Try Affiliate Marketing?  What is affiliate marketing? It’s simple – it’s where you promote other people’s products for a cut of the sales price (your commission).  If you’re thinking that this means you need to buy a sales kit full of jewelry and start asking all of your friends to buy from you, think again.  Internet affiliate marketing is a bit different and you never have to sell anything to your friends or family, unless you want to.

So first, lets talk about some of thebenefits of working as an internet affiliate marketer before we talk more about what and how to do it.  This way you can decide if it’s right for you.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing:

1. No Manufacturing Costs – the costs to develop a new product are expensive and usually beyond the reach of someone looking to work from home and make money online.  In affilaite marketing you are selling a product that has already been created and proven in the market.
2. Low Cost Set Up – even setting up a simple online store and stocking it with inventory can cost several thousand dollars.  With an investment of tens of dollars you can start on affiliate marketing in your spare time
3. No Employees – For many moms, the want a flexible job or business where they can still manage to make money and have time for the kids – which is why a work from home internet business sounds so attractive.  The last a mom wants to do is to start a business that requires employees.  Affiliate marketing requires no employee and still allows you to make money online.
4. No Order processing or merchant accounts – I know lots of moms who started online stores and got orders.  And then had to fill them – at night, on the weekends, at holidays – all for a very small margin.  And while it was thrilling to them to make money, they were working pretty hard for just few dollars profit – and spending time away from their families.  Not to mention the hassle of returns, and setting up a merchant account.  With affiliate marketing, all this is taken care of for you.
5. Make Money Online While You Sleep – yes, if you’re affiliate website is out there on the internet, it is working for you 24/7.  Somewhere, someone is online who will be interested in a product you are promoting and will buy it – and you have made a commission while you sleep.  It doesn’t get any better than that.

So is affiliate marketing the right way for a mom to make money online and work from home?  Yes, it’s can be one of the best ways to have the best of both worlds – time with your family and an income.  See our next posts for more about what affiliate marketing is and how to do it.

The goal is to build an online business that yields $1000 in revenue a month, with minimal start up costs, overhead, and expenses, in one month.  Other requirements include:  It has to be something I can build and run in my “spare time” since I already have a business, a family and lots of other responsibilites.  Also, no shipping of product.  The money has to come from advertising and product referrals (otherwise known as affiliate marketing).  And the subject can’t be about how to make money on the internet.  And startup expenses (inclusding advertising) can’t be more than $500.   And as I said, at the end of the month, I want it to be generating $1000 in revenue from advertising and affiliate marketing.  And I am going to follow a course or book step by step  – to see if I can do it too.

So up for the challenge – you can comment below or sign up for the email newsletter to stay up to date.

And so I embarked on my great adventure.  Fast forward a year or so.   I had spent way more than a few hundred dollars, I had racked up credit card debt and liquidated my savings.  Sure I was making sales, but except at the holiday season, no where near enough to wind up with $1000 a profit.  I had expanded from t-shirts (which while they made little profit, didn’t require me to store inventory) into carrying other items – I had to pack and ship thing late at night after the kids were in bed, running to the post office or the UPS store during my lunch hour.

By no means had I achieved my dream of being able to quit my full time job and spend more time with my kids. And worse with the money I had thrown into the business, I was even farther away than if I had simply not started a business and put all the money away in the bank.  So much for my mom’s version of the American dream.

But then I got serious and wrote down what I really wanted.  What was most important to me was to be able to spend more time with my kids.   Running a giant mail order business was not necessarily what I wanted.  I didn’t want to spend all of my time packing boxes, keeping track of orders or updating shipping information.  It was hard to sell tweens t-shirts using Cafe Press.  I wasn’t ready to commit to going into wholesale.  I needed a business that would deliver $1000 in month in profit, that would allow me to run it from a computer in mom hours – while the kids were at school, after they were in bed.   Trust me I had learned a lot – from how to get a website build, start a blog, send out an email newsletter, source graphic designers, etc.

So I kept searching and looking.  I needed to stop spending money on PR and pricey display advertising, so I decided to get serious about blogging. I started GirlMogul Magazine, a blog aimed at tween girls…and the response was overwhelming.  Offers for products to review, people wanting to get on the list, interest from advertisers.  And I started to get really into blogging.  All of sudden I was getting a tons more traffic to my site for free.  I developed an e book (a pdf) and using ad words, started to sell that.  All of a sudden my sales shot up.  I added advertising to my site and I made money in my sleep….My e-book was delivered without my touching it.  Woo hoo. I had finally cracked the code of how to make money as a mom without running around packing boxes, shipping $20 orders, and making less than $5 on them.  But guess what happened – the products part of business really took off – once I found a way to get more traffic to my site through blogging, and build my email list using Google Adwords, all parts of my business took off.  From using my blog to gain advertising revenue, to selling my ebooks, to my product sales, the strategies I used, once I got serious about the using the internet to effectively grow my business, helped me acheive my dream.
So that’s what this blog is about – how moms, any mom, with a computer and a desire, can make money on the internet using time honored principles.  I believe blogging, email marketing and some other principles of internet marketing can allow a mom to start a successful business, whether it’s a blog to earn money, an online store, a direct sales business or a service or free lance business.  So join the The Biz Wise Mom and let your dream take wings.