TechnoBuck.com

As funny as it might sound, it actually can become a major problem in your family, if you don’t know how to manage this situation. I speak from my own experience, where I’ve been trying to make a dollar since 2004, when I started to see the potential of the Internet to make me financially independent.

I love my wife too much, I swear, but I confess that sometimes I’ve faced endless discussions with her for either spending too much time on the computer or buying training material or software to “improve my business”. At the end, I think she is right, had I already reached financial freedom, she would’ve been the first person to support me.

After all these years, I reached a conclusion “If you are married, you can’t get success alone, you either do it together or no one get it” So, like it or not, your wife is your business partner on your online ventures.

Here are 5 tips that might be helpful to you, if you are on this situation:

1. – Explain what you are doing:

Sometimes, your wife thinks you are just fooling around checking porn sites. Explain your goals, business model and what you expect to achieve in a specified timeframe, you might find she has much better ideas than you.

2. – Setup a budget and stick to it:

Agree on a budget to invest on your online business and stick to it, no matter what. This will give her the peace of mind that you won’t overload your credit cards.

3. Analyze where you spend your time:

Get a time tracker, (there are many free online), so you can analyze and see what you currently do with your time. The goal is to find “blank spots” so you can be more productive and do more activities in less time.

4. – Establish a Work Schedule:

Agree on a work schedule with your wife so she knows beforehand how many hours you’ll be working on your computer and stick to it. Many of the discussions I’ve had with my wife have to do with the fact that she gets very angry when she sees that I’m in front of my computer every minute I’m not doing something specific.

5. – Spend more “Quality Time” with your family:

Please don’t just stay at home watching TV with her, for quality time I mean do something interesting and fun, like dining in a nice restaurant, visiting new places, or do something she likes. Remember that monotony brakes relationships so try to show her that you care about her.

Technorati Tags: family, family relationship, Internet Business, wife

Now, let me give you my own simple definition of Success. “Success is when you move from Point A to Point B, where Point A is where you are now and Point B is where you want to be”. How you define Points A and B, is entirely up to you.

Analyzing both quotes, we can deduct that what we are now is the direct result of our actions and decisions that we have done in the past and if we keep doing the same things over and over again we can expect nothing but the same. We won’t be able to move to Point B until we start doing different things in our lives and our business.

Transfer this idea to your web business and you now have the answer why your business doesn’t go anywhere, maybe you keep doing the same mistakes and is time to start to make changes.

Moving from Point A to Point B in reality is a simple two step process, let me show you how:

1) Define Point A and Point B:

It might sound obvious, but do you know where your online business is at this time? If you don’t know where your website is, how can you know where you want to be? Do you keep track of your web statistics? Things like: Page Rank, Alexa Ranking, # of Visitors per Month, “# of RSS Subscribers, # of Monthly Page Views, # of Back Links to your Website, Website Conversion Rate, etc.

2) Design an achievable plan:

Once you have define your starting and ending points, now design a plan with daily, weekly and monthly activities that can realistically take you from where you are to where you want to be.

OK, you have now defined your current and future states as well as an achievable program of activities, what else you need to do?:

Very simple, you need to add the FUEL to this two step process. This fuel is called “SELF DISCIPLINE”. Unfortunately you can’t “buy” or “Outsource” Self Discipline, this is something that only depends on you.

Why SELF DISCIPLINE is so important and so powerful?

In essence, “Self Discipline” is energy, the energy that will make your plan get moving from point A to Point B. It is the energy that will help you break the barrier of “inertia”. If you don’t know what “inertia” is, let me give you a quick definition:

“Inertia: The tendency of an object at rest to remain at rest, and of an object in motion, to remain in motion”.

So there you have it. It doesn’t matter how good your plan is, if you don’t have a strong discipline. Discipline will keep your plane alive no matter what, specially in those days where you will feel tired, disappointed, or in doubt that you are doing the right thing.

OK, I get it know, but how can I get stronger in SELF DISCIPLINE?

If you are not good in self discipline don’t worry, nobody was born with it. Like any other ability, it’s just a matter of practicing until you get it. How you get it is just a matter of getting rid of BAD HABITS and getting NEW GOOD HABITS.

Habits are behaviours that we have acquired through constant repetition, and since we have done it so often, sometimes we don’t realize about them and we do them without any effort.

The reason for being right now in Point A, is mostly in part because of the actions that we have done in the past, and these actions are in turn, a direct consequence of our BAD HABITS. In order to change what we are now, is just a matter of breaking OLD BAD HABITS and replacing them with NEW GOOD HABITS.

For example, you wonder why your site has just a few back links, have you ever tried to make the daily habit of contacting other webmasters to get a reciprocal link? When I say, “daily habit” I really mean it literally. If one day, you work night and day to get 100 back links and then stop for several days, that is wrong, why? Because, sooner or later you’ll get tired and you’ll drop the ball. It is 100 times better to make the habit to work on 5 or 3 reciprocal link requests on a DAILY BASIS, until this becomes a GOOD HABIT, and then you’ll do it with almost no effort.

Another example, you wonder that you don’t have “enough time” to spend on your online business, but have you realized that if you got the NEW HABIT of getting up EVERY DAY one hour early in the morning, you would have 8 hours more per week?

So there it is, I know you hear all the time that you need to have a plan to be successful, but almost nobody tells you what’s behind that, which are the HABITS which in turn empower our SELF DISCIPLINE which in turn give us the POWER to follow our plans until we are successful.

Technorati Tags: discipline, habits, self discipline, success

I was checking the website http://www.internetworldstats.com which is one of the best ones I have found about the statistics for the Internet usage around the world. It shows very detailed data by region/country and language.

Per the latest data I found today (July 31st, 2007) the current total population of Internet users around the world is of 1.17 billion people. Out of this number, 437 million are in Asia, 322 are in Europe, 232 are in North America (USA & Canada mainly) and 110 million are in Latin America. As you can see, currently almost half of the population of users of Internet is in Europe and North America.

Now analyzing the data for the top six languages, we have:

English 31.7%
Chinese 31.6%
Spanish 8.8%
Japanese 7.5%
German 5.1%
French 5.1%

Let’s review now the percentage of “penetration” for these regions and languages. This data of penetration is very important because it tell us where there is still potential for growth. A country or region with a high penetration percentage means that the majority of the population are internet users, whereas a country with a very low percentage of penetration means that there is still room for growth.

Just to give you an idea North America has a percentage of penetration of 69.5% and Asia 11.8%. The difference here is that the overall population of Asia is of 3.7 billion people and North America has a population of 334 million. Just imagine if Asia, could increase the penetration to one third, or 30%, this would mean that almost 1 billion people in Asia, would be Internet users, which is almost the current number of Internet users around the world. This would cause a significant impact on the demographics of the Internet around the world.

Asia’s Biggest Internet Users

Looking deeper into Asia you will see that China is the leader in Internet users, with 162 Million Internet users followed by Japan that has 86 million users and India with 42 million users. The key here is that while Japan has a percentage of penetration of 67%, China has a percentage of penetration of 12% and India 3.7%. This is telling us that in the future, these two countries will lead the new Internet Culture in Asia.

Now, going back to the data for the languages the users speak. Japan, Germany and France currently have a percentage of penetration of approximately 60% so there is not much potential for growth. So the languages that could have a big increase on the usage are Chinese and Spanish, and this last one influenced by the young population of Latin America.

A closer look at Latin America

For people like me that are located in the American Continent, I think we could be better off, if we focus our efforts approaching the Spanish speaking population of the USA, Latin America and Spain. Focusing on Asia, especially on China wouldn’t be so good since I’m sure there is a lot of people that are much much closer to that region than us, (culturally speaking).

The Spanish speaking world around the world is made of 443 million people with a % of penetration of Internet usage of 22.9%. (101 Million Internet Users). This translates in a big potential for growth. Almost half of the 101 million Internet users are located in Mexico, Argentina, Spain, USA, Colombia, Chile and Peru and besides sharing the same language all these countries also have a culture that is pretty much the same or very similar.

So, what do all these mean?

Up until now, the Internet has been heavily influenced by the English speaking populations of the United States and Europe but as you can see, all this might face a tremendous change. I believe it is a good time to start looking at the needs of Non-English Speaking populations.

One of the advantages of start focusing on non-speaking people is that the Search Engine Optimization on certain languages is almost non existent. As you know, currently it is very hard to find a good place on the Search Engines for a good keyword phrase in English. I can speak from experience here, because, I’ve seen how little competition there is for certain keywords in Spanish.

Another advantage is that, only you know how your people think, feel and want. In today’s business world, is not enough to just be bi-lingual, you need to walk the extra mile so you can be “bi-cultural”. This is what I’m trying to achieve with TechnoBuck.com, I’m trying to bring ideas from the Internet Business world in English to my friends that speak Spanish.

Technorati Tags: , china, internet asia, internet stats, latin america

This is the second part of this article about Making Money with Affiliate Programs, if you missed the first part, I recommend you  click here

From the point of view of the affiliate

This business model, from my personal point of view, is more suited to people that is dedicated to produce content as articles on websites, e-zines, e-books, online videos or any other form of online content. Your job as an affiliate consists in getting a lot of traffic or visitors to your website, so you can then “pre-sell” them with your information, and try to send these visitors to the merchant’s website via your affiliate URL and have a greater chance of getting a commission from a sale or any other special action your visitor ends up doing on the Merchant’s website. My advice here is that you drive qualified traffic, that is, people that have certain characteristics that might have a greater chance of liking the product of the merchant.

When you are an affiliate, you are given a certain URL with a special piece of code that identify you as an affiliate of the merchant or affiliate network. Most of these special URL’s leave a cookie on the computer’s visitor so that even when they leave your website, if later they return to the merchant’s website and buy or do a specific action you get a commission.

If you are too busy to run an online store or other more complex internet business, then this option is great for you.

Where can I find Affiliate Programs to Join?

There are several ways for finding affiliate programs to join, one of them is going to Google and search for any term you are interested plus the phrases “affiliate programs” or “associate programs”. For example, let’s say you are interested in finding affiliate programs for dog training, then on Google search box I would type the following:

“dog training” + “affiliate programs”

Another easy way of finding great affiliate programs is via an Affiliate Networks. These networks contain the best companies and you don’t have to worry about getting paid for your work. These affiliate networks have already pre-qualified the merchants.

Joining to these networks is free and there are plenty of affiliate programs to choose from. Some of the best I’ve tested my self are:

1) Commission Junction http://www.cj.com (Mostly services and hard goods)
2) ClickBank http://www.clickbank.com (Mostly digital products)
3) Azoogle http://www.azoogle.com (CPA Affiliate network)

Is Google Adsense an Affiliate program?

In essence yes, since Google is sharing with you a piece of their profit with “Google Ads”, but this is a little bit more complex, we will talk about this in a separate article, although I can assure you that this is an excellent way of making money.

Pros and Cons

There are several advantages as an affiliate. One of them is that you can start right now if you want, it’s free to join and you don’t require other investment than a website.

Also you don’t have to manage anything as all these tasks are done by the owner of the affiliate program. You also have the advantage of promoting great products or services that you didn’t have to spend any time or money to produce and develop. Some of these products have already gained an excellent image and they are already recognized by the consumer so this is a big plus. Just imagine the time, money and effort it would’ve taken to you to create a product with a strong brand recognized worldwide. If later you find that the product is no longer selling well, you just stop promoting it but you didn’t lose your shirt with it. This is also a good advice if you later want to promote your own product, if you find that the market likes the product, and then you later can make your own version and keep with all the profits for your self

On the other side, there are two things that are not so good about being an affiliate. One of them is the lack of control on the product you are promoting and the other is the lack of leverage. Let me explain this.

Lack of control means that you might find that, for some reason, down the road the product gets discontinued or the merchant goes out of business, and if you don’t know about this, you can lose money for promoting a product that no longer exists. The loss is an opportunity cost, because you could promote a similar product that really gives you money.

The other bad thing is the lack of leverage, which is exactly the main advantage of the owner of the Affiliate program. This means that you only earn if you work and you can’t recruit people that can do this job for you. (Maybe you could, but since most of the commissions are relatively low, I don’t think it’s feasible to do this)

The solution for these two drawbacks is not to depend on a few affiliate programs and diversify your sources of income, so in case one merchant goes out of business you don’t lose your business as well.

Technorati Tags: affiliate income, Affiliate Programs, associate programs

An affiliate program is a great way of making money on Internet at a low cost and with the least effort. An affiliate program is a strategy to increase sales in which a company or individual, use the help of several people that are not their employees and they get rewarded with a commission as a result of the action they are making.

The definition of this action is previously agreed among both parties and even though in the majority of cases it’s a commission from a sale, this is not the case in all the cases. There are affiliate programs that pay per action (CPA), a good example of it is Google, that pays per click and there are other companies that pay per poll or per referral.

So, there are two ways to see how an online entrepreneur can benefit of an affiliate program, one from the point of view of the owner of such affiliate program that recruits a bunch of affiliates and the other is as an affiliate by itself. Both are excellent business models although you have to analyze in which position you are one in order to see what business model is more convenient to you.

From the point of view of the company paying a commission

This is a feasible option only in the case you are selling a product or service of your own, and when the profit margins are good enough to pay an attractive commission and still being profitable. For instance, let’s say you are selling a book and you are offering it in $50 dollars, the cost to produce such book is $20 dollars so your gross profit is of $30 dollars per book, or 60% out of the sales price.

Now, you as individual, have a limit in terms of the number of books you could sell, no matter how much time and money you invest, there is a limit on such amount of books you can sell, and therefore, to the profit you can aspire by yourself. Let’s say that after a lot of effort, and thanks to the fact is well positioned on the SERPs, you sell 10 copies of your book and you didn’t spend anything in publicity. Let’s review the numbers:

Books Sold::                10
( x ) Sales Price:         $50
——
Total Revenue:           $500
(x) 60% Profit Margin    60%
——
Net Profit                    $300

Let’s say now that you are willing to pay half of your profit in commissions, and start an Affiliate Program. This means that now your profit per book is of just $15 dollars or 30% off the sales price. Let’s pretend that your affiliate program recruited 12 people that realized a sale of half the books you sold yourself, that is, 5 books. Let’s review the numbers again:

Number of Affiliates::                                                12
( x) Books sold by Affiliate:                                        5
(=) Total Units sold by affiliates:                                60 Units

(x) Sales Price :                                                            $50

(=) Total Sales                                                             $3,000

(-) Cost to Produce 1 Book ($20 per book)                 $(1,200)

(-) Commissions paid to Affilites (30% per sale)        $(900)
————
(=) Net Profit                                                                $900

As you can see, despite having reduced your profit margin, your net profit got multiplied times 3, and in this case, you even didn’t have to sell a single book, so all these sales were done by affiliates. It’s true, you paid a lot of money in commissions, but, Who cares how much money you paid in commissions if at the end you are making money?

Pros and Cons

The main advantage is the power of leverage, as you can see, even though each of your affiliates sold half what you had sold the first time, together, they sold much more books than you. The affiliates invested in publicity out of their own money so didn’t have to spend a dollar in publicity.

Another advantage when you own an affiliate program, is that you have complete control of how much money you want to make, although you have to be careful of not being too much greedy or the affiliate program won’t be attractive anymore to your affiliates.

As a con, we we have the cost of time and money of administering and maintaining an affiliate program, although there are programs or software (some even free) that automate this process.

Tomorrow we will post the 2nd part of this article, so stay tunned….

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Programs, associate programs, Internet Business