Model No.2 – 5 Steps Towards Affiliate Marketing

25 Nov,

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Selling products someone else created can work out just great. While the common model of affiliate marketing is widely acknowledged, it’s very hard (again) to find complex information provided free of charge.

Surprise! That’s going to be our topic today – 5 Steps Towards Affiliate Marketing…

keyword research
choosing a product
getting a website
driving traffic
profiting & testing

Before we embark on our adventure, let’s get something clear – rest assured that whenever you click a link in this whole article, there are no affiliate commissions involved – you’re here for information now and we understand that.

Step 1 – Keyword Research

Last time we said that keyword research is common for all types of businesses and guess what – we were not kidding.

It’s blatant that before you enter the wild jungle of affiliate marketing, you need to know what keywords to target.

We’ll be using our favorite internet marketing tool, Market Samurai. The exact process has been covered in the Business Model No.1, please follow the link for further reference.

Step 2 – Choosing A Product

Have a niche? Good. Now you need to find yourself a new virtual friend that will make you money, a.k.a. a product.

There are a few grand affiliate marketplaces:

ClickBank
PayDotCom
Amazon
Commission Junction

We will focus on ClickBank, because frankly – that’s where we work and any information provided about other networks would be wild guesses at best. Shouldn’t matter that much, because you can find everything you need on ClickBank…

How can you choose a product on CB?

You can make a qualified decision based on several indicators:

To ensure proper understanding, let’s say a few words about each of these attributes.

Popularity – basically, you want to stay the hell away from the most popular products, because they either have big competition or a few big players who simply know things you don’t. Choose the golden middle path here.

Gravity – we have dedicated an entire article to the topic of ClickBank gravity, please follow the link for further reference.

Reputation – It’s not something you can calculate or put on paper, but if you can find either a very useful product or something the big names in the market are launching, that might be your life savior.

One small hint here – don’t hesitate to subscribe to a couple of newsletters to see what successful guys are using. Let’s face it, there are some basics you can’t and shouldn’t reinvent and this is one of them… Learn from others.

Commission Rate – a.k.a. how much of the price goes to you. It’s a quite simple criterion actually, the higher the better. Don’t neglect it in your analysis.

Sales Letter – this is very important.

Do not promote anything that is an obvious gibberish!

There is a phenomenon that we call “dirty money”. That’s money you make following the saying “the end justifies the means”.

It doesn’t.

We went down this road for one week, with genuine intentions at first. But then laziness and greediness took the upper hand and we started to produce crappy reviews of crappy products… until we came to our senses.

Luckily, we didn’t make any sale, so technically nobody got harmed and the only thing that hurts is our conscience.

This is an extremely internal information, but it’s also extremely important to let you guys know that you really should stay away from some things – and this is one of them.

Now, back to the original sales letter thing – always check it out before you decide to promote anything. Look for:

unrealistic claims
poor grammar
exact numbers

The best thing you can do is to buy the product yourself or try to ask for a review copy so that you really know that it’s useful and it is going to help most of the persons that buy it.

In fact, one of the safest bets are internet marketing tools – jut because they are tools and they are meant to help people.

We marketers are here to help our customers, not to screw them over.

Step 3 – Creating A Website

Have you ever heard the famous sentence “you don’t need a website!”?

Even if you didn’t, you should know that while it’s technically true, in reality it’s like playing soccer blindfolded and with only one leg.

We are going to rightfully assume that having your own website is a necessity. Lucky for you, it’s very easy to get yourself your own site up and running in a matter of hours.

You need to make a crucial decision before taking any particular steps:

your own domain & hosting
blogging platforms you don’t control (Blogger, WP.com,…)

What we recommend is to definitely get your domain and hosting. Once again, we’re forced to make a reference to the Busines Model No.1 – Website Flipping article (Step 2).

Frankly, there’s just one reason which alone should convince you to have your own site:

Do you really want to wake up one morning only to find out that say 6 months of your daily effort are gone and you’ve just disappointed hundreds or even thousands of your visitors, customers and fans?

Didn’t think so.

You may consider your own website as your central office, serving as a headquarters for all of your projects…

… which is exactly what we have in mind with the Darthopia website.

Before you start driving any traffic to your new virtual office, you need to make yet another decision, this time how do you want to run your site:

active blog
passive database

What’s the difference?

Active Blog – again, more or less Darthopia. You need to keep a very decent balance between purely informative posts and posts where you’re trying to sell… I believe our ratio is something like 1:20 in favor of pure information.

Passive Database – you create only a handful of pages, created for the sole purpose of convincing a prospect to buy or take whatever action you desire (click on ad, subscribe to a mailing list,…). You then focus only on the traffic.

We could sum it up like this:

Step 4 – Driving Traffic

The Alpha and the Omega. No matter how skilled you are, how much you want to help people or how good your offer is, no traffic means you are erased from existence like you were never born.

It is this part where most affiliate marketers struggle and thus it’s vitally important that you really get a firm grasp of as much traffic techniques as you can.

Before we go any further, let’s define two necessary terms:

conversion rate – says how many visitors actually do what you want, 1% conv. rate stands for 1 person out of 100 buying something

quality of traffic – we can’t really use your grandfather on a site targeting Eminem

You think the example with the old man was ridiculous? Yet people often wonder why it isn’t working how it should – it doesn’t work precisely because of grandfathers coming where they have no interest of being at all…

Driving traffic is an incredibly complex task, in fact it’s so vast and important that our whole next post will be dedicated to traffic.

For now, let’s just have a quick ride to get you started till the next week:

article directories
blogging platforms
comments
forums

Article Directories - well known, simple, working. Could you ask for more? Basically, you’ll write an informative(!) article and in exchange for the information to provide, you get a resource box so that you can lure people to your empire.

We couldn’t possibly offer more detailed and thorough information than you can find in the Warrior Forum threads here and here.

Blogging Platforms – Only a few points here:

Posterous
The Challenge, Module 3, Day 4
Backlinks + Traffic

Ed Dale’s commentary about Posterous

Comments – being the first one to comment on a popular blog can actually work very well in terms of traffic. Please refer to the Blogging Tips – CommentLuv Plugin article for more information.

Forums – forget about the usual way of having links in the signature. What about if you got people talking about you instead?

Just make sure you give quality responses and always mention stuff of someone else if you have to – that will build you credibility. It’s a bit long-term, but benefits vigorously exceeds costs.

Step 5 – Profiting And Testing

Where are we now?

we have some keywords
we have a product related to those keywords
we set up a website and chose a model for it
we’re driving traffic

The last thing that remains is your conversion rate and how to improve it. Keep in mind that you need a larger number before jumping to conclusions – say 1,000 direct views of your affiliate offer.

Some of the few things that might increase your conversion rate are:

persuasive language
videos
excellent graphic & design
top content

You just have a few seconds to create an impression that it’s YOU that your prospect has been desperately looking for all day long.

It’s obvious you won’t do your best the first time (unless you’re extremely lucky). That’s why you need to constantly monitor your conversion rate and make changes, such as:

changing the word “astonishing” for “amazing”
making your top headline red instead of black
choosing a different font combination
adding more bullet lists

The best tool for such analysis is probably our good ol’ buddy Google Analytics.

Your opportunities are vast. There is no room for complacency when it comes to business – you can always be a little better. Remember that.

Conclusion

It’s painfully obvious that there could be hours and hours of debate over the topic of affiliate marketing.

But our goal is much more humble than to cover the whole marketing industry. We just want to give you enough information and advice to get started.

It’s not so important whether or not we succeeded, but if you’re willing to take action and at least try the processes outlined here.

It’s all about taking action on a daily basis and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you will be making money online.

Thank you for reading and see you next Wednesday!

3 Article Marketing Tricks,

Let’s assume you have the courage and skills to enter Article Marketing. There are countless guides and training courses about this matter, so here and now you’re going to read some, shall we say, less usual stuff. Care to receive 3 Article Marketing Tricks?

Trick No.1 – Backlinks or Traffic?

Article directories can serve two basic purposes:

* traffic
* backlinks

Just a side note – it has been specifically explained in the 3 Article Marketing Myths that there is no such a thing as a duplicate content penalty.

So, with that being said, there is no problem in getting an Article Submission Software (ASS) and distribute one article to literally hundreds of article directories to gain backlinks.

On the other hand, you can expect any reasonable traffic only from a few directories, such as:

* EzineArticles
* ArticleBase
* GoArticles
* ArticleDashboard

You don’t need to make a decision like “either backlinks or traffic”. You can do both.

No.2 – Market Your Articles

You know, the phrase “article marketing” has a word marketing in it. While you can be successful with just submitting your article and forgetting about it, it’s not a bad idea to tell the world that you’ve written something.

You can use the good ol’ methods…

* web 2.0
* forums
* blog links
* you get the idea…

Before you even write an article, you should do your homework (a.k.a. keyword research), so you’ll get a natural SEO help.

If you don’t get 1,548 visits in 10 minutes, don’t panic – decent results can take weeks or even months.

Trick No.3 – Law of Large Numbers

Have you ever had anything to do with statistics? It’s a mathematical science, telling us what can we expect with sufficient number of observations.

The more articles you write the more exposure and views you get, it’s that simple. It’s more than possible to submit 300-500 articles per year. Can you see the bigger picture?

When you think about it, keyword research is more than crucial in the long term. Should you do it well, even when you stop driving traffic to your articles, you’ll still receive some organic visitors.

It wouldn’t be bad to have ~400 well researched and written articles in one place; advertising one thing; all of this after just one year, would it…?

Thank you for reading!

Related Posts:

* 3 Article Marketing Myths
* Content Syndication – 5 Facts You Need To Know
* Get Traffic To Dominate Your Niche – Top 6 Techniques You Should Master
* PLR Articles – Good or Bad?
* Market Samurai Tour – Find Content Module

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