Is Affiliate Marketing The Right Choice For You

Firstly you need to ask yourself why are you interested in starting affiliate marketing, if it's because you want to get rich quick with only a little work then don't bother, but if you genuinely need a serious home based business it could be for you, maybe you are a housewife with young children who wants to work but you also want to be at home for your children, or perhaps you are in a dead end job with no future but you want to give your family a better life. Whatever your reasons are you have to ask yourself a few questions.

1.What are you prepared to put into your business

You need to be able to spend time building your business, you need at least a couple of hours a day to make affiliate marketing work.You also need to put some effort into this it is not as easy as some would have you believe. Do some research before starting, there are plenty of work at home forums that you can learn from and also check out some review sites.

2.Can you stay focused

Sometimes it can seem as if you are not getting anywhere, you need to stay focused on your goal and remember you can succeed, you will only fail if you give up at the first hurdle. Many affiliate marketers give up because they don't see instant results , the successful people are the ones who keep trying. You need patience and persistence.

3.Are you prepared to invest in yourself

This means you need to be teachable, are you prepared to spend a small amount on a good affiliate marketing training program to educate yourself on methods of marketing, there are many aspects to this you need to learn about article writing, keywords, blogging, copy writing and many other traffic generating strategies.
Finally remember if you really want to make a success of affiliate marketing you can, the right mindset is very important, believe you will succeed.

Stay At Home Mum's Fascinating Road To Internet Marketing

I would like to dedicate this article to all the hard working, tired, lonely "Stay at home parents" who are trying so hard to raise their children the "Old fashioned way", at home by their side, whilst also trying to find a genuine way to make some extra money from home to help out their family budget.

If you are anything like me you have, been there, done that, got caught with that one and are really just a little fed up with all the SUPER sellers and promoters online who I must say are "ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS" at SELLING and MARKETING their crummy, outdated, unhelpful products and businesses. But let's not forget these Internet Marketers are pretty much at the top of their game and are probably raking in thousands per month because their marketing/advertising/promotions were SOOO good that we bought their products!! So hats off to them and a big round of applause, they do suck you right in and if you are anything like me you have been stung by them on more then one occasion.

I thought it was time to GROW UP and WAKE UP, there really is no such thing as GET RICH QUICK, (we can sure dream about handing over $20 for a business that will make us thousands per month) but the reality is if there is, it's probably something quite illegal or you need big bucks to put into straight up, and if you are putting in big bucks you surely deserve to make even bigger bucks quite quickly!

I didn't have big bucks, I didn't even have hundreds of dollars to throw into a business, although after some very careful budgeting and scrimping on a few of our favorite grocery lines each week I did create a small stash of cash which I could use to get something started. I also did and still do however have a whole lot of enthusiasm and effort, without these two important ingredients your online mixing bowl is going to be pretty dry!

Being a stay at home mum I really wanted to find a genuine home based business that I could work from my own home, on my own computer, in my own time around my very active young toddler and make a bit of money. Sounds like a very big call I know but out there in the world there has to be other people doing exactly the same thing and making a whole lot of money from it.

I am not really a forward sort of person so I really wasn't into the whole cold calling strangers on the phone, the few times I did do this in another business venture I was physically sick from plain old fear, not the fear of being told off by the person on the phone, (although that was also playing in the back of my mind) but the inconvenient fear of my beautiful little toddler deciding there was no time like the present to put on a star studded performance of "Dr Jeykl and Mr Hyde" and throw a 5 star tantrum, if you have young children you will appreciate it when I politely say, there is NO convenient time to call someone unless your child is in daycare or is fast asleep in their bed at night, then I believe most people really don't want to be annoyed at that time anyway and it really makes you no better then a telemarketer and I'm not really that fond of their work, don't get me wrong I'm in no way knocking them as people, I am mature enough to know they are everyday people and I know they have bills to pay and it's a paying job for them but if I wanted to be called I'd give them my number wouldn't I!

As they say "when the student is ready the teacher will appear", well I was certainly ready, I had a small criteria for what I wanted, I needed someone to be there if I got stuck and needed help, don't get me wrong I'm not hopeless but there are times in everyones business where they need a little guidance, if this is not you "hats off to you, you're a legend!"
I didn't want to be left stranded with a business I had no idea about, so training was another important thing for me also, but again I didn't have hundreds of dollars spare to buy "recommended" ebooks that were the MUST HAVE way of learning my new found business. I didn't have the time, money or resources to fly all over the place attending seminars and having to be available at a particular time to listen to a phone conference just wasn't something I could commit to, not with a young unpredictable toddler.
I really wanted something flexible that I could put the effort into when the time was available to me. I was prepared to invest some dollars to start up and I was prepared to pay a bit per month for ongoing costs which lets face it are there in every single REAL business but I didn't want to spend hundreds per month, unless of course I was making thousands!!
So what I needed was an internet based business, which wouldn't cost me the earth to start up, was a genuine business opportunity and when I clicked on my computer the next day I still wanted the company to exist, I didn't want to have to call anyone ever. Training and support would need to be available, low ongoing costs, no tele-conferences or seminars, oh yeh and I didn't want to be stuck pushing dodgy products that nobody wanted!

It's amazing when you work out what you want and you CLICK a button and it is there for you!
There really are genuine companies, offers and programs out there waiting for you to jump on board. Just please use your head and do a bit of research before you jump into something and are again left struggling. Find something run by a real person, research that person, check out the testimonials, research the people giving testimonials, at the end of the day someone is not going to put their face to a scam unless they are really ruthless and stupid!

My results, yes I did find a business opportunity which amazingly enough met all of my above criteria and I did do a fair bit of research on the guy running it, turns out he is real, he does put he face to it and he is there to help when ever I need it, how fantastic and comforting is that! I also have a home business directory site featuring genuine researched home based money making opportunities

Your Money Thermostat- Is It Stuck?

What's your "money thermostat" set to?

Interesting question, huh?

At last Thursday's MasterMind meeting, Dr. Joe Vitale passed out copies of "The Millionaire Mind" by T. Harv Eker.

It's really making me look at my beliefs about money.

Ol' T. Harv makes the case that everybody has a money thermostat that governs how much money we allow ourselves to make. It's something we learn from our parents, usually.

I haven't finished the book, yet, but I hope he also looks at the other thermostats we have- happiness thermostats, health and weight thermostats, relationship thermostats...

The bad news is that we're pretty much a bundle of conditioned responses. According to Napoleon Hill, and I've seen no data that refutes this, by the time we're fifteen, we're programmed.

Unless we make a conscious effort to intelligently reprogram ourselves, we're stuck with the beliefs, conditioning, and thermostats that we're given as children.

The good news is that we CAN reprogram ourselves.

This is something I've been working on for over a year. My money thermostat was set at about whatever my bills for each month happened to be. I used to be pretty smug about the fact the universe took such good care of me.

The problem was that I could never get ahead. If I needed a few hundred bucks to pay a bill, it would (apparently) appear out of nowhere- but not a penny more. I was stuck.

Looking back, I can reverse engineer this phenomenon. My dad was the same way. His dad was the same way. It's a learned behavior.

I decided to "unlearn" it.

I had some added baggage. I'm an old hippie. There. I admit it. There's a lot about the counter culture I still embrace- mostly ecological and social issues.

It can be very conflicting.

There is a part of me that would be perfectly happy in a Buddhist monastery, with my personal material wealth consisting of a bowl, a saffron robe, and a library card.

There's another part of me that wants that Mercedes Benz and a villa in Northern Italy.

What finally turned me around was the discovery that we live in an infinite universe. The universe has unlimited wealth. I can reprogram my internal thermostats to allow any amount of money, happiness, and bliss I want.

That changes everything.

Just by changing my internal beliefs about money, I've managed to increase my income by an order of magnitude in less than a year.

Joe and I have been putting together the Milagro Manifestation Method to help you have, do and be anything you want. It's the most powerful mind reprogramming program that's ever been created.

It damn sure worked for me.

Take a look at your thermostats. How much money have you allowed yourself to make? How much happiness have you allowed yourself to have?

It's all up to you, you know.

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Can It Help Me Achieve More Sales For My Website?

No doubt you have been searching for something on the internet and your first port of call is a search engine, for instance Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like. You type in a couple of words to search and on the first page of your search you click on the first link and are taken to a website. The website displays an advertising banner on the right of the screen, you click on the banner and are taken to another website. On this second website you then make a purchase for an item you have initially been searching for.

Congratulations, you just made that first and second website some money through affiliate marketing. Confused? So was I.

First let's discuss the general two options of affiliate marketing and show the benefits of both.

First option – The Affiliate.


To become an affiliate you need a couple of things. Usually this will be a website you own. Let's say you promote an information site about Extreme Sports and has a few hundred visitors a month. Your site covers aspects of the different sports and contains a couple of articles people can read that you constantly update with new info and another page with some links to specific sports sites.

You join an Affiliate promotions site and find a website that sells extreme sports holidays. You apply to become an affiliate of the extreme sports holiday with a ten percent commission on sales and are provided an advertisers banner (advertising picture with a website link) to promote on your website. This can be anywhere on your website and on each page if you have more than one page. Each time someone visits your website, clicks on the extreme sports holiday promotions banner and purchases a holiday, you get ten percent commission. You check your affiliate commissions after several weeks and are pleasantly pleased to discover you have made quite a nice amount of money coming in on a monthly basis.

Second Option – The Advertiser


You have been both working on your website for quite some time and are relatively happy with the amount of traffic it is receiving. You sell quite a few niche products on your site, but the income is not quite where you want it. You join an Affiliate site, but this time as an advertiser, not an affiliate. You have several banners created for potential affiliates to obtain. You offer 25% commission on each sale an affiliate generates. After several weeks you find that you now have 25 webmasters obtaining your banners. That's 25 other websites that are advertising YOUR website for potential sales. If these newly obtained affiliates potentially generate 2 new sales per website per week and this is on top of your usual website traffic, you see the marketing power it generates. How many websites would potentially become affiliates of your website after a year……?

As you can gather being an Affiliate can attract more potential web traffic to your site as well as generate an additional income.

Being an Advertiser can increase sales for a business (or any other with product sales) website with the potential to have your website become advertised on 10's, 100's, possibly 1000's of other websites.