Picking a Strategy
Assuming you have already got a product (if not, see Picking a Product), decide on a budget and a business strategy:
Do you want quick results, with absolutely minimum investment?
- The usual route for minimum investment is by becoming an affiliate marketer for someone else’s product – but you’ll probably need to use their product and get to know it well first, to be able to write your own sales material, reviews (and/or use and believe theirs)
- Not having your own website will mean that you’ll miss out on any repeat business, which limits long term income. It also means that if/when you get your own product you’ll then have to start from scratch.
- Then you will want to build a web presence of your own, starting with a domain name and your own website, hosted by a third party (unless you really want to invest and really know what you are doing!)
- Obviously this costs money, though not a great deal (something like $10-$20 for a domain name, then depending on the hosting package, $10-$100 per month, you should be able to start with roughly $10 a month and upgrade as business improves)
There can also be other expenses – i.e. to increase traffic etc. it can cost you $20-$1,000’s a month… and you need to understand what you are doing, or it can quickly become $1,000s a month lost. (see other posts – Pay Per Click, SEO etc.)
The two are not mutually exclusive, but changing from one to the other will cause problems (though you can use different methods for different campaigns, for the same or different products)