Step by step affiliate marketing

[burton4550]

So im new to affiliate marketing and was wondering if someone could just make sure im on the right track here to success, cuz ive had quite a bit of failure so far. Im using clickbank right now to promote there products. Is domain forwarding directly to the merchants sales page a bad idea ? Ive been doing this using forums, yahoo answers, writing articles,twitter,myspace and facebook and still have yet to get any sales. Am I going at this the wrong way?

The other thing I seem to be reading is actually to create a landing page or review site containing valuable information on whatever niche or market the customer is interested in. Once you create that, then put in a opt in list to create a list to continue trying to sell if they don't buy right away. After creating this should I be using the same traffic techiques above to generate leads to turn to conversions ? Which way would you suggest is the faster route to go to make the cash flow?

[kpfingaz]

You seem like the type that takes action and the type that wants to make this work badly and I applaud you for that. You've asked a very good question so I'll do my best to point out the steps you want to take to start making some sales.

I expect others to join in this discussion as well if they have anything to add.

Your first step should be:

Finding a Niche.

Find a niche market and work it. One important thing I must add is to stay away from the "make money online" niche. Its a tough industry for a newbie so you might want to make other things work before you try that out.

There are thousands of other niches you can try besides 'make money online' type stuff and they do make a whole lot more money much EASILY.

How to find a niche?

Remember that a niche isn't a keyword or a product - its a group of people with a common problem. So what you want to do is find a group of people who have a problem and then find a solution (affiliate product) to help them. This means money for you. Its either a problem (like a partner's snoring) or a passion (like concert tickets for example).

*1* Here are just 7 ways (just a few) to generate niche ideas:

1. Look in the mirror. You may be your own niche. What do you spend money on as a way of solving a personal problem? Is there something you absolutely love that you would spend money on?
2. Watch some tv. There are hundreds of ideas you can get just by watching the ads alone (No, affiliate marketers shouldn't have Tivo).
3. Read magazines
4. Look through affiliate program directories like Clickbank
5. Visit blog directories and see what people are blogging about.
6. Visit Google Hot Trends and see what the buzz is all about.
7. Whats in the news that everyone is talking about? Visit sites like CNN, Yahoo and MSN's home page.

Step 2 - Research Your Niche

Miss this step and you're just going to be wasting your valuable time. If you don't research your niche then you won't know what they want, what they're emotional about or even what products they're already using.

Another benefit to be derived is that you will gain some really handy intelligence about your market such as the way they talk, words they use that are specific to the niche...that when you talk like them you're going to be seen as an expert.

To do niche research all you'll need to do is to go hang out online where your market hangs out. Niche specific forums, blogs, social networks? Those are the places you need to go to do niche research.

Trying to get into the golfing niche? Go hang out at golf forums. Find an authority blogger on golf and subscribe to his blog. Read every post and also the comments. Look for the forum threads that get the most responses and you've probably identified a problem that you can use as an approach for marketing in that niche.

The following article will give you some more insight on this topic. Read it through thoroughly.

5 Steps to Becoming an Expert in Your Niche

Also here's an article on how I use Yahoo Answers to do Niche Research.

Keyword Research

You don't need any expensive tools for this one. One of the best tools you can use for this is the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can start using a broad search like say "golf" and see what related searches come up. Then again you will know what type of problem you're going after, you can start there. If you've been doing step #2, then you would have probably come up with some problems your niche has. Type this into the keyword tool and see what comes back.

Don't go for broad keywords like everyone else. You need keywords that are relevant. Think about what your user may be thinking when they typed the keyword.

A user will usually go through different stages before they decide to buy. They go through the research phase, the decision phase and the buying phase. What you want to do is skip the first two phases and just go straight for the buying phase - its the quickest way to money.

You'll recognize buying phase keywords because they usually contain the product name and and identifying prefix or suffix like:

buy
purchase
review
is xxxxxx a scam
free shipping
cheap

You know, the type of stuff that says that the person already has their credit card in hand.

Find a Method of Promotion

You can do PPC or Article Marketing or Content Websites or Forum Marketing or Blogging or Social Network marketing but NOT all at once. If you're going to choose a method, choose that method and learn how to be a master at this type of promotional method.

Who gets paid more? The general practitioner or the brain surgeon? Be an expert at one thing at a time.

I personally love using free methods and article marketing is my favorite.

To make this work, once you've done the first set of steps, you will usually set it up like this.

1. Set up your main promotion on your own domain (website). If you don't have a website use a blog (blogger) or you can use a free website service such as Weebly.
2. You'll need to search engine optimize your articles so that they rank on Google's first page. To achieve this you'll have to choose low competition keywords
3. To find low comp keywords, search your keyword on Google in "quotes" and see how many results are returned. Ideally you want results of less than 10,000.
4. To get a high ranking you want to use sites that already rank highly in Google. These sites you will use to link back to your main promotion. These are sites like Ezinearticles, Hubpages, Goarticles, Squidoo etc.
5. You'll need to get backlinks to boost your articles rankings. You can set up a network of these articles all linking to your main promotion and interlinking each other. Also social bookmark these articles where possible and find other places to submit your content.
6. Once you've made a sale, this usually means the niche is a good one. You can do a full campaign which includes collecting opt ins, PPC and other methods.
7. Start right back from #1 with another subniche or a whole new niche

If you'd like a real step by step, Wealthy Affiliate offers an article marketing accreditation course as well as a PPC accreditation course for those who have a budget.

Conclusion

When you get to the point where you're making money, don't go blowing it all as soon as you get it. Put that money right back into your business, whether you spend it on other promotional methods such as investing in an autoresponder, hosting, education, other promotional methods such as PPC or outsourcing some of the article writing.

Last but not least:

NEVER GIVE UP. Don't be afraid to fail. You will fail many times before you have just one success story.

References:
1.How To Do Niche Research

[burton4550]

Thanks alot for this reply , I really appreciate it .. This is awesome information and I am definitely going to take this into action. You are right I am way motivated to do affiliate marketing and succeed , its just really hard since im learning all this on my own with no help.. Thanks a lot again though. Greatly appreciated ..

[kpfingaz]

Cool no problem. I just hope that you take action and put this to use. Please tell us when you get your first sale.

Jay

[burton4550]

I certainly will , I will post it right here once that happens. Hopefully it will be soon cause Ive been at this for quite a while now .. Lots of failed hours put in. However im not giving up , im going to succeed at this and make a career out of it..

[kpfingaz]

Ok, you know what?

Since you're doing this alone, why not use this thread to track your progress. Post your questions as you go along and update us on what you've been doing so that others may learn as well.

You'll have my support and I'll answer any questions you may have. If any other newbie has a question concerning the above steps then you can ask as well.

Of course, you're not obligated to but if you need help just post your questions here and we can build on what's already in the step by step guide.

Jay

[burton4550]

Thats an awesome idea !!! I have no problem at all doing that . It will be good for others trying to learn as well, because they will also have the step by step.. As soon as I get on the ball, I will start posting here. I really wanted to start a niche in poker, because I have a lot of experience in that market. The only problem I found with that was, it didn't seem to be that great of a market to make money in..

[burton4550]

I did have one quick question , as to the article marketing ... When you were talking about backlinking to my articles , did you mean to put out backlinks on like forums and blog comments and social networks referring people back to that article ??

[kpfingaz]

Originally Posted by burton4550

Thats an awesome idea !!! I have no problem at all doing that . It will be good for others trying to learn as well, because they will also have the step by step.. As soon as I get on the ball, I will start posting here. I really wanted to start a niche in poker, because I have a lot of experience in that market. The only problem I found with that was, it didn't seem to be that great of a market to make money in..

Poker is a very profitable niche but its usually not a great niche to start with for a number of different reasons.

For one, you're going to have a terrible time finding places to submit content online. Many sites have policies where they don't allow content on poker and gambling in general. Same goes to pills and adult content. Many blogs also automatically send comments with this content to the akismet spam folder.

As a beginner I'd say choose a different market until you're more experienced then you can find ways to profit in this market because it is a great market to make money in, just not great for beginners.

Originally Posted by burton4550

I did have one quick question , as to the article marketing ... When you were talking about backlinking to my articles , did you mean to put out backlinks on like forums and blog comments and social networks referring people back to that article ??

Yeah, but without being spammy. There are different ways to do backlinking.

You can use forums ( the best way is to get a signature and participate in discussions without trying to sell anything). This way you avoid annoying other forum users (which isn't a good thing for your reputation or your business).

You can comment on blogs but you have to submit comments that are relevant to the posts that you are commenting on or you'll either get your comment deleted or sent to the spam folder.

You can use bookmark your articles on sites like Digg, Mixx, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and other sites.

With social networks, only refer people to your articles in situations where its called for and where it will help someone. Trust me you don't want to annoy people.

You can also write other articles and blog posts and link to your other content. There are lots of ways. Basically, any site where you're able to submit content can be used but make sure to read the rules or see what others are doing.

Your goal with backlinking is to get a good (top 10) rank in the search engines so that you can get a lot of free traffic.

Jay

[burton4550]

Great information once again.. Im gonna begin my quest for finding a profitable niche tomorrow .. I will be spening the whole day tomorrow finding something good..

Thanks again you have no idea how much I appreciate your help ..

[burton4550]

Day# 1. Picking My Niche:

Ok so I've done quit a bit of research today in picking the niche market I wanted to be in to start finally getting some sales.

I started off with looking at some different things in clickbank. I would look at the grav to see how hot these particular vendors were. I found a few that interested me, which were Reverse phone detective, a relationship one, tattoo's and satelite tv for pc & mobile phone.

I then went to some blogs and searched for popular trends people were bloggin about. I actually didn't find much information with this. As there are a ton of blogs out there and they are all on different things, most of the popular ones were personal blogs related to that particular person's life.

I then proceeded to go to Google Trends, I found some really good stuff here. I found that a really popular market right now is golf (because of the US open). I then went to yahoo and checked cnn and again found tons of different things on golf once again..

So I took it to the next step and searched in yahoo answers and forums to find out if this was a niche where people were needing help, and I found that multiple people were needing help from there swing to cutting down the strokes for each hole and even people wanting to learn to play golf. So based on this research Ive decided to choose golf.. Im now going to do my research and learn more about this particular niche and find a solution to help people with there problems they are having in this market ... Ill post day #2 once I do some research to let everyone know the progress..

[kpfingaz]

Very, very good.

I'm really glad you're doing this man. I like the way you went from spotting that golf thing on Trends and then verifying that it was indeed something you could work with using Yahoo Answers. Thats kinda like the technique I use.

Now all you gotta do is identify a particular subniche of golfing that you want to target. You said that there were various problems and so on that people were talking about. One of those would work well for your first campaign.

On a side note, not to distract you from the golf thing but for others who are lurking, I realize I told you what to do to find niches but not HOW TO. I became aware of this when you said you went to look for blogs but didn't find anything much.

There are tonnes of niche blogs and here's a few places you can find those.

Technorati Blog Directory

Blogcatalog Directory

MyBlogLog Hot Topics

Lots of categories to browse through and some niche blogs get really specific and you can actually see how they're monetizing their traffic and see what they're selling. By checking out the comments you'll see how people are responding, if they have questions that are troubling them and so on.

Jay

[burton4550]

Yeah this seems to be the easy part so far. With all the resources out there to use, it makes it quite easier. I had a question I was just thinking of. After I do the steps 1-3 when it comes to making a site or blog, can I create just like a landing page or and a review site ? Or do I need to create a site full of content and free stuff with affiliate links built into the content ? Also if I do a blog with blogger , should I set up my own domain and forward to the blog so it looks a little more professional or just leave the blogger url ?

Sorry for the questions, this is just the last thing Im not to sure on ..

[kpfingaz]

If you get a domain name and I do recommend that you do, I think you should go with Wordpress because Google loves Wordpress blogs more than they do blogger blogs. You'll also have a lot more freedom to do whatever you want.

I build most of my sites with Wordpress and I do have some blogger blogs. You can also do a landing page with www.weebly.com as well if you cant pay for hosting.

You can structure your site any way you like as long as it has useful content that meets the needs of the end user.

By the way, keep the questions coming.

Jay

PS. Any other readers lurking and want to ask questions, please do.

[kpfingaz]

Oh hey, just to make your research a bit easier, you can find the authority of the niche you're in by searching Google for the broad keyword "golf" which in this case happens to be http://www.golf.com/golf

Jay

[burton4550]

So if I got a domain would I just set it up to forward to my blog? Cause I know on blogger you have the .blogspot dot com after your keywords. One other thing, since this is techinically my first campaign that ill be doing correctly, would recommend setting up a blog or set up an actual landing page and review site ? Im probably gonna be using main adwords PPC to get the majority of my traffic

Thanks a million for the help here, when I start making millions ill be sure to pay you back for all your help on here lol ..

[kpfingaz]

Originally Posted by burton4550

So if I got a domain would I just set it up to forward to my blog? Cause I know on blogger you have the .blogspot dot com after your keywords. One other thing, since this is techinically my first campaign that ill be doing correctly, would recommend setting up a blog or set up an actual landing page and review site ? Im probably gonna be using main adwords PPC to get the majority of my traffic

Thanks a million for the help here, when I start making millions ill be sure to pay you back for all your help on here lol ..

If you're going to be using Adwords then I would discourage you from using Blogger (Blogspot). You can have a landing page/review site but you can also use a blog but it has to be on Wordpress.

[burton4550]

Day # 2 Researching My Niche

So I browsed a bunch of forums today and also searched through a lot of the questions asked on yahoo answers to research my niche (which is golf).

I actually found that there wasn't really one problem that people leaned towards more in the golf niche. A lot of people were wanting to know where to get there golf clubs, or which golf clubs were better. Some people wanted to improve there game, by knocking off a few strokes and then there were some that wanted to just learn how to play golf in general.

So what I have decided is to build a site containing all this information. Rather then focusing on just one individual problem, ive decided to put multible answers to the common golf questions on my site.

I am gonna use clickbank to get some golf affiliate programs that they have and put in banners and affiliate links throughout my articles and reviews I have on the site and then I will also put in other affiliate links that will direct people to stores to actually buy golf equipment and gear.

My next step now will be doing keyword research and find exactly what people are searching the most for. As this could kinda put a change in my site depending on what popular searches people are doing. So the research will continue tomorrow and I will once again do an update on my progress.

[kpfingaz]

Progressing nicely, but let me just say that Golf is too broad of a topic for you to deal with. It would be better if you focus on one subniche of the whole golfing thing at a time. This way you'll be able to profit faster. Then you could always branch out into other niches within Golf.

Looking forward to your updates.

Jay

[burton4550]

So it would be better then to focus on say specific golf products (like clubs,putters shoes) or focus on like a vendor that can cut down strokes, or even an vendor that offers an affiliate program of just learning how to play golf. Just focusing on one of those , its that what you are saying?