Leverage Benefits Internet Marketers

Leverage is the ability to achieve a substantial gain from a small investment - whether that investment is time, effort or money.

We usually think of leverage as the mechanical benefit that derives from using a lever. In fact, Archimedes once stated, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

But leverage isn't limited to the physical world of mechanical advantage - it applies in many other conditions as well.

In business, Change Agents regularly speak of altering one or more business "levers" in order to change the organization's structure or performance. Unfortunately, in today's world, those business levers are often perceived negatively, resulting in job cuts, down-sizing, bankruptcies, or other forms of corporate re-organization.

But leverage has many positive uses as well.

People apply financial leverage when they use borrowed funds to increase their ROIs, or when they use options to control large quantities of stock for much less cost than if they purchased the stock.

Home businesses employ leverage when they function online. Simply by doing that, they've avoided the boundaries of geography (and largely, time as well) and leveraged their advertising dollars, since it requires about the same amount of money to create an ad that reaches only a few people as it does to create an ad that is global.

If we were running a small "brick and mortar" store, we might be satisfied with a couple hundred visitors, but as an affiliate internet marketer, we want massive traffic numbering in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions - and not just any prospects, but highly qualified prospects.

We are using leverage when we use tools such as Google AdWords: we use the Google technologies to generate targeted traffic for us and send it to our website.

The Web provides us with many forms of leverage, but they basically all boil down to the use of technology. Technology is one of the greatest levers ever invented.

Most online businesses are familiar with the use of autoresponders and search engines, etc., but they often fail to make full use of the technology lever in their back office processes - including everything from managing sales leads to fulfilling the order and taking care of the follow-on billing and customer service issues.

Those online businesses that take full advantage of the leverage that technology provides are the ones who will succeed in this competitive environment.