Beat the Giant

You might think it sounds crazy that you are able to beat a huge competitor while you are just a newcomer.

Well, I say you’re right if you were entering a ‘brick-and-mortar’ market. Why? Let me explain to you.

In a physical industry, big firms have advantage over small firms due to the ‘economic of scale’ which allows them to have a huge amount of production at a low cost. This gives big firms a power to reduce the cost of their products, and when the big firms do reduce the cost of their products, the small firms are also forced to lower their products’ prices as well in order to not lose consumers. However, small firms can only lower prices of their products to a certain level where they cannot lower anymore or they will start making a loss and eventually go bankrupt. Because of this, it is relatively easy for big firms to run smaller firms out of the competition simply by outlasting them.

However, the law of ‘economic of scale’ does not apply for online business as it involves the selling of  digital products where there is no cost to mass produce the products. We only spend money for product creation the first time, and then any copies we make of it to sell are then of zero cost to us as it just involves copy and paste of the digital product.

So, how should you go about beating the giant?
There is one surefire way to beat the giant competitor in order to dominate the market, and that is to make yourself, your products and services more attractive than the competitors services or products.

Since you are a newcomer, you have not made any impression on your potential customer. This can be used to your advantage if you give off a good image of your business the first time round. To do this, you have to create a good introduction of your products or services through various ways like:

• Create a “Unique and Irresistible” product

  By creating a unique product/service which has a special advantage over your competitor product/service, you are making yourself more attractive to potential customers than your competitor.

• Create a “Unique and Irresistible” offer

  You may do so by giving a special introductory promotion  price on your services or products. In fact, you might even give away your services and products to a limited number of people and then later ask them for a honest opinion and testimonial for the product. This testimonial can then work as a catalyst  to  help expose your services or products to the market  and helps it gain credibility in no time.

• Be Aggressive!

  If you want to beat a giant, you should be aggresive. You have to be prepared to do an aggressive marketing campaign which although will cost quite a bit  of money, will help your potential clients know  that you really think your products  or services are worth spending the money to promote.
  Yes, beating the giant is something possible. However, there is  always the possibility that the gaint competitor might fight back, in which case you might get burnt.

Befriend the Giant

This approach may sound easy and too simple. However, not many people realizes the power of befriending giants. I will talk more about this in my next entry, in the mean time, just know that there are 2 ways to dominate a market. And if you haven’t read the affiliate marketing jargon that all affiliates should know about, I strongly suggest you read it.

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1. All Successful Business Starts With A Market Research On an isolated island of Jamaica, lives a young boy....

First of all, there are 3 steps you need to follow (This is just a rough guideline):

1. Ask yourself questions!

   Before doing anything, pondering is often the best way to focus your mind on the right track and direction.

   These are a few questions you may ask yourself which will help you succeed in affiliate marketing:

   a. What do you like to do? (hobby)

   b. What are you interested in?

   c. Do many people have the same interest as yours?

   d. Is your interest valuable? (Is able to become income generating)

2. Open your eyes and your ears wide. Check every corner!

   If you are going to discover something, be sensible!

   Check everything around you; magazines, TV, newspaper, classified ads.

   Take note of the topics which are discussed regularly.

   Also do check online medias such as blogs, forum, myspace, youtube, etc.

   Topics that are presented regularly are those with a huge demand from the market and thus a better market to go in. If let say you like sports, then tune on to the sports channel or read sports magazines more often. Check what kinds of sports are popular or what kind of food supplements sportsmen prefer.

   Another example is, tuning to a talk show like Oprah Winfrey. Listen carefully to what the show is talking about, a talk show like Oprah usually discusses a specific topic about problems faced by people today. This might be a profitable market that you might like to go into.

   Classified ads in magazines are also a good place to determine how popular a market is. You will discover that there are many different sizes of advertisement posted on the magazines; the advertisement might be half page, full page or a quarter page. The bigger the size and the more strategic the location of the advertisement in a magazine, the bigger and more competitive the existing market. This simply means that revenue generated by the industry is higher than other industries, and therefore the company that posted the advertisement is willing to pay higher prices for the advertisement spot.

3. Validate the market!

   So once you have discovered a market which you are interested in and that has a high demand, you must now validate and check that the market is really profitable and in high demand. To check whether a market is really in high demand, you can check the popularity of the keywords (the amount of times the keywords are searched) online by using keyword tracker tools.

   Here are a few keyword tracker tools:

   • 1.WordTracker
   • 2. Google Keyword tool
   • 3. Good Keywords Tool

If you are satisfied with the number of times the keywords are searched and that you are genuinely interested in the market, then that market is the market for you.

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Affiliate Marketing Jargon You Should Know:

• Affiliate/ Publisher/ Partner – Someone who is paid for sales and leads generated by traffic to the merchants website.
• Merchant – A Merchant is a company that participates in affiliate programs and provides commission to affiliates for helping to sell their products.
• Click Through – A click Through is registered when a person clicks on an affiliate’s unique URL that takes them to a merchant’s site.
• Click Through Rate – The number of click throughs divided by the number of impressions of your banner expressed as a certain percentage. So if for every 100 impressions of your banner you only get 5 click throughs, your click through rate would be 5/100 = 0.05 or 5%.
• Last Man In – The term used to describe how a affiliate marketing agency decides on who to pay. When a visitor has gone through a few different affiliate links before buying something, the last man in (the most recent affiliate) will get credited for the sale.
• Paid Search Traffic – Usually refers to traffic from search advertisement programs such as Google Adwords where you pay to list your advertisement in searches of people. The opposite of organic/ natural search traffic.
• Organic/ Natural Search Traffic – Refers to traffic that comes naturally from search engines without spending money on buying advertisements on search advertisement programs. The opposite of paid search traffic.
• Tiered Program – A tiered program refers to a merchant’s offering to affiliates that is based upon the affiliates performance most commonly in terms of sales volume.
• Landing Page – Basically a sales page where you want first time visitors to see.

Above are some of the most basic affiliate marketing jargons that you must know in order to understand what you are doing better. No list is complete, so if you would like to have more terms added into the list, please do not hesitate to drop a comment and I’ll add it into the list for you

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You might feel his comment is biased since he is one of the few super affiliate marketer on earth today. However, now I’m not promoting him. Actually, now I’m going to explain why what he said is true.

Well, there are 3 main reasons:

• 1. It’s an Instant Business

  To become an affiliate requires no money or startup capital at all. All that you have to do is to create an account with Clickbank or Pepperjam Network. Once you have that, you can register to any affiliate program you want within Clickbank or Pepperjam Network and immediately start promoting them and making money.

  In affiliate marketing, you do not necessarily require a website or a physical/digital product. You may directly promote your ‘employer’s’ website right away. As long as people click your personalized affiliate links and buy the product you promote through your ‘employer’s’ website through your affiliate links, you’ll earn a commission which can either be a once off payment or a recurring payment.

• 2. A Very Convenient Business

  Affiliate marketing is one of the most convenient type of online business out there. It is so since all you have to do is to promote a product. You do not to worry about the product creation, copywriting, and the delivery of the product.

  If you are acting as an affiliate, you are actually bear almost ‘zero’ responsibility in case there is a problem with the promoted product as you are not the one who created it.

  So, if you do this kind of business, focus on the traffic generation!

• 3. An Earn-As-You-Learn Business

  Affiliate marketing is a very flexible type of business. You do not need a very high education or have intense specific training to become an affiliate or start your affiliate business, the reason for this being that affiliate marketing is a earn-as-you-learn business. This means you can literally go into affiliate marketing with zero knowledge and slowly increase your knowledge and the cash you earn as time passes.

  Affiliate marketing is a business with no risk at all as you are not required to spend any money on it, unless you use some paid advertising along the way. Since it is an almost zero-risk business, you can go as far as you want. Besides that, because you do not need to spend any or very little start up capital, you may make mistakes without losing any money or very little money, thus making affiliate marketing a very beginner friendly business.

  That’s why Ewen often says that affiliate marketing enables you to “Learn as you earn and earn as you learn”.

  If you are a beginner in internet marketing, where you still cannot afford to create your own product, nor do you want to sell a physical product like setting up an eBay shop to sell t-shirts, then please consider doing affiliate marketing which is a more specialized branch of internet marketing. This is because it is much easier to start with affiliate marketing due to it being beginner friendly then doing internet marketing straight away.

Being an affiliate marketer is not hard. Really! However it is not without it’s challenges either. This is because you may find nearly a thousand other affiliates promoting the same product you do. Even so, this is still the best way if you want to succeed in doing an online business with the least amount of risk.

As I mentioned earlier, in affiliate marketing you need no product, website, and delivery system at all to get started. All you have to do is to concentrate on how to drive people to click on your affiliate links.

It’s truly hands-free business. Amazing, isn’t it?

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