$$$ Affiliate Blueprint
Complete Guide To Building Your
Online Fortune With Affiliate Marketing $$$$
>>>>TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO AFFILIATE MARKETING...............4
Basics of Affiliate Marketing...................6
Affiliate Marketing 101 – The Basics............9
The ClickBank Marketplace 101..................11
Researching Your Products......................14
Amazon.com Bestsellers.........................14
NEWBIE TO PROFITABLE AFFILIATE...................17
Build Up To About 10 Products To Promote.......17
Clickbank Marketplace..........................18
CB Trends......................................19
CB Engine......................................20
Getting Traffic To Your Site...................23
Video Promotion................................ 23
Things to remember:............................ 25
Pay-Per-Click Advertising......................25
Adwords & Contextual Advertising...............26
Ad Variations..................................29
URL Display and URL Actual..................... 29
Yahoo and MSN’s Contextual Advertising.........30
Facebook and Myspace Advertising...............31
Squidoo and Hubpages...........................32
Web 2.0 Social Networking......................33
Building Your Affiliate Funnel.................34
STEP-BY-STEP CHECKLIST TO AFFILIATE SUCCESS......39
Get Organized!.................................39
Sign up for Pay Per Click programs.............39
Sign up for Clickbank..........................40
Video Training.................................40
Article Marketing.............................. 41
Top 25 Article Directories..................... 41
Build Squidoo Lenses and Hubpages..............43
Autoresponders.................................43
Sign Up For Web 2.0 Social Networking..........46
Build An Online Store..........................49
Set Up A Blog on a Free Site...................49
Consider Setting Up Your Own Website...........51
Getting Traffic To Your Site...................52
INTRODUCTION TO AFFILIATE MARKETING
When it comes to going into business online, one of the
easiest and most lucrative methods is through Affiliate
Marketing. This is because becoming an affiliate
marketer requires no experience, no website and simple
promotional techniques that will convert prospective
buyers into customers.
For the relative newcomer, affiliate marketing offers a
planned method and blueprint to begin making sales
online. There are a multitude of different
opportunities, niches and markets to choose from. A
person can become an affiliate for just about anything
from digital products to flowers and everything in
between.
In this e-book, we will cover the basics of affiliate
marketing to give you an idea of where to start, how to
get started and what websites are good to work with.
We will then move into how to become a profitable
affiliate in 60 days or less, becoming an affiliate
insider and some advanced techniques that if applied
properly will take your earnings to the next level.
This e-book is not the end all in affiliate learning;
instead, it is a good step-off point that will lead you
to other e-books that will expand your horizons and
earnings.
By the time you finish reading this e-book, you will be
able to implement a concrete plan that will get you
into earning money quickly and easily.
These techniques have worked for a long time, and they
work consistently to earn money from affiliate
marketing if followed.
If you are already familiar with affiliate marketing,
this e-book will give you new techniques to add to your
marketing arsenal so that you can increase your
affiliate earnings and expand on the methods that you
use in order to be successful.
So, without further ado, let’s get started on our
journey to affiliate profitability!
Basics of Affiliate Marketing
The concept of affiliate marketing is a variation on
the outside sales position except that it all happens
in cyber-space, and there is no door-to-door component.
Think of yourself as the salesman, one of many, for a
specific product or service and you’ve mastered the
basics of what is an affiliate.
People have all kinds of products and services that
they want to sell online.
Part of the process to become successful is to have a
large amount of traffic that is interested in what you
have to offer. The way you can accomplish this is by
having salesman or affiliate promote your products.
When a sale is made, you share the earnings with your
affiliate/salesman through commissions.
Successful affiliates make a good living by promoting
products and services of other vendors in order to make
that commission.
For the purposes of this e-book, I will focus on one of
the easiest affiliate networks to get started –
Clickbank and list the others with a brief look at the
larger networks. Once you learn how an affiliate
network like Clickbank works, you will be able to
expand that to other larger networks that have a myriad
of different products and services that are
commissionable.
Clickbank is one of the largest, oldest affiliate
networks out there online. Clickbank sells only digital
products, is extremely easy to learn how to use and has
a ton of vendors just waiting to snap up a good
affiliate.
There is no waiting time to become a part of the
Clickbank affiliate family, and the commissions are
much higher than the other networks, with some
commissions going as high as 75%.
Clickbank is an affiliate network in that it is a whole
bunch of vendors and affiliates all working under the
umbrella organization called Clickbank.
Through Clickbank, products and services are bought and
sold, accounting goes on within the network and
commissions are calculated per product sold. Before we
go any further, let’s look at what you can potentially
earn from one product.
For example: You promote and sell on Clickbank product
called Maverick Money Makers: Get Paid For Life!. It
sounds like a pretty exciting product, right?
Well, it has the highest payout of any Top 10 Clickbank
Product and is the Top Converting product offer online.
It pays out at a 50% commission level.
When you look at it’s pitch page, it is endorsed by
some pretty heavy weight people including CNBC, As Seen
On TV, Small Business Opportunities, Fox News, CBS News
and Readers Digest.
As an affiliate, you will earn 50% of the $97 dollar
price tag, and it’s repaid on a monthly basis.
So, that means that for every person who signs up
through your affiliate link (which we will get in a
minute), you will be paid $44 each month as long as
that person stays signed up.
What do you think if you simply stuck with this
affiliate program and reached their magical 100
referral mark. That’s $4400 per month for promoting
only one product.
Are you beginning to see how lucrative affiliate
marketing can be?
Think about how much you could make if you found 10
affiliate programs like this one? This is not only
possible, but not that hard to accomplish if you know
how.
Look on Clickbank and find 10 things that you think you
might want to sell.
Make a list because as you learn more, you may want to
revise it, and you may find that your choices are
golden.
Affiliate Marketing 101 – The Basics
Since you are reading this e-book, I will assume that
you are interested in making your fortune. Before you
can even contemplate picking an affiliate program to
join, you will need to make some basic changes in your
thinking.
Change the way you think about money.
You’ve got to really change the way you view money and
you want to begin to feel like you deserve to be
wealthy. While this concept seems simple, many people
don’t feel like they deserve money.
As a result, their activities reflect their feelings of
lack of worthiness. Instead of coming home from work
and hitting the computer, reading an ebook, taking
action on a plan, they will instead come home, sit in
front of the television and time will pass.
Instead of becoming a veteran internet marketer, they
will become the master of television watching.
People who feel like they should be able to make lots
of money online will naturally make a lot of money
online. This is not some spiritual mish-mosh, although
I feel that spirituality is a part of everyone’s
journey. However, that is not what I’m talking about
when I say people can make lots of money.
The most important thing to remember is that if you
feel like you deserve lots of money, you will take the
actions to make it happen.
It takes some basic things to be successful at
affiliate marketing:
Stay focused
Pick a niche product to start with and then START
Read this e-book and then take action.
Make a schedule and then stick to it.
Start small and apply what you learn as you go.
Avoid being overwhelmed out of the gate. You want to
learn, apply it on a small level and then scale up when
you feel you have the basics under control.
While you are doing this, you will start to make money.
By staying focused, I mean avoid the multi-tab
distractions. You can open a ton of websites in
browser’s nowadays.
If your plan calls for answering email between a
certain time and certain time, avoid reading emails
before that time. Tell yourself, it will still be
sitting there waiting for you at.
The ClickBank Marketplace 101
Clickbank has been in business since 1998, and has
built their network to one of the largest retailer of
digital products. With over 10,000 digital products, it
is one of the premier affiliate networks.
It is easy to use, easy to join and there are products
in a ton of different areas from pets to electronics.
In order to earn commissions, all you need to do is
take your affiliate ID and you get a link which you can
use to send customers to. When they click on your link,
it will record your commissions when they buy the
product.
These affiliate networks generally require that you
have a website that is related to the affiliate program
you want to sell.
However, that’s not impossible to accomplish, and you
can get one at www.blogger.com, www.typepad.com,
www.wordpress.com and the like.
You can also sign up with very reasonable hosting
services that provide one click installation of your
blog site where you can start posting articles and blog
posts related to the product or service you apply for
at one of the larger networks like the ones listed
below:
Clickbank is a Fast Start, Needs no website and pretty
easy to be accepted into this program.
www.clickbank.com
Need to have a website, makes sure that it’s
established with an About Us, Contact Us and Privacy
page on the site. Should have a few weeks of posts at
the very least.
www.shareasale.com
www.cj.com
www.linkshare.com
www.amazon.com
www.ebaypartnernetwork.com
www.pepperjamnetwork.com
www.datafeedr.com
www.goldenCAN.com
www.rubiconproject.com
Wait at least 90 days before putting Adsense on your
site. To ensure that you will be accepted to the
Adsense program, it’s best not to apply until you have
an established site to show them.
www.adsense.com
These two are secondary and shouldn’t be considered
until you’ve got your sites up and running for a few
months.
www.azoogleads.com – CPA network
www.cpaempire.com
Before you apply to any of the other sites, you need to
have a real site. You will want to blog on the site for
at least two weeks, one blog post per day.
If you aren’t a writer, you will need to hire a
freelancer. Go to Elance.com, rentacoder.com and the
like to find a writer. You can hire a freelancer fairly
inexpensively who will deliver you blog posts to add to
your site.
Researching Your Products
Pick a niche product and start to research if it’s a
viable topic or subject. Whether you want to go with
Clickbank products or with other affiliate products,
you will need to do your research.
Finding a profitable niche should be the very first
thing you do when starting in affiliate marketing.
You want to have a product that is Hot! If you find a
product that isn’t very hot, don’t expect to make any
kind of money with it.
The reason I picked the Maverick Money Makers is
because it is a hot item. People are interested in the
niche, and it’s marketed well, presented in a
professional manner, and has tools for its affiliates
to use to make money.
To find out what are people looking to buy:
Amazon Best Sellers – Amazon.com
Pulse.ebay.com
Terapeak.com
Amazon.com Bestsellers
Amazon gives you a quick and easy way to find out
what’s hot and what’s not on their site. It is a clear
indicator of what the buying market is looking for,
making it very easy for your to put yourself in the
path of oncoming web traffic and make sales.
If you sign up with Amazon’s affiliate program, you can
sell all of the products on the site, and with the
Bestsellers section, you will know for sure that
certain products are selling. They even give you a
Top10 list for each category so that you can use that
to make articles, reviews and blog posts.
Ebay Pulse tool: http://pulse.eBay.com
This is a great place to find out what the hot products
are because if a person is typing it into eBay, they
are typing it into Google and Amazon. Ebay Pulse gives
you a real-time look at what people are looking to buy.
You can log into eBay and do a search on the completed
items. It will tell you what people are selling, how
many have sold and the average price.
Look for items with bids, and this is a great way to
get an idea of what people are looking for.
Terapeak is another great way to do things
www.terapeak.com
Go to Hot Research, sort of like eBay pulse. It will
give you a listing of what’s hot on eBay. You can then
drill down and it will give you an idea of some of the
different auctions that are going on. If there are
bids, this is a good item to become an affiliate for.
Hot Research > Hot Searches and then Search
Good average price above $30.00, with a good commission
rate of no less than 40%, the higher the better. Also,
don’t go for the very high end products that are priced
at above $125 dollars.
Newbie to Profitable Affiliate
Build Up To About 10 Products To Promote
As an affiliate, you will want to build up to about 10
products, so that you can mix up the top performing
products and add the latest releases. While you should
like what you’re selling, don’t be wed to it.
What may be a hot seller, may cool off and if you
follow trends, you need to be able to move on. You
don’t want to add all these products at once, and build
slowly as you get more experienced.
Because you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with
products, pick your products carefully. Choose popular
products because you want to have top performing
products.
Here are some things to remember when you are selecting
products.
When you search for new products to promote from
Clickbank, there are certain things that you are
looking for.
First and easiest is the selection of the category that
you want to work with. For instance, each affiliate
products has some information that will help you make a
good decision.
The three sites you will want to use to ascertain if a
product is a good seller and a possible product you
will want to promote includes:
Clickbank Marketplace – www.clickbank.com
CB Trends – www.cbtrends.com
CB Engine – www.cbengine.com
Clickbank Marketplace
1. Sale Price: ($/Sale) This is the amount that
affiliates are earning for referring customers.
The amount earned is kept by Clickbank accounting
and pays out every two weeks to the affiliate.
2. Percentage of Sale: (%/Sale) This is the average
percentage commissions earned per affiliate per
sale.
3. Referral %: This is the percentage of sales that
people you refer
4. Gravity of Product: The gravity number is
important because it shows the popularity of the
product over time. Every time the product is sold
or a new affiliate joins and uses the link the
gravity of the program will change.
CB Trends
The popularity, price and commission paid of the
product is very important.
When it comes to popularity or gravity, unless you are
already a Super Affiliate avoid the products with very
high gravity (125+), because it means that the market
will be highly competitive and the chances of you
making sales will be decreased accordingly.
This applies only to Clickbank and not the other
commission driven organizations.
In order to find out if a product is good to add to
your affiliate arsenal, you will want to check it out
at CB Trends (www.cbtrends.com) which is a free service
that shows visual representation of what is on the
Clickbank marketplace site making it easier to
understand.
There are some useful tracking tools that give you an
easy way to see what is happening with the products you
choose including:
Popularity of the product
Earning per sale
Percent per sale
Gravity
Referrals
Commission
If you take the visual representation, combine it with
what you see on Clickbank’s Marketplace, you will have
a good idea of whether the product you’re thinking
about promoting is a good one.
Out of the 10 products that you pick to promote over
time, you will want at least 6 of them to be popular.
You want to mix it up so that at least half of what
you’re promoting is more competitive. The rest of the
products should be up and comers, those products that
are newer and building in the Marketplace.
CB Engine
CB engine shows you the new products and is an
excellent tool to use if you want to focus on the new
product releases. If you are going to work with
Clickbank, which is a good first step into the
affiliate arena, CB Engine should be one of the sites
you bookmark and use.
It has a Brand New Products list, re-listed products
with a ton of information to help you make an informed
choice about the products you want to promote.
Each product, new and re-listed, have graphs and visual
representations about the health and viability of the
products.
There are a couple of ways to go about finding out more
about the product or service you are about to promote.
First, you can buy the product.
Whether it’s digital or tangible, buying and
experiencing the product will usually make you a better
promoter. However, with 10 products, that can become a
bit pricey, so you may want to buy a couple products
that you can afford, and look over the sales pages only
of the remainder.
When looking over the sales or pitch page, you will
want to think in terms of being a prospective buyer.
Ask yourself some basic questions:
Does the page, headline and opening paragraph grab
your attention.
Is the page easy to read in terms of colors,
graphics and layout of the site.
Is the message being presented clear and concise
and easy-to-understand.
Are there highlights of important facts, headlines
to break up content and pictures that are relevant
to the topic matter?
Does the page lead you to the logical conclusion
where you want to buy the product?
All of these things are important and will make or
break you when people come through your referral link.
Having a page where you want to buy the product will
generally translate to high sales conversions.
In that way, the traffic you drive to the product site
stand a higher chance of buying in the end. If the page
left you with a ho-hum, whatever feeling, it is
probably quite possible that visitors arriving at the
site will have the same reaction.
As you go about promoting your affiliate products, make
sure that you keep track of the products that are
converting well, and the ones that are not. When you
have a hot product that goes warm and then cold, you
need to be ready to get rid of it.
Earlier I told you not to get attached to a product or
service. This is why. You have to know when to get rid
of it.
Look at the choices you first made on Clickbank and ask
yourself the questions from above. Are there any
products that you might want to get rid of now?
Getting Traffic To Your Site
Video Promotion
While most people will tell you to use pay-per-click
advertising, article marketing and building a website,
here’s a shortcut method to get your started and
quickly. Videos can get you into search engines fast.
Use one of these tools to get started:
Camtasia Studio has a 30 day free trial
CamStudio which is free and located at
http://camstudio.org
Jing that works on the Mac or PC
Web Cam
Sony Movie Studio
Movie Studio 9
Now that you have a selection of products, a website or
direct links to a vendor’s website, it’s time to
promote. First, you will want to get into the video
arena.
I know you probably weren’t expecting that. But, people
are video junkies, and if you want to get people
engaged, you will need to go where the traffic goes.
Creating videos is one sure-fire way to get traffic to
your site. Creating a video is not as hard as you
think. It’s easy and fun, and will get you into the
Working with Camtasia can be a little daunting, but it
will pay for itself in spades if you take the time to
learn how to use it.
If you need to go free Jing is the second easiest way
to record from screen to video. If you’re good with
Powerpoint, you can create a slide show, narrate it
about your site and simply read from a script. These
are the easiest type of video to create, and when used
correctly, they are traffic bringers.
Set your monitor resolution to 800x600 for recording.
Record your videos at 800 x 600, resized to 480 x 360
with SmartFocus. You want them to be quick, and talk
about the product you are promoting.
The bottom third is very important in videos. You want
to tell them about your domain name or the domain of
the affiliate site. If you don’t have a site of your
own, go to SnipUrl where you can put in your affiliate
link, and it will give you an output.
For instance, if your affiliate product is for Maverick
Money Makers, and your affiliate link is
http://XXXXX.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net, your SnipUrl
will be www.snipurl/MaverickMoney.
The SnipURL can go in the lower left part of your
video, and remain there for the duration. As you talk
about your website, all you need to do is use SnagIt to
capture pictures, which you put in your Powerpoint
presentation and capture as video.
Add a couple of transitions, and you are in the video
arena. These short video reviews are what you upload to
all of the video sites.
Things to remember:
Make sure that the name of the video is your
longtail keyphrase or product name plus a word
like deals. (ie. Salmon deals, Rolex watch deals)
Make sure that the keywords and keyphrases are
submitted and enclosed in quotes as well as
without quotes.
Make sure that you submit them with the URL
leading back to your website
In the information section, be sure and put your
website, or SnipURL if you don’t have a website
that leads back to the affiliate product.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
If you don’t have a website, landing page or place to
send prospective traffic, pay per click or PPC
advertising is an excellent method to drive sales via
your affiliate link.
Again, you will want to use discretion so that you
don’t wind up losing more money than you gain in sales.
The largest PPC outfit is Google. Those little
advertisements that you see on people’s websites, plus
on the side of the search results are called PPC
advertising.
Advertisers pay a set amount per click in order to
appear on sites. It is considered contextual
advertising, because the advertising is related to the
information being presented either in the search
results or on the website. For instance, you won’t get
an advertisement for ice cream on a site about auto
parts.
Adwords & Contextual Advertising
Advertising with Google is easy and deceptive to
newcomers. Easy, in the fact that it is very easy to
use; deceptive because if you aren’t very careful you
could lose a lot of money trying to get advertising
that makes you money.
Here are some techniques so that you can use the
Adwords system and make money.
The site is located at: http://adwords.google.com
You can sign up for an Adwords account by clicking the
Start Now button and filling in your information. Sign
up for a standard and not a starter account. Adwords
is pretty easy to use. Many people will want to start
out with 100s of keywords and will take everything
suggested by Adwords keyword tool.
Avoid this method and stick with a few terms that are
laser-focused on your product or service.
Use the Adwords keyword suggestion tool or other
keyword tool like MicroNiche Finder, Nichebot and
Keyword Elite to find about five or six terms that are
tightly related to your product.
You will want these keywords/keyphrases to be low
competition, high traffic words. The software just
mentioned are designed to find keywords like this for
your product.
You will want to drill down on your keywords. For
instance, if your product is about dog health, don’t
just look at the keywords “dog health” and dogs.
Look for things like “relief for dogs from fleas”,
“best dog food” or go into a specific breed like
“cocker spaniel health”, or “best dog food for
beagles”.
While you will get fewer visitors based on these
keywords, the ones that will arrive will be very
interested in your product. When you look at products,
you will want to take this into consideration as well.
List your keyphrases and base your advertisement around
these keyphrases. You will ideally want to get them
into the title of your advertisement as well as in the
listing for Adwords to use when listing when your ad
will appear in the search results and on people’s
websites.
Use the Adwords keyword suggestion tool here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Select keyphrases that are relevant but not very
competitive. Remember, that although you may only get
100 visits a day from a keyword, conversion rates are
1-2%, so that will usually equal a sale.
This is why you don’t want to promote a product that is
much cheaper than $30. If your commission is 50% to 75%
of $30, that is $15.00 to $22.50 on each sale.
It has been shown that affiliates will convert on
average 1% to 2% per 100 visitors if they have done
adequate keyword/keyphrase research.
It will generally convert the same on a $30+ item as it
does on a $15.00 product. The amount of money you earn
will only change due to the commission level and price
of product.
Ad Variations
When you have your keywords in hand, go to Google and
search on those keywords. Put the keywords between
quotation marks and watch what comes up on the right
hand side. This will give you great ideas on how to
word your own advertisement.
Look at what ad is in the top spot 3 spots. Look at the
titles they are using and see how you can word your
advertisement similarly so that you get good
clickthroughs.
Then when you put together your initial ad, make some
variations and track how many clicks each ad is
getting. Keep the ad that performs the best.
When you are just starting out with Adwords, keep your
bids low. Bid as little as $0.05 cents per click where
you can, and just make sure that you get on page one of
the search results.
Look towards doing advertising on websites only and
forego the search results, because it is counted in
1000 impressions at a price and your money can go a
longer way.
URL Display and URL Actual
One nice thing to remember is that you can put your
Clickbank ID and URL in the Destination URL section of
the advertisement. In the Display URL, you place the
actual website URL of the affiliate products vendor.
Example:
Display URL: www.maverickmoneymakers.com
Destination URL:
http://xxxxxx.maverick66.hop.clickbank.net/?
tid=MAVERICK
That word “?tid=MAVERICK” on the end of the Clickbank
ID is called a traffic tracking device which allows you
to track how your campaigns are going. Both Clickbank
and Adwords will allow you to track your advertising
campaigns so that you can make a decision about what’s
working and what needs to be changed.
To track within Adwords, you will need to choose a
keyword that you want to track in Adwords. Click on
Edit Keyword Settings. Then you have a URL that you can
add a tracking ID to which in this case would be “?
tid=MavAd1” for Maverick, Ad #1. You only have 8
letters that you can use, so whatever you decide, it
should be easy to understand and decipher.
Yahoo and MSN’s Contextual Advertising
While not much is said about the contextual advertising
that is available through Yahoo and MSN, it does exist.
As an alternative, you might want to consider
advertising through them. The same rules apply, the
competition is less and you may wind up spending a lot
less for the same amount of advertising.
In order to figure out if it’s worth the money, you can
sign up for accounts with both MSN and Yahoo pretty
easily and try it out. They also run a lot of specials
and give away coupons worth various amounts of money
just to get you to try their service.
Yahoo PPC Service:
http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketin
g/
MSN Adcenter: https://adcenter.microsoft.com
While these are lesser advertised, contextual
advertising outlets, you can get a lot of mileage from
them, and all kinds of traffic you might have missed if
you focused on Google alone. Remember, being successful
as an affiliate means thinking outside of the box.
Facebook and Myspace Advertising
Often overlooked and very good places to advertise are
Facebook and Myspace. While I wouldn’t advertise the
How To Make Money Online e-books, they are great places
to advertise other digital products.
If, for instance, one of your products is Jamorama from
Clickbank, it is a “learn to play guitar online”
service that is made for young people, is done totally
online and would make a great Myspace advertisement.
Squidoo and Hubpages
If you don’t have a website and you want to have an
intermediary page that gives more information and pre
sells the product more, you can use either Squidoo or
Hubpages. They are free to build, takes about 60
seconds and requires no HTML ability to use.
Tons of people build Squidoo lenses using articles that
expand on the products and services that they are
promoting.
In this way, a person doesn’t click through your link
straight to the pitch page of the vendor and only think
that you are trying to sell them something.
Through the use of these intermediary sites, you can
add value to the product or service with a personalized
set of information that is tailored to make the product
more understandable.
If you decide to build a Squidoo page for your
affiliate product, most people will do a review of the
product or write an article outlining the benefits of
using/reading/listening to the product. In this way, it
is more personal and less salesman-like.
Web 2.0 Social Networking
By using Web 2.0 social networking, you can announce
and spread the word about your affiliate product.
Instead of sending them directly to the vendor’s site,
you can use Squidoo, Hubpages and other social
networking sites like Ning and Scribd.com to Presell
the product through writing articles and converting
them into mini websites.
Instead of advertising the vendor site, you will
advertise your intermediary site and use it to list
build and follow up through an autoresponder.
The easy way to list build is take a picture of one of
the aWeber or GetResponse forms using a program like
Snagit, and upload the picture and make it a clickable
link to a squeeze page.
You can build a squeeze page using Weebly.com which has
a drag and drop interface that makes it extremely easy
to build web pages with autoresponder forms embedded in
them.
You then have people click, go to your landing or
squeeze page and fill out the form. On the landing
page, you can further outline the benefits of the
product you are promoting.
Building Your Affiliate Funnel
While a lot of affiliate marketers can operate without
setting up a website, the benefits of doing so will
become immediately apparent. First, having your own
website establishes your credibility on the subject,
and further lends authority to the product you are
promoting.
While you can strictly use Adwords and other contextual
advertising methods, having your own website is a way
to add other income streams, organize and consolidate
your affiliate product offerings and add other types of
advertising and monetization schemes to your site.
Setting up a website is not that difficult nor is it
very expensive any more. If you decide to go with your
own website, there are a few things you should know in
order to get started.
Get your own domain name. A domain name is a unique
name that identifies your website. It transforms an IP
address (100.99.103.44) to something memorable –
www.yourdomain.com.
Having your own domain name adds to the authority of
what you’re writing, should be easy to remember and
gives you a platform from which to write. Registering a
domain name nowadays costs only about $8 to $10. Some
of the best registrars include:
Godaddy.com
Namecheap.com
Internic.com
Next, you will want to get webhosting. This is also
very inexpensive. A full featured webhosting plan will
cost you only about $5.00 to $10.00 per month.
Godaddy.com
Hostgator.com
Dreamhost.com
Get an easy to use website platform. You don’t need to
be an HTML or Dreamweaver expert to set up a really
nice site.
The platform of choice these days is Wordpress, which
is very simple to setup by using Fantastico and Cpanel,
and there are tons of very nice themes out there for
you to use. Two other easy to use content systems are
Drupal and Joomla.
All three of these will build out a full site for you
that has an admin interface that is easy to learn and
use.
Through the use of one of these platforms, you can
accomplish a number of essential things to the success
of your affiliate sales:
Affiliate link cloaking: It would be nice to think that
every body is honest. However, this is not the case. As
a result, you need to cloak your affiliate link so that
when a person clicks through your link and buys the
product, the commission goes to you.
Especially with an affiliate network like Clickbank, it
is very important to cloak your original link with an
ironclad decoy link that keeps the commission
protected.
It will take a link that looks like a mish-mash of
letters and dots and like this:
http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net and turn
it into something like this:
http://yourdomain.com/product.html. It makes it both
easier to read and keeps your affiliate information
secret and intact.
Pre-selling: This affords you the opportunity to write
or have written articles that are keyword optimized
(which means that they are designed to rank highly in
the search engines for specific words), traffic magnets
that affords visitors the opportunity to learn more
about a specific product and get more exposure that
leads to eventual conversion. Pre-selling is an art
that happens over time.
Ad Tracking & Analytics: While Google Adwords offers
excellent ad tracking features, having a person visit
your website further refines the analytics you can look
at.
As a visitor explores your entire website, you are
gaining valuable information about what pages they
visited how long they stayed on specific pages, what
links they clicked and the like. All of this
information can help you refine what is on your
website.
For instance, say a person arrives at your home page,
goes to a page on a specific product and then goes
through a link on that page to another page on your
site and stays there for a long time.
If this happens over and over, you have just gained
valuable information about what has caught people’s
interest. In that way, you can offer more of the same
that is on the second page so that people are likely to
return and be re-exposed to you, your products and your
site.
Blogging About Specific Topics Related To Your
Affiliate Product: With a website built on the
Wordpress platform, you can set up certain programs
called plug-ins that automatically optimize your
website.
What this means is that Google and the other search
engine spiders will love to stop by your site and add
pages to their search index.
As you get more pages into the search engines, you will
rank higher. What this means is that you will have more
and more visibility and in turn more traffic will visit
your site over time.
Learning about keyword research and search engine
optimization or SEO is one of the things that every
affiliate should learn.
The more you know, the better your site will become,
and the better your site, the more sales you will make.
Step-by-Step Checklist To Affiliate
Success
With everything you’ve learned to date, I’ll bet your
head is swimming. Below is a plan that you can
implement to get you started on the road to affiliate
success and profit.
Get Organized!
Pick on affiliate network (I suggest Clickbank
because it’s easy). Spend a couple of hours
learning the ins and outs of how it works. Look at
the gravity, sale percentages and pick some
products and make some affiliate links so that you
are fully familiar with how the process works.
Go to CB Trends and CB Engine and make sure you
understand how they can help you pick winners.
Stop by the Google Adwords tool and search for
about 10 keywords for each product that you pick
making sure that they are low competition, good
traffic keywords and keyphrases.
Keep good notes about what you are doing so that you
can refer back to them later.
Sign up for Pay Per Click programs
Get yourself the following Pay Per Click accounts:
Adwords, Yahoo Publisher and MSN Adcenter accounts
Make a decision about whether you are going to
build a website or work strictly through Pay Per
Click advertising.
Sign up for Clickbank
Sign up for Clickbank and get your nickname if you
didn’t do that yesterday.
Go through the help files at Clickbank, Adwords, etc.
so that you understand basically how each program
works.
Video Training
Make a decision about which program you want to
use to make your 1 minute videos.
Look on YouTube and search under Camtasia
training. You will find a ton of videos on how to
make a decent video.
Check out www.TubeMogul.com for free uploading of
your videos after they’re done. If you want more
options, there is a paid portion that will allow
you to submit to more video sites. Also, you can
consider Traffic Geyser for maximum coverage with
videos, if you have some money to spend.
www.trafficgeyser.com
Article Marketing
Article Marketing is one of the easiest ways to get
steady traffic to your website. Using good
keyword/keyphrase research will get you a ton of
traffic as you write articles based on the results. In
those article directories, you can put links back to
your site and that will send traffic your way.
Never submit the same article to multiple sites
You need to change your article by at least 50%
for each site. This is not as hard as you might
think. Check out Unique Article Wizard located at:
www.uniquearticlewizard.com on how to accomplish
that.
Top 25 Article Directories
1.ezinearticles.com
2.ArticlesBase.com
3.buzzle.com
4.pubs.acs.org/hotartcl
5.searchwarp.com
6.goarticles.com
7.articlealley.com
8.articledashboard.com
9.articlesnatch.com
10.ideamarketers.com
11.webpronews.com
12.amazines.com
13.articlegarden.com
14.upublish.info
15.isnare.com
16.articlemaniac.com
17.365articles.com
18.articlesfactory.com
19.articlecodex.com
20.web-source.net
21.articleblotter.com
22.articlebuzz.com
23.thecontentcorner.com
24.articlebliss.com
25.articlepool.com
Build Squidoo Lenses and Hubpages
Get some free pages which can act as intermediary
sites which you can use to pre-sell your various
products by writing articles presenting the
products and writing about the features and
benefits.
Build one Squidoo or Hubpage per article and
product. Avoid combining stuff on pages, because
you want to give a clear message about each
product or service that you are promoting.
You can build more than one page per product. Look
and think about the different angles you can bring
to each product or service that you are promoting.
For instance: list the features and benefits in
general lens, then build 4 or 5 lenses on specific
sub-features where you only talk about that feature.
Then, from the main lens or hubpage, you can link to
the sub-feature pages.
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are e-mail messages that are sent
automatically when an e-mail arrives for a specific e
mail account. The most common example of an
autoresponder is the ubiquitous "Out of Office" message
sent by mail programs like Outlook and Eudora.
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Web autoresponders are used by affiliate marketers to
send responses to questions when they are away from the
computer.
Autoresponders will answer questions, send information
about a product or service. They are also key to list
building which is where many affiliate marketers make
backend sales by sending follow-up messages. Most web
autoresponders give you unlimited autoresponse
messages, and you can have multiple autoresponder
addresses.
Autoresponders are inexpensive and are considered your
silent 24/7 salesman. Two good autoresponder companies
that charge around $20 bucks a month include:
Aweber – www.aweber.com
GetResponse – www.getresponse.com
There are many other autoresponder companies out there,
and you can even get autoresponders as part of your
webhosting package.
However, these two autoresponder companies offer a host
of addition features and benefits that allow you to
build a list super-fast.
Backend sales on follow-up messages accounts for a
large part of affiliate sales. It is a known fact that
people need multiple exposures to a product to convert
tire-kicking to sales.
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Sign Up For Web 2.0 Social Networking
It is very important to sign up for as many Web 2.0
social networking sites so that you can promote your
product pages – whether they’re on Squidoo, HubPages or
Weebly. In this way, you can build a steady flow of
traffic to your pre-sales pages, build your list with
an autoresponder form and increase sales.
The Top Sites To Sign Up For Include:
Digg – www.digg.com - Digg is a website made for
people to discover and share content from anywhere
on the Internet, by submitting links and stories,
and voting and commenting on submitted links and
stories, in a social and democratic spirit.
Propeller – www.propeller.com
Newsvine – www.newsvine.com – Newsvine allows you
to report on the news that you find around the
net. If you have a website, Newsvine is a great
way to get the news out about it. Newsvine also
allows you to create your own blog, so you write
articles, post reviews about products and more
just like you have your own site.
Bebo – www.bebo.com
Scribd – www.scribd.com – Listing your stuff on
this site will get you listed very highly in
Google.
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Stumbleupon.com – www.stumbleupon.com - Boasting
2.75 million users, StumbleUpon is a web browser
plugin that allows its users to discover and rate
web pages, photos, videos, and news articles
Linkedin.com: www.linkedin.com - 12.5 million
members -- a powerful tool for business
networking.
del.icio.us: The website del.icio.us (pronounced
as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web
service for storing, sharing, and discovering web
bookmarks.
Orkut.com: Orkut is an Internet social networking
service run by Google Now has a membership of 57
million.
Twitter.com: A free social networking service that
allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts
that are up to 140 characters long) via SMS,
instant messaging, email, the Twitter website, or
an application such as Twitterrific.
Yahoo! 360 (a.k.a Yahoo! Days) is a personal
communication portal similar to orkut and MySpace
-- it is currently in the beta-testing phase. It
integrates features of social networking, blogging
and photo sharing sites.
Xanga.com: 40 million members. Xanga is a free
Web-based service that hosts weblogs, photoblogs,
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videoblogs, audioblogs, and social networking
profiles.
Ryze.com: .25 million members. Ryze.com is a free
social networking website designed to link
business professionals.
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Build An Online Store
As an affiliate, you can build a store or join a
program where a store is provided for you. There are a
number of Clickbank-ready stores that are pre-set up.
You only need to pay a one time fee and the store will
be activated in your name with your affiliate ID.
So, instead of promoting just 10 products, you can
promote the entire Clickbank host of vendors. There are
ups and downs to this.
Pros: All the work is done for you. There is a Featured
section to these stores where you can highlight the 10
products that you are actively promoting.
It also gives you a quick web presence and if you don’t
have website building experience, everything is done
for you.
Cons: Your store look just like every other person who
bought the store package. Because it is built for you,
it is a standardized template, so there can be
hundreds, even thousands of other stores out there that
are just like yours.
Set Up A Blog on a Free Site
Take a short bit of time to set up a blog on one of the
free sites, or build a site and get webhosting. Which
ever you decide, having a small site that is yours will
go a long way towards building your credibility for the
long term. Using PPC (pay per click) is fine up to a
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point. However, to expand and grow with products and
services, having a site is essential.
Free Websites:
Wordpress: www.wordpress.com – You can get a blog
started in less time than it takes you to read this
sentence. All you need is an email address. You’ll get
your own WordPress.com address (like
you.wordpress.com), a selection of great free and
customizable designs for your blog (called themes) and
3 gigabytes of file storage.
There is a great deal of help and instruction to show
you what to do and how to get started. Your website
address would be something like
http://product.wordpress.com and you can build as many
of these free sites as you like.
The positives of using the Wordpress.com system is that
you are on a domain that has a very high page rank,
lots of visitors and tons of help. Even if you’ve never
set up a blog before, it’s so easy that you can get
started and not feel overwhelmed.
Blogger: Another free platform that is owned by Google
is great to set up a blog on. Again, you will be a
subdomain like http://product.blogspot.com, but it’s
free, there’s no webhosting fees involved and you can
set it up without any HTML, programming or web design
experience. You simply pick from one of the many themes
presented, and your blog is ready to go.
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Having a Blogger blog gets you listed in Google (since
they own it), and makes it easy to get your message out
there.
Joomla: Although Joomla is free, they don’t have a free
site where you can build on a subdomain. Joomla is an
award-winning content management system (CMS), which
enables you to build Web sites and powerful online
applications.
Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and
extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web
site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open
source solution that is freely available to everyone.
With that said, Joomla has a ton of online help just
like Wordpress; however, you will have to get
webhosting and a domain name to use it.
Consider Setting Up Your Own Website
Which ever platform you decide on – Wordpress or Joomla
– you will need webhosting, a domain name and it will
take a bit of time to get things set up.
Most affiliate marketers tend to go with either Blogger
or a Wordpress blog and self-hosting. Joomla is an
option, but the learning curve is a little bit longer.
So, if you’re looking to get going, you might want to
consider either the free services or Wordpress.
Once you decide on getting your own blog, select
inexpensive webhosting. Remember, webhosting should
have cPanel or One-Click setup attached to it.
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Hostgator has cPanel and Fantastico and Dreamhost has
One-Click. Both perform the same function – set up of
Wordpress with no knowledge of MySQL, Wordpress or FTP.
This is the quickest way to get started with your blog.
Once it’s set up, you will need to look at article
writing. If you’re not a writer, check out the
freelancers at Elance, Guru.com and Rentacoder.
Getting Traffic To Your Site
Write down and plan the methods you are going to use to
drive traffic to your website: Pay-Per-Click, Squidoo
and Hubpages, article marketing, social networking and
the like. Then schedule when you will be posting to
your site, and posting to social networking sites.
In the end, if you follow this entire checklist and
don’t give up, you will begin to see sales for the
products that you are promoting.
You can also add more products over time to promote,
build more than one website, put up Squidoo and
Hubpages highlighting your various products and
services and add things like Adsense to further
monetize your site.
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