickbank allows you to supply up to 50 different digital products to it per Clickbank account, it doesn’t provide its Affiliates with more than one URL to use for Clickbank to track the sales of your different products.

Assuming your registered Clickbank nickname is “jeremy” (you’re Clickbank’s Supplier), and one of Clickbank’s registered Affiliates’ nickname is “susan”, then all “susan” needs to do to link to your product sales page (and still be tracked for her referral should a sales occur for the purpose of calculating her commission) is to use the following URL:

http://susan.jeremy.hop.clickbank.net

This URL will then re-direct to your web page selling your product, which is usually “http://www.YourDomain.com” as you would have specified that URL as your “Home Page” in the Clickbank Control Panel.

Because Clickbank doesn’t allow you to specify more than one “Home Page” for each Supplier Clickbank account, if you have 2 different products to sell, this one Home Page must necessarily contain 2 different links to your 2 different products’ respective sales letters at your domain.

When this is the case, Clickbank’s Affiliates can’t really link from their advertisement for Product 1 directly to its sales page, but to your Home Page which contains 2 different links to 2 different products.

This can result in some confusion for the Affiliates’ Prospects who clicked through the ad for Product 1 only to see a choice of 2 different products to look at – the link for Product 1 and another link for Product 2.

If the Prospects aren’t confused, they now have a choice of 2 different products to buy – and may well end up not being able to decide which one to buy.

It gets worse when you have more products to sell, as your Home Page will be filled with up to 50 different links to your many different products.

When your Prospects’ attention is diluted, or they’re confused, they will be less likely to buy from you – and Clickbank’s Affiliates will soon stop marketing your products and instead look at your competitors’ products instead.

One solution is to open another Clickbank account for the 2nd product, but you’ll have to pay for a new Clickbank account every time you do this.

2. Clickbank’s Affiliates don’t link directly to your web site
Clickbank’s Affiliates use the following URL to link to promote your products:

http://susan.jeremy.hop.clickbank.net

This URL then re-directs to your domain.

Note how the above URL isn’t linking to your domain, but to clickbank.net instead?

This is necessary since the Affiliates are really Clickbank’s Affiliates (not yours), and the Affiliate Program software resides at www.Clickbank.net.

When this happens, Clickbank’s Affiliates are not building up any links to your own domain, but to Clickbank.net instead. Search Engines like Google look at the number of links to your sales page to decide whether to rank it higher than your competitor’s web pages on keywords related to it – so your sales page will get no help from Clickbank’s Affiliates here!

3. You’re building up Clickbank’s Affiliate force for free
Clickbank will list your product in its marketplace for its other Affiliates to check out and make the decision to market, but you really do need to market your own product to your own list of Prospects to start off since nobody knows what your product name is or which category it is in when you’re launching – not to mention the hundreds of competitors you have who are already populating Clickbank’s Marketplace even if they do know.

Now your sales page for your product will usually contain a link to your Affiliate Program details since not everybody who sees your sales page will become customers, but some will become Affiliates since it costs nothing them to join your Affiliate Program for them to be able to earn commissions for their referral efforts.

However, what you’re really doing is building up Clickbank’s own Affiliate force, as they’ll have to sign up at Clickbank’s web site as an Affiliate (you’ll have to link to Clickbank’s Affiliate sign up form) and for Clickbank to be able to track their Clickbank Affiliate Links that re-direct to your domain for calculating any sales that result from their efforts.

4. Clickbank isn’t available to Merchants, Affiliates and Customers in some countries
This is due to various considerations, and one of them is the higher risk of credit card fraud in certain locations according to Clickbank’s own “findings”.

Thus if you’re a potential Clickbank Supplier, know that you’ll either be unable to be its Supplier because of where you are, or you’ll be selling a lot fewer of your products than with another retailer like Clickbank without its restrictions.

The MOACA
=========

While Clickbank can be a great help for you to get up and running in the quickest possible time, and is the retailer of choice for many Suppliers, the above factors may be important to you and make you decide not to go with Clickbank.

But is there a better alternative with practically the same benefits as Clickbank without the disadvantages listed above?

I’ve hunted high and low for a solution and I couldn’t find it.

Until now.

Stay tuned for it because you’re about to discover the Mother of All Clickbank Alternatives (MOACA) – with benefits that far surpass Clickbank’s!

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://SenZe.com/business-blog/clickbank/clickbank-issues.htm

Technorati Tags: Clickbank, Clickbank issues, Affiliate Program, Affiliate Program software, digital product