How to Start an Internet Business
in 1 Hour with $50 and no Technical Skills

by Michael Ellis (1/26/2006)

Starting an Internet business doesn't have to take several months and hundreds of hours of effort. You can have a potentially money making webpage up and running by contributing about 1 hour worth of effort, around $30 - $35 bucks, and no technical knowledge if you follow the techniques defined below! However, don't think that you're going to be on easy street after only an hour of work. You will still need to continue to put time in to maximize the exposure, traffic and effectiveness of your website.

Ok, I'm going to go over the easiest, quickest and bare-boniest (not a real word!) way to get an Internet business up and running by completing 4 tasks. Granted, each of the 4 tasks can be greatly expanded on and maximized, but the goal here is to be quick and easy.

Your 4 Tasks

1. Finding a Product to Sell
2. Creating a Webpage
3. Accepting Payments
4. Getting Customers (webpage traffic)

Finding a Product to Sell

The quickest way to sell products over the Internet is to sell someone else's products through affiliate sales. An affiliate is basically a third party (like you) advertising someone else's product and getting a percentage of the profit on each sale that comes from the third party's (your) advertisements. Sound complicated? It really isn't.

Let's look at an example… Say you purchased a product from the XYZ Company and you found it extremely useful. If you found that product useful, it is likely that others would find it useful as well. So you make an arrangement with XYZ to advertise their product from your small webpage. The XYZ Company tells you that you will get 35% of the profits on all orders that come from your webpage. They also provide you with a tracking link that allows you to see the number of potential customers that clicked your advertisement and how many of those potential customers actually bought something – as well as how much profit you've made. That's a quick and common affiliate scenario.

Incase you're wondering how it could work, the company (XYZ in our example) will give you an affiliate account ID number. Your account ID number will be appended to the URL of the XYZ advertisement that you place on your webpage (discussed next). When someone looking at your advertisement clicks on the advertisement or link, they will be taken to the XYZ webpage and XYZ will grab your affiliate ID in the URL and credit your account with any of the sales.

Affiliate sales are very common on the Internet, and can also be very lucrative. Typically, companies will provide their affiliates with 15% - 60% of the profit for any sales that came from the affiliate's advertisement. With some products costing several hundred dollars, you can see how quickly the money can add up.

Okay, now you just have to find a product to sell and become an affiliate of that product, which isn't very hard to do. The hardest part is deciding what you want to sell. Maybe you bought an information product on the Internet and you found to be extremely useful? Chances are the company that offered the product also offers affiliate arrangements. Check out the company's webpage. You will usually see an 'Affiliates' link somewhere on the homepage – usually at the bottom.

Here are a couple other great places to find affiliate products:

Marketing Tips: The Internet Marketing products this company offers are outstanding. I personally recommend these products myself. Every Internet marketer should make sure they have a copy of the Insider's Secretes course.

ClickBank: Offers a wide variety of affiliate products to sell… Make sure to click on the 'Promote Products' link on the webpage.

Note: when you decided to advertise any product, you should be absolutely sure that the product has a value and lives up to its claim. The product you select should be of interest to you – it should be something that you would like to know more about. That way, when you talk to people about this product you can discuss how the product helped you.

Okay, now let's move on and talk about building a webpage for you to promote your advertisement.

Creating a Webpage

Creating a webpage and getting the webpage up and running is a 3 step task. Therefore, this section will be broken into the following 3 steps:

1. Creating a webpage
2. Selecting a domain name for your webpage
3. Fining a place to put your webpage

Creating a webpage

You now need a webpage that describes your product in a positive light and contains a link (with your affiliate ID) to the company's website that is offering the product. For a complete newbie with no technical skills, the quickest way to get this done is to have somebody else do it.

For about $30 - $45 dollars you can go to a freelance website and hire someone to create a single-page webpage describing the product you are promoting. The freelancer can even dress it up with some appealing graphics to make it look professional. You can also give the freelancer your target URL and affiliate ID and have them place it in the webpage for you. The complete webpage can be created for you by the freelancer.

A good freelance site where you can easily find someone to create your webpage for you is Get a Freelancer. Make sure the freelancer you select is experienced in writing content in English and is will to show you plenty of examples of their previous work.

Selecting a domain name for your webpage

A domain name is the unique name that identifies an Internet website, for example, www.Your-Website-Name.com. If you happen to be promoting a product to that helps people lose weight, then a suitable domain name for your webpage might be Easy-Weight-Loss.com.

It's good to choose a name that hints at the topic of the site. It is also a good idea to try and select a few business names that you are interested in. That way, if someone else has already chosen your name, you will have a few to fall back on.

Write down a few of your selections… you will need them for the next step.

Fining a place to put your webpage

You will need a web host to place your new webpage. A web host is basically a company that that puts your webpage file on their computer and configures your selected domain name to point to your webpage file. This will allow Internet users to enter your domain name and access your webpage from anywhere on the Internet.

A great, low cost web host is 1and1. For $2.99 a month, 1and1 will host your webpage and register your selected domain name at no extra charge. Their website is very easy to use, and they have a 90-day money back guarantee.

Accepting Payments

Since you're just promoting an affiliate product, you don't have to accept any payments directly. The company which you are an affiliate takes care of the payment collection process.

Getting Customers

Ok, now you have a webpage online and waiting for customers. Now what? Well, you need to promote it! If you've chosen a product that caters to a subject that you're passionate about, then you should have plenty of opportunities to promote your site without much extra effort. Here are a few free promotion methods:

Message boards and forums

Do a search on google.com for 'your-product-topic forum'. Of course, replace your-product-topic with the actual topic that your product covers. You should be able to find several forums and message boards where regular people exchange thoughts on the topic.

Most message boards and forums allow you to have 3-4 lines of signature text at the bottom of their posted message. This is where you can put your name, contact information and link to your webpage. Also include a few short words.

Here's an example:

Jane Smith, JaneSmith@anything.com
For more information on your-product-topic, visit Jane's webpage at www.anything.com

This is a great way to generate webpage traffic. And the posted messages tend to remain posted for quite a while – so there is a lot of opportunity for people that are interested in your product to see your message/URL. How do we know they are interested in your product? Well, they're in a forum that discusses the topic that your product caters to.

Granted, I don't think that you'll get thousands of hits a day using this method, but you will get traffic. And if you've found a product that you're already passionate about, then you're likely already writing messages in these types of forums, or at least you'll enjoy talking back and forth in these types of forums. Why not try and get paid for your expertise in the topic?

Yahoo groups

Do a search on Yahoo discussion groups that pertain to your product topic at http://groups.yahoo.com. Join the groups with the most members and post messages in the message boards. Of course include your signature test that we discussed in the previous section.

Email

Attach your signature text to your email messages when you correspond with people that may have an interest in the product which you're promoting.

There you have it. You should be able to get your part of these tasks done in about an hour, give or take a little bit… Granted, your freelancer will probably need a day or two to create your webpage.

Okay, so now you're probably wondering how much you can make doing this… believe me, when I was new to Internet marketing, that was always the first question on my mind! The short answer is, it depends. (I know… I never liked those answers either!)

But let's try and get a little better idea… If you find a great product, and the company offering the product does a great job at converting browsers to buyers, and you do a great job of sending people to that company, you could make a very decent profit.

Many entrepreneurs' make a full time income from affiliate selling. Granted, as you become more experienced you can investigate other ways to market your webpage. Make sure to read the other articles at VictoryKey.com for more marketing methods.

But let's take a look at an example scenario… Say an affiliate promotes a product that has a price tag of $147 and makes, as an affiliate, 50% of the profit. Then for each sale, the affiliate will collect $73.50.

If the affiliate gets 1000 people to view the affiliate webpage in 1 month, and 25% of those (or 250) click the promotional link, and 2% of that 250 (which is 5) actually makes a purchase, then the affiliate made 5 x 73.50 = $367.00 for the month. And what about operating costs? Just 2.99 a month for the webpage hosting! Now think, what if the affiliate had 10 affiliate web pages? Or 20 affiliate web pages? Or 100 affiliate web pages?

Of course, let me throw out the normal disclaimer… I am not saying that the previous example is what you can expect to earn in your business - you could do better, or you could do worse. It depends on the click-through and conversion rates of the advertisements.

If you're itching to get into the Internet business, go ahead and give it a try. What's the most you could lose? $30 freelancer fee + $2.99 a month until you cancel your hosting account. That's not a bad loss for decent potential and experience!

Good Luck! And welcome to the wonderful world of Internet marketing

Author - Michael Ellis (Email: michael@victorykey.com)

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