Business Articles For Online Businesses

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I base many of my articles and newsletters on my own day to day experiences in the world of Internet marketing. Things that have happened to me. Emails I have received. Interactions I have had with customers, subscribers and other Internet marketers.

The more I work online, the more it becomes apparent to me that some people just don’t ‘get it’. What don’t they get? Well in my experience, many things but the ‘thing’ that someone didn’t ‘get’ this week was the benefit of marketing an affiliate product which has a recurring income element to it…..

One of my membership websites, SimplyWholesale, has an affiliate program which allows anyone to link to the site and earn 50% of any sales generated by their visitors. Nothing special here - millions of websites offer a similar deal. In addition, because one of the payment options offered by SimplyWholesale is a monthly subscription, my affiliates can also earn 50% of future monthly subscription payments made by a member who they introduce to the site. Again, nothing special here - many membership websites have the same arrangement.

So what’s the story?

Well, last week I received an email from an affiliate ‘complaining’ that he wasn’t earning enough money from his customers who were only signing up for the monthly subscription option. (A monthly membership is £4.99 so his earnings would have been £2.50 on each one). Now, this individual had been referring, on average, one new member to the site per day and the vast majority were opting for the monthly membership. The odd one here and there was paying for a yearly membership which generated a higher commission but the majority, as I say, were paying monthly.

So everyday for the past couple of weeks, this guy has earned £2.50 from having a single banner on his website. Assuming this continues for the next two weeks, he will have earned at least £77.50 for the month. Actually it will be more than this due to the annual subscriptions but let’s keep things simple

Ok, £77.50 isn’t a life-changing sum of money but let’s move things forward a month or two (and this is the bit that the guy clearly hadn’t thought of when he emailed me with his ‘complaint’)…..

Month two, assuming the level of sales continues, he will earn another £77.50 BUT he will also see an income from the second monthly subscription payments made by the members he referred to the site in month one. It is fair to assume that some members may cancel their subscriptions but to date we have a pretty low cancellation rate. Let’s work on the worse case scenario and say that 20% of his members cancel in month two - he will still earn over £60 from the renewals. Add that to the £77.50 from the new members and month two earnings are getting on for £140. Things are starting to look a little more interesting….

This isn’t just theory - let me back it up with some ‘real-life’ figures based on one of my actual affiliates….

This particular individual has one link to the SimplyWholesale site from one of his own sites and in the first month of being an affiliate, he earned £60.

Month two, daily sales continued and with renewal subscriptions, my affiliate earned £230.

Month three (the current month), this particular affiliate is on target to make over £400 in commission.

Each week this affiliate refers roughly the same number of new members to the site but look at how quickly the commission payments are growing each month.

The point of this article isn’t to try and persuade you all to sign up as affiliates for SimplyWholesale (although that would be great!) but to get you to think about the potential of small payments either for your own products or as an affiliate.

I have built several businesses around very low pricing structures and it works very well. I am also an affiliate for one or two low price products and some of these schemes have been sending me cheques for years even though I stopped promoting the actual product ages ago (the commissions are earned from customers who I referred years ago who are still using the site or service in question).

With online business costs so low, it doesn’t always have to be about the hundred dollar products and in fact, the ‘less than a tenner’ products can also be extremely lucrative….

Copyright (c) 2006 Richard Grady

Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998. To view Richard’s latest website, SimplyWholesale, visit

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It has become too easy and too cheap to find a web content writer who is located half-way across the world to write up some web content for your website these days that, frankly, it’s getting a bit boring for old hats like me. as I search for relevant keywords on the internet, chances are, I will see web content that are more like clones of each other, only one is either shorter, longer, worded differently, have a different byline or rearranged, that’s how tough it is to find original web content these days. And that’s because of only one reason.

…it’s easy to rearrange someone else’s words!

Trust me because this is sometimes what we do…guilty as charged. But that was before the web content industry has grown by so much, so, please give me that much chance to explain myself. Original web content was never quite so important because search engines don’t know how to differentiate them back in those days. As long as they are not identical, the search engines will pick up the web content and list them anyway.

One example of how the search engines have evolved is this. I have posted the same article in a website, in www.ezinearticle.com, www.wordpress.com and I have a link from my website leading to the original website. The tie is there but it’s really quite far off. But the amazing thing is that one fine day, www.google.com picked up on the duplicate content, reduced the ranking of the original website (from No.1 to NOTHING!), we went ballistic! What in the world went wrong? Hence, the start of our frantic search for our mistake…which were only guesses.

Apparently, www.google.com picked up on my relationship with the original website owner, tracked the link from the www.wordpress.com account (under my ownership but identity is hidden from public eye), back to www.ezinearticles.com and then…believed that we were duplicating content and that I was the owner of that website! AMAZING!

This kind of systematic link and web content tracking system was never there before therefore, web content writers were free to do whatever with the content that they came up with. That’s why I say that original web content is crucial to your website’s ranking…especially if you have high ranking on selected keywords. Be careful of the kind of content that you place in your website and in other servers because search engines have gotten so smart that they’ll find you.

So, even if you find a cheap and reliable web content writer these days, it’s important to let the web content writer know that you mean business when you say ORIGINAL. Because with search engines, there may not be a second chance.

Marsha Maung is a freelance web content writer who has been writing web content for the past 8 years. For more information about Marsha, visit marshamaung.com marshamaung.com or for seo writing tips and articles, visit writeforseo.wordpress.com writeforseo.wordpress.com

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