Affiliate Website Pros, Cons and Getting Traffic
By Rick L. young
Thinking of buying an affiliate website? With the web these days growing at a substantial rate, just about everywhere you turn on the web, you will see offers to own your own web business. Many of these offers are legitimate businesses with real products and items waiting for you to open one of their affiliate sites and start selling. They can sound very good, get you excited, tell you that you can make tons of money and sometimes be under $100.00 dollars to start. But there are some important things you should consider before you buy.
Pros:
Affiliate sites can be a good thing if you’re looking for a low maintenance way to have a business on the web, like if you’re retired or like to travel a lot. They can also produce a fairly good income 24/7 once you become established and if you know where you can pick up some local traffic just through friends and neighbors.
Cons:
But there are downfalls to having an affiliate site, and the most important one is you probably won’t have much control over it, sometimes none at all. First, you may not have control over the ad banners that appear on your site, you probably won’t have control over the content, links or text links and on some of them, you may not be able to control the keywords or optimize the site for the search engines, or possibly even see your daily traffic or check your stats (how many visitors you have gotten and how many items you have sold).
One of the things they won’t tell you as they are trying to sell you a web site, is that even the big time companies with web sites consider themselves a top notch site if they make one sale out of every one-hundred visitors. As the matter of fact, this is what companies web sites aim for. Traffic is simply just not an easy thing to build up. A web site is not like putting a convenient store on a corner and everyone will see it as they pass by, and stop. If you do not advertise in some form, no one will know you’re on the web. The old adage “if you build it, they will come” just isn’t true when it comes to opening a web site.
Getting The Traffic:
Of course getting some heavy duty traffic will become your main goal when you open a web site, and it doesn’t matter how good it is or what it is selling. But web advertising can be flat out expensive, even scary. When you run a search for web advertising, you will find all kinds of bargains and promises to get heavy traffic to your site, and some of these are legitimate businesses, while others are mostly full of wind. Once you have your site and you begin searching the web for advertising, there’s one old adage that you should always stand by, “If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is”. Don’t fall for so-called bargains such as “100,000 visitors to your site for only $39.95!” Because it’s not just the traffic you need, it’s the quality of it.
If you pay for 100,000 traffic hits to your site that are pretty much forced to land on your page, more than likely you aren’t going to land a sale for it. There are plenty of advertisers that will do this. Such as pursuading you sign up on a traffic building list where people are forced to click on your link, just so they can earn a credit for it to get traffic back to their own site. Or joining and paying for an MLM type traffic builder where the member simply passes their site around to other members who desire more to sell than to buy. These sites can have as many as 25,000 members (so claimed), but all they are really doing is advertising their sites to other members while trying to make money from one another. As far as I have seen, normal outside web traffic or non-members rarely see these advertisements, if ever. Watch out for what can also be called FFA ads (free for all). They make it sound really good to join these, but when you place your ad in the rotation, you must give them your email address, and you will get literally slammed with everyone else's ads in YOUR email box.
Personally, I think the best advertising for any web site is word of mouth. Start locally by spreading the word and grow from there. Use flyers, penny saver papers and of course business cards and spread them all over your town, and county if necessary. Put a magnetic sign on the side of your car and give relatives and friends some business cards to pass around. All it really takes to get started, is a few people who know a few people and so on. But above all, don’t get discouraged, because it can take up to a year or two for a website to really take off. The most important thing is traffic, traffic, traffic (but QUALITY) traffic. Because the more you get, the bigger chances are of getting bigger and better sales. Good luck!
Copyright 2005 - R.L. Young - National Wholesalers
About the author:
R.L. Young is the owner of National Wholesalers, a wholesale website to businesses and the public and to help those who would like to have their own home business. Mr. Young began web marketing in the fall of 2002 with many experimentations and much research in web marketing, advertising and sales; including studies with affiliate web sites, and always learning more
Visit his site at http://www.natlwholesalers.com
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What Everyone Should Know About How To Buy Wholesale
By: Melanie Burns
Finding a supplier for the product you want to sell, at a price that you can profit from, can be a big task. The best suppliers for your online sales or auctions do not advertise their services and often cannot be found online.
Those that you can find online tend to be middle-men. It is often difficult to get a good enough price to make any real profit online.
Let me tell you about my simple 2 step system to find an untapped source for wholesale suppliers. This is so simple that it's often overlooked as a source for product. This system involves thinking outside the box and not letting policy stop you. (continued below)
The First Step to find a supplier is to find someone that already sells or has access to what you want to sell. This could be a website, an eBay seller, a manufacturer, a wholesale outlet, or a regular store in your city. This is the easy step. You know what you are looking for and you can search on the internet, not for a wholesale source, but for anyone already selling what you want to sell.
Another valuable source for a local supplier is your local phone book. The yellow pages are the best way to find local sources. This should be the first place you look. Doing business locally with someone that you can meet face to face is a big plus for your business.
Another potential source for your product is to find a distributor who would be willing to private label a product for you. You could get a very high quality product for a much lower price than if it had the name brand label.
The Second and Key Step is to convince the source you found to become your supplier.
Manufacturers and wholesale sources often have minimum orders that might be beyond your reach if you are just starting out. Online retailers, eBay merchants, and retail stores may be your best bet. Try to find a small store who is looking to expand.
But remember, you are dealing with a human being and they can be convinced to do business with you. Just be sure to sweeten the deal for them. One way is to offer the person you are dealing with at your new found source, a percentage of your profits from the products he supplies you.
Be sure to project it out for him. If he can see the benefit of working with you even though it causes extra work for him, you can be successful in making a deal.
You could offer him 20% of the profit from sales of his products. For example you could show him that you project to make at least $100 profit from each product, and you expect to sell 40 of them per month. The $4000 a month means an extra $800 per month in his pocket. You still make a nice $3200 profit for the month in this example.
On top of that, he will be ordering more products from his supplier and may be eligible for a higher price break from them. This way, his reward for the effort to work with you, is making money on both sides.
There are many benefits you can offer your potential supplier, but no matter how you look at it, the main thing it comes down to is MONEY. What's in it for your potential supplier to do business with you? If can you show him that, you have a better chance of making a deal with him and starting your online sales.
NOTE: When looking for suppliers around your city, don't go trying to impress the big stores with your $800 or even $3,000 extra income per month proposal. Try going to the little stores that are looking to expand their business, they are the ones that are usually more open to new opportunities.
The big stores are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in profits, so an extra couple of thousand would probably not impress them the least bit.
So now you see that by thinking outside the box, you open the door to many possibilities and increase your ability to make money online with your products.
About the Author:
Copyright © Melanie Burns
This article is free for reproduction but must be reproducted in its entirety including live links and this copyright statement. Subscribe to the iBusiness How2 Newsletter to receive hot tips, how to's, internet business tools, and relevant product reviews by sending an email to: newsletter@internet-business-how-to.com
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