Do You Have What It Takes to Succeed Online?
Starting a new career is daunting as it is, but accepting the role of a new entrepreneur where you’re not following a franchise blueprint can seem even more nerve-wracking. Luckily, there are many entrepreneurs who have succeeded before you and who can advise you of the pitfalls to avoid.
Being an online business owner means you have the world at your fingertips – not only in terms of your audience being global, but also the wide array of topics and interests you can tap into.
There are five core principles you need in order to have a successful journey. Some might come easy to you, while others will require you to work on making them an ingrained habit.
Willingness to Learn New Things
All successful online marketers absorb new information on a regular basis. They crave it and enjoy devouring new concepts and strategies. If learning sounds grueling to you, then you have to consider two things.
First, it may just be that you haven’t had the right teachers who inspire and educate you in a way that you enjoy. Learning can be fun when the right person is guiding you. Luckily, with Internet marketing, there’s a plethora of individuals and companies to choose from who will steer you through your efforts.
If you want to learn how to create a blog, for example, you’ll find teachers of all types – some monotone and technical and some humorous and easygoing. You simply have to find the right mentor to listen to.
But there’s another thing to consider. If no one ever meets your requirements for teaching, then you could just be averse to learning in general. You might be the type of person who needs a step-by-step job that never changes.
If that best describes you, then you might not want to pursue an online marketing career – because it is always evolving and changing. This is thrilling to many people who hate routines that become stale, but for others, it’s too intimidating to consider.
The great news is, there are many media formats you can learn from. If you prefer reading, you can find guides in eBook format. If video is your things, you can watch tutorials that way.
Even podcasts or webinars are a popular teaching method for many mentors, so if you like to listen on the go, you have that option. Your biggest job will be using a search engine to find the right courses to learn from.
Courage to Implement Even When Nervous
Learning is one thing. Implementing the advice and strategies is another. Not everyone has the courage to face their fears and do the tasks required to be a successful online marketer.
There are many people who prefer to be wallflowers and never be “seen” or “heard from” by strangers. That might be your downfall as an entrepreneur – but you also have the option of creating a pen name or business persona to operate under.
What are some common fears people have when it comes to starting a career online? Leading a niche in general is intimidating to many. They don’t feel like they have the experience to label themselves an expert.
The good news is, you don’t have to have a PhD or some sort of certification to lead an online audience. Many people prefer to learn from others in the same boat, so simply blogging about your journey can help you build a formidable audience who loves that you’re leading by example.
Another area where people let fear stop them in their tracks is having to put their name on a paid course – or a book (as an author). Again, you don’t have to make up false claims of expertise you don’t have.
You’ll be amazed at how many people flock to those who are one step above them on the rung of success, so be honest about where you are in your journey and let your audience weed themselves out if you’re not their cup of tea.
Social networking is a popular method of building a rapport with your audience, and also getting free traffic to your site and offers. But this, to some people, is terrifying. You might ask, “Why would anyone care what I’m doing this weekend?”
The reason people personalize and share a little piece of themselves online is because it’s what we do with friends – talk about insignificant things because it helps paint a picture of who you are.
So go ahead and snap pictures of your meals, share a cute video of your pet being silly, and yes – talk about the weather. It’s the little things that bond us as humans. It’s also not intimidating for your audience to participate in, as opposed to someone who posted a tour of their new mansion and 99% of their audience can’t relate, so they keep quiet.
Making videos might be your impediment. Yes, you can stick to text or even podcasting (audio) if you want to. But eventually, you should start utilizing video since a large percentage of the population prefers it.
You don’t have to put yourself on camera, though. You can use screen capture video like Camtasia and a slide show presentation using a tool like PowerPoint and that will be a good compromise with your audience.
Desire to Help People Improve Their Lives
If you want to succeed online, you should enjoy the process of helping others. You’ll be addressing what’s known as their “pain point,” and it doesn’t have anything to do with health or actual pain in many cases.
A pain point is something that the audience wants improved. That could be something like literal pain, but it can also be something as enjoyable as wanting to improve their knitting skills or learning how to ask a woman out on a date.
Helping others is one of the most rewarding aspects of launching your own online business. You’ll have people contacting you with their issues and asking for help. Not only will you get to help them, but you can make products out of those ideas that help many others in the same boat, too.
Sometimes, you’ll be helping people with serious pain points. Maybe their bills are out of control and they need debt relief and credit repair advice so that they don’t live every hour of every day in despair.
Helping people like that, who turn their lives around thanks to your advice, is very rewarding on a personal satisfaction level. You’ll wake up every day eager to help others and go to bed each night satisfied that someone is sleeping better because of what you have to say.
Sometimes, this part of the job can be difficult for some people. Depending on what niche you get into, it can be heartbreaking opening yourself up to that type of topic day after day.
For example, if you were in a niche for depression, you might feel sad interacting with heavily depressed people on a continual basis. So consider that sharply when you pick your niche.
You might flip the concept and turn it into a happiness niche, teaching people how to pursue more happiness in their lives, rather than, “how to treat depression.” Slanting it is key to the type of audience you’ll attract and be interacting with regularly.
You want to make sure you have the type of personality that doesn’t belittle others and their concern for their problems. Sometimes, you may not personally realize the depth of your subscriber’s pain, but if they reach out to you, assume that it’s a big problem for them, and gently guide them to a solution.
It takes a lot of courage for them to seek you out and put themselves out there by reaching out and putting themselves out there with a blunt request for help to make things better.
Commitment to Be a Leader in Your Niche
Being a leader in your niche is something every online marketer should strive for. You should never be okay resting on your laurels and putting just enough effort into the process to get by.
Consumers are looking for cutting edge, current marketers to lead them – regardless of what their issue is. They want someone who is always learning and sharing and coming up with innovative ideas that maybe they haven’t heard yet.
Yes, you can lead under a pen name or business persona. But regardless of the name you represent yourself with, you need to be committed to leading your audience. That means showing up to serve regularly.
Don’t start a site and then disappear for months on end and expect to resume your communication with those people whenever you feel like coming back. There are many competitors who will be there for them on an on-going basis, so if you’re the type of person who might be flighty – then your leadership skills may need some tweaking.
Leaders are always devouring new information, including paying attention to what’s in the news about their niche. And they come to their audience with those facts – whether or not they agree with them.
As a leader, you have to be willing to step up and have a vocal opinion on what they should and shouldn’t do. Be willing to say, “I don’t agree with this, and here’s why…” because most marketers won’t do that – they’re too scared to speak out.
Leadership doesn’t mean shoving the bulk of your business tasks off onto outsources. The best leaders are in the trenches with their audience. They want to stay tuned into their customers’ needs and reactions closely.
As a leader, people will come to you asking about things you may not know. Can you honestly let them know you’re not informed about it – and be willing to find out more and report back to them?
That’s what a good leader does. You don’t have to pretend or avoid communication. That’s what some people do when they’re approached with a question they don’t know. They hide.
Don’t be a leader who hides. Get out there and ask questions and dig around until you expand your knowledge and can address whatever issue it is that you were previously uninformed about.
Ability to Silence Your Excuses on an As Needed Basis
Excuses can kill any amount of success you may enjoy. They’ll create roadblocks to keep you from further growing your income, so you have to learn how to navigate around them or silence them so that you can make progress.
Your mind will come up with all sorts of reasons why good things can’t happen – or won’t. It will tell you that you don’t have enough time to do something, or that you’re too old or not attractive enough to be a leader in your niche.
It will try to make you believe that, because there are already dozens of competitors in the niche, that your voice is not needed – or welcomed.
The best thing you can do is not believe a word of fear that your mind tries to tell you. We have a way of sabotaging our own success. Maybe we grew up with it, thinking we were just being humble – but it’s not an attractive quality in a niche marketer.
In fact, you have to continually nurture your own self confidence and make sure that it’s growing steadily, along with your knowledge. If your problem is something like time, then you need to make a plan of action that addresses that issue.
Instead of just being too busy to succeed, how about you rearrange your schedule or multitask in some way, shape or form? Start saying no to people who infringe on your time (especially since you “work at home”).
Ask your spouse or someone else to take over some of the household tasks or errands. If you have to run around, download a lesson and listen to it on the go instead of listening to music or talk radio.
Some people want success so much that they get up an hour early or go to bed an hour later – after the kids are asleep – so they have some peace and quiet to concentrate on their business.
Don’t use money (or lack of it) as an excuse, either. There are many ways to start a business online with nothing. You can also do it on a shoestring budget where all you’re paying for is a domain of about $10 a year and hosting of about $10 a month.
What could you sell or give up to have that money you need to get going? You know it’s doable, but are you willing to do what it takes to have the bare necessities of launching an online business?
Becoming an online marketer can be intimidating in some ways, but it’s also the most rewarding career – void of bosses and clocks you have to live by. You’re in control of your destiny, and while it might make you a bit nervous at first, you learn to embrace it as a thrilling adventure that no job could compete with.
Best Practices for Successful Affiliate Marketers
Making money online is one of the most rewarding careers you can have. It offers the opportunity for you to profit from your efforts in sharing information, but also allows you to earn commissions off of the work others create.
Working as an affiliate means you can make recommendations to your subscribers and readers and get paid whenever that referral results in a sale. You can be an affiliate for both digital and tangible products.
But there’s one mistake some new marketers make when trying to earn money as an affiliate marketer – they haphazardly review anything and everything just to make a buck and it backfires on them and ruins their ability to earn anything subsequently.
Choose Products That Reflect Upon You Positively
Your readers need to have faith in your ability to guide them properly. Not only do they want good tips, advice and motivation from you – but they also want to be able to trust you with product recommendations.
While you might be seeing dollar signs whenever a product creator approaches you asking you to promote for them, you have to understand that you’ll face the wrath of an angry list if you cause them to waste their money on something that’s not worth it.
Whenever you’re reviewing digital products, such as an eBook or video course, make sure you get a review copy from the seller so that you can properly vet the advice given to your readers.
This means you need to take time to go through the information (and even implement it to test it out if time permits). What do you do if the seller won’t give you a review copy? You have a couple of choices.
You can choose not to promote it at all, or you can buy a copy for yourself and go through it before recommending it to your subscribers. It’s understandable that you can’t do this with tangible products such as treadmills – because who has thousands of dollars per product, not to mention the space to house various brands and models that you review?
But digital items leave you no excuse for not analyzing them. You have a duty to your customers. What’s neat about building this kind of trust with your readers is that they will often buy anything and everything you recommend simply because they know if you say it’s good, they’re going to be pleased.
Break their trust, and you’ll find it harder to convert them into a sale from that point on. Be careful not to get caught up in a buddy system where sellers try to strong arm you into promoting their product, even when you feel it’s not very good.
Your obligation is to protect your readers, so be honest with the seller and let them know why you can’t promote it. If you’re the type of person who worries about hurting their feelings, just remember you’re a business owner – it’s not about feelings – it’s about doing what’s right for your customers.
Personalize and Be Thorough with Your Product Reviews
Many product reviews you read on blogs are so stale and boring. It’s hard to get through them because all they do is spout off the stats of a product – such as its dimensions, color, features and more.
Consumers do want to know those specifics, but they also want to learn some other things – and to have an enjoyable experience when they go looking for a recommendation.
The first thing you want to do is make sure your product review is thorough. That means going through any and all possible questions your customer might want to know and addressing those.
You can find the questions in forums or – if it’s a tangible item – in the customer review section on sites like Amazon. See what people are asking and address those issues in your review.
To add a bit of authenticity, add some personalization to your product reviews. There are a bunch of competitor affiliates touting the basic specs of a product, but what will set you apart is your personality.
You want to include things such as why you’re recommending the product. Aside from cost and quality, etc. What made you want to write a review on it? Do you remember how confused you were setting up a blog and you want to help others avoid the same confusion by recommending a blog course?
If it’s a blender, can you tell them you’re the type of person who likes to mix up strawberry daiquiris during the summer months and you needed a blender that’s easy to clean and doesn’t take up much space?
Anything you can do or say to paint a picture of how you understood their needs, and want to help them based on your own experience will help seal the deal. In fact, adding pictures if you own a product can help the reader trust your opinion even more because it’s proof that you own it or have used it, too.
Vary the Types of Product Review Formats
Product reviews can be created in many different ways. You can obviously pick a product and write a review about it for your audience. This is where you would thoroughly go through every single thing about the product and tell why it’s a good investment.
But there are other review methods, and your site should vary them from time to time. Or, you can stick to one formula for your site, but at least learn the various options available to you before you start to review things.
Top 10 lists (or top 3, top 5, etc.) can be very popular with consumers. People love lists and when you give them options, that’s fantastic because then they get to choose. Think of how many people devour a bestseller’s list with books – they want everything that’s rated near the top, not just the best one.
To do these types of reviews, you might have one extremely long blog post – or simply write a paragraph about each product and then link to it so that they can go and read the specs themselves.
Comparison reviews are a good way to get people to spend money on your recommendations. People like to see one item pitted against another. It’s okay to have faults with each product – you just need to convey how they stack up against one another.
Don’t be shy about being honest. You might have one product that’s over priced, but price may not matter to the consumer if they’re looking for a different feature that’s more important to them.
Warning reviews are very effective. People often avoid writing product reviews against a product, but this helps your reader see that you have their best interest at heart – that you’re looking out for them.
You can write a review warning them against buying a particular product. But then, you’ll also be making a recommendation on what they should consider buying instead. That’s where your revenue comes into play.
Charts of features are something many consumers love – especially when you’re talking about certain niches like electronic gadgets. People love to be able to quickly glance at a chart and see which feature each product has.
In fact, Amazon often has this type of chart included on the page of a product, especially if they can compare various items for a brand, such as Omron electrotherapy gadgets for example.
If you look one of them up and scroll down, you’ll see that checkmarks and text differentiate whether one of the 5 devices being compared has a certain feature. Features might include number of batteries required, whether it has auto shut off, if it has an LCD screen, whether it has heat, and how many pain relief modes it has.
There are plugins that can help you create charts on your blog post. Or, you can create an image using something as simple as Paint or PowerPoint and embed it in your blog post.
You can also write reviews of the best products for a specific person or purpose. So for example, you might review the best paid blog theme for a writer, for a teacher, for a chef, and so on.
Or you might be reviewing the best anti aging cream for women in their 20s, 40s, 60s or those who have sensitive skin, dry skin, or oily skin. Narrowing down the review to a particular subsection of your core audience helps them pinpoint what’s right for them to spend money on.
Expand the Review to More Than Just Product Details
Product reviews are great. They gather the information about a product and share why (or why not) a consumer might want to invest in it. But you can go above and beyond with your product reviews.
You can expand on them and make them tutorials and tip sheets for using the products or getting the most out of them. You can also come up with a complementary lesson – something not directly about the product itself, but related to it.
You can give these away within the blog post or as a gift – or make it available only to those who purchase the product through your affiliate link, depending on what you’re promoting, and from where.
So let’s look at a few examples. Let’s say you were recommending a treadmill. You could have a portion of your review include a tutorial on how to develop a treadmill walking plan to take off the weight.
What about an anti aging skincare course? Your product might be all about beauty items they can use to moisturize their skin and remove sun spots. But your tutorial can expand on that and go over hydration from the inside-out, or tips for protecting your skin from future damage like toxins and the sun.
Some people like to include games as a bonus or expanded tutorial. SO let’s say you were reviewing a set of golf clubs – or a digital course on how to shave 10 points off your handicap.
You could develop a fun eBook download of 20 golf games you can play with friends on the course. They can be just for fun or betting games, since those are popular among golfers.
Look Outside the Typical Affiliate Programs for Untapped Resources
You’re going to find that many people promote the same things everyone else does – nothing more than the bestsellers’ lists. But you can actually do very well promoting items outside the norm.
If you’re promoting tangible products, look for hot new releases in a category – and sign up on brand manufacturers’ websites so you get advance notice of whenever something is getting launched.
Don’t simply stick to Amazon, either. Go to Commission Junction and Share a Sale to see what’s available on those merchant sites that you can promote, and add those to your list.
Not only is it good for your readers to see that you have the skill to seek out more than one option for them, but it also protects you in case your source ever closes your account, like Amazon did to many affiliates.
Aside from well-known affiliate platforms, you can also contact product developers directly if you have a list and ask them if you can promote for a share of the sales. They may have a specific affiliate program that’s closed to the general public.
With digital products, look on sites like ClickBank, JVZoo and Warrior Plus. But don’t forget to look in other places, too. Again, you can approach sellers who may not have thought of opening an affiliate program publicly.
But you can also type in your niche on search engines, and add the words affiliate program. This might take you to other places like Zaxxa or an affiliate program set up on someone’s site through a tool like JRox Jam where it’s not going through any other platform but PayPal.
These are resources that most of your competitors may not know about, so if you find something of good quality, it will thrill your subscribers to find out about it – especially when no one else has advised them about it before.
Being an affiliate marketer can be lucrative and can shave much of the expense and time from your profit potential when compared to info product development. But don’t mistake that shortcut with an invitation to slack off and spam your readers with any deal that comes along.
Pretend that every recommendation you make is being told to a dear friend or family member – be just as protective of your subscriber as you would them. That will help you build a rapport with your audience that is an unbreakable bond serving both of you well now and in the future.