Affiliate Marketing is the New Job on the Market

Posted by Alan Mater on Feb 6, 2010

With the economy still way below normal and jobless rates not seeing a high increase, people are still looking for new job opportunities, both offline and online.

When I lost my job in 2008, I decided to start building an online presence and get a proofreading portfolio together. I wanted to provide a valuable service to others and build up a clientele. At the same time I hammered down on my online business and tried to learn as much as I could about internet marketing. I knew there was money to be made online, and there still is.

That’s why I truly believe that affiliate marketing is the new job on the market. Trillions of dollars are being spent online, and as an affiliate, you can claim your share.

Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest and most lucrative business model, so it’s no wonder why you see so many new affiliates these days. I imagine that there are many people looking for something different, just like I was when I lost my job.

I wanted this post to be a little different, so instead of me rambling on about stuff you may or may not already know, I thought I’d make it extremely easy for you to find all of my posts related to affiliate marketing.

So, simply click the link below:

http://www.replaceyoursalary.com/work-from-home-blog/category/affiliate-marketing

and you’ll have every post I tagged with affiliate marketing at your fingertips. This will surely give you enough information to read up on for the next day or two until I get a new post up. Hopefully you’ll find some informative information as well as some inspiration if you’re thinking about getting into affiliate marketing.

Have any thoughts? Share them below…


Freelance Work From Home

Posted by Alan Mater on Jul 19, 2009

Freelance work from home isn’t a new concept by any means. There are many freelancers that enjoy spending the day at home doing various work for different clients. The internet has made this possibility even more of a reality for many people.

Basically, if you have  a specific skill or skill set, there’s no reason why you can’t find freelance work from home. If you have a particular interest or are very knowledgeable in a specific area, chances are that you can get paid to render your services in that area.

You might be saying you don’t have any skills or aren’t qualified in any specific area, so finding freelance work from home is out of the question. Well, the fact that you’re reading this proves that theory wrong. Even if you have basic computer skills, which I’m assuming you do, you may just find someone that is need of your knowledge.

Even so, there’s quick ways to learn and get the knowledge necessary to render services for others in a specific area. You could take an online course for an area of interest and get certified. This is what I did after I lost my job over a year ago. It has paid off very well and is well worth it.

One website where you can get such training and take an online course is UniversalClass.com. Here they offer classes for just about any subject, and after completion, you’ll be certified and have the knowledge necessary. The next step after that will be to get some experience.

To get your feet wet and eventually do freelance work from home full-time, you’ll need to find a constant stream of work. This can be a bit challenging to say the least. Fortunately, there are websites that connect freelance service providers with people looking for freelancers.

List of freelance sites to check out:

  • GetAFeelancer.com
  • IFreelance.com
  • ODesk.com
  • Elance.com
  • RentaCoder.com

This isn’t an all-inclusive list of feelance sites, but this will give you a good start to find freelance work. I’m a member of a few, but I’ll be honest, I have yet to get any work through these sites. I get most of my work through forums.

Forums can be a great place to find freelance work from home. It might be a little unorthodox or different than what you’re used to, but this is how I get all of my freelance work. There are many benefits to this avenue.

With forums, you don’t have to spend time bidding on projects that appeal to you. This can be time-consuming, and with a hundred other competitors all bidding on the same project, the chances of winning the project aren’t very good.

If you already have the experience then being seen as an expert in your field won’t be difficult. Just back up your claims with real testimonials from satisfied customers/clients. Notice I said “real” testimonials… that’s very important. You never want to fake testimonials for any reason.

Forums usually have an area to advertise for a product or service. Use this to your advantage to get your name out there. If you have to, do some work for free in exchange for some testimonials. You may just gain a regular client from it in the process.

Adding a link in your forum signature to a web page that describes what you do and the services you offer is another benefit to take advantage of. This can get you good exposure, and anyone interested will click on the link and may just become a new client.

For me, the services I offer are appealing to the members of the various forums I’m a member of. So for me, this strategy is very advantageous.

Regardless of how you find freelance work from home, online or offline, just know that it’s a great way to earn money and work from home.

What are some ways you go about finding freelance work, whether it’s online or offline?


Home Based Business Provides an Alternative to 9-5 Job

Posted by amater on Apr 8, 2009

Income generating alternatives to the ‘nine-to-five job’ are becoming increasingly important in our unstable globalized economy. Many people have successfully diversified their incomes through network marketing.

Why Network Marketing?

Many members of the local community have found that a secure job or career is a thing of the past.

The career and financial uncertainties arising from corporate downsizing has coined terms such as McJob and permatemp. A McJob is a low-paying, low-prestige position requiring few skills and offering little opportunity for advancement. Permatemps are temporary workers who are expected to do the same work as permanent employees but without the benefits or prospect of career advancement.

Network marketing offers individuals an alternative to job insecurity.

Entrepreneurs looking for financial freedom and a better way of life have turned to network marketing. There are many reasons why network marketing offers a viable alternative to working in the corporate world.

First, a direct marketing business can be developed in your spare time while you continue working. Often wives build successful network marketing organizations while their husbands continue to work in the corporate world. Over time, the network marketing business grows large enough to support the whole family. In the meantime, it offers an additional income stream and decreases the risks associated with corporate downsizing.

Second, most direct marketing businesses require little start-up capital. For many organizations, this is less than $300. Starting your own business or buying a franchise can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. (And there’s no guarantee that the business will generate sufficient income to repay the money borrowed). If you’re looking for a company to get started with for less than $30 a month, check out SFI.

Third, direct marketing generates an ongoing stream of residual income. This is especially true for organizations marketing a product that gets used up and needs to be purchased regularly.

Residual Income is the Key to Financial Freedom.

Residual income (also called passive income) is one of the greatest benefits offered by network marketing . This is why Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad and many other publications, highly recommends network marketing in his books.

Kiyosaki writes about ways to develop residual income streams. They include:

  • networking marketing
  • royalties from patents and copyrighted works
  • sales commissions in some industries, e.g. insurance
  • rental income from property investment
  • dividends from shares

With the exception of network marketing, most of these methods require large amounts of capital, time, or both to generate long-term results.

With a small investment and dedication, network marketing has helped many families take control of their financial destinies by generating a residual income. They have found a solution to corporate downsizing in the form of network marketing.

More importantly, residual income from network marketing can lay the foundation for your future wealth and financial freedom.
Besides the financial benefits, people have found one of the greatest benefits of network marketing is that it can be operated as a home-based business.

Learn More About the Latest Direct Marketing Opportunity?

If you’re interested in creating Financial Freedom, I would like to discuss this ground floor network marketing opportunity with you. You can leverage your time by working with your friends, family and associates to build a successful network marketing business. Time is of the essence. Contact me now to learn more.

Email: 3822292@usana.com
Website: http://www.ideallifestyle.usana.com

Access practical hints in the topic of website traffic – welcome to your personal knowledge base.


Useful Advice About Leads On Line For Free

Posted by amater on Apr 5, 2009

If there’s one thing you need in order to succeed with MLM/Network Marketing, it’s leads. Without leads, you’ll never make much money regardless of your company, the pay plan, your upline or anything else. You’re also going to need a lot of prospects since there’s no way you’ll sign everyone to be an agent. How many you’ll need depends on several factors such as your skill and your business. Not to mention, if you have a lot of leads, you won’t have to feel like you have to sign everyone.

It’s a lot easier to say no to having someone that doesn’t match what you’re looking for if you have 20-30 people waiting on your call. There are other factors involved in succeeding, but if you have leads and use them, that’s a big hurdle passed. Call everyone you know and ask for referrals. Tell them about the great business you have and how they can benefit from either being a customer or agent. If you’ve chosen wisely and believe in your company, you won’t see a problem with this. If you aren’t sure you have a great business, maybe you should keep looking.

A great way to decide if you have a good company is to ask yourself if you’d sign up your best friend or valued member of your family. Or, ask yourself if you’d use the product if there was no pay plan involved. If the answer is No, maybe you should keep looking. Build lead capture pages and get them listed high on search engines. This will generate leads that are interested in your company. However, anyone who has worked at getting a site listed high will tell you this is time consuming and far from easy, and it’s not an overnight job either.

You could spend a lot of time working on your site and never break the top 100. You can advertise your lead capture page on Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines. The largest sites are Google and Yahoo. These are the ads that show up at the top or on the right when you search. This is the quickest way and depending on the key words you’re bidding on could be cheap or very expensive (some keywords cost over 100 bucks) and there’s no guarantee you’ll get a single lead. It only guarantees that someone will see your page.

If you’re going to go this route, do yourself a favor and either get trained on how to do it or start slow or both. You can easily blow hundreds or thousands of dollars before you know it. You can print flyers and post them on bulletin boards around town and put them on doors and cars. If you figure a 1-2% success rate, you’ll get 1-2 leads per hundred flyers and then depending on your closing rate, you can figure out how many flyers you’ll need to hand out consistently to reach your goals.

Also figure in printing costs. Even if you’re printing these at home, you’ll have to pay for ink/toner and the wear and tear on your printer, not to mention the time and gas it takes to drive around and post the flyers. You should also get permission from property managers if you’re going to put them on doors or cars since some people will throw them on the ground. One other thing to be wary about is car alarms.

You can spam the world with one of those “e-mail 16 million people for 29.95″ spam messages you get every day. Do us both a favor and forget about that. The best you can hope for is to not get blacklisted or in trouble with the feds. The odds are that you’ll be visited by the feds and/or have your ISP shut you down. The way these are collected is by sending a little robot spider to crawl the web and collect e-mail addresses from forums, news groups, blogs, web sites and anywhere else they can find them.

These are just bad news and may get you kicked out of your company since they could be black listed because you didn’t follow this advice. An easy way to tell if they are real leads or harvested is the price. If they’re unbelievably cheap or don’t include i.p. address, they are probably harvested.

Cold Calling – This is just as it sounds. You pick up the phone book and start calling. This is the cheapest way to generate leads and if you have a thick skin may work for you. The thing to remember is that those people may be on the Do Not Call List and it may get you in trouble. The best thing to do is research the legal requirements before attempting this.

You can buy leads from a company that generates leads for you. But even these aren’t created equal. Some companies sell the same lead to 5, 10 or more people; even people in the same company as you and sell them for weeks, months or longer. You could end up with a lead that is 5 months old and been called by 10 or more people and is just plain tired of talking to people or has already joined a company and is quite happy with it.

Some are also overpriced and use shady tactics to get people to sign up such as contest sites. Or you could join a lead Co-Op that only sells the lead to you and generates it after you order meaning they are about 1-3 days old and only sold once. You want to make sure the company is reputable, been around for awhile and truly cares about their customers/members. They should offer multiple lead packages, training on how to effectively contact those leads, multiple autoresponders to make contacting them for follow-up (the fortune is in the follow-up) and training them easier and a presentation to explain what network marketing/MLM actually is in case the person has never heard of the concept or your company doesn’t offer a recruiting site.

It would also help if the company has a pay plan so that as you refer your new downline to the great leads you use, you can create an extra income stream (or at least get them for free) and so can your downline.

The thing to remember is that regardless of how the prospect was generated these people asked for information on starting a home based business and you should make it your responsibility to get them the information as soon as possible. Unless you didn’t take my advice and used a spam CD; then you’re on your own. Another thing to think about when choosing a method is will it be duplicatable to your downline and get consistent results? But that’s a subject covered in a previous article.

Read more about leads on line for free and free ways to generate leads to increase your income.

Access realistic information about website traffic – welcome to your own guide.


Home Based Business

Posted by amater on Apr 3, 2009

One way that people choose to make money from home is through a home based business. There are many reasons that this choice is one that makes sense. It offers the owner many options that may not be present in all work from home jobs.

An advantage of having your own business is that of choices. You can turn a lot of things into a business. All that’s needed is a strong consumer demand for your service or product. It’s very possible to take an ability or talent you possess and turn it into a viable home based business. Begin with doing some research to assess the demand for it.

Once you have hit on the perfect product or service to offer, your next step should be figuring out just how much it will cost you out of pocket to get things started. This can be anywhere from very little to having to get a small business loan. It completely depends on what your business is going to be. For example, if you want to begin a house cleaning service, your initial financial outlay will most likely not be a lot.

Examples of home based business could be domestic help. After all you already clean your own house so there are probably already a lot of needed supplies on hand for this work from home based business. As you take on more clients, your inventory can be upgraded but, by then, you’ll have the money to do it.

Something you should keep in mind is that when running a home based business you forego a lot of the overhead that public businesses incur. You don’t have to pay rental fees on an office, for one thing although you will probably want to get a second line installed for business use. Everything you need is right in your home office. There are certain things you must pay for each month, anyway, and while some of these expenses may increase marginally, you won’t be paying them for 2 different places. That is certainly a real benefit of having a home based business.

It is better if you have a room in your home to devote to office space. In that way, the rest of your house remains yours and there is little notice that you actually are running a business out of your home. If you have small children, it’s even better to be able to keep work related items in a separate room so that little hands don’t destroy something, or cause harm to themselves.

When you feel you’re ready to take the plunge, don’t hesitate to ask for advice or guidance from others who are traveling this path. With the right idea, a little ingenuity, commitment, and dedication, you CAN make this work!

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Finding Success In Your Work From Home Business

Posted by Alan Mater on Mar 8, 2009

I’ve touched on the topic of success in the past, but it never hurts to provide tips and strategies that you can implement to find success in your work from home business. For the most part, success begins with you.

Over at SmallBizBee.com, the owner, Matt, attended a conference on special event management, and the keynote speaker focused on the 5 elements to a successful event. As Matt pointed out, and I totally agree, these 5 elements can be applied to your work from home business.

The first element, which I believe is the MOST important of them all, is having passion for what we do. This would almost seem like common sense, but many people ignore this factor. Think about it for a minute. Why would you want to do something that you truly don’t have passion for?

A work from home business is different in that you have a choice in  what you do, unlike a JOB. Having passion in your work from home business will give you the drive and determination to see it to fruition.

The other elements in that article are just as important. If I could add another element that would determine the success of your work from home business, it would have to be one’s mindset. I’ve written an article on this subject before. When you get a chance go read it… You Must Have the Right Mindset to Succeed With a Money Making Home Business.

Remember, it doesn’t matter what work from home business you have. You will find success when you apply these elements and realize that it all comes down to one person… YOU.


Can You Really Make Money Online?

Posted by Alan Mater on Jan 29, 2009

I’m sure this question gets asked all too often. Then, there will be the naysayers that chime in and say that it’s completely impossible to make money online and that you need to go get a JOB!

Well my friends that is just not true at all. Why would it be impossible if there are people doing it? That doesn’t make sense to me. The harsh reality is that for some it is impossible because they’re just too lazy, but it’s not impossible to make money online.

Some just aren’t cut out for it. The time and energy put in could far exceed any real job out there. That’s reality. The people that stick with it and tough it out are the ones that will succeed and make money online.

The others who can’t will say it’s impossible and then profess that it’s impossible for anyone to make money online. They don’t have the determination and mindset to succeed.

This is where you need to separate yourself from the crowd. Go beyond the “impossible” and make it possible for YOU to make money online. Only you are capable of making it possible for yourself to make any kind of money online.

Also, don’t be naive and think it will be easy. As I said earlier, it’s downright hard work. No, it’s not manual labor. You’re not going to get blisters by any means. But, it will require planning, learning and execution on your part if you want to make any money online at all.

If you believe anything I say, believe that it IS possible. With all good things, however, there is a learning curve involved. Sometimes there is even a price, whether it be time or money.

Some say you have to spend money to make money. That depends on many factors, but it’s not always the case. Money might be better spent on educating yourself so that you know what to do and how to do it to make money online.

There are many paths to take with this. It’s hard nowadays to know who to trust when everyone is claiming to be a “guru” and that they will teach you everything you need to know.

I don’t claim to be a guru. I don’t claim to know all the answers. But, I do know that you CAN make money online. I know this because I have made money online and am currently making money online.

I can do this because I have found the education and training that is necessary to create the positive and successful mindset. The training that has allowed me to know what works when making money online.

I’ll provide you some resources if you’re looking to make money online, or if you already are but want to make even more. Because who doesn’t want to make even more money online?

Here’s what has helped me over the years, and I’m sure they’ll help you too:

A Completely Different Approach To Making Money Online
Success University – Personal Development to Achieve Success!
Niche Power Group – Training YOU to Make Money Online!

P.S. You can also sign up for my FREE newsletter where I will teach you how to start and run a successful home business so that you can make money online. I provide many tips and tricks that can be applied to any type of online business, even if you already have one.


Retirement Income Not Enough?

Posted by Alan Mater on Dec 23, 2008

Retirement is something many people look forward to. It’s a time to relax and enjoy life. Unfortunately, retirement income is something most people don’t think about, until they actually decide to retire.

A lot of people find that their retirement income just isn’t enough to provide for their current style of living. They either have to find part-time work to supplement their retirement income, or they have to degrade their standard of living.

Most people would prefer to keep up with their current standard of living, so they must find a way to supplement their existing retirement income.

Finding another job, even part-time, isn’t exactly something many would like to do. After all, they retired for a reason. They would rather spend their time at home and enjoy themselves.

So how does one add to their current retirement income without getting another job?

The solution that most find the easiest as well as rewarding is to work from home. Working from home provides the relaxation that they want, the time and flexibility to enjoy life and the retirement income that they require.

There are so many passive income ideas available today, that working from home just makes sense for those that are recently retired, or soon to be. Some consider it a hobby, while others put more time and effort into it in hopes of building a long-term business that will provide for them long down the road.

Everyone’s needs are different, and finding the right work from home opportunities to supplement their current retirement income shouldn’t be taken lightly. You should figure out what you’re good at or what you would enjoy doing most.

There are many work from home “jobs” that provide almost instant income for the time and effort that you work, while others are an actual business that will take time to build.

Your retirement income is nothing to take lightly. Take the steps today to ensure that you have enough retirement income to still enjoy the pleasures that life brings you.