How To Start Making Money With Affiliate Marketing in 2022 (NEW)
Making Sure You Plan For Success
Getting affiliate links is the easy part. Having a place to host them—now that's a little more involved. Having a place to host them where people will convert to buyers—that's even more work. You need to create a place where people can find you, where they'll want to come for information or assistance, and where they'll leave only to go complete the sale (even though they may not realize they are 'leaving'). Nevertheless, it can be done.
But before you do anything, you need to structure a game plan. You need to write the plan that gives you all the potential for selling that you need.
But first, your plan...
We won't go into detail about how and where to get an actual website—that's information you can find out easily enough and quite possibly already have. We'll throw out a couple of names like GoDaddy and HostGator, but also know that there are numerous hosts and website building templates ranging from the freebie that came with your ISP to be your own host. The only point you need to know is that anyone can build a workable, attractive website; and even if it's not the best looking on the block if it's built so that traffic can come, they will.
What we want to focus on more are the structure of your website and/or websites. First off, we'll talk about the individual sites themselves.
If you will be promoting more than one product—and to make money the way the Big Dogs do you will need to—each related group of products should have their own dedicated site; out of that group, you will focus on your one most promising product most of the time. This site doesn't need to be huge, it can be just a few pages in total—say between ten and twenty, depending on the number of products you'll be selling; but it does need to incorporate all the elements that will gain you attention from the search engines, and thereby from visitors and buyers (targeted buyers with a need!).
Eventually you will want to build a master website that directs to each of your smaller, product-focused websites. This will be the website you use to "clean-up" the rest of the traffic generated by the keywords you haven't targeted—those generalities that aren't necessarily on the verge of buying anything. But that can come later. First, build the sites that will sell and start making money sooner.
So initially, your plan will look something like this:
• Target markets and keywords
• Choose specific affiliate products
• Build a website around a specific group of products
• Build more product-grouped websites for each affiliation
• Create a master website that captures traffic, then links traffic to smaller product-specific websites
Let's try to put this into perspective and give you a real-world example.
Okay; let's suppose that you are selling fitness-related products—a variety of sorts from body-building supplements to fifteen minute workout routines. The buyers who are looking for muscle-building supplements and powders could probably care less about your crunch-time workout videos. And you don't look like much of a reliable authority by just slapping up one ad next to the other. So you break down each of those product types into groups, and market five or six or so together on one website dedicated to each. So instead of having a catch-all website with fitness products, you have two dedicated websites that specifically serve the needs of the visitors ready to buy. You have
• A 10-20 page website selling body-building supplements, and
• A 10-20 page website selling workout videos for the too-busy-to-exercise crowd
Each site gives your buyers what they need—not what the other needs. After those sites are established and doing their thing, you can go back to that model of the fitness-products store, and create sections and virtual "aisles" that point to these smaller dedicated sites.
Now here we need to clarify a bit. This structure is one of the number-one things that Big Dog affiliates do, and small players do not.
What you will see many times is that small players collect a number of products, usually related, sometimes not even, and group them all on one website. They market their affiliate site as a sort of one-stop-shopping storefront for everything. And they create so much confusion and competition amongst their own affiliate products that they never maximize the potential of the sales traffic that is coming in.
What the Big Dogs do in contrast is start by focusing on the small sites. They build up products in a way that clearly sells each one. They create choice for buyers by comparing their own like-products against each other, so that whatever product is chosen, the sale is theirs. Genius, yes?
Then they get the traffic going to and buying at those sites. Later on they'll build something more akin to the storefront, and link to these smaller sites when visitors click to learn more, just to clean up the rest of the lookers.
In the end, eventually anyway, both the Big Dogs and small-timers both end up with catch-all parent sites, but the Big Dogs have that added layer of sales protection that gives the customers what they need to make the sale, and also brings traffic in at both ends.
Now build it and they'll come
What you most need to know, then, is how to build that small-niche site.
To reiterate, the purpose of this site is to develop a very consumer-specific website that provides information and resources for the person who is looking to buy a product of this type. That's from the buyer's perspective. But you have search engines to please, too, so that content will need to do double-duty and also help you be found and ranked well for your target keywords and target audience.
There are two basic components to these small sites. Those are
1. Articles and buyer-centric information
2. Products
The pages of your website will be split amongst these two components. It probably should not be a straight 50/50 split. The division should be weighted more in favor of information than products. This will serve two purposes:
1. Information gives the buyer all the supporting information and details they need to decide to buy.
2. Information provides more feed for search engines so that buyers can find you.
However you decide to structure the actual website, it should have a simple division—information and products.
The product pages are simple. Create a page for each individual product that gives the specifics on the product (often the information provided by the affiliate). You need to give enough detail without overdoing it. Set up the product pages so that when the visitor performs the desired action—clicks a 'buy' button, or opts for a free sample or service—they are taken to the affiliate website, where they [hopefully] will order and purchase your product.
The informational pages require a little bit more work, but not too much. Each of these pages should host one piece of supporting information that helps your visitor decide to buy. It should be an article, product review, or product comparison. As you'll learn later, these are the things that will really draw the very specific and targeted ready-to-buy consumers that you want. This is the information that they are looking for just prior to purchase, and so it is the information that is most likely to net serious buyers and not just curious visitors.
Tips for Tapping into Demand Markets
To be clear, these techniques can and do work to get you selling in any market, regardless of how in-demand and highly- competitive the market may seem at first view. You see, the key is not in going for the most popular traffic, but in the most targeted traffic.
You can, most certainly, gain enough ground in any high-demand niche market
to make Big Dog kind of cash. First off, you're not looking to net every sale the niche makes, you're just looking to net a percentage that translates into steady income for you. In high-demand markets, even a small percentage of overall sales can be highly profitable.
But moreover, you—as opposed to most other affiliates out there—are targeting the right kind of traffic. You are using the less-often searched, but more productive keywords to get your traffic, and so you've already slipped in under the radar of everyone else who has cornered the big-time keywords (but are making few sales with them).
In internet marketing circles, this is what is referred to as riding the 'long tail' of keywords. For every top keyword, there are many more (hundreds more sometimes) that are used by searchers and neglected by website owners because
they are not the "best" way to draw in big traffic. But the key isn't quantity so much as it is quality, so for you that works just fine.
Basically, tapping into the big-demand markets all boils down to this:
• Choose niches that have selling potential—not obscure interests where no one is buying (solve a need! Provide a product)
• Choose the products within that niche that are really selling and that meet the needs of your buyers
• Figure out what the top sellers of those products (your competition) are doing that serves the needs of your consumers; draft an outline of your target visitor
• Create product-centered websites to serve your target consumers
• Use the right keywords to attract the right kinds of consumers
• Create content that serves your audience, and also feeds the search engines
Follow this simple plan for tapping the in-demand markets that are selling and generating affiliate profits, and then you will be very well on your way to making money easily, just like the rest of the Big Dog affiliates do.
Get People To Buy
People often want to know— why does conversion matter? When in the end, conversion is all that matters. If your websites do not convert visitors into buyers, you're just not making any money.
Period. Plain and simple. That is why conversion matters.
But to go a step further, conversion as it matters to you, the Big Dog affiliate marketer, isn't just about what one or two visitors do—it's about what the masses at your website do. For our purposes here, conversion really means what your site is doing as a whole. We can't reasonably expect that every visitor to your site will convert into a buyer (but wouldn't it be nice if we could!). You do need to know that overall, however, what you are doing on your site is working.
Conversion is about rates and statistics and sales, and unfortunately, there are no real solid rules that apply. You cannot make sweeping judgments because the rules will be different for each and every product that you have. Each product and niche has its own set of needs.
What you can do is maximize the profitability of your site. The way to do that is to test and change and tweak your content and your website until you have gotten the highest amount of sales and profitability that you can. There are ways to do that, and that's what we'll talk about next, but by and large there is a definite element of trial and error involved in converting website visitors into buyers.
In the end, we're left with exactly what we started with in answer to this question. Plain and simple, conversion matters because conversion equals sales. Learn the "art" of the conversion, and you'll have one more of the crucial pieces of the affiliate marketing puzzle.
How to make it Happen
First off, to understand how to make conversion happen, you have to understand your role in the grand scheme of things. Your role—your sole purpose for Big Dog survival— is to get your visitors to your parent affiliate's sales page— your merchant's sales page.
Many new affiliates, and indeed some seasoned affiliates who just don't 'get it', mistakenly think that their job is to sell the products themselves. Subtly, yes, in ways, that is true. But overall, that is not your job—the sales itself is the role of the product seller. What you need to do is warm your visitors up so that they can feel confident in taking that final step, and going on to seal the deal.
Again, this is where you need to realize that the merchant has done a lot of the work for you. They've constructed the sales pages and order processing mechanisms. They've written (or had written) the killer copy that will totally convince the buyer to buy. All they need you to do is get the seller there.
This is the part of the biz that is referred to as the 'pre sale' or 'pre selling'. This is the part where you work as the middle man—the liaison between the seller who has this great product and the buyer who really does want to buy, but needs that added little push, or the point in the right direction.
An important thing to remember, too, is this—your readers are busy people. They, like you and everyone else in the modern world, do not have the time for extensive reading and research. That's why they're coming to you. They're hoping you've already done that for them. The lesson to take from that is that you should put up quality, product-supporting content, and you should make it valuable; but you should not kill your visitors with kindness. Make the whole process very easy.
• Give readers a piece of information they can use (a product review, a tutorial, et cetera).
• Show them that you understand their need (you identify with their problem, you see their need, you know how to fix it, you've been in their shoes).
• Point them to the place with the solution (link to your merchant's page).
• Let the merchant do the rest! (They've already done it anyway, why reiterate and waste your visitors' time?)
The whole process is done and over in about three simple steps. And out of those, the only one that really requires work is the providing of useful information—the converting part. You'll read more about some very specific methods for subtle conversions in the latter part of this chapter in the 'Tips and Tricks' section, but understand that whichever method you choose to use, it needs to fit within the needs and demands of the visitor's life. In other words, it needs to be simple, directed, and effective. And all the better if it is action-oriented. When people have to take an action (and we're not just talking about the action of buying), they feel they are being productive and proactive in fulfilling their needs, or solving their problems, whichever the case may be for your product(s); sometimes it could be both.
Focus is Everything
You've built your affiliate website and your pages for a reason. A very specific reason—to sell your targeted affiliate product! What is critical to your success as an affiliate—to barking with the Big Dogs, not just lapping up the trickle—is to stay focused on that central goal, that very specific driving reason for the very existence of your website.
To do that, you need to keep the eye on the prize, to use another cliché. You have to make your information and your product your number one focus; more specifically, the only focus.
All too often, affiliates are drawn by the prospect of easy money from simple to use monetization programs like AdSense or some such program. They'll fill up their sites with ads to make traffic-based money, and they kill their chances at affiliate success!
In effect what you accomplish when you fill up your conversion website with advertising and peripheral monetization strategies is inviting in all your competitors. Every ad or link that posts is one more opportunity for your crowd, which you've worked hard to get there, to leave and get consumed by the tangents. You drive your very own visitors straight into the waiting, wide-open arms of your competition!
Moreover, the inclusion of multiple ads and streams of information is downright confusing. You draw your visitors in with the promise of the information they've so desperately sought, and then you take them to a site so muddled with banner ads and links that they can't tell which one is the piece they've come for. They become
distracted and frustrated. And then they leave. They go back to their search bar to find a website that really delivers the goods.
Trust us when we say (and you probably know this just from being a web consumer yourself) that people have had enough of bogus sites that don't help them. They want a website that is straightforward, to the point and helps them, rather than hinders them. They recognize the pretenders within a few seconds of landing on a site, and if you don't prove yourself to be helpful right away, they'll move on and not bother to scroll down for your article or product review to find out if it really is there.
How, then, do you create focus on your web pages?
• Stay away from advertising, monetization programs, and outward links that don't lead to your sales pages (at your merchant's site)
• Only include ads and links that go to your affiliate products (imbedded, naturally, with your affiliate ID so that the sale is credited to you)
• Feature your promotional material and one link above the fold of the page so that it is readily available (seen immediately by visitors when they land on your page) keep the focus on the solution your readers seek
Blogging Decisions
What is the blogosphere, really? It's a place where anyone—man, woman, child, or automated feed scraper—can slap up templates or build a site of their own and update it with useful(?) information or tales of their weekly shopping trips to their hearts content. It's both a powerful tool utilized by businesses and websites on a daily (or more often) basis and a running personal diary put up online for all to see. The blogosphere is filled with experts and novices, and people who think they are experts who are really novices. It's a mixed-bag of content and expertise, or lack thereof. It's a community experience that knows no real bounds. Or boundaries.
As such, blogs can be a boon or a bust to your affiliate program. Nevertheless, they are being touted as the fastest, easiest, most simplistic way to promote affiliate products and generate sales. But are they? Let's explore both sides of this issue.
Why Blogging Might be a Bust
Many of the very things that make blogging a 'natural' choice for affiliate promotions are what make blogging the wrong way to effectively market as an affiliate.
First of all, let's take on the very blogosphere itself. It's a crowded place. It is true that the blogosphere is filled with a variety of interests, and holds something for everyone, but in the midst of all that interest, it's increasingly hard to be found.
Even the best, most prolific, and most dedicated bloggers take months and years to build a solid following. A blog is absolutely not the place to go for instant traffic.
The community aspect of blogging can be great, but couldn't it also be a bust? All that commenting and free-for-all outside commentary might work against you and discredit you. And you need to think about how valuable that following is. This will largely depend on your spectrum of product offerings. If you have a variety of products that a customer might want to come back for, or an upgradeable product suite, staying in touch with buyers could be a great thing. If your product is more of a one-time-only purchase, there's probably no recouping the time investment you will incur.
Content refreshment is one of the biggest recognized benefits of blogging. You can post quickly and easily everyday and thereby please those search engines and hungry blog-followers with new content. There's no denying that. But you need to think this through—how much can you come up with to say about your products?
Can you keep your products upfront on a blog? How many times can you spin it? And most importantly, what happens when your well of topics dries up? Those search engines and readers will be waiting for more, and you'll be grasping for new post ideas.
It's easy to get a blog started and keep it running for a few months, but Big Dog kind of income demands that you construct a more long-term plan. Theoretically, a blog is a long-term prospect, but without something new to say, one can only live so long.
We also need to tackle the issue of being able to feature multiple products. This flies right in the face of the discussion we just had in the last chapter, doesn't it? By doing that, you're dividing your forces and taking the focus away from your top- seeded efforts. You've created a marketplace of confusion, and you've made it hard to figure out what the right—simple—solution is.
We also need to talk about blogs from a structural standpoint. Unless you can build your own blog (and even if you can this is tough…), blogs and templates do not allow for a high level of flexibility. There is a basic structure, and it is very hard to add the buttons and features in the places you need them to be. Consider, too, that sometimes the structure and design you've worked so hard for may be impacted (rearranged) by the length and amount of your postings.
Now it might sound like we're completely anti-blogging for affiliate programs, but that's not exactly the case. Let's wrap this discussion up by looking at how a blog might still be a useful tool.
Website & Content
The obvious choice would be to put that effort into your website and content. You can achieve the same results by simply refreshing the content of your website. You can add to its archives and additional resources sections (without muddying the primary pages we established before), and still give current information and additional value to your customers and to the search engines.
Not only can you add additional content, but you can test and tweak and change the content you have and test it against past versions. As you'll learn, even very small, seemingly insignificant changes can really make a big difference to traffic and conversions. Spend the time you would spend posting on a blog to look for ways that you can tweak or enhance your website.
And don't forget—you've got that master site to build. Instead of devoting time to a minimal-return blog, why not get started on your big catch-all so that you can dominate your niche traffic?
Articles, Articles and More Articles
All the articles you write or hire out to a freelance writer to have written, do not need to be posted on your website. In fact, they shouldn't be. Use those primary articles and tutorials on your site, add some new stuff now and again to keep everyone happy, and then submit to article directories. Utilize profile and link capabilities to link back to your website, the authority on Widgets. (You might know this method by other popular names, like "Bum Marketing" or "Article Marketing.")
Social Marketing
Social marketing is what is driving web 2.0. Instead of spending your time on a new blog people may or may not eventually find, spend it on the blogs of others who've already captured your audience.
Become a contributing member of the community, make some friends, and use your wit and wisdom to get people to click on your name, link, or profile and visit your website. Do the same by creating pages on social websites like Squidoo and MySpace; frequent forums and other places where potential buyers may gather.
By engaging in social marketing, you're bringing your products to the masses, rather than waiting for them to find you. It's a much more active approach, and one that can be tailored to offer that all-important focus your affiliate plan needs. Not only that, but it's a lot more fun than talking to yourself on your blog, too, and you won't have to worry about maintaining it when you're off on vacation enjoying all that Big Dog affiliate cash!
Now that we've addressed the question of blogging, let's move on and talk about the one thing that dominates the internet—playing the web game to pull in the traffic. In the next few chapters, we'll talk about how to run with the Big Dogs that run the whole show—Google and its peers (if Google has a true peer….). Next, we'll get into the issue of search engines and optimizing to make them your friends. It's crucial to affiliate marketing, so don't miss these next few episodes.
The Big G
We can't be more clear. Without search engine traffic, you have no traffic at all; none worth mentioning and certainly not enough to sustain your affiliate business.
Ninety percent or more of the traffic to your website(s) will be from search engines, primarily the big-names like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These search engines are what will deliver hundreds or thousands of people to your virtual doorstep searching for products and information such as that you've provided.
Outside of search engines, websites generate traffic in only a few ways. These include
• Links from other websites or articles
• Links and addresses from traditional marketing
• The occasional word of mouth exposure
All of these combined, however, only equates to about 10% of visitor traffic. And while ten percent is certainly something worth grabbing, the absolute best expenditure of your resources is optimizing for search engine traffic. (Incidentally, your efforts to optimize will put more links and exposure out there for your site to be found through the above-mentioned means, making search engine-centered development even more important.)
More importantly, the traffic that you get from a search engine is organic. That simply means that the traffic that search engines generate for you is traffic from real, live human beings out searching for a site like yours. They search for information and products to serve a need. That need may be buying, it may be learning, business promotion, problem-solving or what have you, but it all comes down to one thing—these are the people that are going online with the express purpose of finding someone like you.
Whereas those who click on links or enter your web address from a business card or some such means may just be curiosity seekers, the people coming from search engines started with a purpose, a goal in mind. And if you're good, even if that primary goal wasn't buying, you just might convince them that that's really what they were after all along, and you just might get that sale!
Some search engines matter more than others
We've established that the only way someone searching through the vast mounds of information on the internet can find you [without an address or link access] is by using a search engine. Ninety percent of visitors, perhaps more, will find you this way. But as most of us also know, there are many, many search engines out there, and not all of them are the same. A handful of search engines matter a whole lot more than the rest.
So who matters and who doesn't? In truth, everyone matters because every visitation generated by even the most obscure search engine matters. But for your purposes, you need to work to please the Big Dogs in the search world so that you get the lion's share of the searches for your targeted keywords and keyphrases.
Having said that, understand that there is only so much you can do. Follow the advice given in subsequent chapters here so that you rank well in the more popular search engine results pages (SERP's), and the rest will pretty much follow anyway.
Search engines that rule the web
Enough talking around it, let's take a look at who really matters in the search engine world.
According to seoconsultants.com, the top ten US search engines are:
1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. MSN
4. AOL Search
5. Ask
(Second tier search engines listed alphabetically, not in order of performance)
• Alta Vista
• Fast
• Gigablast
• Netscape Search
• Snap.com
And according to data collected by seoconsultants.com from a Hitwise press release, the breakdown of traffic share by major search engines looks like this:
• Google—67%
• Yahoo!—20%
• MSN—7%
• Ask—4%
Add these numbers up, and you'll see that approximately 98% of searches are generated by just four major search engines. Not only that, but of the second-tier performers, and even some in the first, several smaller engines are powered by the major engines. For example, AOL Search is powered by Google, as is Netscape; Alta Vista and Netscape are powered by Yahoo!
The lesson to learn, then, is to work to please the major players, and the rest should fall in line. And even if they don't, you'll be accessing the greatest percentage of web searchers, and that's your ultimate goal.
How it all Works, or Doesn't
Naturally, to understand how to please these search engines and rank well in the SERP's, or Search Engine Rank Pages, you need to have a basic understanding of how it all works (or, if you do it wrong, how it doesn't!). For now, we'll give you that basic understanding. Later on in the chapter on SEO (chapter 8), we'll talk specifically about the kind of keyword selection that will work to get you found and get you traffic.
Driving web search engines
What drives search engines are their own indexing programs. Those indexing programs are fed information from programs which crawl the millions of pages on the web and feed back essential information to the engine. These crawlers are most commonly referred to as 'Spiders'. The exact programs and algorithms used by these programs are not disclosed, and vary from search engine to search engine. But from practice and study, we can determine the most basic, and even some of the more complex, practices employed by the major search engines.
When spiders go crawling the web, they start with the most popular pages. From there, they follow the structure and links from those sites to other pages and websites, indexing the most often occurring words as they go along.
What the spiders deem to be the more important keywords—and for any given subject there can be many—they send back to their database. There, those keywords and phrases are cataloged, and information is kept to quickly tell the search engine where to find the words and accompanying information again—such as when a user enters those terms or similar terms into a search bar.
Based on a variety of factors, the pages that host the information, or words, that the spiders find are ranked in importance and relevance to a subject, or more accurately, a set of terms; if more than one set of terms appears on a website, the site can be ranked for those terms, giving the possibility to rank well for many related, but different sets of keywords or key phrases.
What's indexed and what isn't
Speaking primarily of the major search engines, what are indexed are the more significant words on the site. Prepositions and 'filler' words—such as a, an, the, in, et cetera, are ignored. What the spiders look for are the words that appear on the site that actually mean something to the end-user.
Those words can appear virtually anywhere on the site. The spiders will search content, headlines, sidebars, ads, and coded tags behind the scenes. Some of these words will add more weight if used properly. For example, titles and subtitles add weight to keywords, so it is a good idea to use your primary key phrases in titles and subtitles and in the meta tags for the site.
There is something of an art to this, however. It didn't take long for the search engines to figure out that people were simply stuffing pages with keywords and keyphrases to get ranks and hits, and so they developed algorithms (undisclosed) to guide the spiders and tell them what is real content and what is bogus.
In addition, there are some types of content that spiders can't or won't index. They won't index information that you tell them to ignore (through your coding); content that is not accessible because it is restricted behind a password or security system cannot be accessed and so will not be crawled and ranked. This is part of the reason that squeeze pages have limited usefulness, at least in terms of search engine rankings; if the spider cannot go beyond that wall, it cannot see what is behind it. Therefore, you have to have the bulk of your optimized content upfront where the spider can get at it. Also, spiders have stopped ranking a lot of squeeze pages because they do not offer actual value—they're just registration docs, and so you should not rely too heavily on these from an SEO standpoint unless you plan to add some content that will please the spider (and still be useful to the human consumer, too).
Plug-ins, non-HTML formats, and non-text content cannot be indexed by search engines. This means that if you are including any of the following, it may not be indexed.
• Plug-in programs
• Videos
• Audios
• Flash files
• Images
• Photos
• Frames
• Java applets
Of course, these elements can be important to the humans who use your site, and certainly do have a purpose that warrants using them, but from an SEO standpoint, they have little to no value. Therefore, the best advice for affiliates is to keep it simple, build it strong, and minimize the use of features that have limited returns.
Summing it all up
To sum it all up, it all comes down to this:
• Search results rely on content and keywords.
• Content = Food for search engines/spiders
• Quality Content = Good Search Rankings
Since no human would have a prayer of completing such a monumental task as evaluating and indexing all the sites on the web, we have to rely on the best processes and programs the search engines can create. Those best programs rely on what amounts to an elaborate matching game that matches search words to words on a page. Very basically, if you have no words, or at least no words that matter to spiders and the people searching, you have nothing to match up to, and so you have no way for a search engine to find you. Your existence on the web, and the traffic to your site, depends on you having the words that people want to find.
To rank well in the major search engines, you need to center on a select group of keywords and key phrases that you want to rank for. You need to use those correctly to prove to the search engines that you are one of the authorities in your subject, for your chosen phrases. As mentioned, we'll give you those details in Chapter 8 when we talk more about SEO. For now, understand the basic inner- workings of the web, and start thinking about how you can make that work for you.
Collection of articles & videos about making money with Affiliate Marketing!
Thanks for reading!
Edward
