Because you're here, you are very likely an affiliate marketer.

I know that when I started this internet business, I had a difficult time deciding whether I should sell my own products or sell other people's products. Let me tell you – marketing for others is far easier and just as lucrative – if not more so – than creating your own products.

There are many advantages of affiliate marketing – here are some of the benefits.

• There is no need to create a product. You simply make mention of an existing product, place an affiliate link, and move to the next promotion. Remember your high school term papers? How much you procrastinated? How you abhorred them? It's the same with creating a product. Plus, people look to you as an expert, so you'd better deliver expert-quality content. No more "mailing it in."
• Speaking of mailing, there is nothing to ship. Every part of the sales transaction is handled by the product creator. You write your product review, a user clicks your link and he buys the product at the vendor's site. Everything from then on is taken care of by the vendor.
• You don't have to deal with customer support issues. The product creator handles all of this.
• There is no "inventory." Many products sold on the internet are digital in format, but even the physical products like books and CDs are shipped out of the vendor's inventory. There is no need for you to store anything at all.
• You don't have to assemble a sales force – YOU are the sales force. In order to be successful, an internet marketer who's created a product needs to develop a sales team of eager affiliates (people like you). It's not easy. For one thing, there are tons of products to sell – why should an affiliate pick yours? In order to lure potential affiliate marketers, product vendors often have to offer very high commissions (50, 75, or even 100 percent!). You reap these rewards by simply pre-selling the product for the vendor, who then takes in 50, 25, or 0 percent of the sales price.
• You don't have to create any sales pages, set up elaborate sales funnels, or configure shopping carts or other sophisticated (and complicated) sales systems.

As you can see, there are many benefits of being an affiliate marketer. Of course, you need to get eager buyers to your site to click your affiliate link. Traffic building will be the subject of a future post.

Getting exposure for your blog posts is one of the primary things you have to do to drive traffic. Here’s a list of 36 RSS feed directories from Susan Suarez that you can submit your blogs to.

1. FeedFury
2. FeedBomb
3. Plazoo
4. RSS Micro
5. 2RSS
6. FeedsFarm
7. RSS Feeds
8. Feeds4all
9. Postami
10. Feedest
11. MySpace RSS
    
12. DaytimeNews
13. RSS Feeds Submission
14. MillionRSS
15. Yahoo RSS
16. More News
17. Find RSS
18. Feed Base
19. RSS Motron
20. Octora
21. Blog Digger
22. Feed 24
23. Findory
24. Feed Boy
25. Chordata
26. Golden Feed
27. Read A Blog
28. Newgie
29. Jordo Media RSS
30. RSS Network
31. Ice Rocket
32. Blog Pulse
33. Feeds2Read
34. Feed Shark
35. Feed Plex
36. Blog Burst

Everybody in Internet Marketing will tell you that "the money is in the list."

The idea here is that you need to build a list of prospects to sell to; otherwise, visitors to your page will come and go, probably never to return (the Internet is really, REALLY BIG! Or so I've heard).

So you need to capture the email address and first name of each of your visitors in order to build a database of "ready, willing, and able" buyers of your products and/or services (whether your own or affiliate). The goal would be to build rapport and trust with your list by supplying them with sound information and advice through the mechanisms of an autoresponder and broadcast messages.

An autoresponder is basically set to deliver messages to your subscribers (your list) in a predetermined sequence on schedule, while broadcast messages can be sent out at any time to your list.

It's a fact that many of your visitors will never even sign up. And those that do will never buy from you. But those that do sign up and buy from you often are repeat buyers.

It is also a fact that people often need multiple exposures to a given offer before they lay down their hard-earned money. The number varies between 7 and 12, but suffice it to say that if you don't prompt people enough to get them to buy, then somebody else will!

How do you get people to sign up to your list? The most often used method is to give something away for free, whether it's a report, ebook, access to a membership site, or what have you.

Entice visitors to join by bribing them, in effect.

People want free information and if you can supply it to them in a prompt, convenient, and informative way, you're probably gold. Stay tuned and I'll give you more pointers on how to build a targeted list of "ready, willing, and able" buyers.

If you’ve been visiting here the past few weeks, you noticed I built up a lot of content. I thought it was a pretty good start!

<sigh>

If you saw this morning’s very early post, I made a big Oops, a mistake I cannot recover from. Why? I didn’t have a backup. The crummy thing? I used to be in tech support, telling people all the time to back up your stuff.

Well, I should have taken my own medicine. But I didn’t.

So, today is a new beginning! This time, I’ll put better content up, learning from my past experience, and perhaps this time, I’ll get it right!

Please stick with me while I re-build this site. I hope to bring you some really cool stuff. SOON.

By the way, I thought of doing this before the site went down, but now I’m convinced that this is the right thing to do:

• The slow way
• The less slow way

What do I mean by this? Follow along with me here and you’ll take the slow but steady way, learning little chunks here and there.

However, I’m working on a project that will speed up the learning curve quite quickly. It’s not overwhelming in terms of the things you’ll have to learn, but you’ll get all the knowledge and materials you’ll need to build an online empire in one shot.

Of course, since this is a pretty big effort on my part, I cannot give it away, but you’ll be surprised by the value you get for the very low price you’ll pay.

Plus, it will save you a TON of time and you won’t have to learn things the hard way, like me and coountless others.

In fact, the project I’m working on is based on a very prominent internet marketer’s own personal business blueprint.

Come on back in a while for the launch.