Getting an Affiliate Marketing Plan into Operation 101
Are you trying to make money with affiliate marketing?
This post will share some things I have learned over the years in this business. First off, if you have not been able to succeed yet, it is not your fault. People say a lot of things. Marketers selling Make Money products say a lot of things. It is a very competitive business.
You face stiff competition for most of the better selling affiliate products. Especially make money ebooks and membership sites. Hundreds if not thousands are already established and getting traffic. Many have huge email lists to offer promos to. This is tough. Sure you can get the occasional sale but to get consistent income is a long battle if you do what everyone else is doing.
If you had a ton of money, you could get a quicker start. By buying ads, getting others to do the writing you need, building sites for you or even buying an established niche site.
Its a catch-22.
You need money to get big fast. You are just getting scraps if you do this part time and can’t afford to buy advertising and outsourcers. So everyone starting out is just like you. They do months of work and get a few sales a month. Many can’t earn enough to even get that first clickbank check and they have to sit and watch Clickbank nibble away the money they did earn!
So how would I recommend you start making money selling affiliate products?
I will share a plan that works almost everytime.
First thing:
You can’t do everything at once. Don’t try to set up 10 blogs in 10 different niches. It just divides your results because you only have so much time to work. Spend it all on one site. Focus all your attention and work on that one site. Sure you can add some sites or blogs to support your focused site but don’t get into a bunch of different niches. Get one thing going and making money and then you can branch out to something else.
By focusing you efforts, you will see results much faster. Plus you will have time to become a real expert on the niche.
Second;
I have to stress trying to sell make money products before you start making money will come across in all your writings. So don’t try to fake it, wait til later. Besides that, the make money niche is packed with experienced marketers. Marketers who have already made a name for themselves and built a following.
Is someone going to buy something you recommend? They don’t know you. They usually don’t trust you. The guru has a list, has expensive bonuses to give away and has name recognition. In this niche, people search for the biggest bonus pack or they read your review and then go buy avoiding your aff link. It’s a losing game believe me I have tried and tried. I can get a few sales but nothing like a guru can. I rarely even write a review for any make money product anymore. People don’t buy through your link unless you pay them with a huge bonus.
What should you do?
Pick a large main niche. Like Golf, Health, Beauty, Fitness or Finance.
Build a blog for that whole niche. You have unlimited topics to talk about now. Don’t go for a super small niche like golf drivers, lose weight or credit cards. With a large niche blog, you can talk about all the small niches while building an authority site. The key is this is all you have to work on. You don’t have 15 little sites to market and promote or build content for.
It is all on one big topic. Only one site to get backlinks to. One site to work on. MUCH EASIER and you can stay focused.
You can build that site into a powerhouse in no time. Just keep finding keyword phrases and write a post about them.
Don’t get your new authority site sandboxed. Don’t build a huge backlink campaign right away. Do it slow and regular. A few new links a week is natural. 50 new links is starting to look spammy.
Don’t start a brand new site and immediately put affiliate links on it. Test if for yourself. Build a new site and leave affiliate links out. Build another site with affiliate links. I have done this and your site without affiliate links will rank higher for longer. I had one site doing great and as soon as I added affiliate links, that site dropped out of google.
Build your site up over 2 months. Watch your rankings and traffic. Keep on building slow backlinks and adding content. Get this authority site established and getting steady traffic. Now you can start adding affiliate links. Get the traffic first. Then monetize.
More suggestions:
Make your site more sticky. Get social. Use your comments section to start conversations. Answer questions. The more comments on your site, the more your visitors will start writing comments for you. You need to get this started. Don’t do this all at once. Go into your blog every day and add a comment or two to some of your posts. Come back in a couple days and continue the comment conversation. Use pennames and get the ball rolling. Be controversial, ask for help and people will respond.
Caveats: Nothing says fake like 10 comments posted within minutes or even on the same day. Stagger your commenting so it looks natural.
Blog comments are something Google loves to see.
The better quality your content is the more visitors Google will send you. Spend some time and be valuable.
Ok so we covered focusing on one big authority site.
Here is a plan that works well:
1. Research and pick a large niche(lots of products, lots of advertisers, desperate customers)
2. Register a domain name. Don’t limit yourself with the domain name. Make it a Top Level Niche name.
3. Get hosting, setup site and blog (wordpress) Clean uncluttered theme.
4. Choose about 5 topics you are going to cover first. These are your categories/pages so set your categories and then write a 400 word page for each topic. You will link to your related posts on these pages later as you add content.
5. Now pick the first topic you want to work on and do some keyword research. Find
a. 35 lower search volume/low competition keywords
b. 40 medium search volume/medium competition keywords
c. 4 high volume/high competition keywords
Start writing posts for the 35 keywords. Sprinkle the other medium/high volume keywords in those posts where you can.
You can pick 35 keywords total for your 5 topics if you want. 5 or 6 for each topic so you get content for everything started. Or you can do 35 for each topic. Depends on your time available.
Write everything and save them for publish later. You want your content to post daily. Google loves daily blog posts. Schedule your posts for the whole month. Get a backlog of content ready so you can take a day off or even a week. Your scheduled content will do the work for you.
Ok now you have your blog started. Now just keep your content growing. Lots of tips, news, ideas, advice. Need content ideas? Go to a niche forum or Yahoo Answers and see what people are asking. Answer these questions with a blog post. Go to press release sites and dig for related content. Spin the press releases you find and blog them.
This will probably have taken you a month. Now it is time to get search engine notice.
That means backlinks.
Do this slow don’t get 100 links and then stop. Get a few a day, or a few a week. Stick to a schedule so you are steadily growing links to your site. Be random but steady growth is what you want.
Don’t you think Google can see a brand new site suddenly getting a ton of links? Yes they can. Does a normal website that just started instantly start getting links? Rarely. A normal site doesn’t get any links for months. Google just found it. How would anyone else find it yet?
A real new site slowly builds content, visitors, links and authority. So don’t rush this. Sure you can speed things up by posting awesome valuable content. Linkbaits. Things that are so good, people will do your backlinking for you. Give away good stuff. Reports, data, stories and useful tools for your niche.
A good backlinking plan:
First month-
Get 15 articles (500 words) written or write them yourself.
Submit 5 to each of the following (ezinearticles, submityourarticle.com and isnare.com) Isnare and Submityourarticle are paid. Buy isnare credits before you submit the articles so they distribute them and join Submityourarticle.com it is worth it. They distribute your article all over the place. You don’t have to waste time spinning and submitting all over. Time saver.
Write 2 or 3 press releases (300 words) Submit them to 2 press release sites. Link to your top quality posts. Announce them. This is what normal businesses do.
Second month-
Write 4 press releases for 4 more of your best posts.
Have 20 articles written and submit them as before.
Continue this every month if possible.
Third month-
Press releases and articles PLUS develop 5 Web 2.0 properties for you niche.(a few articles on each linking back to your site)
Optional: write 20 more articles and submit to the top 10 article directories. 2 unique articles to each directory.
After this take a look at your traffic stats and keep doing what is working.
Now you should see yourself in the search rankings and should be getting growing traffic. Now is the time to start adding monetization. Add some aff links, recommend some products.
You can add a opt in form and start building your own list. Write up a couple free reports. Give one away no strings attached on your blog(offer your best report on a squeeze page) Get them to join.
An email list is truly the ticket. They take awhile to build so when you first start. Simply have a welcome message and then a 7 day ecourse about your niche. Free info no selling. The course is just to give them something valuable so they start to trust you. After that you want to simply broadcast a weekly newsletter. Have a few recommended products/sites for your monetization in each newsletter. Put them in different spots in each issue. Write them like content not like sales pitches.
Add this email list to your site as soon as you can get it setup. No penalty for having a newsletter.
Use the newsletter to monetize. You can add a few affiliate links to your site but really the sales come from your subscribers. You will get more search engine traffic and more people will link to your site if you don’t have an affiliate link spam fest going on.
Couple more tips:
Use images on your posts. Have a nice looking colorful header image designed. If your site starts taking off, make it look great. It helps. Get a custom theme when you can afford it.
Tell stories in your posts. Case studies and data make great content.
Conclusion:
I hope you learned a few things. If you set up one site like this, you will start getting lots of free traffic over time. Once you have traffic, now you can monetize it. Now you have an authority site. Now you can get links from other authority sites. Now you can use your list to send people back to your new posts. Now you can send your subscribers to secret members only pages. Now you could start a forum or membership site.
Get busy;
Mike
