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[W173]Web Business For Sale

by Deepak Dutta, Dee

What is an affiliate program? It's basically a commission-only sales arrangement. Someone with a product or service will offer to let you sell it for them in exchange for a cut of the selling price. Typically with a hard product you'll be lucky to get 10% commission on sales. The good news is that downloadable products such as ebooks and software will often pay you 50% of the sales price as an affiliate - you can even find deals where you get 75%.

If you're just starting out you are certainly advised to begin your affiliate selling career by selling downloadable products because they are the ideal in our 'instant gratification' society. Your customers don't have to wait around after paying their money they can immediately download their purchase over the Internet. If you go to www.clickbank.com, you'll find they have several thousand different downloadable products you can sell as an affiliate, and the majority offer you at least 50% commission. Signing up is a simple one-time process and you'll then be able to use your Clickbank ID to sell any of the products in their online catalogue.

You can browse the Clickbank catalogue by subject area to find something that interests you. In any given subject area you will usually find that there are several related products that you could sell from a tightly-focused Website where you could set up pages to pre-sell the products you have selected and then place a link that your customers can click on which will take them to the affiliate site to place their order - and if they do that, you get your commission.

One of the best types of site you can build using the above ideas is a review site. Set up some simple pages on your Website comparing and contrasting the features of several related products that you've picked out to sell. All you really need to do is go along to the vendors Website which will basically be a sales page for their product. Here they'll list the features and benefits of their product. You can adapt this information to highlight the similarities and differences between two or more of the products to help your customers to choose which product would be the most suitable for their own particular circumstances.

What is the easiest type of Website you can set up to achieve the above? You've probably heard the buzz by now surrounding blogs and blogging. One of the main reasons blogs are recommended for setting up tightly-focused niche topic Websites is that they are usually easier to get traffic to from a standing start than conventional Websites.

Another good reason for choosing a blog as your site-builder of choice is that they are comparatively easy to set up if you're a Website building novice. Once you've carried out some pretty basic setting up, the software behind the blog handles most of the major house-keeping chores, like making sure all of your pages are properly linked together. All you have to do is to keep adding on-topic content regularly.

Two good choices if you want to experiment with blogs for your niche affiliate review sites following the above model are WordPress and Blogger. WordPress is free open source software that resides on your own Web server - so you'll need some hosting of your own if you want to go this route. This is certainly the preferred way to go because if you've got your own domain name and hosting you'll present a more professional image to your customers. You will also have more control over the look and feel of your site.

If you are a complete novice and you just want to test the waters to see if this niche marketing with affiliate sites thing is for you, then the cheapest (free) way to get involved is to go to www.blogger.com, sign up for a free account and make use of the free Blogspot hosting.

Whichever blogging route you choose, once you have your blog set up, just put your review articles on it comparing and contrasting the affiliate products you've chosen, as detailed above. To bulk out the content on your blog, just look around the Net for news items and information on the subject area you've chosen and write some articles based around these.

Once you have one blog set up with a decent amount of content on it, just rinse and repeat. Find some more subject areas that interest you and put more blogs together on these subjects, based around more good affiliate products that you can promote.

There are people out there right now who are making very good money using nothing more than these, and similar, ideas. How will you know whether you could join them if you don't give it a try?

Let's look at a few offline examples:

If you are a manufacturer, your design involves identifying a market opportunity, developing a product, building a factory, locking in distribution, and handling customer warranties and complaints. Your leverage is in the capital you put into the factory and your competitive advantage can include superior products and product development, lower manufacturing costs, access to capital and locking up the distribution. You measure your success by return on investment (the capital bit) and market share (the advantage bit.)

If you were one of the big management consulting firms, your design is simple ? hire the best minds ? your leverage is usually a few (well-connected) partners selling work at partner prices but done by low cost juniors. Your competitive advantage; the relationships you form with clients who then prefer you to the unknown competition for jobs on which their own employment security may depend.

Things are different on the web and much more fragile. An example?

On the web, you write an e-book, put up a web site and drive traffic to it by locking into search engine keywords. That's your design. The leverage, you are endlessly told, is the small amount of time spent on the book and the competitive advantage is your expertise ? captured in the book.

The problem for the web entrepreneur is that digital products are extremely easy to copy eliminating the leverage. Search engine competition is fierce and positions unstable. And the apparent expertise is as easily replicated as the book (no sustainable competitive advantage.)

The bottom line: on the web most entrepreneurial activity is transient. People enter, create something, and hold on to it as long as they can but then their position is eroded, their profits drop and they exit. If you want to develop a long term business, you have to shift to something much different. Thinking about the three components ? design, leverage and competitive advantage will help you enormously. A couple of examples:

In the e-book field, e-Book Wholesaler sells private label e-books to resellers with full resell rights. The design is very simple. Tom Hua, creator of e-Book Wholesaler, sources books from a stable of authors and offers them to the market with resell rights.

Very simple. But he levers and protects his business cleverly.

The basic leverage is in outsourcing writing and selling the same book many times. He also levers his marketing by allowing each book to be personalized with your address, codes and favorite affiliations (generating viral marketing opportunities for the buyer plus selling memberships of the e-Book Wholesaler site at the same time - automated affiliate marketing.)

Even though he uses a membership site formula (levering a single sale into regular income), his sustainable advantage is low, being mainly in the inventory of books he has. His formula is easily copied or muddied, the primary barriers being getting it organized and building membership. Indeed there are others like his including The Viral Profits Warehouse ? and the increasing number of private resell rights sellers.

In the AdSense field, JVMembers have built something original. The design is again simple. They set up a number of AdSense sites; they promote them on the web, and populate the sites through contributions by their members. The members write short articles and share in the AdSense revenue generated from their pages.

The leverage is in the writing of the articles. JVMembers needs thousands of individuals generating fresh, original content all the time (very attractive to the search engines). These thousands of writers cost JVMembers nothing and for their role in organizing it they get 50% of the AdSense revenues. Sustainable advantage is not high in that the concept could be easily copied.

Our two examples share the characteristic of having simple structures, using leverage well but being readily copied. Are there web businesses that cannot be easily copied? Here are a couple.

Saleshoo is in the eBay drop ship business. They use a regular design ? sourcing product and distributing it to members who have pre-sold it on eBay. Members can also buy for their own account and can derive affiliate income (marketing to new members.) So where is the advantage? It lies in excellence of service. The major problem faced by drop ship users is reliability of supply. If you sell something on eBay the buyer expects you to deliver it. Failure of a drop shipper can impact your reputation with eBay. Saleshoo's focus is on reliability of supply as well as good prices.

The Internet Marketing Center is a $60m business selling web tools and education. Their sustainable advantage; they started out as a guru business and migrated to a bigger entity. Today, their advantage lies in their exceptional in-house web marketing talent plus their huge affiliate organization and finally their access to capital to build exceptional products with high production values.

The message; design is critical and you need to be aware of it. Leverage is mostly well understood; analyze a few businesses to see the main components. Competitive advantage is difficult and typically found in complexity (the base of reliable sub-suppliers owned by Saleshoo), service (reliable supply) or mass (as in IMC).

Copyright (c) 2007 Michael Kay HBBReview.com

Article Source : What Do You Need To Get Internet

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Both Deepak Dutta & Michael Kay are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

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