Any business, whether it be a brick and mortar mom and pop shop or a work-at-home affiliate marketing website, thrives when the business owner builds relationships with other businesses and with potential customers. This is especially true in new online B2B businesses that don’t advertise themselves through word of mouth and can’t rely on a good location and a flashy sign (like brick and mortar businesses) to drive in customers.
In this episode of Future of Publishing, host Murray Newlands interviews Darren Rowse of Digital Photography School on how he monetizes business relationships:
Highlights
- Meet other bloggers and online marketers…
- After you’ve met someone, try to develop that relationship into a business relationship…
- Monetize that relationship by selling them products through affiliate programs and making them a sub-affiliate for your programs.
Frequently, as a work-at-home blogger, you will find yourself providing services for new business clients, effectively as a per-job consultant. For example, they might pay you money to write a positive review or good post about their company or their product so that they can better communicate with their potential customers. However, this is not where the business relationship has to end: You can re-monetize your relationship by selling them B2B products through affiliate programs, but the products must be ones that you genuinely think are good and will genuinely help the client lest you lose future business from them. You can sheer a sheep as much as you want but you can only skin it once, so make sure to sell people products they’ll actually like if you want to maximize the money you make off your relationship with them.
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