The last Weekly Q provided a step-by-step guide for advertisers on launching an affiliate program. The Master Class series is alternating between tutorials for advertisers and affiliates and in this week’s newsletter we give advice for anybody looking to become an affiliate..

Half of business start-ups fail in the first year and 80 to 90% bite the dust within five years. If you don’t want to fall foul of the statistics, you need to be smarter, more creative, more hard working than most people – and, critical in improving the odds of success is having a top notch Business Plan.

A building will have a longer life if the planners and architects have meticulously planned everything and, similarly, the first step towards setting up a successful affiliate marketing enterprise is to think things through properly and set up the right structure.

Contrary to what most non-businesspeople believe, websites like MySpace and YouTube were not overnight successes: they were built with a great deal of forethought and strategic planning. Had the foundations of the businesses not been almost perfect, they would not have become the multi-million dollar success stories they are.

People are usually so keen to get going they jump headlong into developing a website, but arguably the most critical part in the development of any business is the conceptualization and fermentation period. Spend days, spend weeks, spend months if need be thinking things through and doing the groundwork. It’s not the most exciting part of the process, there’s no doubt about that, but this stage is vital.

A lot of individuals set up websites and blogs with no intention of making money and that is laudable. It is usually the case, however, that webmasters and bloggers who don’t generate an income usually end up becoming frustrated at having to pour hours of their time on a regular basis towards something that doesn’t provide them with any material reward and, in the long run, most websites earning no revenue tend not to be updated very often or simply close down. Everybody has bills to pay and so our focus will be on entrepreneurs whose intention it is to generate revenue with their online endeavors.

The first thing you should do is look yourself in the mirror and ask whether you are willing to endure the sacrifices necessary to build your own business. Are you willing to cut down on time spent with your friends and family? Are you willing to put months of effort into a venture that is unlikely to reap dividends in the short term? Unless you have significant savings, are you willing to reduce your standard of living and spend less money on material goods and vacations to invest capital into your business?

If the answer is no, then return to watching Big Brother or emailing your friends about that girl you met last night. If the answer is yes, then open up your word-processor or sit with a pen and paper and jot answers to the following questions:

	What subjects interest me and am I knowledgeable about? What do I like doing in my spare time?
	If I work in which fields will I become a more content and spiritually satisfied person? Which will contribute towards making the world a better place?
	Which subjects are the most likely to bring me a decent income in the long term if I set up an business devoted to them?
	Will I set up my own web properties or generate income via Pay Per Click (PPC) arbitrage in search engines?
	How will I attract visitors to my website when there are (almost inevitably) so many established competitors?
	Which advertisers could I affiliate with?
	How much money am I willing to invest in my business?
	How much time am I willing to invest in my business?
	What are my financial goals? How much would I like to make from this business in month 3, month 12, month 24, month 36?
	Which geographical areas will I target? Will I expand into other territories?
	Do I have the necessary skills and time to do everything myself?
	Will I take on board partners or employees?
	How will my business be structured? (Sole Proprietor, Partnership, Limited Company)
	What is my exit strategy?

We recommend you focus on areas you enjoy because (a) work should be fun and (b) you are more likely to make sacrifices for a project and put your heart and soul into it month in month out if you are genuine passionate about it. If you are merely setting up a business in a field because you think it will be bring in the bling, you are less likely to be a happy person or succeed.

You should thoroughly study competing websites and research the niches that interest you. Bounce off ideas with knowledgeable friends and family members if you can. Many public and private bodies are keen to encourage internet businesses get off the ground and you may be able to get valuable assistance – ask around (though don’t expect them to have ever heard of affiliate marketing!).

Case Study: Michael, 24, from the Bronx in New York had always been zealous about music and his dream was to become a singer. He was working in a grocery store to pay his bills while he attended singing classes and auditions. His best friend, Brad, had a baseball website from which he was making a second income of $800 a month and Michael was wondering whether he could use his encyclopedic knowledge of R&B to create a blog and make some money to supplement his low income from the grocery store. Michael sat in front of his computer one evening to do some research. After spending a couple of hours surfing around the net he read the majority of blogs were not updated after a couple of years of being set up. He realized he needed to have a well-thought-out Business Plan and do his math if he was going to ensure his blog would succeed in the long term and generate income for him. Michael met up with Brad a couple of days later and they studied other blogs in the same sector. They discovered that the main source of income for most R&B blogs was selling CDs via Amazon.com and Google Adsense advertising. Brad guestimated that less than 0.5% of visitors to an R&B blog were likely to buy CDs or download music via affiliate links. Based on that figure, a typical album price of $10, a commission rate of 5%, they worked out that Mike would need to pull in 200,000 visitors to generate $500. Although Michael had programming skills from college, he had no online marketing experience and, seeing the sheer number of quality competitors, decided the idea of setting up an R&B blog for a reasonable second income was unrealistic. He set up a meeting with Brad a week later to discuss some other ideas he had and, in the meanwhile, resolved to spend at least two hours every evening on affiliate and business discussion forums to learn more.

 

One final thing worth remembering before you steam ahead is affiliate marketing is obviously not the only means of generating an income with an online business and it may be worth exploring other options including drop-shipping, selling your own products, reselling other people’s products, network marketing and CPM/CPC income streams.

Useful Resources

Books

	Starting an Online Business All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies – available from Amazon USA and Amazon UK . Offers would-be entrepreneurs useful information on launching an e-business and succeeding in a competitive marketplace. Published three months ago, this guide consisting of eleven mini-books comprises nearly 800 pages.
	The Super Affiliate Handbook – available from Amazon USA and Amazon UK . Contains basic information about affiliate marketing. Useful for people who are just beginning to dip their feet into the water, although the self aggrandizement of the author and upselling of other products is irritating.

Websites

http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/new-internet-business/index.html - no-nonsense advice on starting on internet business

http://www.oncallgeeks.com/tutorial/ - five step tutorial on setting up an online venture

Nadeem Azam, PrimeQ
Public Relations Manager
nazam@primeq.co.uk

Amazon Launches Personalized Ads to Affiliate Sites

After years of offering personalized targeting on their website, Amazon is allowing affiliates to host advertising that will offer similar capabilities.

Amazon has launched three separate products. The first is aStore which allows affiliates to set up a customisable Amazon store on their sites with only a line of text.

The aStore features product images, titles, descriptions, reviews and prices. It is only when products are bought that customers leave the affiliate site. aStore has similar capabilities to dozens of Amazon Web Services scripts, but is a lot easier to implement.

Another feature which has been released from months of beta testing allows websites that display products from Amazon to carry preview panes which provide more information to potential shoppers. If a mouse is moved over a product title or image on an affiliate site, a box appears which includes the image, price and other details.

The affiliate community has been most excited about the release of Omakase, which is a Japanese word meaning “leave it up to us.”

It targets user behavior rather than simply placing ads in context and, as Amazon explains, “with Omakase Links, Associates can now automatically display the products and content that visitors to the page are most likely to buy… after a short learning period, the ads will be optimized based on what the Associate has been successful with in the past; what that user has been interested in; and what the site is about.”

Each person visiting a site may see different products advertised and the sophisticated technology behind Omakase is likely to improve sales from affiliate sites.

The product has been hailed as a competitor to Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network in some quarters, although it remains to be seen if many webmasters will switch to providing space to an advertiser which pays around 5% CPA when they can earn a reasonable CPC amount from Google and Yahoo.

An Affiliate Shopping Mall with a Difference

An affiliate charity website has been launched for the holiday shopping season called CyberMonday.com.

Cyber Monday, a term coined last year by Shop.org, represents a trend initially recognized a number of years ago, when many retailers saw spikes in sales and traffic as consumers went back to work after the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

CyberMonday.com features nearly 400 well-known online retailers who are promoting special savings and discounts for holiday season shoppers.

But this isn't just another run-of-the-mill affiliate shopping mall: all proceeds from CyberMonday.com sales will be donated to the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for students interested in an eCommerce career.

Ray Greenly was a Vice President at Shop.org before passing away from cancer last year.

Consumers are expected to spend an average of $800 on holiday shopping this year, and nearly 50 percent plan to make at least one holiday purchase online, up from 36 percent three years ago, according to a report last month by the National Retail Federation, a Washington, D.C., trade group.

It’s your publication, so let us know and we’ll try to steer The Weekly Q in the direction you would like. Email nazam@primeq.co.uk with your feedback.

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