Affiliate Marketing – A Unique Form of Online Business

Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable ways to start earning online. With a solid affiliate marketing business, you can see commission checks coming in month after month.

With enough mini-websites out there, you can have a substantial passive income and only have to work a few hours a day. And it all starts with earning your first $100 online.

So many ways

There are tons of ways to make money online, no doubt. But this guide is concentrated on affiliate marketing for a few important reasons.

First of all, affiliate marketing is accessible. It doesn’t matter if you are brand new to the making money online concept or have spent years spinning your wheels online. You can start an affiliate marketing business with very little online experience.

Your main task

Affiliate marketing is also a great way to make money online. You don’t have to worry about creating your own product or paying someone else to create it for you. You don’t have to take the time to craft a sales letter and set up a payment processor. All you have to worry about is the traffic building process.

Affiliate marketing is also a relatively inexpensive business to set up. With some methods, there are no costs involved at all. If you do have costs, they are limited to purchasing website hosting and domain names, which can run for less than $20 a month. Considering the fact that most new business start ups need at least $10,000 the potential for profiting with affiliate marketing is amazing!

So, what is it?

You may be wondering exactly what affiliate marketing is. Simply put, as an affiliate you are being paid to send qualified traffic to your partner company’s website. If that traffic purchases, you make a commission. Affiliate relationships exist in offline businesses, but they are much easier to manage online.

Your traffic is tracked through a unique affiliate id URL. This affiliate id will ensure that you get credit for any sales that will result from your traffic.

Depending on the affiliate relationship, you may get paid once a month or you may get paid every other week. You can find affiliate programs through affiliate networks, or you can find a product first and then determine if they have an affiliate program.

Visitors are the key ingredient

As an affiliate, you have to find traffic and motivate it to go visit the site through your specific affiliate id URL. There are several ways to do this. You could pay for traffic to go to the website using pay per click marketing. You can spend time on social networks promoting your URL.

Both methods are effective, but they take a lot of money and time respectively.

In this affiliate marketing guide, you’ll learn a method for setting up small feeder sites to drive traffic to a blog.

Minimal costs

The costs involved with this method are minimal (just hosting and a domain name) but the system is very powerful. You’ll have a better chance of being found by the search engines and you’ll stand head and shoulders above other competing affiliates.

The five step system revealed in this affiliate training will guide you through all you need to know about affiliate marketing from finding a niche to setting up your first site. This system is easy and repeatable so you can use it in a variety of different niches, time and time again, in order to develop a substantial passive income.

Your first $100, step by step

For now, though, let’s just concentrate on making your first $100 online. In the first step, we’re going to look at how to find your niche and how to develop a profitable keyword list. Following that, we’ll discuss the technical aspects of setting up your affiliate blog.

Blogging is an easy tool to use for affiliate marketer and it has the added benefit of being great for search engine rankings.

Content is king online and in Section 4 we’ll go over a variety of different ways that you can create affiliate content to bring in readers and help you build credibility in your niche. Content is also important in section 5 where you’ll learn how to use articles to build traffic back to your website.

Finally, the last section is devoted to building free feeder sites to build additional credibility and drive even more traffic. Free feeder sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Blogger can be used to give you more presence online and really light your affiliate marketing traffic on fire.

Let’s get started!

Gathering the Essentials You’ll Need to Launch a Profitable Campaign

Launching a profitable affiliate marketing business all starts with finding the right niche. In this section, we’ll go over all of the necessary steps that you need to start making your affiliate blog and your feeder sites.

Niche research, keyword research and product research are absolutely essential to your success. These steps may take a while but they are necessary in order to have a strong foundation for your business.

Niche Research

Niche is a term used to describe a group of people who are very interested in the same thing. They are connected in some way based on their interests, conditions or circumstances.

While large companies focus their marketing efforts on large markets (McDonald’s markets to anyone who is hungry) as an affiliate marketer you want to drill down closer to find a small, passionate niche of a larger market.

Think small

Niche marketing requires that you think on a small scale. It’s better to target a market that has several thousand passionate people than one with hundreds of thousands of members. As an online marketer, you just don’t have the kind of resources that you’d need to market to large groups.

Finding a niche is as simple as thinking about popular topics and then drilling down. For example, gardening is a very popular topic. There are magazines and even television channels dedicated to gardening. However, it is a very large market and you’ll need to drill down to find your niche market.

Go beyond

Think about what kind of gardening people do. There’s herb gardening, vegetable gardening, flower gardening, organic gardening…the list goes on and on. Each of these specific types of gardening constitutes a niche.

You can even drill down further to find small sub-niches within these niches. For example, there is a relatively large market of people who are passionate about growing vegetables with heirloom seeds.

Brainstorming, please

You can probably brainstorm off the top of your head a few large markets and then with some Internet research drill them down into tiny niche markets. If you find yourself stuck for ideas, you can try a few different methods. First, you can visit sites like Google Zeitgeist or Squidoo Top Lenses in order to find search patterns and trends for different markets.

Magazines.com and Amazon.com are also two great resources for finding niches. You can bet if there is a magazine or a best selling book on the topic, you’re looking at a passionate niche. Browse through the best sellers and the most popular in different categories and jot down ideas.

Write down your ideas

As you visit these sites, you should write down niche ideas in a long list. Don’t evaluate them right now. Just get them written down and then you’ll have something to work with.

You can also get niche ideas from your own personal life. Are you passionate about a sport, a hobby or a topic? It could potentially be a great niche for you. Mine your own life and the life of your friends and family for niche ideas.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be passionate about the topic you are creating your site on. In fact, sometimes our passions don’t always create profits. But it doesn’t hurt to do a mental check of your life to see if any niche ideas pop up.

Time to evaluate

Once you’ve gathered a long list of niches, it’s time to evaluate them on a profitability basis. Not all niches have buyers and not all niches are conducive to affiliate programs. Scan through your list and ask yourself if people are going to be willing to pay for information or products related to the niche.

Remove any topics on which there is a lot of free information available (like children’s party games) or in which there is a resistance to spending money (like frugal living).

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• Finding the niche, products and keywords
• How to do keyword research
• How to research the competition
• Where to find affiliate products

After building a list of potentially profitable niches, you need to take your research to the next level and look at keywords.

Keywords are the key

Keywords are the terms that people use to describe the information they are looking for online. Whenever you type a word or a phrase into Google or Yahoo to look for something, that’s what I define as a keyword.

Fortunately, these search engines record information on popular searches so you can tell how often people are looking for information on specific topic.

Research Tools

Using keyword research tools you can find out how many people are looking for information on a niche and what specific keywords they are using to describe that niche.

There are many keyword research tools out there. Some are free and some cost money to join.

Since we’re trying to keep things low cost in this system, the best free keyword research tool to use is SEOBook’s Keyword finder.  This tool pulls results from the major search engines and gives you an in depth view of keyword term usage.

Start with general terms

To start doing your keyword research, put a general term for your niche into the keyword finder. For example, solar energy is pretty popular these days and many people are looking to use solar panels. By typing in solar panels into SEOBook, we see several different variations of the term.

When you look at keyword lists, you want to try to find related keywords within your niche keywords in order to make your site targeted.

Be targeted

If you’re creating a site on organic gardening, it’s best to focus on one aspect of organic gardening – like vegetables or flowers. This way all of your marketing will be very targeted and you’ll reap the rewards of targeted traffic.

So for our keyword list for solar panels, we see several terms that have to do with making your own solar panels or installing them yourself. This is certainly a good sub-niche within the niche of solar panels.

Write down the related terms for your sub-niche. In this case, it would be:

• “diy solar panels”
• “make solar panels”
• “cheap solar panels”
• “how to build solar panels”
• “build your own solar panels”
• “make your  own solar panels”
• “building solar panels”
• “home made solar panels”
• “do it yourself solar panels”
• “making solar panels”

These terms all have at least 30 searches per day based on the search engines reporting.

Gather you keywords

Obviously it’s best to stay with keywords that have more searches per day but you always want to get a long list of keywords to create your blog posts and your article marketing articles. At this point, you’ll want to rank your keywords in terms of their searches per month.

Create a document file on your computer and list your keywords in this order.

Start with 30 to 50

Try to find at least 30 to 50 keywords for your initial research list. If you need more keywords, you can go back and enter in one of the terms into the keyword research tool to find additional variations. For example, “make solar panels” produces several additional keyword phrases that would be good to use on your site.

Go through each of your top keywords and create a list of at least 50 keywords that have at least one search per day.

One or all at once?

Now, there are two schools of thought on this research. You can either work with one keyword off of your list at a time and, or you can do all of your keyword research at once.

If you go through your whole list at once, you’ll spend more time doing research on the front end, but you’ll have a ready list of niches to work.

It’s a personal choice, but it may save you time to do them all at once. If you can’t find enough keywords or the search numbers are really low for a particular niche, cross it off your list and move on to the next.

For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to pretend that we went through our entire list and have selected the do it yourself solar panel niche to work with first.

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• Finding the niche, products and keywords
• How to do keyword research
• How to research the competition
• Where to find affiliate products

Once you’ve gathered your list of keywords it’s time to look at the competition that is out there.

Don’t skip this

The competing sites for a particular keyword will determine how likely it is that you’ll be able to rank well and, subsequently, make money from your website. Do not skip this step!

Right now your keywords are ranked based on their searches. You need to find a main keyword that will serve as your “base” word. This keyword will be used for your URL as well as the main thrust of your marketing.

You may need to go low

Although it may seem like the keyword with the most searches per month would be a natural fit for this, this isn’t always the case. You may need to find a lower competition keyword so you can get your site ranked.

Armed with your list of 50 keywords, head to Google and begin typing in the phrases with quotes in order to see the competing results. The reason that you do it with quotes is because you want to make sure that you are looking at the sites that have been optimized for that particular phrase. This is your true competition.

For example, our keyword phrase with the most searches is “diy solar panels”. But that phrase has over a million competing pages!

There’s no way you’ll break into that top tier unless you spend years and years optimizing your pages. Although it will be helpful to have a post using the phrase “diy solar panels” on your site, you’ll need to find a different phrase as your base phrase.

It’s a numbers game

Poking around a bit, the phrase “how to make your own solar panels” looks like a good option. It has 14 searches per day according to the Google estimate and it has 11,000 competing pages. This is a good keyword term to use as the basis for our example affiliate site.

How many competing pages should there be? Generally speaking, anything around 10,000 is a great find. It is reasonable, however, to expect to break into a market that has 25,000 competing pages.

Obviously if you find terms with less than a few hundred competing pages you may have hit on a gold mine. I say may because competition is actually a good thing. Since people have been affiliate marketing for over a decade now, if there isn’t some competition for a phrase there’s probably a reason that is so.

Write down 20 to 30 terms

Write down the competing pages for all of you terms and throw out the terms that have too much competition. You should develop a list of 20 to 30 terms that have at least 500 searches per month and no more than 25,000 competing pages.

Divide the number of competing pages by the number of keyword searches to create a keyword index. Use this number to rank your keywords in the order that you will use them.

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• Finding the niche, products and keywords
• How to do keyword research
• How to research the competition
• Where to find affiliate products

Now that you’ve got a niche and your keywords, it’s time to find your affiliate products.

Although some affiliate marketers advocate only focusing on one product there’s no reason you can’t promote more than one in the same niche. In fact, many buyers who are interested in purchasing a product in the niche may appreciate getting a review of more than one product so they can make a more informed decision.

You have several options

There are several places you can find a product to promote on your site.

Affiliate networks are large sites that contain many products for you to promote. Three of the most popular are Clickbank.com, Paydotcom.com and CommissionJunction.com. You can search through the databases on these sites to find products that fit your niche.

Clickbank.com and Paydotcom.com specialize in information products and membership sites. If you are in the Internet marketing niche, Paydotcom.com is the best place to find products as many Internet marketing product creators prefer that system.

Clickbank.com has a variety of different products to choose from.

Alternative to Clickbank Search

Clickbank.com has a notoriously clunky search function which doesn’t always produce the results you are looking for.

You can use CB-Analytics. This site is not affiliated with Clickbank but it does show the Clickbank products available for your search terms much more easily.

Wanna get physical?

CommissionJunction.com is unique because it specializes in physical products and major companies, like Home Depot. If you are interested in selling physical products through your site Ebay.com and Amazon.com also have their own affiliate programs.

The Basic Guidelines

When you look for products to promote you should have a few basic guidelines in mind. If you are selling infoproducts, pay close attention to the sales page and the graphic presentation of the product. Does it look like something you would buy?

You can check the affiliate network’s stats to see how well the product is converting, meaning how many people are visiting the site compared to how many people are buying the product.

What are others saying?

For physical products, check the reviews on epinions.com or consumersearch.com. If you’re selling within the Amazon network, they also have their own feedback and ratings system.

Obviously if you have a choice between two products and one stands head and shoulders above the other, it’s a better bet to promote that product.

How much?

You’ll also want to take a look at the level of commission. Don’t pay attention to the sales price or percentage as much as the price per sale. A product that offers 30% on $97 is much better to promote than a product that has 75% on $19.

Time to build

Once you’ve picked your product or products, you’re ready to start building your site. Before you go on to the steps in the next section, be sure you’ve found the right niche, discovered your top keywords and evaluated the product.

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• Finding the niche, products and keywords
• How to do keyword research
• How to research the competition
• Where to find affiliate products

Creating a Home for Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

It’s time to start making your mark on the online world with your affiliate blog. In this chapter, we’ll run through all of the important pieces of creating a blog online.

Thank you, Wordpress

Don’t worry if you consider yourself to be a technophobe. Thanks to the Wordpress blogging platform it’s easy for even the newest person online to make a great looking site that is easy to update.

Start with Your Domain Name

In the last chapter, we referred to using your top ranked keyword as your domain name. You’ll want to use a phrase that has several searches but also not too much competition.

Use keywords or phrases

Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo take the domain name into account when determining results ranking, so it’s a good idea to use a competitive keyword phrase when you are registering a domain.

There are several choices in domain registrars, but I prefer GoDaddy for several reasons. They offer very good prices for domain names and they often have special discount codes so you can get your domain for an even lower price.

Domain name preferences

Start by visiting their site and typing in your top level keyword phrase. The system will spit back out all of the potential domain names. Try your hardest to get a .com name, with .org and .net being the next top choices.

If you can’t get your keyword phrase as is, try using hyphens or underscores in order to register the domain.

For example, if howtomakesolarpanels.com is taken try how-to-make-solar-panels.com. It’s better to have a domain with hyphens and a .com than the exact phrase and an .org.

All you need is the domain

Go through the checkout process and buy the domain. Ignore the offers for hosting and all of the other “one time offers” that they throw your way. All you need is the domain for now. There are better and cheaper solutions for hosting that you’ll appreciate much more.

Get a Hosting Account

The domain name is the address for your website, but the hosting plan is where it lives. It’s the space online where you’ll store the files that will make your website work. For hosting, I suggest you use HostGator (affiliate link – affiliate status disclosure).

You can get unlimited domains hosted for just $9.95 a month, plus you get a $50 Adwords credit in case you want to use pay per click marketing to promote your site.

Sign up for the hosting plan and then have a technician walk you through attaching your new domain at GoDaddy to your hosting plan. Their tech help can walk you through everything via chat or on the phone, so I’m not going to waste space by going over these steps.

You could of course watch this Hostgator support video: Changing Name Servers.

(You’ll find a huge collection of Hostgator instruction videos by clicking here.)

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• How to build your first affiliate blog
• Installing Wordpress the easy way
• Tweaking your Affiliate blog
• Time to enter you affiliate links

Once you’ve gotten your domain name linked up, you need to login to your cpanel and click on the Fantastico button. It looks like a blue smiley face. This will help you install Wordpress onto your site.

Simple installation process

Just click on the Wordpress link within Fantastico and set it up to place a Wordpress blogging system on your domain name. (Hostgator support video: Installing Wordpress via Fantastico)

You can login to your Wordpress admin panel by visiting yourdomainname.com/wp-admin (obviously substituting your domain name in the place of “yourdomainname”). This is the backend of your Wordpress site and where you’ll be able to create posts and adjust the look of your website.

Finding a Wordpress Theme

A theme is the visual presentation of your Wordpress blog. Themes come in all shapes and sizes and you can find them to fit virtually any mood that you want to set for your blog. It doesn’t matter whether you will be posting on candy or cancer treatments, you can find a theme out there that will work for your site.

Use a free theme for now

There are some paid options out there for themes that offer a few more bells and whistles, but for our purposes you really only need to use free themes. Fortunately, there is a plethora of free themes available to choose from.
Themes can be found from a variety of different Wordpress sites, but here are a few of the absolute best to try:

• Word Press Themes Base
• Free Word Press Themes
• Instant Shifts’ list of 140+ Brilliant Free Wordpress Themes
• Smashing Magazine’s 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes
• Theme Splice

It may take some time to browse through these different themes, but once you find one you can use them again and again for your various purposes. You should look for an uncluttered header that can be adapted to your niche. You’ll also need at least two columns, although a three column them works best because you can fit in more advertising or an opt in list (we’ll talk about those in a few moments).

Installing the theme

Download the theme and save it your hard drive. Then unzip it and add it to the themes folder on your domain. Inside of the Wordpress admin area, go to appearance and your theme should be there for selection. The theme will automatically load when you click on it. (Hostgator support video: Managing themes in Wordpress)

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• How to build your first affiliate blog
• Installing Wordpress the easy way
• Tweaking your Affiliate blog
• Time to enter you affiliate links

There are dozens of different variations that you can use to customize your blog. But for now you only need to know a few key distinctions.

(If you want to learn more about the various Wordpress settings, please feel free to download the document below:)

Download and Read More: Wordpress Resources

A collection of resources that makes Wordpress even more amazing

(Right-click here or on the
PDF icon and select “save as”)

First, you need to change the permalinks so they reflect the title of your blog posts and not the date information, as they are set up to do.

Click on Settings followed by Permalinks. Click on the Custom setting and then enter the following: “/%postname%” without the quotes. This will make your post titles appear like this: http://www.mywebsitename.com/post-title instead of http://www.mywebsitename.com/11-09-09.

Don’t forget to build a list

You’ll also need to have room for an opt-in box for an e-mail marketing list. Building an e-mail marketing list is one of the most essential parts of building a long term relationship with the niche. If you end up building several different websites within the same niche, you can use the same e-mail marketing list.

E-mail marketing is a topic that deserves its own ebook, but the basics are you set up an account with an autoresponder program like Aweber (affiliate link – affiliate status disclosure).

Aweber has a flat fee per month and you can have as many e-mail marketing lists as you want, so it is a good option for affiliate marketers. Once you join Aweber, you login to your account, create a list and create a web form.

You copy and paste the web form into a blank text widget that is in the sidebar of your template (AWeber video: How to integrate my blog with AWeber)

Give something away for free

Now you just need to offer your website visitors something attractive so that they will sign up for your list. Typically, you’ll give away a free ebook or e-course, but it depends on your niche and how much writing you’d like to do.

Use Widgets

While you’re in the widgets section, you’ll also want to make sure that the most recent posts and categories are displayed in your side bars, as well as a few extra text widgets. These text widgets can be used to display block ads if your template doesn’t already have block ads in place.

Although you can use image affiliate ads on your affiliate blog, the bulk of your advertising is going to come through text weeks within your quality content.

The next section will show you how to make (or buy) content that will bring in your first $100. But first, you need to make sure that you are getting credit for the traffic you are sending to the host website.

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• How to build your first affiliate blog
• Installing Wordpress the easy way
• Tweaking your Affiliate blog
• Time to enter you affiliate links

Your affiliate links are perhaps the most important part of the process. You don’t want to simply set up your blog and send traffic to the main site. You need to use your affiliate link so you will get credit for the sale.

Read the instructions

Depending on the affiliate program you are using, the set up process might be a little different from what is being explained here. However, most affiliate networks have extensive instructions on how to get the correct link for the product.

Build your links

Once you register for the affiliate network and sign into the site you can navigate to the product listing within the network and find the place to build your unique affiliate link. Alternatively, some products have their own affiliate pages where they offer instructions on building your affiliate link using your affiliate network ID.

Look for tools

After building your link, you can use it as a text link in your blog posts or link it to an image of the product to use in the sidebar of your blog, as described above. Smart product creators will give their affiliates tools like product images in order to help them promote the product better.

In the next section, we’ll go over the basics of getting content onto your affiliate blog that will not only increase your presence in the search engine rankings but translate to clicks that will lead to sales.

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• How to build your first affiliate blog
• Installing Wordpress the easy way
• Tweaking your Affiliate blog
• Time to enter you affiliate links

How to Create Blog Posts that Draw in Visitors

There’s one statement that rings true time and time again in online marketing – content is king. With other forms of websites you have to worry about several different types of pages but when it comes to your affiliate blog, you just need to worry about blog posts.

300 to 500 words

Blog posts are short, tightly focused pieces of content that are from 300 to 500 words long. They can be shorter or longer, but for the purposes of your affiliate blog you’ll need to keep your posts within this range. In this chapter we’ll cover the type of content you’ll need to be writing, how to set up your blog to run on autopilot and how to make content creation simple and cheap.

Using Keywords and Doing Research

The content for your blog should be based on the keywords that you found in section two. In order to draw traffic in from the search engines and write about topics that your audience will find interesting, you need to base your articles on your keyword research exclusively. Don’t just write about any topic related to your niche… you’ll be wasting valuable space.

Get some inspiration

One of the easiest ways to find relevant topics to your keywords is to head over to Ezinearticles.com or Goarticles.com. These are both article directories that republish content written by other authors. Please don’t misunderstand me…I am not telling you to rip off other people’s content! Just look at the titles of the articles to get ideas and then do your own research. The list of article titles will help get your creative juices flowing.
As for research, you can find a variety of sources on your topic from different places on the ‘net. The following general research sites are a good place to start, and then you can begin narrowing your focus as you see fit:

• Wikipedia
• About
• Ehow

Short and tight

Although you can certainly create blog posts that deal with a general overview of the subject, you should know that blog posts often work best when they are organized as lists or how to articles. Short, tight paragraphs are more attractive to the reader than long blocks of text.

Each paragraph of the blog post should include your keyword phrase for that blog post. You should also include your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post. For example, if you are writing a blog post about “small business taxes” your title would be “Small Business Taxes: 5 Things You Don’t Know But Should”. The phrase “small business taxes” would appear once per paragraph, about once every 100 words.

What to Include in Your Content

The goal of the content on your blog is to refer to the reader to your affiliate product. That being such, you want to make sure that your posts are worth reading but they don’t include the entire story. Think about the problem that your affiliate product solves. Try to create your blog post so that the reader will see the natural solution is clicking on the link and buying the product.

“Please be gentle…”

There is a subtle difference between creating content that is hard selling and creating content that gently moves the reader in a particular direction. You must make sure their next natural step is to click on your link.

For example, you are in the debt reduction niche, your article is “5 Steps to Reducing Your Credit Card Debt” and your product is software that helps people figure out the best way to pay off their credit cards and save a lot of interest. Within the article, you’ll want to mention tracking your debt as a good way to pay off your credit card bills. You can mention that using a tracking software product is a good idea and link to it.

The problem solver

You can also write entire blog posts about common problems that people experience with your particular niche. You can emphasize the problems that people commonly have and then present your product as the obvious solution toward the end of the post.

Either one of these methods will create content that not only fills your blog but makes sure that the readers are interested in learning more about the products that you are promoting. Be sure to write at least one blog post for each of the twenty keywords on your list. Once you’ve reached the end of that list, you should start from the top again and create more blog posts on those keywords with a slightly different slant.

Affliate guide

Articles in this section:

• Creating content for your affiliate blog
• Using cheap PLR content on your blog