Chapter 2: Getting Traffic to Your Website 

Section 13: Your Own Affiliate Program & Using Joint Ventures

Before moving on to the skills section of my site, I want to discuss a couple more advanced topics, and walk through the basic steps that you need to take to implement them.

As discussed in the funded proposal section, selling other people’s information products and/or services when you begin setting up your website is an excellent idea, and one that I would say is just about critical to your success. In fact, this should ALWAYS be an element of your online business strategies. However, once you are in a position to be able to, you should also create your OWN information products. Once you’ve learned how to properly use google adwords to effectively promote other products, you’ll have the skill set needed to promote your very own products. However, once you’ve created your own product(s), you will be positioned to tap into yet another powerful money-creating system: your own affiliate program.

You see, just as the network marketing business model is the most cost-effective way to distribute goods for a company, so to is an affiliate program the most cost-effective way for YOU to distribute your information products. As you know, when a company distributes products via network marketing they replace ALL of their advertising and middle man costs with commissions to distributers. And of course, they only pay commissions when products are sold. Affiliate programs can work for you in the exact same way: you can cut out all of your advertising costs (if you wish), and pay commissions to affiliates ONLY when products are sold. Sure, you are giving up a good percentage of the revenue earned per sale, but you remove any advertising risk, and you can reach a much wider audience by having other marketers promoting your products.

If you find the right marketers with large lists to e-mail, you can EXPLODE your profits very quickly, in a way you could NEVER do on your own. Taking the method to that level is called a Joint Venture, or JV.

Now, the mechanics of doing all of this is not as bad as it might seem. If you are using 1shoppingcart for your autoresponders already (or even if you aren’t) you can upgrade and use them as your shopping cart. They also have a merchant account that you can use to accept credit cards. (Note, you should always have multiple merchant accounts available to use. www.cardservice.com is another place you can go. And, you should always accept paypal.com, and even checks by mail. You want to give as many payment options as possible, so that you don’t lose any sales unnecessarily.) 1shoppingcart also has an affiliate program available, which you can use for everything except paying your affiliates.

Finally, you’ll need to be able to create your info product. You should do this in as many formats as you can: ebook, cd, dvd, even membership website. Creating an e-book is simple. You can create a pdf file from a word document here for free: www.primopdf.com.

However, if you want to add password protection (so that people can e-mail a copy to 100 people in their downline after buying just one copy) you should produce the document using e-book gold. To create your info product as a CD, you can just interview someone over the phone (say a successful upline mentor) by using www.voicetext.com. They will send you the call in an mp3 file, which you can then edit and add to a site and made available after a payment is recieved, or burn it onto a CD.

As mentioned before, you can record on screen actions and your voice at the same time into a file using camtasia, and then burn that into a DVD using this software, or use that to convert a video into DVD. You can also use 1shoppingcart.com to create and maintain a paid membership website. To produce an actual hard-copy manual, or CDs and DVDs, you can use these sites. They will also fulfill orders, since you don’t want to spend your time physically mailing your orders out! You want to outsource everything that you can, so you can spend your time recruiting, and creating more training and info products!

Finally, is your task of finding JV partners. For general marketers, once you have a good salesletter you can do something like adding your product to clickbank. For JV partners with large e-mail lists, you’ll want to give them special treatment though. Have a richer payment plan set up for them, know your conversion numbers well, and make a point to personally contact them. They will be few in number, but will account for 90+% of your sales. As a starting point, contact me! I’d be glad to promote a useful, relevant product to my list!

For some more detailed methods of creating your own information products, I’ve found the following programs useful:

Now that you’ve finished this section, you have a website with all the important features, have intergrated a number of ways to make money, and are utilizing both the basic and newer, more advanced methods of generating traffic. We’ve covered a tremendous amount of material already, but we are not done yet! As always, give me a call or e-mail with any of your questions. Now, I want to move on to the various skill sets (other than website creation and traffic generation) that you will need to be successful in network marketing, and really even more generally any endevors. Let’s learn MLM Training and Skills now…