Scunthorpe's Oldest Football Fan Celebrating His 96th Birthday
It's a while since I wrote a ‘personal' article on my blog, but there are times when you can't work, even though you still need to earn money.
The worst thing possible happened to me in February 2021. My beloved Dad died, of COVID-19, but that's sort of irrelevant. The fact is that he died and I was completely knocked sideways. You might say it's silly to be shocked by the death of a 98 year-old, but my sister and I just somehow never expected him to ‘go'.
He had the virus for 8 days and was completely asymptomatic (apart from a positive test) until evening 8, but even then his symptoms were mild and his care home told us “No cause for concern”. Then on day 9 he slipped from this world into the next. We try to console ourselves that he just fell asleep and went to join Mum – as he'd told us he was ready to be with her again.
Here is a picture of Dad celebrating his 96th birthday in full Scunthorpe United fan kit. He loved his home team right until the end and avidly listened to matches on the radio. Sadly they didn't often make it to the TV.
Dad was an intelligent and highly motivated business man, right to the end. His favorite topic of conversation was always his business and we used to joke and say we had no idea what people chatted about unless they were in business.
So he would completely understand – and even expect – that within hours of his passing, my sister and I were flung into the procedures associated with working towards granting probate of the will, and taking over his business.
None of this is easy. Our accountant has suggested we will need patience. But that's not something either of us finds easy.
When You Can't Work
It's a bit of a misnomer to imply that I can't work, because working towards Probate has flung me headlong into providing a mass of paper-work and spreadsheets like I never imagined. Yes, our very efficient accountant would do everything for us, but (a) he has other clients needing his assistance (b) my sister and I aim to keep the costs down (and speed up the process) by doing as much of the admin as possible ourselves.
“When you can't work” in this instance, implies that I can't work on my own business because I'm just overwhelmed with working on my Dad's business and probate. No doubt when ‘things' settle down I'll get back to it, but in the meantime I have expenses to pay and my own bills keep coming in too. So it's lucky that my online business is set up in such a way that income still comes in when you can't work.
There are many other reasons why people can't work – long-term or short-term:
- Illness
- Holidays
- Retirement
- Moving house
- Any other family emergency such as my own
Affiliate Marketing Can Help
If a business that generates income even when you can't work appeals to you, affiliate marketing can be the best choice for you.
Here are the affiliate marketing businesses that brought in cash for me while I was working on Dad's probate and business. They are:
- Traffic Dominators – this program teaches marketers of all kind the essential skill of getting visitors to your website. No visitors, no sales. You can start learning without spending money. It needs effort to get set up at the outset – but get real – tell me about any business that's free AND effortless. When it is setup, and you have introduced a few other people to work in the team, you will be earning from their efforts, even when you can't do the work yourself.
- VC Crowd – this is actually my favourite program. The affordable way to be a ‘venture capitalist' is a long-term wealth generation strategy, but with an associated income opportunity to promote the club membership and earn a commission for introducing other members. It's like a share club, where you can – optionally – get paid a monthly commission when other members join. I have members who joined more than 2 years ago and are still happily paying their subscriptions – because they value the shares now in their portfolios.
- GetResponse Autoresponder – this program automates keeping in contact with your customers, and keeps it legal. As well as being a must to keep your own business going, it's a good one to promote because once people have set up their automatic mailer of choice they're very unlikely to change it, so promoting an autoresponder can (and is) earning me money for years to come.
- Traffic Wave – although this is yet another autoresponder, like GetResponse – this one has a far better commission payment structure (a) you can earn down 10 levels (b) you'll can help from your upline due to overspill from the matrix (c) you can mail as many people as you like for one affordable monthly fee.
Click the links above to learn more about them, take a free trial and choose what's best for you. (Autoresponders and training are essential for ANY online business.)
Make Money Online With Your Own Product
To back up a little, there are two very popular ways to make money online are by developing your own product, or with affiliate marketing.
It's true that to be a big earner you should create your own product, ideally with a repeat monthly purchase, if you want to earn a good income. Because once your customer has purchased a product, they are locked into buying that product again. So the more people that you get to buy your product, the more income you will generate.
The risk is that you put hours of work and thousands of dollars into developing a product and you never even make enough sales to cover your costs. Also, it's not the ‘walk in the park' that most marketers tell you it will be.
I'll be honest – I tried this once and made a real hash of it and lost money, not because the product was bad but because I couldn't generate enough traffic / visitors to the sales site.
What I SHOULD have done was follow a course like this one -> click here for free product creation training (affiliate link). Following the training on the webinar comes with its own traffic source. Watch it anyway, you'll learn a lot!
But that course wasn't available when I was stumbling my way through creating my own product.
Make no mistake – if you want to create a digital product, and you understand that a proper business needs a budget, the training above is the best one.
Not ready to produce your own product, but can see the value. Click here > to be an affiliate to promote the training course mentioned above.
Make Money Online – Affiliate Marketing
Nowadays, I mostly stick with affiliate marketing because my offline work has increased so much. It's a gentler way in to online marketing because the work of creating a product is already done for you, so “all” you need to do is learn the skills of traffic generation (which you can learn in the free Facebook group).
If you become successful with the skills of affiliate marketing you can always choose to create your own product and nothing you have learned in affiliate marketing (described below) will be wasted.
With affiliate programs, there is no requirement for you to create a product, handle the payment processing, customer support, product deliveries, or customer complaints. That is done by the merchant program. There is also no limit on how many you can join, although it makes sense to hone your skills on an audience with similar interests – e.g. weight loss, healthy eating, exercise.
What you have to make sure is that you promote quality products that are in demand. Ideally they should be monthly products, and aim to get at least 50% of the sales value from each sale that you make.
Here's a way to be an affiliate to promote a higher ticket product – the training mentioned above.
All business carries some risk, online or offline, but affiliate marketing is lower risk because you don't have to shoulder the risk of product creation, as affiliate programs are offered with products that are already designed for you. You just have to find the best one for your audience – OH and you have to find the audience!
Affiliate Marketing General Strategies
To summarise, in my opinion the best way to make money on the internet for free, especially if you're new to Internet marketing, is to find a good affiliate program and find people who will buy their products. You are entitled to commissions from affiliate sales and all you have to do is to get the people to the merchant's website. This can be done by a number of ways. Some of them include: pay per lead, pay per click, pay per sale, pay per lead, and pay per click. Whatever the method, the key is to get people to sign up with the merchant so that you can get them to the merchant's site. This is known as traffic generation / finding visitors to your site.
Some very detailed free training on traffic generation can be found when you click here.
If you want to run this type of business, take these points into consideration:
- Make sure that you choose programs that offer you residual income. The programs that can offer you residual income include Auto-responders, Clickbank products and Swipe cards. With residual income, you are entitled to commissions from any products that your customers purchase after they sign up with you. There are a number of affiliate programs that offer this kind of program. Choose those that can offer you this kind of income, because it's that type of income that will pay you month after month even when you can't work.
- People are very unlikely to buy on first exposure, so make sure you capture their contact details and mail them regularly with an Autoresponder such as TrafficWave (free trial here)
- Make sure that you choose programs that are reliable, so that you are protected against failures and refunds. Choose those that have a 4 star average. For instance TrafficWave is a top quality autoresponder that people purchase and stay with.
The sky is the limit with affiliate programs. You can start with a minimal investment and earn as much as 50% from each sale. Aim to add people to an autoresponder and offer them monthly products and/or new products in their niche.
That is how I continued to make money when I couldn't work. With the proper training you can too, Click here for free affiliate marketing training.
