Affiliate Marketing

Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing Guide’ Category

Once you have researched your niche, created a monetized website and started driving traffic to it, there is still more work to do if you want your site to be as successful as it can be. You really should continuously analyze your visitor activity.

First of all, you will want to know how many people are visiting your website but beyond this you will want to know where they are coming from (so that you know which traffic sources are working best) and how they behave once they are on your site.

Which pages are people most interested in? Which exit links are people using most? How do people tend to navigate around your site? Which posts are attracting the most comments? Which pages are people not navigating to?

It is through monitoring your visitor activity that you can answer these questions and work on ways to improve your site’s navigation and design. Of course, you should also be monitoring the conversion rates of the various affiliate products you are promoting. If a product is getting a lot of clicks but no conversions you might need to think about either replacing it or introducing your visitors to it in a different way. Conversely, if products are converting well, you might want to think about giving them more prominence on your site.

Many people use Google Analytics for monitoring visitor activity. Personally, I use StatCounter. Both are free and simple to install on your site.

A great website with no visitors will not earn you any money from affiliate marketing which is why it is important to attract visitors to your website (also known as generating website traffic). The best type of website traffic is from the search engines because it is free and highly targeted AND it is easier to generate search engine traffic than you might imagine.

Firstly, you need to have conducted good keyword research and built a well optimized website. Then, you need to generate backlinks for your website so that the search engines know that your website exists and can see that other websites are linking to yours. How many backlinks you need will depend on the level of competition for your keywords. There are some great articles on this subject at our sister site, Do-It-Yourself SEO.

In short, your options are:

- to get backlinks manually by posting on forums and commenting on other people’s blogs.

- to buy backlinks.

- to buy software that will help you generate backlinks automatically.

The main rule of thumb is to build a variety of backlinks consistently each month.

Whichever option or combination of options you choose it is likely to be only a matter of time before your website gets onto the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) IF you have done your keyword research diligently. Realistically, you should expect it to take 3-6 months (maybe sooner for less competitive keywords) before your website pages are ranking high on the SERPs but if you can’t wait that long here are some quick methods of generating instant website traffic.

The final stage of building your website is to monetize it. Your main aim should be to provide your visitors with valuable and useful information NOT to solely promote products. Try to build your affiliate offerings into the content of the page so that they are a natural fit with the information you are providing. Alternatively, you can have affiliate products or feeds running in and around your content. Affiliate products can easily be found for most niches by joining ClickBank, Amazon, eBay, PayDotCom and so on – a full list of affiliate programs and networks is provided on the sidebar.

Shortcut
If you think building your niche website is going to be too time consuming or if it is beyond your skill set, you should consider buying VRE Generator. It builds your website for you AND monetizes it enabling you to build a fully optimized, fully monetized niche website in less than 2 hours. Right now, you can buy the VRE Generator package for just $97 and this is a one-off cost that enables you to build unlimited niche websites. Highly recommended.

If you are going to build an effective and sustainable affiliate marketing business it is imperative that you have your own website. The simplest way to do this is to set up a WordPress blog as this also makes it really easy to optimize your website for the search engines. 

You are going to need a hosting account and a domain name (this is your main website address). We use Just Host as our hosting provider of choice and recommend them unreservedly as the best and only hosting account you will ever need. As standard, they offer unlimited bandwidth, a free domain name, unlimited email accounts, unlimited WordPress blogs, unlimited discussion forums, unlimited add-on domains and a host of other benefits. So with a Just Host account you can easily add additional websites every time you want to develop a new niche.

Once you have got your hosting account and first domain name set up it is time to build your niche website. If you have done your keyword research well, this will guide you through the building of your website. There are some basic pages that you should have on all websites – Privacy, About, Contact, FAQ – to make your website compliant and user friendly. But the key pages are your content pages and these should be based around your keyword research. They should provide your visitors with useful content built around the keywords you are targeting and for each content page, here are the golden rules:

- Include your main keyword in the title of that page (if you are using WordPress this will automatically include that keyword in your url for that page and therefore, a meta tag for that page – all very useful for generating search engine traffic).

- Include several LSI keywords (i.e. related keywords) for the page’s main keyword in the content of that page. These should be naturally occuring because primarily, the page should be written in a way that is attractivce to your website’s visitors.

- Include your main keyword and the LSI keywords as tags to the post or page you have created.

You need to repeat these golden rules for each main content page/post of your website.

One of the most important things you need to do before you begin to build a website is to conduct keyword research. Why is this so important? Because the best way to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business is to generate website traffic via the search engines and the only way you can do this effectively is to have a highly optimimized website that is based on solid keyword research.

Within your niche you are looking to find keywords that have a reasonably high search volume and low or moderate competition. There is a manual way of doing this and there are tools you can use to help both automate the process and to keep you on track.

Manual Keyword Research
Your aim is to find keywords around your niche that have low or moderate competition. There are three ‘footprint’ searches you can use to do this:

1. Search with quotation marks – You type in a keyword phrase (use Google to help give you ideas of phrases that have three to five words) and put quotation marks around it. Right before the search results it will show you how many exact matches there are for that phrase. That is, how many other websites are using that exact keyword phrase – if it is in the millions you probably want to stop right now and find alternative keyword phrases related to your niche.

2. Search with quotation marks AND the prefix Intitle:”Your keyword phrase” – This footprint search will let you know how many other websites have that exact keyword phrase AND have it in the title of the page.

3. Search with quotation marks AND the prefix Intitle:”Your keyword phrase” AND Inurl:”Your keyword phrase” – This footprint search will let you know how many other websites have that exact keyword phrase AND have it in the title of the page AND have it in the url of that page.

This stuff might look tedious but it is really, really important. When you find a keyword phrase using the third footprint search that has less than 1,000 exact matches then you are in with a genuine chance of getting ranked on the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If it’s less than 100 it will be relatively straightforward to get ranked on the first page of SERPs and if it’s less than 25 then it will be easy to get ranked on the first page of SERPs.

However, running alongside the level of competition, you also need to make sure that the search volumes for each of your keyword phrases are relatively large. There’s no point being ranked on the first page of SERPs for a keyword phrase that has just ten searches a month. And as you might imagine there tends to be a correlation between how competitive a keyword phrase is and how many searches there are for that keyword phrase. But you are looking for a balance and in reality, you are looking for keyword phrases that have over a thousand searches each month – Google’s keyword tool can give you a decent indication of how many searches there are each month.

Before you build your website you need to find a selection of keyword phrases that are low or moderate competition combined with decent monthly search volume. Each one of these keyword phrases should be a different page of your website and how many you need to find is up to you. We would suggest a good starting point is to have between 6 and 20 keyword phrases.

Automated Keyword Research
Doing this keyword research manually is possible (as described above) but it’s also pretty tedious and long winded. So you might like to think about buying yourself a tool that will do most of the hard work for you. We recommend Micro Niche Finder as the keyword research tool of choice for affiliate marketers. By entering just one keyword, it gives you up to 600 related keyword ideas. For each of these keyword ideas it gives you the number of exact matches, an estimate of the monthly search volumes and let’s you analyze the level of competition. It costs $97 but this is a one-off cost and includes lifetime updates. It is on version 5 right now so it is a tool that has been around for a while and keeps getting upgraded as the search engines become more and more sophisticated.

LSI Keywords
While you are doing your keyword research you should also make a note of the LSI keywords (these are simply the words that the search engines regard as related to your main keywords and can be found at the bottom of most search results pages). The LSI keywords should be used naturally within your content.

One of the ‘newbie’ mistakes that people make when starting out with affiliate marketing is that they get drawn into the internet marketing niche. The reason for this is that while you are searching for information about affiliate marketing you are exposed to a number of websites and sales pages that promise they will show/help you make a fortune out of affiliate marketing. Inevitably, this often means that you sign up as an affiliate for an internet marketer, get on their mailing list and get drawn into promoting their opportunities. The reality is that the internet marketing niche is so competitive that unless you really know what you’re doing and you have a lot of resources at your disposal, you will make very little, if any, money from the internet marketing niche. This is probably the main reason why so many people fail at affiliate marketing – they are working on the wrong niche from the beginning.

So how do you find the right niche(s) for affiliate marketing?

One of the key activities that you will need to be successful at as an affiliate marketer is to produce content. This might be in the form of articles, videos, blog posts, podcasts and so on. In order to consistently produce new content in a niche you need to pick something that you are genuinely interested in. By producing regular content you can become an authority in your niche and build a reputation for your website. But don’t worry for now how you are going to make money from your niche – virtually all websites can be effectively monetized.

And one of the keys to building a long-term income as an affiliate marketer is scalability. That is, once you have created one profitable niche you can create another and so on. The only limitation to your success is how many niches you are prepared to research and create websites for.