The purpose of leverage is to return the maximum advantage with least effort.  Specifically, for affiliate businesses, that means greatest profit with smallest personal involvement.

Preceding articles described ways of obtaining leverage by 1) re-using content, and 2) re-purposing.  In this article, we’ll focus on increasing leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our personal skills, experience and/or nature.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman described some interesting findings from 25 years of Gallup organization research – initially in their book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, and subsequently elaborating on those findings in later books.  Two of their findings, that are important for online marketers and home-based business owners are these:  1) Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Acquire staff for talent.

The world of online business has a rather large learning curve and involves many different skills.  Unfortunately, few people are personally skilled at all of them – and even those who are may not be making the best use of their available time and other skills should they focus on their weaknesses.

William of Occam, best known for “Occam’s Razor,” has stated:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.”

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a big proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add tasks or other non-favored tasks.  Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not limited to the world of giant corporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, online companies can afford to outsource many tasks to virtual assistants.

Many internet marketers elect to outsource writing articles.  They see the value of article marketing, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, so they outsource article authoring to ghost-writers. 

Another task you might consider outsourcing to a virtual assistant (or call center) is the telephone and email follow-up required for lead generation and sales closings.

If you focus on your areas of strength, you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses will only marginally improve your results. 

Which would you rather do – multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?

If you like what you’ve just read, and would like to learn how to leverage your efforts, and become a millionaire – get the FREE Infinite Income Plan report and put your income on autopilot.

There are many reasons why people fail at Internet marketing and Internet business in general. For the most part everyone starts out with a broad goal and idea and starts doing research to see what it is that they have to do or learn to make it happen. The problems begin as soon as they do their first search on Google for “Internet business opportunities” or “Internet marketing”. They are immediately assaulted by thousands of results that for the most part are useless. There are so many scams and get rich quick schemes that are so well introduced that it’s no wonder that people get sucked in. The sales copy for these websites is excellent. The use of some very talented copy writers and professional graphic designers makes these "opportunities" irresistable especially to the newbie marketer.

Not all is lost and not everything is a scam

Fortunately there are plenty of legitimate opportunities and courses that will get you going in the right direction. Before diving in to a business I would recommend that you look around and find the legitimate course programs and think about taking one. But also you have to think about and decide how you want to make money.

One very popular model of business is niche blogging or niche marketing. While they are similar they are not the same. In niche blogging you create a blog, preferably a self hosted WordPress blog, and you “blog” about a particular subject or “niche”. You might choose dieting or dog grooming or even sports card collecting. You then begin to write articles about your subject of choice and begin the process of driving traffic to your blog. Depending on your writing skills and how much time you put into it but it can take 6 months to a year for your blog to become popular. You can make money using various systems and techniques. You can sell an eBook on the subject that either you wrote or bought PLR rights to. Private label rights eBooks allow you to put your name on them and publish them as if you wrote them. You can also use Google Adsense to have Google post ads on your blog and get paid when people click on those ads. Of course in either case you have to have a good amount of traffic coming in.

Niche marketing is a bit different in that you publish a site sometimes referred to as a mini-site, due to the fact that you just publish one page as the sales page and write a compelling sales copy (Page) to sell your product. A lot of people that do that use pay per click advertising to drive traffic and use services like PayDotCom.com to find others to sell their product and pay them a commission. One good example of this is MyResellSoftware a site that sells software to people who would like to start a business selling software.

Selling Software As A Business

The nice thing about MyResellSoftware is that they give you everything you need to get up and running in no time. You can literally have a site published with about 1 to 2 hours of work (depending on your skill level) and all you really have to do is insert your information like PayPal account and email address and your name. But the rest of the site is 100% finished and ready. The presentation of the software is first rate and the sites, especially the ones that come with source code and full resell and PLR rights are excellent. The sales page for the individual software titles is written by a professional copy writer so once you get some traffic the site should convert some sales.

There are other sites that I have seen that sell a “business in a box” concept but few do it as well and as complete as MyResellSoftware. While some of the others I’ve seen I have liked they sell PLR eBooks which are a dime a dozen and therefore much harder to market well and make a good profit. Of course if you can write your own eBook, a quality eBook at that, then you can also make some good money by selling the eBook either for the niche it was written or as a PLR title.

In my next article I will discuss other forms of Internet business including PPC Marketing which can bring you tremendous riches but which can also leave you broke and destitute if your not careful. I’ll also discuss some courses that I am currently reviewing. I got my hands on a few popular ones and let you know how they stack up. In the meantime do your research carefully and don’t go with the first offer that comes along.

You can check for updates at BobWaltman.com.

Leverage is the ability to gain a great gain from a small investment – whether that investment is time, effort or money.

We typically think of leverage as the mechanical benefit that derives from using a lever.  In fact, Archimedes once boasted, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

But leverage isn’t limited to the laws of physics – it applies in many other situations as well.

In business, Change Agents regularly speak of changing one or more business “levers” in order to change the organization’s structure or performance.  Unfortunately, in today’s world, those business levers often have negative connotations and involve job cuts, down-sizing, bankruptcies, or other forms of corporate re-organization.

But leverage has many positive applications as well.

People apply financial leverage when they use borrowed funds to increase the return of an investment, or when they use calls or puts to control large quantities of stock at a cost far less than outright purchase.

home based businesses use leverage when they operate online.  Simply by being online, they’ve eliminated the boundaries of geography (and largely, time as well) and leveraged their advertising dollars, since it costs the about the same amount to create an ad that reaches only a small number of people as it does to create an ad that is global.

If we were running a small “brick and mortar” store, we might be satisfied with traffic that numbered in the hundreds, but as an affiliate internet marketer, we want traffic numbering in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions – and not just any prospects, but highly qualified prospects.

We are utilizing leverage when we use tools such as Google AdWords:  we use the power and reach of Google to identify targeted traffic for us and send it to our website.

The Internet provides us with many forms of leverage, but they basically all boil down to the use of technology.   Technology is one of the greatest levers ever invented.

Most internet marketers are familiar with the use of autoresponders and search engines, etc., but they habitually fail to make full use of the technology lever in their back office processes – including everything from managing sales leads to fulfilling the order and taking care of the follow-on billing and customer service issues.

Those online businesses that take full advantage of the leverage that technology provides are the ones who will succeed in this competitive environment.

If you like what you’ve just read, and would like to learn how to leverage your efforts, and become a millionaire – get the Free  Infinite Income Plan report and put your income on autopilot

I’ll bet you have probably read a lot of headlines that sound similar to this one above, or make promises like this one seems to. You have probably even read some of those articles all the way to the end, even clicked on some of the links in the article and read all the information on those links. When you were done reading, you might have thought “There’s 15 minutes I’ll never get back”… that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard… or whatever that! IT WILL RUIN MY IMAGE!

Well it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m going to give you some tips that will give you an opportunity to monetize your website or blog, while preserving your brand. One of the best and easiest ways to monetize your online properties is to join some affiliate programs and advertise them on your site.

Affiliate programs are the answer

Why affiliate programs? Simple. When you promote affiliate websites, you get instant access to products and services that are well supported by professional marketing materials without and up-front development costs. All the work of writing an eBook, or recording an audio track, or programming a software product is taken care of by someone else. But that isn’t the end of the benefits. You don’t have to create any marketing materials – those are all created for you by the person who builds the product and is running the affiliate program.

Another big benefit is that you really don’t have to manually keep track of ROI or conversion rates. Most good affiliate programs will provide the members with a login to a sophisticated affiliate management program that is based on one of the leading affiliate software programs. Software management of affiliate program means that you won’t have to ride herd on the affiliate program owner.

Five tips for choosing affiliate offers to promote

1. Look good earnings potential – You want to make sure that if one of the people you refer to an affiliate offer buys, that you will make some decent money. Some people think affiliate programs offering high percentage payouts are best. My preference is for affiliate programs that offer high ticket items and pay large commissions. This affiliate program for promoting 30/60/90 day sales plan templates gives you the opportunity to earn almost $50 per sale.
2. Choose programs your readers will like – It is critical that you choose affiliate programs and offers that your audience will appreciate and be interested in. It wouldn’t be too smart to choose to promote affiliate programs and products for chocolate desserts on a site that is dedicated to losing weight. However, if you have a website that helps people find careers is sales, it would be great to promote something like How to Get Into Medical Sales.

3. Look for affiliate programs powered by software – When you sign up for an affiliate program it will quickly become obvious if the owner of the program is serious about helping affiliate members be successful. If you are redirected to a page powered by a top-tier affiliate marketing software program, they are probably serious about their affiliate program. If you get an email message that says ‘here is you affiliate link’ you should think carefully about investing any time. Their are several top name brands like iDev Affiliate, LinkShare, and JROX JAM. My favorite is JROX JAM, which you can get for free here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/recommends/free-affiliate-management-software.htm

4. Make sure the website is NOT anonymous – What I mean is, make sure that there are real people standing behind the website, people with good reputations, who take customer service seriously. People who let you know who give you contact information with phone numbers are more likely to treat you well. They aren’t likely to try to ‘run and hide’ from you if there is a dispute. If you find a bio, picture, and phone number of the website owner, chances are they will behave legitimately. You will also be able to search the Internet to find any negative information about their program. Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, is one of the country’s leading sales recruiters – she proudly announces her site ownership on the about pages like this one: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/about/

5. Choose affiliate programs that have support programs – If you are choosing a piece of software to buy, you probably wouldn’t purchase it if there was not support mechanism in place. You should use the same criteria when evaluating affiliate programs. Affiliate website program owners that don’t put support systems in place – things like a ticket system or help desk software – probably won’t care about any their products or customers, nor will they care about supporting your marketing efforts. If they do, then you can be rest assured that they are trying to delight their customers. If they AREN’T trying to keep customers happy, their poor service will reflect poorly on you, and tarnish your reputation.

There are a couple of affiliate programs that meet the important criteria, that I recommend if your site’s visitors would be interested in these subjects. One is an affiliate program for a sales interview tool that targets sales professionals – you can check it out here: http://30-60-90-day-sales-plan.com/affiliate-program-details/. The other is a program that has a broader appeal – it targets people who own businesses that either have no web presence or under performing websites; you can get all the information for it here: http://websitesthatdrivesales.com/blog/home/affiliate-program/