Affiliate Marketing is the hot buzz now a day. People are earning millions of dollars per month with affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing is promoting a specific product or service on your website and earning commissions whenever the referred user makes a purchase based on your recommendations. This Affiliate Program Guide is your source to a successful affiliate marketer. There are many different ways of earning affiliate commissions but the best way is to find a niche and create a viewers interest rich, content-rich and keyword-rich website on a specific subject and starting earning with affiliate links and AdSense ads.

STEP 1: Set A Goal:

“If you don’t know where you’re going you’ll end up somewhere else.” So it better if you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you’re going.

Let’s start with a reasonable goal. Let us say you aim to earn a $100 in your first month from affiliate commissions and AdSense. We have set first month’s target amount low, because it’s important that you believe you can do this. Achieve small successes first, see the money in your hands and then increase your goals. This guide will give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.

STEP 2: Find Your Niche:

Let us say you’re considering building a site about hiking boots, type “hiking boots” (using quotation marks) into Google and Yahoo! and carefully examine the top 10 sites which appear in the search results.

They’re your real competitors. Can you create a better, more interesting, more useful site? Can you think of a new angle, a new approach? Do those top 10 sites all have high pagerank- say 6 or more? If so, you’ll have to work really hard to get in the top 10.

Let’s say the top 3 sites in Google are PageRank 8, 7 and 6. If so, you’ll probably have to work hard for a couple of years or more to outrank them. I’m not saying it cannot be done, but it will require either a great deal of work, or a very innovative, eye-catching approach.

You can quickly check the PageRank of your potential competitors by using Seochat’s free online tool – http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search . Type in “hiking boots” or whatever and you’ll be able to see the PageRank of the top 10 sites.

Do those sites all have the phrase in the title? (The title is the words that appear at the very top of your screen when you visit a site.) If not, you may be able to beat them.

How many links do your potential competitors have?

Do your potential competitors all have thousands of links to them? This is important, because links are important to search engines. You need good, relevant links to your site. To find out how many sites are linking to a site, use the free Yahoo! Site Explorer. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – and login (set up a free account if necessary).

Type the URL of the site you want to explore.
Click on “Explore URL”.
Click on “Inlinks”.

Modify your search to make it more useful. Select the options to show Inlinks “except from this domain” and “entire site”. This will exclude internal links and show you all external links that Yahoo! knows about to ANY page of the website.

If your potential sites have thousands of links to them, they’re likely to be very tough competitors.

Don’t decide definitely on a niche topic until you’ve taken the next two steps…

STEP 3. Choose a profitable niche

Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you’re considering. (The free trial at Wordtracker is fairly restricted. You need more than that. I find Wordtracker so useful I have an annual subscription. However, you can get a cheap one-week subscription and do an awful lot of research in one week.)

Because you’re planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdWords.

You’re going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don’t rely on guesswork.
You must do this keyword research BEFORE you start building your web site. That’s critically important.

Find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you’re interested in. Here’s how.

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and play around with the free Keyword Tool.

For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as “recipe” and click on “Get More Keywords”. Pretend you’re willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows – 100. (You can choose any currency. I choose US.)

Over on the right side of the page, make sure that “Cost and position estimates” is selected.
The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases.

Try entering a different word, say “debt” or “free”, click on “Re-calculate” and watch how the CPC changes.

You don’t HAVE to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.

In July 2008, Google improved its free keyword tool, making it much more useful. It now shows you the approximate number of monthly searches done at Google for any keywords you type in. So you can now do some fast, reliable keyword research there free. So this is a very good place to start your keyword research, using real search numbers from Google.

If you use Site Build It to build your site, you’ll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn’t have thought of without it.

Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you’ll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.

Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.
For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see:

https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

Advertisers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear on your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you’re planning to create and look at their AdSense ads.

For more accurate research, you can also use the free AdSense preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.

Don’t make any firm decision on your niche until you’ve taken the next step…
Research affiliate merchants

STEP: 4. Research affiliate merchants

Before you make a firm decision on a topic for your site, you’ll need to do research to see if there are suitable affiliate products which match your topic.

You want affiliate merchants that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they’re good at selling. Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.

If you’re lucky, you’ll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions. You’ll earn repeat commissions when “your” customers make more purchases.
Build a useful, interesting website on your niche

STEP 5: Build a useful, interesting website on your niche

Here’s an very important step. Many newcomer affiliates who fail do so because they have overlooked its importance.

Don’t just build a website. Build a useful, interesting website on your niche.

One of the best ways is to build a site which solves people’s problems. Useful sites also often help their visitors decide which products to buy.

Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.
Show your personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. You need to connect with your visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like.

There’s no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a website. For that, you’ll need a good instruction manual.

If you’re short of money, you can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies.
You’ll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual.

Add affiliate links

STEP 6: Add affiliate links

As you write the articles for your site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as you write the articles. Speak to that visitor.
Your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy.

One successful technique is to gradually lead your visitor towards a purchase. Start by outlining a problem, discuss a good solution that has worked for you, and end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, “Find out more here.”

Your task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that’s the merchant’s job) but to presell, to warm up your visitors. You want your visitors in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when they arrive at the merchant’s site.

For superb advice on preselling, I strongly recommend you join Ken Evoy’s 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. It’s free to join.

Ken is an absolute whiz at preselling and he’s renowned for working extremely hard to help his affiliates succeed. He has a superb program. It’s been No.1 in my Top 10 for several years. I earn five-figure monthly commissions from this affiliate program.

STEP 7: Place AdSense ads on your site

If you have a good, popular site, it’s remarkably easy to make good money with Google AdSense. AdSense is free to join.
Get good quality links to your site

STEP 8: Get good quality links to your site

Without links to your site, your site won’t be found in the search engines. So you MUST get links to your site, if possible from “authority” sites – ones that have lots of links to them.

First, link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to you.

This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular.

Now you see why I said build a useful, interesting site. If you do that, people are more likely to link to your site.

Reciprocal links should be only a small part of your marketing strategy – not your whole marketing strategy.

Even better than reciprocal links are one-way links. Some of these one-way links techniques are fairly advanced and require considerable work. Most of your competitors will be too lazy to do them, so you’ll have a big advantage if you do. They can make the difference between a hobby site and a serious, very profitable business.

STEP 9: Anchor text

You’ll also need to understand the importance of anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site.

STEP 10: List your site in major directories and niche directories in your industry.

You probably already know about Yahoo! (good but expensive) and DMOZ (often takes months to get into).
Here are some more directories (some charge a fee):
Gimpsy
Skaffe
Joeant
Business.com
GoGuides
SevenSeek
ThisIsOurYear
Looksmart (probably too expensive)
BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind

Guides to web directories
David Mahler has a Guide to Web Directories. It’s a good list of recommended web directories.
Here’s another list: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php

STEP 11: Place your articles on other websites

Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them (more challenging.

This step isn’t absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if you do it. Now you understand why it was so important that you chose a topic that was easy to write about.

STEP 12: Add more pages and get more links.

Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (you do research at Wordtracker for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to your site.
Make friends with other web site owners, and more people will link to you…

STEP 13: Be patient.

If your new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and you’ll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.
You’re likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. You’re likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk.

Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If you’re persistent and get the details right, the process I’m describing works beautifully.

Learn something new every day. Do something to improve your business every day. If you do this, success is inevitable.

Expect to see signs of success

STEP 14: Expect to see signs of success.

Eventually, because of all the links to your site on other sites, Google, Yahoo! and MSN will find your site and start sending you traffic.

Perhaps around the three-month or four-month stage you’ll be receiving 100 visitors a day. Visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to you and asking you to link to them.

Keep at it. You’re just getting warmed up.

STEP 15: The payoff…

About six months down the road, after little expense but quite a lot of hard work and research, you hit your magical $300 a month mark, from affiliate sales and from AdSense ads on your site.

Depending on the niche you’ve chosen and the skills you’ve learned, you might earn considerably more than $300.

Perhaps after 12 months, you’ll be earning $500 to $1,000 a month from your site.
The checks keep coming in, month after month, even when you take a little vacation. You start telling friends how easy affiliate marketing is, and are puzzled when they’re not convinced.
Of course, it’s not really easy. It just seems easy after you’ve done the hard work.
…or the NON-payoff

If you’ve merely scanned the instruction manual and jumped right in without doing any research and built a “Make Money on the Internet” site, you’ll probably earn very little. A search on Google for “make money” displays more than 4 million pages. If one of those is yours, you have a LOT of competition.

If you did this and it isn’t working for you, go back to step 1 and start again.

Tweak your site

STEP 16: Tweak your site

To boost your conversion rate (your visitor-to-sales ratio), try little experiments, one thing at a time.
Try changing the heading on a page, the words, the colors, the placement of your links. With each change wait until about 1,000 visitors have seen the change, and monitor your affiliate commissions to see if they rise or fall.

You do this because you understand that if 1% of your visitors are buying and tiny changes boost your success rate to 2%, you’ll DOUBLE your commissions.

STEP 17: The future

When you reach your goal of $300 a month, you wonder whether you should expand your site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an auto responder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell … and turn it into a portal. You dream big. Perhaps you even start dreaming of having your own affiliates promoting your reports for you…

Or perhaps you just research another little overlooked niche and start on your next simple little, low-maintenance money-generating site.

It can be done. The main ingredient needed is persistence. Been there, done that, and I have a very nice lifestyle to prove it.

The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that’s all you earn, you’ve done something “wrong”. You haven’t chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, you haven’t built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, you haven’t learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or you haven’t attracted enough good quality links to your site.

That’s the wonderful thing about this business. You can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don’t make TOO many mistakes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 11:17 am and is filed under Make Money Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.