by Riley West
Affiliate marketing is one of the first places where Internet Marketing “entrants” look when examining the idea of making money online.
The reason for this is clear.
Affiliate marketers doesn’t have to go through the long, and often painful, process of developing a product to sell to a market. If you just want to do it the way I do, go to Clickbank and open an account. It’s free.
Once there, you can look at the various “market segments” Clickbank divides it’s considerable marketing world into.
Make a list of the top three or four products in each segment.
There you are! That’s what’s hot. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be in the top three! Therefore, don’t stick with the same list!
Make a new list once a month and, pretty soon, when you get your marketing plan together, you’ll hit a home run because because you are playing ball in the right park.
That doesn’t mean you can’t make money selling products that are not in the top three or four. You can.
But how to pick a product isn’t the only reason I am writing this article. I want to talk to you about HOW you are going to sell this product.
I have only had success in one way.
First
I pick what looks to me like the best product at that time, and the product pretty much defines the buyer type and thus the niche.
Second
I make a sales page (very low key-most high powered internet marketers wouldn’t do this – but I am NOT a high-powered marketer) that presents the product in a good way.
Third
I then put that page at a url that will help it get well ranked for a keyword at the beginning of the url and the keyword has to be VERY relevant to the product or market.
Fourth
I get some links to the url by posting it out on the web at a some select places. I like Stumbleupon and Digg and Reddit. I get some other links to that url by submitting my rss feeds to some “feed aggregators” like feedest.com and feedage.com
Fifth
I write some articles (this is one!) about the topic “keyword” and put them at Ezine (at a minimum) and other article places if I can. Recently I enabled myself to place articles at hundreds of places (including EzineArticles) by paying for a mass submission outfit to…well…mass submit my articles to LOTS of places. It has real impact.
Sixth
This should be about the fourth day. Maybe fifth. At first, while you are a slowpoke. Right about here is when I check to see if I am “indexed by Google.”
How easy is that? You select your entire URL and copy it. Now paste it into the Google search box. If you come up right there at the top of the page, or nearly, you are indexed! Google knows who you are!
An awful lot of websites sites are out there, but no one knows it. You can bet they are NOT indexed and I can hear them screaming about low traffic now!
Seventh
What I do…while I am looking to start another easy affiliate marketing site is to go through a series of other things I can do to cause traffic to come to my site.
Like I will put a ‘pointer” post on 3StepAds. The links I put on there “point” to pages I want to increase the rank of. There are other places like this too.
In that “pointer post” I will have links pointing to my site! If I was selling fish oil it would look like this in the text body of the post… “There are many great benefits you receive when you take 2 of these fish oil capsules in the morning.” The italicized keyword “fish oil capsules” would be a hyperlink to my “fish oil capsules” URL. Get it?
The keyword “fish oil capsules” is one of Googles most important ranking factors. Google considers a “text link” that is in context (where it belongs – and not just in some random place) an important “vote” for your site being good for “fish oil capsules.” They (google) then start to move you toward the first page for “fish oil capsules.”
On some keywords I got to first page fast! Like a week. On others – never. But one things RULES! You absolutely have to have traffic to your site!
And Google Page One gets you TRAFFIC!
About the Author
Riley West has been showing how to succeed at simplified affiliate marketing for some time now. The formula is Web Page + Offer + Traffic = Sales. If you want to learn more about how to do this simple and productive model for affiliate marketing just go to http://makinganinternetmarketer.com/targeted-traffic/ for fast free sites that are easy to build.
