Affiliate Programs: The Simple Way to Start an Online Business

Starting an online business it is a very daunting prospect. Some of the things to be considered are; what can you offer to your potential customers? With your own online business, the first thing you must have is a product or service to sell.

Do you have a product that you can buy or produce yourself to sell, or are you going to enter a 'franchise'? Because selling physical products online means you are faced with making the products yourself, finding a franchise opportunity and researching wholesalers, to find a product range that you are comfortable with. Ideally you would have a working knowledge and experience of the product or service. You then need to be able to fulfil orders, package them, deal with customer enquiries, arrange and pay for shipping costs and the list goes on.

If you provide a service, then you may well have to start by offering to undertake jobs for no charge in order to get an opportunity to prove your abilities to your potential customers. This is one way of establishing credibility, and then when you are charging for your service, you are still limited by how much work you can actually handle due to time constraints.

Of course there are other options like drop shipping with all the problems that may involve.

Whichever route you choose to take, it is important to present your business in a form that shows clearly what product or service is being offered.

This involves not just building a web site, which is in itself a learning curve, there is also the need to be able to write compelling ad copy, an effective marketing plan, sorting out payment processors and cash flow, all of these things are best planned in advance for smooth implementation, for when you are setting things up for trading.

All the above systems do all have the ability to provide you with a very nice income from home, but if you want to get started on making an income from home quickly and easily, then affiliate programs are the ideal starting point, read on to discover why.

AFFILATE PROGRAMS EXPLAINED

At this point you may well be wondering what exactly ARE affiliate programs?

Essentially, an affiliate program allows you to sell another company's service or product and you would earn a commission on every sale or lead. The company for whom you are an affiliate will provide you with an affiliate link, which is a special URL code that will identify you as the source of the customer's introduction to the company, so you can see for yourself that your marketing plan is sound and producing results. This means that the only skill you need to master initially is that of marketing, you do not even need to build a website or handle the transaction.

Affiliate programs often have tiers, which means that if someone who signs up to the affiliate program through your link is placed in your "downline" and you will then earn a percentage of any sales they make too.

HOW DO I CHOOSE AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM?

The first step in deciding on an affiliate program to promote is to research the popularity of some of your interests. You are more likely to make a success of promoting a product or something you are interested in, than something you know little or nothing about.

There are many sources to determine if people are searching for products and services in a particular field, including free ones such as the Overture keyword tool; (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion ) and paid ones such as the word tracker service (http://www.wordtracker.com/ ).

Once you have decided on a product or service, for which there seems to be a demand and is in your scope of interest, you will need to find affiliate programs in your chosen field. This can be achieved easily by typing your chosen subject along with 'affiliate program,' into your favourite search engine and sift through the results until you find an affiliate program you like the look of. Alternatively you can search through affiliate directories such as http://www.associateprograms.com and http://www.affiliatesdirectory.com/.

Once you have found a program that interests you, ensure you read the terms of the program; take particular care to check the level of minimum payout, and when payouts occur. If payouts do not occur until you reach a high level of commission you may well never see your money.

It is a good idea to go with programs that have high commission percentage rates, as in effect you have fewer products to sell to achieve the income you desire. It is often the case that digital products; (books and software) have the highest commission rates, due to the lower costs. A good starting place for finding affiliate programs is clickbank (http://clickbank.com/ ). However these tend to be lower priced than physical goods so pick your chosen affiliate program with care! Affiliate programs will provide you with a variety of marketing tools such as banners, classified ads, email ads and so on. They may well also have training on how to market. Then all you have to do is set off promoting your new affiliate program everywhere you can.

Once you have mastered this skill and see the income come in, you will be in a much better position to start selling your own product. Good luck!

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This article may be reprinted providing it is published in it's entirety, including the author's bio and link to the URL displayed.

John J Farina is a successful affiliate marketer. He provides expert reviews on which affiliate programs to join and which ones to avoid like the plague. He shows people how to actually generate substantial income on-line using very simple, easily modeled systems. An example of such a system that you can study and duplicate is at: http://www.johnnysreviewsite.com

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Data and MP3 Compression: Understanding "Digital"

The MP3 and MP4 generation was generated mostly due to advances in data compression. Let us first take a step back and focus on digital music. There are two types of data in the world: Analog and Digital data. Analog data is real time data, and it is essentially how we perceive the world. As you listen to any music, you are listening to an analog signal. Everything we see and hear is analog. So what is the significance of digital? Digital is a way of storing and transferring this data. Think of a twelve inch ruler. With this ruler, you can measure any distance between between 0 and 12 inches. Depending on how good you are at reading the ruler, you can probably measure to a resolution of 1/16 of an inch. Even though there is measurable distance between these 1/16 inch marks, the distance is rather insignificant to you. At this point, you can record the distance two ways:

1) You can mark the ruler with a pencil and store it in its true "analog" value

2) You can round the value to the nearest 1/16th and record it. This could be referred to as a "digital" value.

Digital is a collection of zeros and ones that represent a number. Because there are two values, the system is base 2. Our normal system is a base 10 system. For example:

The number 1456 is really:

6x(1) + 5x(10) + 4x(100) + 1x(1000) = 1456

Where the number in parentheses are 10^x power.

Let's try a base 2 number of 100110:

0x(1) + 1x(2) + 1x(4) + 0x(8) + 0x(16) + 1x(32) = 38 (decimal)

Where the number in parentheses are 2^x power.

In this base-2 example, the number is referred to as "6-bits". A typical "byte" is normally "8-bits". So instead of storing the number 38, computers would store the number 100110.

So why would you want to do that? There are 6 digitals in base-2 versus two digitals in base-10. The answer is simple! Ones and zeros are much easier to store (It is like a light switch, either ON or OFF). Further, in a base-2 system, there are only 2 possible solutions. In a base-10 solution, there are 10 solutions per digit. The more solutions you have, the more chance to make errors.

Now let's revisit the the analog signal. In this type of data, there are an infinite number of solutions. Mind you, the error won't be great, but you ARE guaranteed some error every time. Every time you recall a analog signal, the results will be varied to some degree.

Think about your cell phone. About 5 years ago, all cell phones were analog. When you entered areas of poor reception, you received static, distortion and noise. Now, most cells phones are digital. As long as a portion of the ones and zeros are transmitted, you will receive a perfect signal every time. (If you transmit the number 1.2 or 1.5 or 0.8, it will always be read a one! i.e., the signal is immune to noise!) If you cannot even read these simple ones and zeros, you drop off completely. The clarity of the signal is perfect and repeatable, as long as the data is present.

Music works in the same manner. Old-school records and cassette tapes are analog signals. These media will product static and noise and will degrade over time. CDs are digital signals. As long as the compact is readable, the CD player will provide you with the exact sound as it was recorded. The CD itself might degrade over time, but the data will always be stored in its original form.

Since the inception of digitally stored music, the quality of music has remained high and to the same standard as it is today. Compact discs still offer the highest form of music available. The problem with compact discs is that the amount of bits required to store a song is high. That leads us to the modern use of data compression and MP3. (And another article for another day!)

Matthew Bredel is a 31 year old online entrepreneur and engineer currently living in San Diego, CA.

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