You’re ready to make your mark in the affiliate marketing world but you don’t have a clue how to get started. There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made in affiliate marketing but only if you do it right. Many successful affiliate marketers had multiple failures before hitting on the formula that finally made them an affiliate marketing success. If you want a better chance of pulling it off on the first try, here are the steps to take.
Affiliate Marketing Guide
Phase 1: Getting Started
Many of the steps you will take to form an affiliate marketing business will happen before you ever even consider starting to build a website. The decisions you make in the planning phase go a far way towards determining your long term success, so take them seriously.
Start by setting a modest goal. Thinking of affiliate marketing as an easy, get-rich-quick scheme will doom you to failure. Decide that you will be happy if you can just make a certain amount, whether it be $100, $500, $1000 per month through affiliate commissions. You can always raise your goal once you have achieved it for several months.
Then decide what your niche will be. You need a specific product or service (or related group of products or services) so that your traffic is not fractured among people of very different interests. Your niche could be anything. If you choose one of the more popular ones, like poker or mortgages, there’s a lot of money to be made, but also a lot of fierce competition. If you choose a smaller niche, like vintage clothing or wine connoisseurs, you’ll have fewer other sites fighting for your traffic, but there will be much less convertible traffic out there to begin with. Keep in mind that you will need to create content related to your niche, so make sure you have some idea how you will do this before you choose one.
Once you’ve settled on your niche, you’ll want to check out the competition. If your fellow affiliate marketers in this space all have very high PageRank (an indication of how relevant the site appears to Google) or have a tremendous number of inbound links, you’ll have your work cut out for you. Try to determine what the sites without a lot of PageRank or inbound links are doing wrong, and what the sites who are booming in these areas are doing right. Next you’ll have to actually find affiliates. Locate an affiliate directory and look up your niche to find companies that are marketing products and services in your niche. Then contact them to set up an affiliate program relationship.
Your next step is to generate keyword lists. Keywords are the blood cells that keep traffic flowing through your affiliate marketing business. The best keywords and phrases are the ones that will drive the most traffic to your site. You’re going to need a keyword tool like Wordtracker to find all the best keywords and keyword phrases for your niche. You’re then going to need someone who can create the content that will anchor those keywords to your site.
Phase 2: Creating Your Affiliate Marketing Site
Now it’s finally time to create your site. Remember that there are millions of websites out there, so there’s no particular reason why people should come to yours, read it, and click on your affiliate links. You need to create websites that people want to visit and stick to. That means it should be visually appealing and it should have content that interests people and makes them want to stay and read more. You can stuff your website with all the keywords in the world, but if a Google search leads someone to just a page of keywords, they will be gone as fast as they arrived.
Phase 3: Optimizing Your Site
The content also needs to be fresh. You want people coming back for more, both those people that you have already converted into sales and are looking to convert again, and those that have visited but haven’t clicked through to an affiliate yet. It’s a good idea to include some calls to action in your content. Be subtle, but let your visitors know what they want to be clicking.
You can make money not just through clicks to your affiliates, but through direct advertising. Look into an advertising service like Google AdSense to get some ads directly onto your site.
Once you’ve got your website launched and all your keyword-rich content in place, you’re probably ready to start raking in the revenue. But there’s a problem. You’re still not really on the map yet. Or rather, you’re on the map, but there are no major roads that run past your town. That’s where link building comes in.
Link building is the process of generating inbound links to your site and it is a necessity for a successful affiliate marketing plan. Search engines perk up when they see a site with a lot of links to it, especially links from trustworthy sites, sites that are also linked heavily from elsewhere. How do you get these links? There are a number of ways. You should link to other sites that are related to yours, and encourage them to link back to you. You should comment on blog posts and forums that are related to your site and leave your link in the comment. You should write articles with links to your site embedded in them and submit those articles to article directories and newsletters. You should also list your site in various online directories related to your business. Finally, a site that has highly useful information in a particular industry will be linked to organically by people and organizations wishing to pass along and share this information. Adding additional pages can also generate more traffic and more links.
Phase 4: Reaping the Benefits
Once your site is all set up, you don’t want to just leave it and let it run, hoping it will be a money-making machine that will simply churn out dollars. Use analysis tools like Google Analytics to see how your site is doing every day. Find out where your traffic is coming from and why. Develop ideas for generating new traffic. The Internet is always in flux, and you must be too if you wish to be successful at Internet marketing.
As you can see, being a successful Internet marketer isn’t as easy as it may have first appeared, but this is a good thing. It means that while everyone can be an affiliate marketer, not everyone can do it well. Armed with this guide, you can now be one of the ones who can do it well and make your affiliate marketing dreams a reality.
