In this article we will tackle the four essential none financial factors that we should look at when studying affiliate opportunities if you are new to the online business. In a previous article we have listed and discussed the financial factors.
Since you are reading this article then most probably you have already started your search for ideas to establish your online business. If you did, this means that you must have come across a few sales letters that are trying to convince you of various affiliate opportunities.
Within those sales letters you will find that most of the authors are doing the following:
1- Describing your pain
2- Telling you their life story on how they were at some point in your current situation or even worse.
3- How their programs helped them become the millionaires they are today.
4- What their programs are about. Here is where they start their promises.
5- Few bonuses if you subscribe now
6- The real price and the discounted price which will last only for a limited time or some kind of time or product limitation.
7- The last section you either find two fields where you need to fill you name and e-mail to get more information, or the payment section.
There is nothing wrong here. The problem with many of the sales letters is that they are filled with very exciting language that the reader is lost in emotional turmoil rather than in rational information processing. To Further complicate the problem, both bad and good affiliate opportunities use the same hyped language. So how can we differentiate between the bad and the good?
The only way is to know exactly what we are looking for and dig it up from the pile of words within those sales letters. Any person who is new to online business and who is searching for affiliate opportunities should look for the following:
1- Training: The affiliate opportunity should have a structured and detailed training that will enable the participant to learn online marketing. Be careful here as many affiliate opportunities provide training resources which are full of e-books and articles. There is nothing wrong with that, but that is not a structured training and you can get lost within the information easily.
2- Support: Affiliate opportunities differ in their structure:
a. With some you would be an affiliate who is signing under another affiliate who is your sponsor. What if your sponsor is just as new as you are? There is nothing wrong with that, but the problem is that he/she will not be able to help you if you are stuck.
b. Others are flat and therefore, who ever signed you up, you will be supported by the owning person. Usually that person is very busy with creating other ideas or simply cannot handle all the affiliate questions in good time. If it was a company its better, but they must be setup for such support.
Therefore, the ideal support structure should be of two layers:
i- Help Desk: Either in form of the ability of submitting trouble tickets or a simple e-mail contact.
ii- Forum: The affiliate opportunity should have a forum or a section within a forum. This way all affiliates will be able to ask questions and all affiliates will be able to contribute with their answers. This way all the experiences of the affiliates are pooled in one place.
3- Your own website with your own domain: Now this is a tricky one. Many affiliate opportunities give you a dedicated website page with your own affiliate code extension so that you can promote as your own. Yet that is not your own domain. It will normally be the affiliate program own domain with an extension that will include your affiliate code.
To have your own website with your own domain is an exercise that requires a good amount of research, effort and some technical skills. Being new on the online business world you would normally have no idea were to start from. This is what you would normally need to do:
a) Research for a hosting company that would suit your needs. The problem is that you still don't know what your needs are.
b) Design, build and create content for your website. Each of those requires different sets of skills and/or tools, which at this moment you still don't have.
Some affiliate opportunities save you all that from the very beginning and would do all that for you. All what you need to do is choose your domain name and they will do the rest for you. I must admit that there aren't a lot of affiliate programs that offer this, but there is a couple of them out there.
4- Building a list: Almost in every online marketing course you would find a section talking about the importance of building a list that you can e-mail your offers to. To be able to describe the details of this one for you, I would need another article. In short there are affiliate opportunities that write your e-mail campaign for you and show you step by step how to set up your autoresponder. Some programs go to the extreme of setting up the autoresponder for you.
Now what you need to do is see which of the above areas your lacking skills for, or you simply don't know how to do, and find affiliate opportunities that fill the gap for you. These are the facts that you will need to look at when studying which program(s) to join.
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