How to start
Internet Marketing with
no money and no website
by William Charlwood
24th September 2004
The reason I wrote this article was that yesterday someone in South Africa sent me an email asking if I could help get them get started online even though they had no money. I thought about it a bit and decided that they weren’t the only person in that position and anyway I wanted to help in someway. Apart from anything else, the challenge was interesting.
So here goes and in case you think this article is a bit rough and ready, I wrote it in 30 minutes because I had to go out but had promised something to my friend by the weekend.
The good news is you don’t need a website or any money to start but the going is quite hard to begin with. What you need to do is find some products you can promote as part of an affiliate program. These programs allows you to sell other people’s products in return for a commission. Sometimes the commission rate can be as high as 50% or more.
To sell such a product you need to get potential buyers to visit the product’s sales page in such a way that
you are identified as having brought in the sales lead. If a sale then takes place,
you qualify for your commission.
The second bit of good news is that there are loads of products you can do this for if you join the Clickbank network. Clickbank acts as an exchange between people who produce products and those who sell them. For example, my own ebook
The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense sells through Clickbank for $49.95 and anyone who sells the book on my behalf gets 50% of the net sales value sent directly to them by Clickbank as a check in the post. Clickbank deducts a transaction charge so your commission is
around $23 a sale.
To do this you need to open an account with Clickbank – it’s free. Here’s the signing up link
http://zzz.clickbank.net/r/?1insider.
You have to choose your own Clickbank ID as part of this process – just a name that you can remember.
Okay, so now you have your own Clickbank account you need to create what is known as a hoplink. This is a specially coded link that takes people to the sales page for the product you are selling in such a way that Clickbank knows you would be due any commission if a sale is made. So if your Clickbank ID was “yourclickbankid” your hoplink for my product would look like this:
http://hop.clickbank.net/?yourclickbankid/1insider
Your challenge now is to get people to enter this hoplink into their browsers and visit the sales page – but there are ways you can get people to do this online free.
What you have to do is exploit forums and your own email account. Let’s deal first with forums.
Exploiting free forums
Forums are simply parts of a website where people with similar interests post messages and ask and answer questions about specific topics. To find a suitable forum for, say, AdSense, simply search Google using the phrase “adsense forum”. Once you’ve found a few forums you like, have a look at the type of questions people write but, just as importantly, check to see what people are writing after each post: most forums permit people to add a line or two of text about themselves after each posting automatically. These lines are called “signatures” in the trade and they can usually include links to other web pages.
So you need to create a “signature” that invites people to click on the link in your own signature, and, yes, this can be your hoplink.
So for example, if you were selling The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense, you could create a signature that said
“The Truth about AdSense: read The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense”
and you could make this signature link to my sales page via your Clickbank hoplink.
What happens now is that anyone reading your post in the
forum is likely to see your signature and, if they are interested in AdSense, they will probably follow your link to my sales page and if they go on to buy my book, YOU GET THE COMMISSION.
No web page, no web hosting fees, no domain name but you still get paid. Furthermore, you get paid if they come back to my sales page and buy anytime in the next 60 days due to cookie technology (but that’s another article!)
Exploiting your email
Now let’s look at your email.
Many people use a signature at the bottom of their emails but most don’t use it wisely. Your email signature can also be your hoplink back to my sales page.
Again, what you have to do is write a signature that invites people to click the link. The best way to do that is to offer them a good reason to do so. It’s no use saying “click this link”. You need to put something in writing that will demand to be clicked such as
“How to make money with Google – free info and The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense.”
Then every time you send an email, whether to a friend or some other contact, your advertisement goes with it and, every now and then, it gets clicked and the reader goes to my sales page via your hoplink.
Once again, if a sale arises, you make money.
So that is one way of starting and like so many processes on the internet, the best way to start off is simply
to start somewhere and then get better.
A few tips now.
-
You need to find forums that are busy and if you visit www.alexa.com you can get some measure of how much traffic a particular forum gets. Aim for one that is in the top 100,000 sites. The best signature on the internet won’t get you any clicks if it is on a website that doesn’t get any traffic.
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You need to make your forum signature powerful so that it gets the clicks you need. Always give people a
reason to click in the signature itself: offering a “how to” or “the truth about” nearly always intrigues people enough to get a click.
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Your email signature is probably going to be different from your forum signature because it is aimed at a more general audience whereas on a forum you know exactly what things interest people – the subject of the forum.
A couple of final points: you are not restricted to selling only one product via Clickbank. In fact you can sell as many different products as you like. Each will have it’s own special hoplink. You may want to craft your signature in different forums to suit each product you are promoting.
Secondly, another way of getting people to visit your link is to write articles and get them posted on other sites whilst including your hoplinks either in the body of the article itself or, once again, in your signature file.
Many webmasters are desperately looking for more content on their own sites,
if only to boost their AdSense income, and, if you can write a good article about something and get it posted on someone else’s website, you could have a link to a sales page hosted for nothing.
Here’s an example:
This article was written by William Charlwood, author of The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense. For free AdSense tips, tools and resources visit
www.FactsAboutAdSense.com/guide.htm
Copyright (c) 2004 William Charlwood.
If you wish to reproduce this article you may but all links
must remain intact.
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