Affiliate Marketing ABC

I’ve talked a lot about Affiliate Marketing, and it is by far my most successful home business. It can be quite confusing to a newcomer though, so I’m going to try and explain the steps you need to take to get into Affiliate Marketing.

1. Choose a Niche
   You have to decide what product or service you are going to market. There are several ways to choose a market, some requiring a little more work than others.
   In terms of digital products, a good place to start looking is one of the affiliate sites, such as Clickbank.com or Commission Junction. While you are there, sign on as an affiliate so once you’ve selected your product, you can get started on the next step. There are thousands of products available to you on these sites. You can either search for their best sellers, (the products with high gravity), or search in categories in which you have either an interest or some knowledge. For instance, if you are a teacher, you may feel more comfortable marketing educational products where you can use your experience as a teacher.

   Choosing a niche market gets a little more complicated, but basically you want to narrow your audience down so that you are targeting a select group of people who will be genuinely interested in buying the product you are marketing. So, you won’t just be marketing to anyone who wants to buy an educational product. You may narrow it down to college students who are looking for study methods, or parents of preschoolers who are looking for help getting their kids ready for school.

2. Choose a product
   Once you’ve decided what market you’d like to target, you can then start choosing products to promote. I would suggest starting with just one product – you can always add related products later. Sign up as an affiliate for the product you have selected, and go to the vendor site where you will find banner ads, suggested website copy, landing page and sales letter copy and PLR articles – I’ll explain what those are shortly.
3. Create your website
   Although it is possible to promote a product without your own website, it does make marketing a little more difficult. Building your own website is not an impossible task – the technology available these days makes it easy for even the least techie amongst us to do. WordPress is fabulous for those needing help building a website – they pretty much take all the confusing stuff out of your hands! You can also make use of Squidoo to build a lens, which then acts as your website, or you can use other sites like Weebly.com.
   While you create your website, you need to start working on SEO and keywords, as both of these are very important to the success of your site.
4. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
   Basically, SEO is what you need to do in order to improve the position of your website on the search engine results. This section could be a 50 page site all by itself, but there are a few key points that will get you started. Remember, always, that search engines like relevant content. You cannot fill your website with irrelevant, useless information. If your product is in the educational category, your site has to contain useful educational content. That content also has to be optimised for the right keywords, which I’ll cover briefly in the next point. Then you have to work on getting back links to your site, which you can do through article writing and directory submissions. Blogs, Facebook pages, You Tube vidoes and other social media also provide back links that will help push your site up in the rankings.
5. Keywords
   Now, there are several schools of thought when it comes to keywords. My training at Wealthy Affiliate was based on finding ‘long-tail’ keywords with low competition but a reasonable number of searches. A keyword is the word or phrase that people use when they search the internet. By targeting specific keywords, you increase your website’s chances of appearing in the results for those searches. A long-tail keyword does not target the broad market of ‘students’ for your educational product, but perhaps targets ‘college student study methods’ instead. Think of how you search online. You may start with one word, but that will give you millions of results, then you try again with a more descriptive phrase, sometimes you may even narrow it down by location. The idea is that you choose a keyword phrase that does get some searches, but is not as competitive – ie. there aren’t zillions of other websites targeting the same broad phrase. There are so many ways to do keyword research, I think I’ll have to make it a separate page!
   Some internet marketers say that you should rather choose a keyword that does have a fair amount of competition – because if there’s noc ompetiton, it may be because no-one is searching for it. The keyword research tools at Wealthy Affiliate will help you work it out – far better than I can explain it here! Just know that your keywords need to be used when you build your site, write the content, and write articles to promote the product and create backlinks to the site.
6. Article Writing
   Probably the best way to create credible back links and publicity for your site, articles are a blessing to those affiliate marketers with a shoestring budget. That’s because it costs you nothing but time to write articles and submit them to article directories.
   Your articles, just like your website, have to be relevant and informative. They are not sales articles – most article directories will reject articles that are clearly written to sell a specific product. The idea is to give readers useful information that will attract them to your site – and that’s where you get them to buy your product! In addition, your Clickbank or affiliate hoplink cannot be used in your articles – which is why your own website is so important.
   Some article directories are more ‘useful’ in terms of good page rankings and credible back links than others, but you can submit articles to as many as you want. However, it is not a good idea to submit the exact same article to 30 different directories – Google in particular doesn’t take too kindly to that. You can, however, ‘spin’ one article – change it slightly – and submit it. There are automated systems that you can buy and download to spin your articles for you, but some of them are not great – your article needs to be in good English and follow the Author’s guidelines of each directory.
7. Rinse and repeat
   Figures vary, but a lot of people believe that you need about 1000 articles published in directories to really get traffic to your site. So you will keep researching keywords related to the product you are marketing, write articles about them, and submit those to article directories for a long time. Once you get the hang of it though, you can probably do two articles a day, maybe spin each of them twice, and submit 6 articles a day. There are other ways to increase your traffic – again, that will need to be the subject of another page.

There are a lot of fine details that I have left out here – some of which I am still working on! When I joined Wealthy Affilliate, I was astonished at the amount of work required to get one site up and running – until I had done it once or twice. Now, it takes me a day to get a new site up, another day to create some back links, and within a few weeks I have articles published in directories all across the internet that push me up the search results and get traffic to my sites. I certainly would have struggled a lot more without the training and tools that members of WA have access to – in fact, I think I would probably have dropped the whole idea had I tried to go it alone.

Affiliate marketing can eventually generate a passive income for you – because your websites are out there selling and promoting for you whether you work on them or not. Once you’ve got the recipe for good traffic, your sites will carry on earning for you for years. And that’s what I really love about it!