It is a trend that recently people are shitfing towards building a business in the virtual world than in real life. Software, mobile apps, and games are billion dollar examples of businesses that have no physical existance. Another extreme example is club neverdie from the virtual reality game Entropia that was sold for $635,000 two years ago!
And the reason is pretty obvious: the low over head. You can start an affiliate marketing income system with $0 budget. So there is a trend. And since you are here then you might be interested in it yourself. If so then it is important to know what differentiates a successful online income system from a temporaty one or just plain failure.
There are 5 important criteria for a successful online income system:
1. Sustainability:
A sustainable business is the kind of business that once started it keeps feeding itself with the resources it needs to keep going. In other words, you don’t need to keep doing the same thing over and over again every day so that the business works. If not then when you stop working for any reason of sickness or emergency or just plain vacation your income will stop flowing until you come back and start working again. If your business is sustainable it only requires you to steer it while it supplies itself with the needed stuff like traffic.
2. Independence:
Do you remember the famous affiliate Google slap back in December 2008? Those affiliates had a sustainable business and it was growing and making them millions every day. But once Google unplugged their Adwords accounts they lost everything and had to start allover with other sources of traffic.
That was not an independent income system because it was all built on traffic from one source. When this source is gone the business is gone as well. Successful affiliates learned to diversify their sources of traffic in a way that no source should account for more than 10% of their entire traffic portfolio. This way if one source is gone they still have 90% of their business running until they figure out how to replace the lost 10%.
3. Automation:
Once you have a system that works you can divide it into tasks. Then find a way to get those tasks done for you so that your job will be just to manage the process, not to have to do it all yourself over and over. The idea about perfecting the system is that you can automate it and free yourself for more ideas and the expansion of your business.
An income system that can not be automated is destined to decline and fail. Automation gives you the chance to grow and make up the drops that will show later on.
4. Repetition:
The repetition meant in this context is the one done by the same customer. When you sell something to a customer and the customer has to come back for supplies or more of the same thing because it is a consumable then you’re in a good shape. When you sell a photocopier or a prtiner make sure the customer will come back to refill the toner and buy more parts to maintain the item they purchased. Another example is baby diapers and women’s make up. If they like your brand they’ll come back for more.
Compare the above examples with a customer who purchased a bicycle.
5. Predictability:
Once my income system has been optimized I should know for each dollar I spend how much I will make in return and over how long. This is predictability. Let’s apply this to traffic. If you rely on SEO then you have no ability of any kind to predict the amount of traffic you will get from the time and money you spend on optimizing your sites because the biggest search engine changes the algorithms more than 400 times a year. That’s more than once a day. On the other hand if you are buying the traffic then you can predict what to get for each dollar you spend on advertising.
Those were the most important criteria of a successful online income system. There is more of course, but in my opinion these are the most important 5.