This past weekend a friend was at my house and was asking about what I was doing regarding Affiliate Marketing. I showed him a few of my sites and listed my recent commissions from one of my eBay affiliate sites. I had a very good commission on a guitar that someone had bought through the site. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was probably about half of what many people make working a real job.
Although I had talked to my friend several times about getting into Internet Marketing, he was never really interested. This time though, after seeing that one sizable commission, he was all ears. As soon as I started talking about ‘setting up a site,’ he immediately gave up before he even started. He said, ‘I don’t know anything about setting up websites, don’t you have to be a programmer or something ?’
Obviously times have changed very much. If you had to be a programmer there would probably be a tiny fraction of sites that are presently up and running, and none of them would be mine.
I showed my frined how easy it is to install WordPress, and he was definitely impressed. I don’t have any statistics, but I would guess that the vast majority of the sites being set up regularly for marketing are WordPress installations. With nothing more than a shared hosting account, you can be up and running with more free software at your disposal than most people could probably ever afford to buy to get started.
The one issue that my friend brought up, which was a valid point, was the fact that the new WP installation looked horrible. It did too, it was the default theme that is used when you install WP. He said, ‘I guess you have to pay a programmer to make it look good ?’ I said, ‘nope.’
That’s when I popped open Artisteer and showed him the best software that I’ve purchsed recently. Just the included themes had him ‘ooooing and ahhhhing.’ When I showed him how easy it is to make the themes your own by customizing them, he was sold…literally.
Though I will probably live to regret it, I sold my friend a hosting account through HostGator, Artisteer through an affiliate link, and even XSitePro2 also.
When I showed him XSitePro2 he was again amazed at the power and ease of use that the software offers.
My point of this post is this – don’t let anything stop you if you’re wanting to get into Internet Marketing. I know very little about programming. I don’t even know much about marketing in general. There’s many things I didn’t know when I started a little over a year a go, and there’s many things I still don’t know now. There’s nearly an endless supply of information to help you in your marketing endeavor, usually free if you look hard enough.
I made my mind up I would stick with it until I was able to earn my living solely from marketing online. I’m not there yet, but I will be, and it will be this year.
Setting up websites shouldn’t even be something that you let slow you down, much less stop you. Whether you choose to use only WordPress, XSitePro2 or even just HTML sites, there’s software and information available to get you to the point of creating your own attractive, functional, impressive websites…use it.