South West eCommerce

Most business principles translate from physical business into internet business pretty clearly.  The reason is fairly simple.  Business is essentially one person with a need, whether they’ve clearly thought that out, and some money.  Another person perceives that need as an opportunity, figures a way to meet the need, and shakes hands to receive the money.  Not hard really.  Need, solution, shake hands.

So there have been lots of processes we have used to begin the affiliate marketing train moving.  All of them take time, and I am not keeping up.  I look along the desk at my partner.  He’s determined, hardworking, intelligent, and he’s not keeping up either.

We’ve gone through Market Samurai.  By taking notice of things people are searching for and finding low numbers of sites, we’re finding a need.  By finding products out there that fit straight against these needs, we’re making sure we can provide solutions.  Then building websites, we’ve found a bunch of templates supplied by Commission Blueprint, so it is a process that takes just some time, it’s not going to be expensive.

The internet is the perfect conduit to bring our need and our solution together and all we have to do is follow some proven formulas and make it happen.

Right now we’re in a race.  We’ve just got word that one of our sites is working swiftly as we’d hoped many would, but for a lot of them, there are hours of link building, article writing, and minor work to be done.  Multiply that by the number of sites we’re running and we’re not getting it all done in our working week. 

The notion of leverage is about taking the level of work you have, and making it do more, by use of other systems.  Basically if you can have a tool (like the internet) or another person that does work for you and you can take some value for what work you have them do, it’s leverage.

We’ve taken on the need to put out dozens of articles through our article marketing program that will bring us to the top of the search engine listings.  We’re subcontracting someone who will write the articles and is happy to take the work.  As we climb the search engine rankings, that outlay will make us more traffic and more cash.

We don’t want to spend more cash, but it’s clear we’ve got to accelerate our processes, or we won’t make the cash we need before we crash and burn.  Like everything else, we’re making hard choices, and really time will tell if we make it.  It feels like there’s no choice though, and hunger makes you make decisions.