Darina Loakman.com

I’m a big fan of affiliate marketing as an income opportunity, you promote a product, someone buys it and you get a commission.  No stock to hold, no customer service or shipping to worry about, easy huh !  well in theory it is, the hard part like almost everything online is getting people to buy, promoting your preferred products and selling enough of them ! however it’s not impossible and when you work at it the rewards can be good. 

Even if you have your own online business or shop you can easily add in affiliate marketing as another stream of income and here’s a real no brainer way to do it !

zlio allows you to open your own online shop and sell products (choice of over 2 million products all from reputable merchants) earn commission and all with a couple of clicks and for free !!  They’ve been around for quite a while but are in the news at the moment because they’ve just raised $4 million in funding, so big plans.

Now it all sounds nice and easy (which it is !) and the bonus being it doesn’t cost anything to participate all you need is a paypal account to receive your commission. But there is a catch ! now really it’s not a bad catch it’s the same one with all online enterprises, they aren’t going to get the customers for you.. so no point in making a lovely shop with lots of great products and just letting it sit there, to get it to work for you, you’ll need to work on promoting and search engine optimisation. So it’s actually a good way to learn these things without investment and with possible rewards if you get it right !

So go ahead and give it a try, what have you got to lose?

If you do decide to open a shop with zlio here’s a couple of things to bear in mind before jumping in.

Think carefully about what you are going to stock in  your shop and name it accordingly. Don’t necessarily choose your stock based on your current target market (if you have one) or even based on stuff you like and know.  Do some research find out what’s selling on the internet, this is your chance to experiment, try lots of things, open a few shops !

Realistically with the merchants available you aren’t going to be targeting customers this side of the atlantic, so try and think bigger ! remember you don’t have to worry about shipping and customer service the merchant does all that.

With zlio you can sell everything from toys, clothes, books, electronics, games etc.. huge choice.  They’ve even got a space where you can create a video to promote your products plus a very easy way to add the products to your blog if you have one

Here’s the link again  zlio.com

and don’t forget when you have your shop open come on over to the “promote your business” board on iamawahm and let us know …

http://iamawahm.com/forum/index.php?board=29.0

(I’m working on my shop right now so as soon as I’m happy with it I’ll unleash it for the world to see !)

Darina