When you are drumming up ideas for your home based business, you should determine the best platform and strategy to make money. In promoting products, the two major means of making money are affiliate marketing and ecommerce or selling a physical product on a website. Both of these options have their pros and cons. I am going to give you a rundown of these scenarios.
Affiliate marketing is a great strategy for people who want to advertise in a variety of methods including PPC, pay per view, and other varieties of paid advertising. Once you are accepted into an affiliate network, you can start making money relatively quickly. It requires and advertising budget, but results can be close to instant. There are places you can find to advertise like PlentyofFish.com, Facebook.com and MySpace.com. You can start affiliate marketing as soon as you find advertisers to promote. Keep in mind that it will take time to measure your metrics and find out how to be profitable for your different campaigns.
With ecommerce platforms, there are set principles that you can follow to get where you want to be. You can write articles, submit to certain directories, and you can start creating press releases and ramping up on your blogging efforts. These will help you build a long term presence on search engines and improve rankings. With ecommerce, you are creating a website with categories, finding suppliers who will drop ship items for you, and trying to stay around as long as it takes to make sales on your site.
Ultimately it is up to you to figure out which strategy you’ll use to promote your products or offers. Important points to consider include, cost of development for your product based website, an advertising budget for promoting offers with affiliate marketing, and your willingness to wait for search engines to rank your site and bring you the visitors you’ll need.
