Monday, December 15, 2008

Affiliate Marketing - A Global Business on a Shoestring

Affiliate marketing business is an ingenious model of small business with huge leverage.

Merchant and marketers leverage on each other's strength to cover their weakness. In the end, both win.

Affiliate marketing has its advantages and disadvantages.

If you are considering starting a small business, and are looking for one which requires little capital, it is good to do some research and comparison between affiliate marketing and other forms of small businesses.

The purpose of this article is to give you an overview of this online business as compared with an office job or other business:

1. Low Cost Business

Most people are worried about incurring high capital to start a business.

Affiliate marketing is one business that you can truly start with a shoestring and yet have global reach. There is cost involved in joining an affiliate network. The only cost you will incur is in setting up your own website, which is almost negligible compared to other business.

2. Inventories Not Required

In other businesses, especially the traditional ones, managing the production and inventories is the most stressful and costly part of business. Human and financial resources are needed to take care of this part of business to ensure continued support and alignment with the sale and marketing function.

In the case of affiliate marketing, it is a clean business. There is no production, and no inventory to manage. Your business involves selling of information and knowledge. It is a true-blue knowledge business.

3. Unlimited Income

Depending on your skills, the earning potential is literally unlimited.

You are only limited by your ability to sell. The core skill for this trade is information marketing.

Your earning wouldn't be hurt by raw material cost, production disruption, inventory cost, and any costs associated with material handling of physical product.

The beauty of the business is: It can run on auto-pilot after the initial set-up stage and continue working for you tirelessly like the genie of Aladdin Lamp.

While other businesses needs on-going operating expenses to keep the business running, this business enable you to leverage your knowledge a thousand-fold with one-time effort and generate a stream of long-term income.

4. Worldwide Business

With affiliate marketing, you are effectively having a global business.

Unlike traditional businesses, your market is not limited to your city or even your country. It doesn't depend on location, and hence does not have the problem of rising rental cost when business is good.

At the click of the mouse, you can have access to a global market of 1.46 billion online users. The requirement is to set up your website (the cost of which is a tiny fraction of rental cost in traditional business) and master the skills of internet marketing.

5. Risk

As an affiliate marketer, you are not required to make any capital investment to start you business. This makes it a virtual risk free business. If you fail, or rather quit before you succeed, all you stand to lose is your time.

With no capital involved in starting the business (except for some marketing expense for promoting the affiliate product), it offers the lowest burn-rate among business ventures. This means a significantly longer sustainability period and hence a higher success rate.

6. 24-Hour Sales

It is a business that leverage on technology to work for you.

Your business is global in nature, self-running 24-hour a day. At anytime, there is always someone in some part of the world actively surfing and looking for your product offerings. Your business is literally opened round-the-clock, making money for you even when you are sleeping.

One Salient Point Though:

Despite all the advantages listed above, affiliate marketing is a notoriously competitive business with lots of scams and hypes to lure those with a get-rich-quick mentality.

Success in affiliate marketing belongs to those who take the business seriously, plan it out meticulously and execute the plan relentlessly.

Like any worthwhile business venture, it takes lots of patience, focus, knowledge, hard work and determinations to become successful in affiliate marketing.

If there are any risks involve in this business, they are within your control.

Jordan Cheng is an entrepreneur consultant who empowers the entrepreneurial-minded with free resources in http://www.1stHomeBizSuccess.com If you like to start a home business without taking high capital risk, why not get a world-class niche affiliate marketing education first. It is FREE for now!

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