Affiliate Marketing - What It Means To Me - Mark Byers by Mark Byers [September 2003]

I think it’s only right that I tell you something about what I’m doing online and why I’m doing what I am doing.

I’ve had an interest in the internet for many years and I was always convinced that it presented opportunities for anyone with half a brain to forge a new direction in their life. For more years than I like to remember I spent many nights away from home. This doesn’t tend to bother anyone in their twenties but when you begin to have a family it raises many questions. I’m no different and the big driver for me is having more time at home. The reality is that I now work at home all the time, sometimes not even stepping outside the house. This is a totally new challenge for me and in truth I need to address this because it can be as bad as never spending any time at home. It dawns on me that it’s all about balance.

For me the internet has never been about making a fortune but more about creating a new way to live my life. The reality is that I’ve discovered the internet can make you a lot of money and this is introducing a whole ocean of possibilities.

So what have I been doing and what am I currently doing? To answer this let me tell you where I started, and it’s not that long ago. My internet life began with affiliate marketing. I got hold of a batch of tapes of a internet conference held in Las Vegas about three years ago. I’ll be honest, out of a set of 25 tapes I looked at no more than eight. I had no idea what most of the people speaking at the conference were saying and hadn’t a clue what the next step was. I did nothing for around twelve months. I did what most people do. I bought a valuable resource and did nothing with it because it was just that little bit too far ahead of what I could get my head around.

One of the people talking on these tapes I had bought was Terry Dean. At the time I didn’t really know who Terry Dean was but he struck me as meaning what he said. I checked out his website and joined his mailing list. I slowly started to understand what the conference had been all about and began getting more and more knowledgeable about what could be done. I joined some affiliate programs and started trying to generate traffic with moderate success. I made very modest money, less than £500 most months. But I proved I could make money, though nowhere near enough to change the direction of my life.

I got deeper into the subject and did what most people appear to do, bought more and more information. The result is that I’ve got a lot of eBooks and I’ve tried a lot of tools. Somewhere along the way I forgot the basic principle of find people who are successful and simply copy what they do. Instead I just kept looking at one successful person after another, virtually awe-struck at what they appeared to have done. I never really fixed on one single person and this cost me time.

I returned to Terry and one or two others and now have my affiliate marketing activities generating enough income that they more than cover all my monthly out goings. I work a normal week but the difference is that I choose when to put the hours in and where I work.

I focus on a small number of products at any time and the majority of products I have today will not be in my portfolio in six months time. I choose to run my activities on a project basis which means I can have very busy times and then much quieter times. This works well for holidays and other periods when I need more time for other things.

Earlier this year I began building Health Wealth and Lifestyles (HWL). This is referred to as vertical portal but in plain speak this is a website that’s a combination of free information and a place to buy associated products. HWL has proved to be a big challenge. The concept is to provide people with information that will help them to do something about improving their health. For many people this means they need to do something about changing the way they make a living, because this has a detrimental impact on what they can do about their health habits. For example, the busy manager never finds time to take exercise. The main reason for this is that they’re too busy trying to satisfy their boss in order to get the next promotion and so on. It’s a vicious circle which many people want to change. HWL is intended to give some ideas on how to go about making a difference.

Why am I telling you all this? Well there’s a very good reason. HWL is everything that you’d want to promote many very focused and very topical affiliate products. Information is what everyone is looking for, on a wide range of topics. When people find interesting information you create an opportunity to sell them something. This approach to selling on the internet has a far higher conversion rate than simply sticking up a product store. In the videos you’ll hear Patrick say this many times.

UK Affiliate Gold fits well alongside HWL because I see it as being a key means for people to do something about their wealth. Wealth creates time and time allows people to give more attention to their health needs. As regards lifestyle it’s obvious that if people have health and wealth that they have many more lifestyle possibilities than people with neither or only one of these elements. If you ask me what I’d trade then it would be wealth for health. Sadly I don’t believe it’s that simple and this is why I’m committed to HWL.

Before I finish telling you a little about me I do want to share with you some things I’ve managed to do with HWL. As I hope you already know, drop shipping is not something that we see much of in the UK, or Europe for that matter. It’s very much an American concept and I don’t know if it will transfer across here on anything like the scale it exists in the US. Because drop shipping is not a possibility in the UK it hasn’t stopped me looking at ways to address the problem of selling specific types of products in the UK.

For instance, I’ve established relationships with small UK importers and distributors. I promote and sell product and they distribute it for me. They let me have the product at wholesale price plus a small handling fee. This is the same as drop shipping except I’ve taken the concept to smaller operators who are interested to see if this is something they can use on a wider scale. There’s no reason you can’t do this with products you’d like to sell in the UK but have no current way of getting product drop shipped for you. You just need to make sure you approach people with all the detail to hand. I have not had one distributor say no. This is a model that intrigues small distributors in the UK so I hope this gives you some food for thought.

To close I just want to stress that I consider myself to be some way from where I’d like to be with my internet business interests. The good thing is that I can look back and see that I’m also a long way away from the lifestyle I had and this gives me a great feeling making progress in the right direction. I can only see it getting better and better as we experience more and more interest in online trading in the UK, and Europe as a whole. If you, like me, want a different life then you will all kinds of opportunities to make money online.