Six (6) Things You Need to Know Before You Start Your Online Business

As you start to think about starting a new, or re-creating, an online business you need to think about the basics. For example, if you were going to build a new pizza joint you would first think about location. You would then need to decide upon a construction crew and how you wanted to design and build your new business. What will the business look like? What kind of equipment (ovens in this example) would you need? What about future growth if the business takes off? How can you do this cost effectively? What about the time it will take to get your new business up and running?

The third, but certainly not the least important, component of the Internet Trifecta and The AIM Principal is Monetization.

As discussed in detail in The Internet Trifecta (available for free by filling out the form on the right), the three components of a successful blog are Automation, Integration and Monetization. In the next series of posts I’ll try to give you some ideas on how you can monetize your blog in a number of different ways while at the same time doing as much as possible to automate and integrate the process. One of the most traditional, and fruitful, ways to add an income stream to your blog is through Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing 101

What exactly is affiliate marketing. Well, you can think of it as a typical sales scenario that we’ve all seen a million times before. If you were a ‘brick and mortar’ salesman, for example, you would find a product, look for customers, explain the benefits of that product and then hope that they buy your product. Affiliate marketing is the web version of that scenario.

What you need to do is find products on the web that you believe others in your niche would like and then you become an affiliate marketer (salesman) for that product. When you register as an affiliate for that product you typically will get a specific affiliate code that  you can use when directing your blog visitors to that web site, blog etc. When they click on that link and buy, you get credit for the sale. It’s really just that simple.

Keep Your Blog Personal!

In past posts I discussed the importance, in my mind, of staying in close contact with the visitors to your blog. Making your blog personal is a great way to keep your visitor’s loyalty and have them coming back time and time again.

Creating a Contact Form

There are a number of tools available to you that can provide a more personal touch. In a recent post I showed you how to add an FAQ page to your blog. In this post I’d like to show you how to add a Contact Form so that your visitors can have an easy way to reach you with questions, suggestions and comments of perhaps a more personal level than what they want to leave in a Comment box.

Using WP Contact Form.

This free plug-in provides you with a very simple way to add a form to your blog. When the visitor fills out the form you are notified by email that the form has been completed. The installation of this plug-in is the same as all other WordPress plug-ins. Plug-ins -> Add New -> Search for WP Contact Form with Captcha -> Install -> Activate.