It doesn't make any difference if you're promoting your own product, affiliate programs or MLM programs, there are 3 services your business can't live without.
Service #1: Web Hosting
I'm not talking about one of those Free accounts where they throw their own ad in everytime someone visits your site. I'm talking about a premium, ad free web hosting package with your own domain name. Plenty of space and able to handle plenty of traffic. Free sites that ad their own banner are not very professional in most peoples eyes and turns them off real quick.
Service #2: A minimum of one Sequential Autoresponder account
Why autoresponders? First they allow you to follow up with your online visitors automatically. Most people won't order during their first visit to your website. You can set your autoresponder to send out follow up email messages.
That makes your initial goal to capture the name and email address or your visitor so you can send them more information about the benefits of your offer. At the same time you're building a list of people that you can keep in regular contact with and send special offers to. You will need to prompt our visitor to sign up for an online newsletter, a free report, or any other offer you may have to encourage them to give you their name and email.
You should have enough autoresponder accounts to promote more that one offer. Eventually, may have hundreds of different messages automatically being sent with your offers.
Service #3: An Online Adtracker
No matter whether you're using free advertising or paid advertising you MUST track the performance of your ads. You need to know what ads work and which ones are duds. You have to know which advertising sources are giving you the best results for your time and money. You can even track individual links in your website to see which ones are getting the most hits.
Kristie Weddell is an independent researcher and owner of Affliatesource.com, a site devoted to providing resources for Affiliate and MLM Marketers. Subscribe to her free ecourse '5 Simple Steps to an Online Cashflow' at http://tinyurl.com/33p42
kristie@affliatesource.com