Making Money in A Free Business Opportunity?
Ya know, this annoys me….the word ‘free’ has to be one of the most overused words in history!
Everyone has a free this and a free that to offer you. However, there always seems to be some sort of catch or hook to siphon money out of your wallet somehow.
However, can you really make money running a free business opportunity?
Yes, you can, provided you understand a few underlying concepts of how one can really make money online by offering free information to hungry prospects.
We are going to briefly discuss what is known as affiliate marketing.
You can join almost any affiliate marketing program for free. In many cases, in only a matter of a few minutes you can be set up with an affiliate website and a ‘link’ which is your ticket to getting paid, provided someone follows that link and completes the required action (whatever that may be.)
Now, before you think you have died and gone to heaven there is quite a few things you should know:
Getting traffic to your affiliate web page for free is harder than it sounds. You will have to work hard and master traffic generation methods such as classified ads, article marketing, forum marketing, blogging and so on.
Using the affiliate link given to you by the merchant you are representing is a hard way to make money. If everyone is selling the same product with the same affiliate web site, how do you make yourself stand out? You have to come up with some way to provide a perceived value of your ‘free’ information. This is a huge topic, which I will leave for a future article.
Another key element to the sales process is a person needs to be followed up with over and over before they buy. This is true both online and offline. Very few people buy much today without thinking it over. For more on the referral process checkout the 7 stages of a referral generation. I will also be documenting lead generation via the referral process in future articles.
However, if you promote your affiliate website you are sending traffic to a page that gives you no way to follow up in the future. Your visitor comes to your page, looks it over, and leaves. You have wasted your efforts for nothing.
“There has to be a better way!”™
There is: Create a site and send visitors to it. You create a landing page that captures names and email addresses into an auto responder process. This is known as building a list and trust me, this really does work.
The key element to remember is to provide something of value to your subscribers and they will stay subscribers. Then some percentage of your subscribers will ultimately become happy, paying customers, which is the goal here, right?
Since you are now in control over the messages that are sent to your lists, you have the ability to really offer a whole lot of value at very little costs to you…
How much does it cost you to send an email? 
This is by far no where a complete examination of affiliate marketing, however by following these general guidelines you too can get started in the free business opportunity of information publishing.