To be truly successful as an online marketer, you need to make sure that you are increasing your VALUE to your readership.  Sounds simple right?  What have all the most successful business-people done over the years?  They’ve provided something that others value; things that other people value ENOUGH to part with their hard-earned money to acquire.  Henry Ford, Elizabeth Arden, Walter Chrysler, Mary Kay Ash, Thomas Edison, Anita Roddick,Bill Gates………..all of these people created organizations that in turn created products that enhanced people’s lives.

However, most businesses that are started (anywhere in the world) are created solely with the intention of making that business owner wealthy………and most of them fail!  That’s a sad fact.  One of the most basic reasons that this is true is BECAUSE they were started with only one objective……….making money.  An ESSENTIAL second ingredient to the success-recipe is providing REAL VALUE to your customers.

Online business are no different in this respect, in fact, it’s probably true that even more online businesses fail than “brick and mortar” businesses because there are a lot MORE online businesses created than there are real-world ones.  The percentage of these failing is also most likely higher, because there are a lot more fly-by-night operations out there; people who want to set up websites, ad some adsense ads and then sit-back and wait for the money to start rolling  in.

A LOT of the fault IS theirs, but there are some legitimate business people that will still fail initially because the information that they receive from the internet-marketing “guru’s” is incorrect, incomplete or simply just really poor quality.  Often, the difference between making $100 a month and $4,000 a month could be one little thing that the training (ebook, audio or video) failed to tell you about, but more likely it’s several pieces of the puzzle that are missing.

This often isn’t deliberate; some of these marketing-trainers don’t realize they are leaving out something; others probably don’t want the competition so leave it out on purpose.

A lot of the most successful internet-marketers were simply very fortunate; they found a great Joint Venture partner perhaps that already had a large, quality mailing list of current buyers, or they wrote an ebook that filled a nice little gap (”niche”) in the market-place that they didn’t even realize WAS a gap.  They were just in the right place at the right time.  They often then find that they don’t have anything to follow-up with and they disappear without a trace, having pocketed a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

There are some who have stood the test of time and are so well-established now that people will buy pretty much anything that they offer, all of which are “high ticket” items; $10,000 courses, $5,000 seminars or $397 monthly subscriptions to membership sites.  Others are up and coming and will be the next wave of internet marketers.  You might be one of them.  But you MUST provide VALUE for your readers!  Here’s an article I wrote a while back giving an example of how to create wealth.  Creating VALUE is no different.

However, getting that value TO your potential customer is rather more difficult.  You really can have the best product in the world, but if you can’t get people to KNOW about it AND convince them that it will enhance their lives, then you will never have a successful business.

Take a look here and check-out some of the best tutorials that I’ve seen.  Affiliate Millions is a great place to start, but there are also four other tutorials that could easily make the difference between your online business being successful or not.

AD VALUE to the world by CREATING something that others want.  Do what Elizabeth Arden and Thomas Edison did.  You don’t have to do it on a grand-scale like they did, but hey, who knows how far you’ll be able to take your new business? By becoming valuable to your readers, they will one day turn into customers; loyal customers who will keep buying things from you because they KNOW you will always provide them with great value for money.

Luke.

As you know my wife and I have just finished our trip across country to Arizona.  While we were unpacking our kitchenware, my wife said something to me that struck a chord: “Would you believe it, I’ve opened every box but one and all I’ve found is the stuff that we never use!”.  While this upset her somewhat, I thought about it a while and then realized why this sort of thing happens.

My wife was convinced it was nothing more than “bad luck” (though what’s bad about it I really don’t know….finding you’ve just had your identity stolen MIGHT be thought of as “bad luck” but not opening the box with the dishes we use frequently is hardly life-threatening…………is it!?  But I digress……….

Luck is NOTHING MORE than a wish for the future (”good luck to you!”) or an excuse for the past (”that was bad luck”).  That’s ALL that luck is.

So what had REALLY happened?  Though it certainly wasn’t bad luck it WAS something that Casino owners know a lot about.  ODDS.  You see, most of our crockery is NEVER used; we use the same few plates and pans every night, but most of it (probably 9 pieces out of 10) are either for show, or are family heirlooms which are always stored out of site (mainly because they’re so damned UGLY).

So that leaves about 1 box in 10 that had the items that we frequently use in it.  So, what are the ODDS that the very first box that she opened would be the one with the items in that she wanted that night?  One in ten! Very poor odds indeed by most gamblers standards.

The second box she opened?  The odds would improve of course to one in nine.  Still not good odds.  After that the odds continue to improve, one in eight, one in seven and so on all the way down to 1 in 1 which is “a sure thing”.

She finally opened the box and it WAS the last box.  Unlucky? Nope, it was the FIRST box that was packed, BECAUSE these items were at the FRONT of our cabinets.  Being the first box packed, it was also the first onto the moving van………………and therefore the LAST one off.  When the movers took the first one off, they put it into the kitchen on the floor FIRST and then stacked the other boxes on top of IT, making it, very logically, the last one that we would open.  Ta DAAAAAA!

Whenever you see a sign or ad on TV from a Casino telling you how much they paid out that month, just think about how much they TOOK IN, if they could afford to pay out so much.  If they are telling you that they paid out 4,000,000 then they certainly took in more than that, otherwise they’d go out of business.  Gambling is NOT about luck, it’s about entertainment……………..very EXPENSIVE entertainment I might add.

Okay, what’s my point in all this?  Simple.  STACK THE ODDS IN YOUR FAVOR!!!  Don’t rely on luck because there is NO SUCH THING!  Don’t do the lottery………………..gambling is for LOSERS not winners.  Spend your resources (your time, your money and your thinking) profitably.

How do you do this?  You study, then you take ACTION.  Here’s one of the best places to start I’ve seen:

Affiliate Millions.

Treat yourself to an early Christmas present!  Give yourself the gift of the ability to make money online whenever YOU choose to.

Luke.

Most bloggers make their money from affiliate income.  Yes, some people make SOME money from Adsense, but that is almost always just a few cents per day rather than several hundred dollars.

The truly successful bloggers use all the tools at their disposal and one of the very best out there is called Ninja Affiliate.

It’s actually a Wordpress plugin developed by MaxBlogPress, and it’s designed to automatically convert keywords of your choice into affiliate links like this one —-> Ninja Affiliate.

Even better than that, you can cloak your affiliate links so that they don’t look anything like affiliate links, but rather a regular webpage URL.

You can easily manage all of your affiliate links by using a name that is easy to remember, and the software will allow you to use any type of affiliate format out there.  Because you can cloak the links your site will always look more professional, so you won’t be showing a long, ugly stream of numbers and letters that scream “AFFILIATE!!!” to your readers.

Also, you can prevent affiliate link-theft by using the cloaking feature; if a potential thief doesn’t know it’s a link, he can’t steal it!

Affiliate Ninja has advanced display options that allow you to display any text that you want in your browsers menu bar.  This will give you a little ’search-engine-love”, which is always a good thing.  You can set a limit to how many of your keywords are turned into links, as you don’t want your posts to look like you’re spamming.  You want Google to love you, not slap your wrist, right!?

If you have a limited budget for software this year (and who doesn’t?) this very good software is definitely something I’d recommend you invest in.

Here’s the link again: Affiliate Ninja.

Luke.

Would it make a difference to you if you could read the minds of your blog visitors?  Let’s think about it. YOU want them to keep coming back to your blog to read more and eventually buy some products that you recommend (either affiliate products or your own products).

To do this you have to continually provide content that they WANT to read.  But how do you know WHAT to write about?  What products should you recommend?  What products should you create for them?  Hmmm, tough one, right!?  Nope, wrong!

It USED to be almost impossible to figure-out what to write about, but there superb FREE is a Wordpress plugin that will super-charge your blog, so that you WILL know what your readers want to read more of.

It’s called Psychic Search.  This very clever piece of software from MaxBlogPress works by recording any search-term that is typed into your blogs search-box.  Because you will know what people have searched for, you’ll know what they are looking to read about and then YOU CAN SUPPLY IT to them!

Even better than that, Psychic Search also records whether or not their search found any related posts.  So, if you haven’t posted about the search-term used, you’ll know that it’s something that you SHOULD post about!

This will eliminate any writer’s-block (that we all get from time to time).  You’ll be able to compile a series of blog-posts so that your readers will keep coming back for more (I like to break my longer posts down into parts, sometimes up to as many as four, and I will probably write even longer ones one day).

Using this great free software will also keep you ahead of your competitors! THEY won’t know what to write about but you will.  Almost NOBODY with a blog uses this plugin, simply because they don’t know that it exists.

The final and most important benefit of using Psychic Search is that you’ll make more MONEY, because your readers will be pre-sold on what they want BECAUSE THEY ASKED YOU FOR IT via your search-box.

MaxBlogPress also has another truly excellent piece of software called Ninja Affiliate. This software automatically turns the keywords that you choose into affiliate links.

You can check it out for yourself at: Ninja Affiliate

Luke.

Better than extras and free gifts, is additional help to use the product that is being sold. You can offer a telephone training seminar at no cost for those who buy the product.

Try and persuade the product-owner to speak on the teleseminar, or maybe interview him over the phone for your customers. People really like teleseminars because they feel more involved with the product, you and the product producer.

What usually happens when an affiliate marketer goes to Clickbank or Commission Junction and signs up as an affiliate marketer for a particular product? The first thing she does is usually place a link for the product on his website and send out a marketing email to her list with the same hoplink in it, talking about the value and benefits of the product, asking the potential customer to please ‘click here’ and go and take a look for themselves.

She will then, probably sit back, cross her fingers, and hope to make a few sales.

If this average affiliate marketer happens to get lucky and be included in the launch of a new product, she will do pretty much the same thing. She notifies her list of the upcoming launch (the average affiliate marketer usually only sends one preparatory email) and then he sends out the marketing email at the actual product launch.

She will no doubt make a few sales…very few. Of course, she won’t be working very hard either and maybe she is happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem, however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place, and average won’t make you much money.

Why would anybody want to settle for average? Average means ‘common or ordinary…nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an average affiliate marketer, then you need to do what is required to become an EXTRAORDINARY affiliate marketer.

Being an extraordinary affiliate marketer means being unique.

Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all of others. If you want to be better than just average, and you SHOULD want to be better, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing techniques AND your personal image, that will set you above the average affiliate.

Average affiliate marketers don’t understand the idea that in order to sell a lot of each product, their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers that their competitors are making. Most affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product from then rather than buying the same product from someone else.

Some affiliate marketers will offer some bonuses as incentives, but they will be quite ordinary things that aren’t of much value, or are actually unrelated to the product that is being promoted.

The extraordinary affiliate marketer will offer bonus incentives that are BETTER than anything that is being offered by any other marketer and ones that are directly related to the product that is being promoted. The bonuses can actually sometimes be as good as (or even better than) the product being promoted, perhaps an older product that still has value in the current market.

The whole idea of offering better incentives to customers is just common sense. If you can get 3 products for the price of one, why not get the free bonuses?

Let’s say that there is an E-Book about Email Marketing that you want to promote It’s a great book (you know this because you bought it AND read it!) that has been written by an Email Marketing expert. It is selling for $97 and your commission is going to be $50 per sale. There is a very elaborate launch for the product. Your competitors are offering an additional E-Book or two as bonus incentives.

How can you get an edge in this situation? The only way that you can possibly get an edge is to offer something that your competitors aren’t offering. You could have set up a teleseminar that will take place a few days after the launch for those who buy from you. Or perhaps you could offer a free 30 minute downloadable audio tape that further explains certain points in the E-Book.

The people who buy from you will be getting a better deal than they could get from your competitors. The product will always be the same…but the bonuses that are offered is where you get the edge.

NEVER underestimate the power of FREE! Everybody loves getting something for nothing. They especially enjoy getting something that everybody else is not getting.

And that brings me to another, finer point of offering bonus incentives. If you can offer something such as a free teleseminar that is related to a product launch, you need to limit the number of people who will receive the bonus. That makes it more exclusive and thus more desirable. The more difficult something is to obtain, the more people will value it.

Luke.

When you are one of hundreds of marketers trying to sell the same product to the same customers, you had better have a plan to get your fair share of the market (or more!).

Every niche-market on the Internet is competitive, some more so than others of course. If it isn’t competitive then there can’t be much of a customer base to sell to anyway. That is just the nature of Internet marketing.

Maybe you do have a long list of paying customers. That’s excellent! It means you have already won several of the affiliate marketing rounds. The problem is there are always those up and coming marketers who want your customers to be on THEIR mailing lists.

Your list and your competitor’s lists will very likely contain many of the same names and email addresses. Just having a list will not be enough to assure you of ever increasing sales when selling a product. You have to create some ways that will assure that the people on YOUR list buy from you and not from your competition.

So what is it that I can do that will assure that my customers will buy from me? Nothing! Really, you won’t get ALL of the business; some WILL buy from other affiliates, no question about it, but you CAN do some things to ensure you get a good percentage of the business.

What might one of those things be? Be UNIQUE!

You HAVE to be different from all the others. You have to offer something that sets you apart from all of the other affiliate marketers out there offering the same products to, potentially, the same lists of potential customers. Even if the lists are completely different (unlikely but possible), you still have to ACT as though the lists are identical. This way, you’ll be certain to make yourself and your offers good enough to motivate people to buy from YOU.

There are several ways to achieve uniqueness. One way is to have established yourself as an expert in the field for which the product (or service like a membership site or insurance policy) is being sold. You have to have become credible. This credibility is not easily achieved. It takes a lot of time, effort and diligence.

Credibility is established by taking such measures as writing and marketing articles (like this one) and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums, appearing as an expert on webinars or interviewed by somebody who is already established as an expert in your field.

The fact is that when people know you and trust you, they will buy from you. They will buy from you even if your competition is offering a better deal or more incentives. Why?

Because people do not like to buy from people that they don’t trust, and people don’t trust strangers. It’s a basic human survival tool. The Internet is a big and impersonal place to many people, and to make these people become consumers is no easy task. They want to feel like they know and trust the people that they are considering buying products from.

The time, effort and energy that you put into creating your credibility will the best time, effort and energy investment that you can make. Your reputation is EVERYTHING in the world of Internet marketing. Credibility will be one thing that makes you unique.

Another extremely important thing that you can do to ensure that your customers buy a product for which you are an affiliate is to give them a very good and compelling reason to make the purchase from you. Offer some extras that will enhance the value of the product that you are marketing. If it’s software, then make the product more easily used, perhaps by offering a pdf eBook that you created to guide a first time user of the software.

If you are marketing an E-Book about Internet marketing, you could add one or two other E-Books concerning different aspects of Internet marketing.

Another free gift that people can’t ever seem to get enough of is free software. There are many on the Internet and you can be sure that there are some that will fit right in with whatever product or service that you are promoting. Just because YOU know of some great free utility, doesn’t mean that your potential customers know about it. Point it out to them with a free hyperlink.

While other marketers promoting the same product simply send out marketing emails that recommend the product to their lists, you will be ADDING VALUE to the product for no extra cost to your customer.

I’ll talk more about enhancing the value of your offer in Part II.

Luke.

That’s the title I’ve settled upon for my new product.  It’s not complete yet, but I’m expecting it to be ready sometime in November.

I’ve designed this video course to show you how to make money online using affiliate marketing, but it goes much deeper into the search-engine-optimization techniques you should use to ensure that Google and Yahoo find you quickly and easily.

Making money on the internet is by FAR the best way to start a business, but most people don’t know where to begin and what mistakes to avoid.  This course will have you aimed at the stars and creating your OWN profitable home-based business within just two to three weeks.

Keep you eye out for it.  If you subscribe to my RSS feed or if you get my free eBook, I’ll make sure you are informed when the product is launched.

Luke