Establishing My Business – Part 1 (Formation)

Before I decided to create my affiliate marketing business, I got Dean Holland’s free book, The Iceberg Effect, which gave me great insight into affiliate marketing. If you have not gotten your free copy yet, click here. Next, since I was new to affiliate marketing I wanted to learn all about it. After all, I did not become an attorney without learning my profession first. Same with affiliate marketing. I invested in Dean’s Internet Profits Certified Partner Super Affiliate program and became a Certified Partner. Later I joined his Beginner’s Advantage program, which is one of the best programs I have seen for newcomers to this business. Armed with much more knowledge and having a mentor and support system with Dean’s Internet Profits and my fellow Beginner’s Advantage members, I was ready to create my affiliate marketing business.

The first thing I did was decide on a business name.

• Did I want to use my name? A “business” sounding name? Something else?
• I wanted to keep it simple. It’s not about having a fancy sounding name, it’s about people easily finding and remembering it.
• I decided to use my name – JClouse Business. However, it wasn’t that straightforward. Firstly, I needed to make sure it wasn’t already being used.
• I did an Internet search for JClouse Business and JClouseBusiness. No results came up. A good sign that name was not being used.

Next step was to make sure my business name was available as a domain name (Internet address).

• A domain name is your personal or business name on the Internet. It is your piece of real estate you control on the Internet.
• A domain name follows the “https://” at the beginning and finishes with .com or .net or .org, or another suffix.
• I then went to the domain hosting website namecheap.com. While there are hundreds of domain hosting sites out there (GoDaddy, Ionos, Domain, Hostinger, bluehost, etc), I like Namecheap.
• On namecheap.com I did a domain name search for jclousebusiness and it was available as a .com, .org, .net and many others.
• I wanted a .com Internet suffix because that is the most recognizable suffix for businesses. If .com is not available, the next best option is .net. If that isn’t available, then you decide what is best for you.
• I chose jclousebusiness.com and paid the annual fee, which renews every year.

Now that I had my business name, I could create my company. I want to emphasize that my business name is the name of my company, which runs my business. There are four primary parts of my company: Product, Marketing/Advertising, Banking/Payments, and Legal/Taxes.

Product (Asset). As you recall from my March 19th post – What is Affiliate Marketing, as an affiliate marketer I do not have a physical product to sell. I recommend other companies’ products/services to my audience and in return I receive a commission. However, to recommend those products/services to an audience on the Internet, I need to have an online presence, or website, that people visit to get to know, like and trust me.

As I learned in Beginner’s Advantage, you want to have an online presence that you own. If you create a page on Facebook or Instagram, you do not own that. They own it and let you use their platform to conduct your business, subject to their rules. The best “owned asset” is a Blog. That is a piece of Internet real estate you will own and control. It cannot be shut down by FB or IG. I needed to create a Blog, or owned asset.

The first step in creating my Blog, was to decide on a title and a domain name.

• My Blog is a written documentation of my journey in affiliate marketing from an absolute beginner to success. It is designed to help others achieve success.
• Since journey is a popular term, I chose the synonym voyage. That sparked a memory of a TV show I watched as a kid – Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
• Poof! A light went off and I thought Voyage to the Top of the Sea is what I am doing so I decided that was my Blog title. My Blog was born.
• Although Voyage to the Top of the Sea was my title, that would be too long of an Internet domain name. Remember, keep it simple!
• I also wanted my Blog domain name to identify with me so I decided to use my name – Jordan Clouse.
• As above, I did an Internet search for Jordan Clouse and JordanClouse. No results came up. A good sign that name was not being used.

Next step was to make sure my Blog name was available as a domain name.

• Again I went to namecheap.com and did a domain name search for jordanclouse and it was available as a .com.
• I chose jordanclouse.com and paid the annual fee.
• The important part about getting your own domain name is that you can have a professional business email by using that domain name.
• This is my Blog, or my owned asset I will use to generate interest in order to get people onto my email list.
• You also want to have a professional looking external email that people will want to join. Free emails such as gmail and yahoo, are not professional and will lead to bounced or undelivered emails, especially with new standards. Have a professional email. To do that you need to have a subdomain so you can create your own email sending domain.
• By choosing jordanclouse.com, I could create a professional email that ended in jordanclouse.com.

Now that I had my domain name for my Blog, the next step was to create my email sending domain. The great thing for me was that the Beginner’s Advantage program took me step by step through everything.

• To create my email sending domain, first I created a Cloudflare account at cloudflare.com.
• From there I created my subdomain of @m.jordanclouse.com.
• Now I could create my professional email of __________@m.jordan.couse.com. You can choose whatever prefix name you want. I chose achieve.
• My custom email domain is thus: achieve@m.jordanclouse.com.
• As I see it, anyone who joins my email list is joining to achieve. Subliminal perhaps, but this is what my business is all about – achieving success and helping others achieve success as well.

Now I had my owned asset along with my email sending domain. Another piece of Internet real estate to establish my presence and grow an audience of people who will get to know, like and trust me. So for Part 1, I established my company and product (owned asset) on the Internet. I took the chance and put myself out there to create my own business and pursue success to achieve my dream life.

While this first part may seem relatively simple and straightforward, you are seeing the finished product of a year of trial and error and many mistakes and discouragement to figure this out. You get the benefit of knowing what I ended up doing to launch my business. This Blog is for you, to help you achieve success. I will cover the rest of the primary parts of my company: Product Creation, Marketing/Advertising and Banking/Payments, along with choosing the legal structure for my business, in upcoming posts.

I look forward to seeing you continue my voyage with me. As always, to receive updates on my Blog posts, as well as insider information, make sure you join my newsletter here: Voyager Newsletter.