Archive for January, 2009:
Turnkey Online Business Opportunity: A Recipe For Success?
A turnkey online business opportunity offers many advantages for the inexperienced person wanting to work from home on the internet, but there are several things you should know before plunging in. Check through this article to see if this is the money making opportunity that you need, and what to watch out for before you buy.
What Does Turnkey Mean?
‘Turnkey’ just means that the business is ready to go when you buy it. In traditional business terms, a turnkey opportunity is often a franchise. You buy the opportunity to run an outlet for, say, a fast food restaurant chain. They find the premises and put in all the fittings. You just show up on the first day and everything is ready. You receive the keys to open the doors for business.
There are two main types of turnkey online business plans.
1. Turnkey websites
Here you are paying for a website design and programming so that you can go live with your business immediately without having to do any more technical work, at least in principle.
In fact, what is described as a turnkey website is sometimes only a template that you have to edit and upload to your own domain. Some programs offer setup as an additional service; others will give you no help at all, telling you to hire someone if you cannot do it yourself. Still, it is a lot easier than designing a whole website from scratch.
Other times however you will receive a fully completed site uploaded to hosting which you will control and a domain that will be transferred to you on completion of the purchase. Your site may be unique to you or it may one of many that the developer is selling. This is a true turnkey opportunity.
Of course, in order to make money the site has to either sell something or promote other people’s products for commission. You can buy ebook store turnkey sites that come stocked with ebooks that people will download from you, you can buy huge websites with shopping carts and links to drop shippers who will send out the goods, or you can buy informational sites that do not sell anything directly but run Google Adsense or similar paid advertising programs. The choice is yours.
2. Turnkey affiliate systems
Here you may be told that you will be given a ‘website’ but generally you are limited to promoting the products of one company. You may only have a page that is hosted on their site so you cannot change anything on it. They have control.
Many online MLM and network marketing opportunities work this way. For a small fee - or sometimes for free - you are given a site identical to everyone else’s except that it bears your name and photo. You will join various programs, paying for some of them, and when people join paid programs under you, you get paid commission.
When looking at turnkey internet offers, be suspicious of anything that is marketed as the opportunity of a lifetime, and anything with a membership where you have to pay a monthly or annual fee. You want to own your site, not rent it.
Traffic
Whatever type of turnkey business you get into, you will need to bring visitors to your site yourself. This may involve paid advertising, writing interesting articles, hanging out in forums where your target buyers go, or any of the other internet marketing techniques that you can learn about.
There are many billions of websites on the internet and unlike physical stores, they are not organized into streets and cities. Nobody is going to stumble upon your website if you do nothing to promote it. A new website is completely isolated. This is so important, it is worth repeating: there are no roads leading to your brand new website.
People can only visit your site if they see a link to it on another site or on a search engine. Otherwise there is no way anybody will know it exists. You have to be the person who starts putting those links on other sites and getting your site listed in search engine results - or you have to pay an SEO company a lot of money to do it for you.
So keep in mind that with a brand new site you are not going to make any money at all if you sit back and do nothing. A turnkey online business opportunity is just that, an opportunity - a possibility of making money, not a guarantee.
Tags: tunkey online business opportunity, make money
Why Can’t You Make Money With Affiliate Program Opportunities?
It should be easy to make money with affiliate program opportunities. After all, you do not need a product, you do not have to deal with customers, you do not need an office or even a website. All you must have to profit from online affiliate opportunities is a computer with an internet connection and a certain amount of knowledge that the average person should be able to master without too much trouble.
So why is it not working for you and thousands of other people who are hoping to get rich with this easy money making method?
The answer is clear when we apply some basic math. Affiliate programs are often marketed as a free way to make money online, but almost always there is a cost, either overt or hidden, direct or indirect. And most people wind up spending more than they make in the first few months. Disappointed, they either quit or switch to another system where they have to go through the learning curve over again.
For example, article marketing is often promoted as a free way to make money and it is true that you can make sales with absolutely no costs using this method. You can sign up as an affiliate at Clickbank, pick out some top selling products and start writing articles to promote them.
However, when you come to submit the articles you will find that at the best known article directory ezinearticles.com you are not allowed to put your affiliate link in your signature box.
It is possible to set up a free Squidoo lens or Blogger blog and direct traffic through that, but you have probably heard of people losing their Squidoo or Blogger accounts and their affiliate income disappears overnight. You do not want that happening to you so you buy a domain and get hosting. Now you have monthly outgoings.
By this time you are almost certainly being exposed to a bunch of ebooks and other products that you are told you must have if you want to maximize your article marketing income. You buy a few of these and discover that you really should be building a list. You can convert up to 300% more visitors to buyers by emailing your list. So now you need an autoresponder, another monthly cost which is probably more than your hosting.
You start spending time in internet marketing forums where you meet a lot of helpful people. They tell you that you could be making sales and testing markets much faster if you used pay per click advertising.
Meanwhile, you have not been writing so many articles. You just don’t seem to have the time any more. You don’t want to waste time promoting your site until you have that autoresponder series written, and anyway you have to check your PPC stats and tweak your ads once an hour, because you are worried about your budget.
You are spending way too much but it all seems necessary for your business. You have made a few sales but not nearly enough to cover your expenses and you don’t want to think about your credit card bill. Wasn’t all of this supposed to be free?
Sound familiar? It is a very common scenario and no internet marketer is going to blame you if you have fallen into it. We have all been there.
The good news is that there are three simple ways out. Which one you take depends on whether you have more money or time.
1. You can stop paying out for anything at all. It will take longer to make serious money this way but it is possible.
2. You can limit your expenditure this month to the amount that you made in sales last month. If you apply this method every month and if your sales steadily increase you will be making a small profit which will continue to grow.
3. If you have a day job where you make enough to live on plus a little more, you can put some of that money into your business. This means that you can plan for your affiliate spending to be more than your business income for a limited time - say 6 months.
The third option is the best if you want to get established fast, but you must understand that you are investing in your business and you will not see that money again for a while, if at all.
If you can control your expenses you are half way to success. People overlook this too often, but it is one of the most important secrets to knowing how to make money with affiliate program opportunities.
Tags: affiliate program opportunities, make money
