Archive for the ‘Strategies for Success’ Category

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

If you read my earlier post on acquiring visitors’ email addresses, you understand how important it is to build an email list, and how a newsletter can be a great way to get value from those subscribers. But how can you promote products in your newsletter series without sending your subscribers running for the “unsubscribe” button? How do you promote newsletter loyalty and, at the same time, monetize it to the max?

Let me share with you my 7 steps to a killer newsletter: How to grab readers’ attention, hook them, and sell to them. We at Affilorama employ this strategy quite regularly with our newsletter lists, and with subscribers topping 100,000… we must be doing something right!

Step 1 – Refer to it as a ‘6-day mini course’ instead of a newsletter

• Firstly: It’s more exciting than a newsletter – Essentially it’s the same thing but it sounds a lot more interesting. And, because you usually pay for a course, subscribers will feel like they’re getting something of value for free!
• Secondly: It lowers the commitment barrier – By signing up for a 6-day course, subscribers will not feel like they’re being added to a list they’ll never get away from.
• Thirdly: It builds trust – By creating a 6-part series of high quality emails, you build a good reputation with your subscribers and get them used to opening your emails.

Step 2 – Build an inviting sign-up box

You need to make it really obvious how to subscribe. A good idea is to have your sign-up box display “above the fold” and appear on every page of your site.

Your sign up box really has to pack a punch. Don’t just shove a little form in your sidebar and hope for the best. You need to sell your newsletter – almost as if it was a paid product.

We’re not saying that you have to create a huge sales letter for it; a few bulletpoints covering what people will learn in each lesson is sufficient. But don’t give too much away. Create a bit of mystery, and make it enticing!

Step 3 – Make sure your content is the very best you can offer

It’s an old saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and it’s true for your newsletter. If you don’t capture the attention of your readers from the start, there’s every chance they will unsubscribe and you will have lost them forever!

Conversely, if they haven’t unsubscribed within the first 10 to 15 emails, then they will probably stay on your list for good. Fantastic! Another reason to make sure that your first 10 emails are first class.

The quality of your content also sets the tone for how much readers will respect you as a source of trusted advice. If the content has obviously been copied, scraped, or lacks substance, it’s likely your readers won’t view you as an authority and your product recommendations will be far less successful.

Step 4 – Include affiliate promotions, but leave the hard sell at home

While there’s nothing wrong with including relevant affiliate links to ClickBank products in the body or signature of your emails, the focus really needs to be on valuable content. So avoid the hard-sell in your mini-course.

One technique is to just say “if you’re looking for the best guide to XYZ, I really recommend ABC. It gets right to the heart of 123 and will teach you XYZ in no time” and then return to your main content. You need to remind yourself that you are trying to build trust. A constant sales pitch will undermine that.

Step 5 – Day 7 promotional email

After the 6-day course has ended, your subscribers are ready to get a hard-sell promotional email. This could be a product review or talk of a recent product launch. Pull out all the stops and sell, sell, sell. Include limited, time-sensitive offers or create truly unique deals by adding your own bonuses that you’ve put together for this promotion.

Step 6 – Keep emailing them every 3 days

At this point you need to decide which direction your newsletter will take:

Option 1 – If you want to build loyalty and have long-term subscribers, then offer a mix of informative and promotional emails, emailing every 3 days, with every 3^rd email being something promotional like a product review.

Option 2 – If you’re not interested in building up your email list as a long-term asset, you can take the option of ongoing, rapid-fire promotion. Product reviews, launch offers, YouTube reviews and affiliate links should feature heavily in all your emails. True, your subscribers will probably end up growing tired of it but hopefully by then they’ve bought from you at least once!

So, is emailing every 3 days too much? Surprisingly, our tests proved that emailing two or 3 times a week was optimal. There are reasons for this and why email frequency is a vital part of your newsletter strategy but the key is: don’t be afraid to email people frequently. Chances are they won’t be opening all your emails so in reality they aren’t actually getting 3 emails a week after all!

Step 7 – Track your newsletter performance like a bloodhound

Don’t fire and forget. Know which newsletters are helping and which are hurting.

• Check your autoresponder statistics to see which emails are generating the most unsubscribes. Look at what might be offending your subscribers in these emails. Can you fix it and keep them hanging on?
• Use ClickBank’s tracking IDs (TIDs) to see which promotional links are getting the most clicks. Create a new tracking ID for each newsletter. If nobody is clicking the links in a particular email, can you see why that is?
• Don’t forget to use redirects or other link-rewriting services to make those nasty affiliate links look pretty and inoffensive to click on!

Hold up just one minute – Is your niche newsletter-worthy?

Before you even start down the road of building a newsletter and getting sign-ups, you need to determine if a newsletter would be helpful or appropriate for your niche. Not every niche works well with a newsletter series. Dog training, World of Warcraft, and dating niches are good because people have a passion for these topics. On the contrary, I am yet to meet anyone who has an ongoing interest in yeast infections or hemorrhoids. Nobody wants to be reminded of these problems every three days!

Don’t underestimate the value of a good newsletter

Many affiliates find that a large portion of their earnings comes from their newsletter series. Sometimes they earn more from their newsletter than their actual website! Rolling out a killer newsletter strategy is one of the most profitable exercises you can undertake – you just need to make sure you do it right!

Have you used this newsletter strategy? Did you modify it to boost its converting power or did it not work for you?

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend you review the Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing before kicking off your next campaign!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Charles Kirkland, Guest Blogger

This is the final post in a three-part series. Be sure to read Parts 1 and 2 first!

Factor 3 – PPC Marketing the Smart Way

When using PPC marketing, there are several factors to take into account to guarantee that your ads are displayed properly so that your money is spent on the clicks that have potential for converting into affiliate sales. These are some tips will help you get started with PPC marketing for your affiliate products the smart way.

1. Properly group your keywords

Creating groups of keywords based on their theme will assist the search engine in displaying ads that are relevant to those particular keywords.  Avoiding placing all of your keywords in one large group makes it easier to test the strength of your different campaign ads.

2. Link to a specific web page on your site

Every click counts. If you are displaying a specific ad for a particular keyword then you want to ensure that the ad directs the visitor to the appropriate page. In general, this would mean a specific landing page and not the homepage of your website.

3. Focus on a keyword’s overall conversion rate

It is common for marketers to confuse a keyword’s high click through rate (CTR) with its actual overall ability to convert. The CTR is only referring to those who clicked on the ad and reached your page. It does not count the amount of people who then went to the merchant’s sales page and actually purchased the product.

4. Split up campaigns based on region

It is ideal to display your ads based on the geographic region of the visitor. If you organize your keyword ad groups properly, you can customize your ads to attract more people. This is a key method to personalize your ads, as you can write them in a language native or familiar to people.

I hope these tips have been helpful for you in getting started in your affiliate marketing business. The key point that I want you to remember is that PPC can be done very effectively on a shoestring budget, when you have the right offer, when you have the right landing page and when you are taking advantage of PPC marketing.

About the Author

You can read about Charles Kirkland and his adventures and misadventures in affiliate marketing at his blog. He also provides free affiliate training and videos for marketers at any level there as well.

Written by: Charles Kirkland, Guest Blogger

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Be sure to read Part 1 first!

Factor 2 – Building a Quality Landing Page

Once you find a profitable offer in the ClickBank Marketplace, you will then need to prepare a quality landing page. In terms of selling products through PPC, landing pages are among the most vital elements, and many methods are used to properly optimize the pages. One of the most successful approaches to making large profits online is by presenting a strong review page along with quality content. Here are some essential points to be mindful of when building your landing pages.

1. Emphasize the benefits of the product for your visitors

Industry studies have shown that a properly sorted list of product advantages can be influential to visitors. When clear benefits are listed, readers feel more encouraged to purchase the product.

2. Use convincing reviews and recommendations on your landing page

Unbiased product evaluations and testimonials provide fantastic possibilities for transforming your visitors into customers. Most people seek out immediate and quick remedies for their problems. Furthermore, they readily trust personal recommendations that don’t seem biased. Therefore, it’s best if you purchase the product you’re reviewing so you can provide an honest assessment.

In the event that you are low on money, simply explore the product in detail and compose a balanced review for your landing page. Some vendors may even give away review copies to affiliates so they can fully understand the product before promoting it.

3. Compare the product with other similar affiliate products

Presenting a comparison between a large number of affiliate products is a wise way to develop an outstanding review landing page. Comparisons easily grab the attention of a visitor and establish confidence. Make sure to compare between 5 to 10 different affiliate products at the same time on the review landing page to avoid any potential confusion or misunderstanding.

4. Focus on your keywords in the landing page

When making your landing page, highlight your top keywords and try to use them in the page title, header and throughout the content.

5. Make it easy to reach the vendor’s website

Since the landing page you are building is aimed at directing visitors to the vendor’s main site, you must guarantee that they are transferred to the vendor’s site without any problems or confusion. An easy transition to the main sales page will increase the percentage of conversions.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for the final installment, where we’ll discuss specific PPC advertising techniques you can use to get the most out of your ad campaigns.

About the Author

You can read about Charles Kirkland and his adventures and misadventures in affiliate marketing at his blog. He also provides free affiliate training and videos for marketers at any level there as well.

Written by: Charles Kirkland, Guest Blogger

This is Part 1 of a three-part series.

With numerous opportunities to make money online available worldwide, one of the most popular methods these days is affiliate marketing. There are several approaches to affiliate marketing, but most marketers agree that the fastest way to start making money immediately is through Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. Unfortunately, this is also one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of money if you do not plan properly.

In this guide, we will take a look at three critical factors that every affiliate marketer must be aware of in order to successfully turn a profit using PPC marketing without the risk of losing a large amount of money.

Factor 1 – Discovering a Profitable Offer

Generating an exceptional profit using ClickBank is still highly possible at the moment. Having said that, there is such a large variety of products and niches that it might be tough to choose the most effective income generating products on ClickBank to advertise. So what’s the easiest way to determine which products are ideal to promote so that you can make the most money without having to waste your time.

Let’s take a look at a handful of tips that when followed should put you on the right track to uncovering some of the most successful ClickBank products.

1. Pay attention to exactly how well other affiliate marketers are doing in promoting the product

It’s possible to understand a great deal about whether or not a product is profitable by looking at the sales statistics of others. A product is without doubt selling very well if there are a high number of affiliates advertising it. ClickBank has a sales statistic known as gravity, which is a number that represents the percentage of online marketers successfully promoting a specific product.

You shouldn’t make a judgment based solely on gravity, but it is useful data that ClickBank provides and can be an excellent tool in selecting a income generating product to advertise. Choosing virtually any product with gravity between 10 and 100 is usually a great start.  If the gravity is less than 10, odds are it isn’t selling very well. Likewise, if the gravity is more than 100 it may be an indication that the marketplace is saturated, although that is not always the case.

2. Monitor products that are rising in popularity

To discover successful products, it is helpful to pick one with statistics that are climbing. Restrict your choice of products to roughly 10 and track them for at least a week or two. Should you note that other affiliates are choosing one product a lot quicker than the others, then that could be a successful affiliate product.

3. Estimate the return rate

One crucial factor you should consider when choosing the top ClickBank products is the return percentage rate. When return rates are high, then a product sales rate is not indicative of your potential success with a product since you will likely end up returning your earnings in the future. Virtually any product with return rates higher than 15% probably should not be considered, irrespective of sales rates.

The only way to truly gauge return rates is to promote a product for a while and keep a close eye on the return rate. However, if you want to get a rough estimate of the potential return rate before you start promoting a product, you can do Google searches for these kinds of phrases:

“What is your opinion about PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did you like PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did anybody buy PRODUCT TITLE?”

The results for these searches will often give you a good overview of the quality of the product and what the general customer opinion of it may be.

4. Examine the size of the market

After you have narrowed down the products a bit more by crossing out products with high return rates, you should then check out the market size. For example, suppose you have found four different niches. Use the Google keyword tool and research the variety of keywords for each niche and determine the search volume. Google Trends is also a useful tool for analyzing the developments of a niche immediately and over time. The best scenario is to find a product with few competitors and high demand from customers.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for Part 2, where we’ll discuss how to build a great landing page where you can send your PPC advertising traffic.

About the Author

You can read about Charles Kirkland and his adventures and misadventures in affiliate marketing at his blog. He also provides free affiliate training and videos for marketers at any level there as well.

Written by: Chris McNeeney, Guest Blogger

When I first got started as a ClickBank vendor several years ago, I faced one of the major challenges that faces all new ClickBank vendors: how to find and attract affiliates to promote my product. Since then, I’ve sold several very successful products through ClickBank, and have learned what it takes to get affiliates to promote your product, which is absolutely key if you want to make a lot of sales. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned over years of finding and attracting affiliates.

First Things First

An extremely important step in attracting affiliates that many new vendors don’t know about or ignore is promoting your offer yourself before seeking out affiliates. The reason for this is that you need to make sure your offer converts. Otherwise, all your efforts will be wasted. Many affiliates, especially highly successful ones, will only give a product one chance. If it doesn’t convert into sales for them, they’ll stop promoting it and probably won’t try again, especially if they spend money to promote it.

Pay Per Click traffic is a great way to test how well your product converts. The goal is to get a conversion rate of at least 1% – ideally closer to 3%.

This may sound like unncessary groundwork, but it really is a vital first step: the importance of having a high converting offer can’t be stressed enough.

If your offer converts, recruiting affiliates will be a piece of cake. Any affiliates you bring on board will make money and continue promoting you. Their efforts will quickly pull in many new affiliates, and so on – its a virtuous cycle. Your offer will go viral if your conversions are high, as other affiliates start to see what their competitors are promoting.

However, if your offer does not convert you will have a tough time keeping any new affiliates you do manage to enlist. Your offer will likely stagnate and then disappear for good.

So be sure to run a simple PPC campaign to test your conversion rates before reaching out to affiliates. You can get more info on PPC at my Affiliate Videos page.

Next Steps

Now that you have a proven 1-3% conversion rate, its time to start contacting affiliates. The good news is that some of the work is already done. With ClickBank, you are never working from a dead start.

First, the ClickBank Marketplace will introduce your new site to a potential network of hundreds of thousands of affiliates (you should submit your product to the Marketplace as soon as you are approved). Second, the fact that all payments are handled by ClickBank ensures you have instant trust with affiliates. ClickBank have paid out over $1 billion to vendors and affiliates – so your affiliates know they will be paid on time, which is important since you don’t have any reputation right now. In short, listing your product with ClickBank gives you a firm platform to recruit affiliates from. You may well even attract affiliates passively before you start work.

But a mere presence on ClickBank won’t be enough; we have to actively build on that platform and reach out to affiliates if we want to succeed.

So how do we do that? And what kind of affiliate do we recruit? To a large extent, it depends on your niche. In the fat loss niche, for example, you have many avenues open to you. There are thousands of potential affiliates, some with lists of customers (so they can promote you via e-mail), some spending huge amounts of money on Pay Per Click traffic, and others with well-visited “authority sites” that pull in masses of free (”organic”) traffic from the search engines.

Smaller niches may be more restrictive, with all the sales coming from one traffic source or affiliate type. For example, in your niche, perhaps there are 10 big e-mail affiliates (”list owners”) who account for 70% of all sales. I’ve seen it happen before. Perhaps all the action is happening on a handful of search engine keywords that can be targeted via “organic search” or “pay per click” (this is actually the norm).

I have divided affiliates into 3 types here, but there are many other traffic sources, such as affiliates who purchase ad space on media networks (”media buys”). For simplicity’s sake I have restricted the affiliate types to e-mail, Pay Per Click and organic.

Pay Per Click Affiliates

PPC affiliates are very often the easiest to reach of all, although often the most fickle (they are constantly tracking their return on investment, and so will move to the highest converting offer in a heartbeat – another reason to ensure you are converting before you recruit affiliates).

PPC affiliates basically buy traffic from search engines such as Google, so that when people enter a keyword relating to your niche (e.g., “fat loss guides”), their ad shows up on the right hand side of the search results page.

If you enter a few keywords that relate to your niche, look at the ads that appear down the right hand side. Do any affiliates appear here that are promoting your competitors’ offers? Are there are any vendors promoting their own offers but collecting leads? If so, they may be open to promoting your offer to their lists.

If you find advertisers like these, you should contact them and ask them to promote your offer.

You can brainstorm keywords to find these PPC affiliates by entering the URL of your website or related keywords using the Adwords Tool or my affiliate keyword tool. Search for each related keyword that the tool returns and look for affiliates advertising on that phrase.

Organic / Website Affiliates

Some affiliates buy traffic from the search engines via PPC, but others have established sites that actually get free rankings in the search engines. These “organic” affiliates often have a huge amount of traffic coming to their sites, and so can be superb affiliates.

The first step to finding them is to take the keyword list you generated earlier (when you were looking for PPC affiliates), enter the same keywords, and now look for webiste owners appearing on the left hand side of the results page. Visit every site and head to their contact page, explaining how your offer is relevant to their website. Some website owners may not be familiar with affiliate marketing, so you may need explain to them why it can be lucrative for them and a good fit for their audience.

You can also search for the name of a competitor’s product (e.g., “The Ultimate Fat Loss Guide”) and contact any website that has a review of your competitor’s product. If they are promoting your competitors, they may well promote you also. When contacting these organic affiliates be sure to emphasise why your offer will add value for their visitors.

E-mail Affiliates (”JV Partners”)

These are the hardest affiliates to get on board, but also potentially the most lucrative. E-mail affiliates have a list of customers that they can promote offers to. It stands to reason that many of your top e-mail affiliates will be your competitors, such as other product vendors. These guys have a customer list of their own, and may be interested in promoting your offer to their list.

If you do get them to promote, they can generate huge numbers of sales with a single e-mail. Secondly, e-mail affiliates are the key to going viral: since all the big product vendors and affiliates sign up to each other’s lists, if they do promote you, other affiliates can jump on board quickly. A high-converting offer can go viral off a single e-mail, as more and more affiliates see the e-mail blast and jump on board. That’s the power of reaching thousands of people with a single e-mail.

List owners like this are in theory very easy to find – just do a simple search on the ClickBank Marketplace and contact any vendor in your niche who is collecting names and e-mails on their Pitch Page.

However, while they are easy to find, these affiliates are also the hardest to recruit. Many of your e-mails asking for promotion will probably go ignored, much more so than the other kinds of affiliates. These guys are bombarded with e-mails like yours, and they just don’t have the time to answer every one they receive. It isn’t personal, its just business.

For this reason, I advise you to focus on the PPC and organic affiliates to start with. Then, when you have some grass-roots traction behind your offer, and you know your product converts well, you can approach the big e-mail affiliates from a position of strength.

What to Say When You Contact Affiliates

You usually only get one shot at contacting affiliates, so it’s vital that you do it right the first time. First, make your e-mail personalised to the affiliate in question. Reference their site and start by telling them your offer is relevant and will deliver value to their visitors/customers. Please do not send out a “one size fits all” e-mail. Any potential affiliate receives dozens of e-mails like yours – you need to make it personalized if you want your offer to stand out.

Next, tell them why they will make money by promoting your offer – give them your overall conversion rate, details of any affiliates you already have on board, and how successful they’ve been. Explain what is working especially well for you. Finally, close by giving them a call to action – tell them to either visit your affiliate page or e-mail you back for further information and a review copy of your product.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll repeat my advice from earlier: it’s vital that your Pitch Page converts before you recruit affiliates.

This will make it much easier to retain the affiliates who you do recruit, and also bring on new affiliates once you get your first set of affiliates on board. Once you have a high-converting offer, set up your affiliate page, listing details of your conversion rates at the top of the page. The affiliate page is where you will be sending potential affiliates, and should include your HopLink info and any resources (Adwords ads, e-mail swipe copy, etc) that affiliates can use.

You should also submit your offer to all the affiliate directories that are out there, along with the “announcements” sections of the top affiliate forums. This will take some time, but is vital to establishing your initial grass-roots foundation. Then, once your offer converts, your affiliate page is live, and you are listed in some directories, you can approach the above 3 affiliate types and start generating some real sales for your ClickBank product.

Finally, understand that affiliate recruitment is a numbers game. Look at it as a process rather than an “end game.” You’re looking to build gradual momentum, get your offer out there, and if it converts, the viral power of the Internet will do the rest. A high-converting offer only needs a little push before it gathers traction. So get to work – and build that initial buzz yourself!

About the author

Chris McNeeney is the owner of Affiliate X – a resource site for ClickBank affiliates with affiliate tools, affiliate videos and training information.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Those of us in the affiliate marketing world work hard to get visitors to our pages, so it’s disappointing when they turn on their heels and walk out without even clicking a HopLink. The disappointment is intensified if you actually paid for the traffic using PPC advertising.

What can you do about this? Is it possible to still get value from visitors who are leaving your site? Do you just let them walk away, or can you still convert them into potential customers without requiring them to buy right then?

A lot of smart Internet marketers realize that every visitor to their site has value, and they maximize that value by realizing that even though not every visitor will hand over money, they can part with something that may prove just as valuable – their email address. Having a list of qualified, opted-in visitors can be very valuable to your marketing efforts, allowing you to re-market to these visitors later (just follow all CAN-SPAM guidelines), and can be a powerful bargaining chip when negotiating joint ventures with other Internet marketers.

Studies indicate that the majority of site visitors leave within 8 seconds of visiting a site. Another significant percentage leaves after reviewing the landing page and deciding the content is either not relevant, or not compelling enough for them. A mere 3% will actually make a purchase, on average. Interestingly enough, though, approximately 30% of visitors will sign up for a newsletter.

If you’re not getting many email addresses from visitors right now, and you’re feeling frustrated by all the traffic just walking away, then I strongly encourage you to try the following methods to improve your signup conversion rate.

• Popover – A popover is a small overlay containing newsletter signup information that can be set to appear on every visitor’s screen shortly after they arrive at your site. Unlike popups, browser blockers do not affect popovers. They can’t be missed either. They appear in an overlay that sits over the top of the page and can be as detailed as you like, listing the reasons why they should sign up and fields for their name and email address. You can see an example of this on SaleHoo’s main landing page (give it a few seconds to show up). You can style them any way you like and include as much or as little text as you want. To maximize your chances of a signup, make it clear what’s in it for them and make sure the whole process is easy and works smoothly!Testing indicates that delaying the popover for about 20 seconds gives visitors a chance to get familiar with your site so they’ll be more inclined to sign up.

• Sidebar signup – If you run a WordPress site, then adding a sidebar widget is something you can probably do in your sleep. Signup form code can be pasted into a standard text/HTML widget. With your signup form appearing on every page of your site, it increases the chances of it being seen and capturing an email lead before they exit, regardless of the entrance page.

Give them a reason to give you their email

Asking for an email address outright doesn’t generally work. The novelty of getting emails wore off about 10 years ago, so there needs to be a good reason for someone to part with their email address these days!

The secret to getting a visitor’s email address is to think about what they want. It sounds obvious but it’s often ignored. You get them what they want and they’ll give you what you want. Simple.

Think about what you have of value that you can offer in exchange for an email address.

• A free eBook
• A free 7-part mini-course
• A free trial membership
• A free SEO report on the visitor’s website (using an SEO tool like Traffic Travis)

Obviously free is a good start, but make it relevant and you’ll be on to a sure thing. For example, if you have a site about dog training, then offer a 7-part course on house training a puppy. Or, if your site is focused on Internet marketing, tempt them with a “Beginners Guide to PPC” eBook.

Give visitors two options: Buy or leave their email address

If you’re only focusing on making sales you’re ignoring around 97% of your visitors. That’s not good business practice. If you put as much effort into capturing email addresses as you do trying to make a sale then you can look forward to a far more successful online business in the future, with an email list that can potentially earn you a lot of extra dollars in the months to come.

Do you try to capture email addresses? What works for you?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Blogger

One of the things I get asked a lot is where to begin as an affiliate marketer.

It can all be so overwhelming. There are so many different ways to get traffic, build sites, and pick products to promote (these are the three components of any affiliate marketing effort). In addition, some of these traffic and site building options can be expensive and highly technical, requiring a lot of training and expertise.

My goal in this post is to highlight a way to get started as an affiliate that’s relatively easy, risk-free, zero cost, has a great chance to make your first money online, and doesn’t require any technical knowledge or experience.

We’re going to use ClickBank for our product, a BlogSpot blog for our website, and search engine optimization to get traffic. If you’re totally new to search engine optimization and want a very quick introduction, you may want to check out this video.

Step 1 – Find 10 products you’re interested in promoting

• One of the best parts of being an affiliate for ClickBank is that it’s so easy to get started because there are thousands of unique products to promote. Once you have a ClickBank account, go to the Marketplace and browse it to find products that you have an interest in and/or that you or someone you know would buy.
• Make a note of the products, including their Pitch Pages and the custom HopLinks you’ll use to promote them (you’ll get these by clicking the Promote button next to the Marketplace listing). It’s a good idea to save this information in a text file on your computer.

Step 2 – Find potential keywords using Google’s keyword tool

• Go to Google’s external keyword tool.
• For each product you picked in Step 1, enter the most generic keyword that applies to your product. For example, if you’re promoting a product on how to cure tinnitus, use the keyword “tinnitus” and click the Get Keyword Ideas button.
• Go over to the Match Type drop down box and select Phrase Match.
• Sort the list in descending order of global search volume by clicking on the column Title.
• Make a list of any keyword that is between 10000 and 30000 global monthly searches, and that has something to do with your product.
• At the end of this step, you’ll have 10 lists. Some of these lists may be empty, as it’s possible that there won’t be any keywords that meet our criteria.  We’re being very careful about selecting only the ones that will work for us, so have patience and don’t get discouraged.

Step 3 – Evaluate the competition for SEO

• Now we need to see if it would be possible for us to actually rank in Google for terms that would drive traffic to the product we’re going to market. For each keyword identified in Step 2, head over to Google and type the keyword in quotes. For example, if the keyword phrase was “cure tinnitus,” you’d type “cure tinnitus” into Google.
• You’ll see the search results and the words “Results 1-10 of about xx,xxx” on the right hand side. If the xx,xxx number is less than 100,000, move on to the next step. Otherwise, discard this keyword.
• Do another Google search by typing inurl:”keyword phrase”. For example, for our keyword above it would be inurl:”cure tinnitus”. Take a look at the number of results again. If that number is below 1,250, this keyword is a winner. Make a note of it.

Step 4 – Pick the keyword you want to start with and build a BlogSpot blog

• We’ve picked a BlogSpot blog for 2 reasons: it’s easy to build a nice-looking site quickly, and blogs rank very well in Google.
• In general, pick the keyword phrase that has the highest search volume, the lowest competition numbers from step 3, and seems to be the best fit for someone looking to actually buy your product. There are really no wrong answers here, just go with your instinct using these criteria as a guide.
• Build your BlogSpot blog. Sign up and watch the tutorials on how to create content like posts. When setting up your blog, make sure that the blog title is your keyword phrase.
• Make sure that the blog address (URL) also contains the keyword phrase you’ve picked in some way. So in our example, best-tinnitus-cure, my-tinnitus-cure, etc., all work just fine. Dashes are fine anywhere, so with a bit of creativity you should have no trouble coming up with a name that’s not been taken.
• The goal of your blog is to inform and to sell. Provide valuable content from the Pitch Page of the product, as well as outside resources. Add your HopLink to the actual product using text and possibly images. You can often get images from an affiliate page for the product, which can be found in the product’s Vendor Spotlight in the ClickBank Marketplace.
• Important: Never make up any information about the product! I encourage you to buy the product or have someone you know purchase the product, so you can give a truthful and accurate opinion of it.
• The exact steps to build out the site are too extensive to go into here, but an example should do the trick.  Check this page out.  It will give you a great idea of what we’re after.

Step 5 – Do some link building

• Link building is the key to search engine optimization, and the best way to quickly get included in search engine results for the keyword you’re targeting.
• The process of getting a backlink is a bit different for each option listed below, but you can’t go wrong here.  The idea is to do three things: get a link to your site, use your keyword phrase in the description or tag when you’re using a bookmarking site, use your keyword phrase as the “anchor text” (the text that’s clickable…that is the actual link to your site) whenever possible.  Don’t worry about getting this perfect…any link is better than a perfect link, and you can do no harm!
• Blog comment posting is a popular way of getting backlinks.  Here’s a nice page that explains how to do it.
• Social bookmarking can be a great way to build backlinks to your site.  Here’s a huge list of them! Just set up an account with them and add your site.
• Web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages, etc. are great places to put up a small amount of content and then to add a backlink to your site.  Here’s a nice list of these types of sites.
• Also take a look at this guest blog post I did previously for other ideas.

Try to build at least 5-10 backlinks every single day! This will give you the quickest results.

Conclusion

The most important part of this process is the keyword research in steps 2 and 3.  If you have trouble finding the right keyword phrases for the 10 products you selected, go get 10 more and try again. Have patience. If you stick it out and find the right keywords, the rest will usually take care of itself.

After a while… it could be days, could be weeks, you should show up in the Google search results and people will click on your links to the ClickBank product and you’ll make your first money online! Best of luck in your affiliate marketing efforts.

About the author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of several best-selling Internet Marketing information products, including Commission Blueprint 2.0, Niche Blueprint, and SEM Business Blueprint. You can get more great advice and information on their blog.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is the final post in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1,  Part 2,  Part 3 and Part 4 if you haven’t already!

#5 – Look for the niche within a niche

Some affiliates fail because they think of a niche as a single entity. So if you ask them what niche they’re in, they’ll say “weight loss” and then they wonder why they don’t seem to be getting any traction. The sites that thrive in these competitive niches are the ones who have discovered niches within the niche.

For example, some successful affiliates have targeted a specific subset of weight loss customers, such as people looking for high protein diets. When you start researching this sub-niche you start to discover a lot of different products you can promote, and it can be enough to support your Internet marketing business.

So remember, you don’t need to take on the whole niche. Just find a healthy niche within the niche and you’ll have your sales without the excessive competition that comes with being too generic.

For example, some weight loss sub-niches you could try include:

• High protein diets
• Bride diets
• Belly fat diets
• Low carb diets

We’re barely scratching the surface here, but something you’ll find with competitive niches is that they fragment really well, allowing you to easily find a sub-niche you can quite happily take on.

Have you been scared off taking on a competitive niche? What would make it easier? Do you think taking on competitive niches is a waste of time? Please leave a comment with your thoughts!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is Part 4 in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1,  Part 2 and Part 3 if you haven’t already!

#4 – An organized link building campaign

It’s been said that 80% of search engine “love” comes from backlinks to your site. That’s not to say that all the on-page SEO you do is not worth doing – it is – but you should remember that without backlinks you won’t stand a chance in a competitive niche.

Link building can be challenging and you might actually feel it’s more ‘link begging’ than link building. While there’s nothing wrong with asking for a link, remember there are lots of other ways you can get a backlink to your site. Here are a few suggestions:

• Article directories such as ezinearticles.com or squidoo.com
• Industry directories that are directly related to your niche
• Forum posts or blog comments (search for CommentLuv blogs that offer dofollow comment links)

The advantage of creating your own backlinks is that you can use the anchor text of your choice, and using the keyword phrase in backlinks to your site is a huge plus for boosting your site’s relevancy for a specific keyword phrase.

Remember to monitor your backlinks with SEO tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster tools or Traffic Travis. While not all backlinks are reported, these tools will help you gauge how successful your link building campaigns are.

Stay tuned for Part 5, where I talk about focusing your niche to be even more competitive.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is Part 3 in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already!

#3 – Thinking outside the box

It’s difficult to tackle competition head-on. Like any great battle commander will tell you, it’s more effective to attack your enemy from the rear or even the side. Similarly, affiliates can be more successful by thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways of doing things. Dell was able to shake up the computer industry by selling direct to the public online, rather than through retail outlets. So instead of thinking about what your competition are doing, think about what they’re not doing.

If you’re in the weight loss niche, is there something other affiliates are not giving customers? For many customers in this niche, a sense of community support is vitally important and has been the basis of success for offline weight loss services such as Jenny Craig. As an affiliate, could you fill this gap? For example, you might try some of the following ideas:

• Add a weight loss widget to your blog that allows readers to enter this week’s losses
• Build up an online discussion forum around reviewing weight loss products
• Allow visitors to your site to create their own profile page where fellow members can post messages of support
• Add a Twitter list to your site that collects inspiring and encouraging tips for people trying to lose weight

Stay tuned for Part 4 next Monday, where I’ll talk about organized link building campaigns.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.