Bill McRea

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Affiliate marketing and niche marketing are two separate and distinct business models for making money online. Because there are some similarities between the two models, there may be some confusion about the specifics, so we are going to explore each online business model and explain how each one works and how you make money.

What is niche marketing?

Niche marketing is all about targeting a very specific segment of a larger market, finding out exactly what they want and need and offering it to them.

When you are marketing to a specific niche you want to get some insight into exactly what these buyers want and specialize in that. An example of a major market might be candy. There are hundreds of different kinds of candy available. A niche market within the candy market would be fine chocolates. Your buyers who are looking for the very best fine chocolates are not going to be the same buyers that will be looking for gummy bears, or jaw breakers.

You might set up a website with content focused on the various different varieties of fine chocolates, the countries where it comes from and reviews of the different brands of chocolate. Searchers looking for information about fine chocolates would land on your site, read your reviews and maybe click on the ads you have on your site or maybe they click on an affiliate link that pays you a commission if the visitor actually makes a purchase.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketers basically drive traffic to a specially coded affiliate link for a product or service that is owned by a merchant. If any of the people who clicked on your affiliate link make a purchase, you earn a commission paid by the merchant once per month.

Affiliate marketers select the products that they want to market, and they create blogs where they can pre-sell the product, add sometimes add value by kicking in a unique bonus that can’t be found anywhere else. In this way, affiliate marketers create relationships with their buyers so that they come to trust them over time and become repeat buyers.

As an affiliate marketer you don’t have to collect payments, you don’t even have to deliver the products you have pre-sold, you don’t have to deal with customer complaints or support. Once you get your affiliate sites up and running, they can operate largely on auto-pilot. All you have to do is send targeted traffic to your sites and you will start generating sales if the offer is appealing.

If you want to get started making money online, but you don’t have a merchant account, you don’t have a product of your own, and you don’t have a lot of money to develop an ecommerce site, affiliate marketing is a good way to delve into the world of making money online.

So, with niche marketing you are focusing in on a defined segment of a market and catering to their specific needs. Affiliate marketing is a broader approach where you might be marketing several different kinds of products.

But niche marketing and affiliate marketing are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the various ways that you can make money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find lots of information about how to build and grow your business online.

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A joint venture is when two or more businesses agree to work together on a specific project. One of the most exciting aspects of the world of Internet marketing is joining up with other marketers to help expand you reach and get exposed to new ideas and strategies. A joint venture could be something as simple as a list swap, or as involved as launching a product together. But if you are new and just getting started with Internet marketing, or if you aren’t well connected with other marketers, there are ways that you can find a JV partner to work with on your next project. In this article we’re going to look at some ways to find joint venture partners for your projects.

Wikipedia defines a joint venture in this way, “A joint venture is a business agreement in which parties agree to develop, for a finite time, a new entity and new assets by contributing equity. They exercise control over the enterprise and consequently share revenues, expenses and assets.”

Now that we’re clear on what a joint venture is all about, let’s take a look at how you might find a JV partner.

International Association of Joint Venture Brokers
Nick-named the “Joint Venture Capital of the Internet,” the IAJVB is an organization that was founded by veteran Internet marketer, Willie Crawford. The nexus of this organization is a live database where members enter their product and project launch dates. Members can then search this database either by date or niche so that when they are planning to launch their product, they can choose a time when it won’t get swallowed up by a ton of big launches.

International Marketing JV partner and Mastermind Group
This group can be found on meetup.com, and it is a resource for finding potential JV partners all over the world so that you can actually meet them in person and develop a working business relationship.

JV Alert
Ken McArthur hosts a members-only joint venture program where you can meet other Internet Marketers who are looking for NV partners. He also hosts an annual conference each year called JV-Alert Live, where you can network and broker deals with other marketers in person.

Private JV Club
Founded by marketing consultant Stefanie Hartman, the Private JV Club is a monthly membership club where you can network with other business people, find joint venture partners and learn new marketing strategies to help you leverage your resources in the most powerful way possible.

JMme.com
This free to join joint venture network looks and feels like a social media website where people can join, create a profile, add friends and join and create groups.

These are just a few of the established websites online where you can find joint venture partners, but you can also take the informal route and simply ask marketers that you meet and interact with in online forums such as the digital point forum, the warrior forum, or more niche-specific forums that you are active in. You could put out a request on your Facebook profile when you are looking for a JV partner.

Joint ventures are a powerful way to gain exposure to new markets, build valuable business relationships and make more money without spending more on advertising.

If you want to learn more about how to leverage joint venture relationships along with many other Internet marketing strategies, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

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In a business like Internet marketing where stories of overnight success are legendary, even more are the stories of those who have failed miserably having spent thousands of dollars on courses, hiring the wrong coaches, and chasing every hot trend that comes along. There are a few commonalities among the mistakes that new online marketers make. In this article we will explore just eight of them and how to avoid them.

1. Your website looks unprofessional

With competition as steep as it is online your website must look professional and you must appear trustworthy or else visitors will click away. No one will take you seriously if your website looks sloppy and unprofessional. This is not an area to cut corners if you want to make money online. Spend the money and hire a designer.

2. Starting out with ideas that are too complex

Keep it simple when you are first starting out and then build on your small successes. Don’t aim to create a site to compete with Amazon as your first project.

3. Failure to focus

Because the Internet moves so fast and there is so much going on people can easily get distracted and want to drop what they are doing and jump in on the next, “Big Thing.” You will never find success if you do not focus on one project at a time until you achieve the goals you have set.

4. Failing to keep your website updated with fresh content

You can’t just build a site and then sit back and wait for sales to roll in. In order to attract traffic from the search engines, and attention from your human visitors, you need a steady flow of fresh, relevant content on your site several times a week.

5. Neglecting SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization is critical if you are going to rely upon organic search engine traffic to your site. One of the biggest determining factors to search engine ranking is how many back links your site has.  Either spend the time building backlinks or hire someone to do it for you or your site will flounder and never reach page one in Google.

6. Attempting to go it alone

Internet marketing can be a challenging thing to try do all on your own. Having joint venture partners, and networking with other marketers is a great way to gain support and encouragement, get exposure to other audiences and learn new strategies.

7. Neglecting to build an email subscriber list

This is a huge one, and it should be closer to the top of the list. Ask any successful marketer and they will tell you that they would be dead in the water without their email subscriber list. This is one of those rare cases where size does not matter. What matters is the kind of relationship you have with your list. If you maintain a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship with your subscribers, your email list can be a lucrative resource.

8. Giving up too soon

Here’s another big mistake that would-be marketers make and that is to give up before they give their project a chance to reach success. So many new marketers jump from project to project without seeing success simply because they did not invest enough time or have enough patience to see it through.

If you want to avoid common mistakes and learn some powerful Internet marketing strategies, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover how you can build and grow a successful business online today.

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Actually, Facebook is changing the way Facebook users will be using email. Given the fact that 96% of Millenials (those born between the mid 1970’s and the mid 1990’s) are members of at least one online social network, and Facebook’s global popularity, chances are they have a Facebook profile. With the launch of the new messages format, Facebook has placed text messaging, chat and email all together in a simple, threaded conversation that will absolutely transform the way we communicate with one another online.

Lance Ulanoff of PC Magazine said, “Facebook didn’t kill Gmail, Hotmail or any other messaging service, it simply changed the rules of the messaging game.”

For the sake of clarity Facebook messages is not email. You don’t need a subject line, there’s no CC or BCC and when you are done typing and ready to send you just hit the ‘Enter,’ key. If the person you are having a conversation with is live on Facebook, it will turn into a chat. If you start chatting with someone who is not online, your message will go to their inbox. You can also check a box to send the message to their phone if they use Facebook on their mobile phone.

Now, if you have set up your Facebook email account, you will have an “@facebook.com” email address with your username, and all of your messages will be together in one place. You can have complete control over who can send you messages through your privacy settings. With the new format you can see the full history of the conversation you’ve had with that person. And for those who are tired of having to weed through spam to get to the messages that matter to you, spam messages are hidden from view automatically.

Your Inbox now contains only messages form your friends. All other messages get sent to the ‘Other’ box which can be found in the left navigation panel directly under the inbox. You can move a conversation from the other box to your inbox by opening the message, clicking on the ‘Actions’ button and then selecting ‘Move to messages.’

With Facebook messaging, “You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time,” –Facebook blog.

Give this a try: login to your Facebook account and go to your Messages tab. Open a new message and address it to yourself at your regular (outside of Facebook) email address. Then open that email client and check for the message. It will also reveal your “@Facebook.com,” email address.

Facebook messaging has removed the barriers between email, SMS and live chatting. Imagine you’re sitting in the office chatting with a colleague on Facebook and you’ve got to leave for a meeting you can simply transition the conversation to SMS and continue the conversation via SMS on your smart phone.

If you’d like to learn more about topics related to Internet marketing, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you’ll discover lots of tips and strategies for starting and growing a business online.

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Today’s economy, which is struggling to come up out of a deep recession, while at any moment running the risk of a full on economic depression, has been going through a major shift that has had deep and negative impacts on the livelihood of people all over the world. Small, home-based businesses have been the life raft that has rescued many families from the brink of disaster after millions of job losses, foreclosures, and bank failures.

After facing the challenge of not being able to find a new job in this new economy, many people have turned to home-based businesses to help keep them afloat only to find that they can replace and exceed the income that they earned in a traditional job.

According to MSN Money Central, “more than half of all U.S. businesses are now run from kitchen tables, extra bedrooms, basements and garages. Home-based businesses make a $530 billion contribution to the nation’s economy each year.”  What makes these businesses so appealing is that they do not take a major financial investment to start and they can be run from home with just a computer and an Internet connection in most cases.

With all of the resources available on the Internet to help support small, home-based businesses, the prevalence of social media, which makes spreading the word about your Business so easy for the non-marketing expert, and easy access to outsourcing via freelancing job sites, making a small Business profitable is within the reach of those who are focused and success oriented.

One important aspect of finding success with a home-based business is choosing something that you are passionate about. When you are pursuing something that you already have a passion for, it is easier to remain committed to it through those beginning stages when it can be in danger of going under.

Several major corporations got their start during challenging economic times including well-known companies such as, Fed-Ex, Trader Joe’s and General Electric (GE). During time of great challenge there is always opportunity. Those visionaries who can seize those opportunities are the ones who will find a way to prosper despite the current economic climate.

Here are a few tips for making the most of a small, home-based business startup:

• Plan for success

Create a business plan. Visit your local small business development center (in the U.S.) and get free advice about your startup.

• Make sure your location is legal

Some municipalities have zoning restrictions that apply to where a business can be located. Check your city zoning laws to see if your location is compliant.

• Keep proper records

Be aware of the current deductions that you can take when you operate a business from your home. Read, IRS Publication 587, Business Use of Your Home, which can be downloaded from irs.gov.

• Remain focused

An acronym for focus is: Follow One Course Until Successful. If you keep trying different things you will never know which one might have worked out.

So, in answer to the question, “Can a small, home-based business make it in today’s economy?” the answer would be a resounding, “yes!” and these small businesses will continue to grow and thrive as the job market continues to flounder.

Looking for ways to grow your small, home-based business? Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog where you will learn more about Internet marketing today.

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