Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable online businesses a person can have, but many struggle in creating their first affiliate site and making their first sale. For those who don’t know, affiliate marketing is promoting someone else’s product through your affiliate link in order to receive commissions from selling
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
that product. I’m going to take you step by step through creating your first affiliate website and having success with it.
Remember, all you do to make money online takes patience and hard work, so don’t give up after you have completed 90% of the work!
1. First of all, before you put up your website or blog, you must choose a product to promote. This product should have high conversion rates and good commissions, as well as little competition for keyword research (step 2). These statistics can be seen at CB Analytics. Before all this however, you must join an affiliate company. The top ones are Clickbank, Commission Junction and PayDotCom. Once you have chosen the product and signed up at the affiliate company, you will need to create your special affiliate link.
2. Once you have chosen the product you will promote, you will need to do some keyword research, like in builing a niche content website. I recommend using Google’s Keyword Tool External and Wordtracker. Try to choose keywords (related to the niche your product is in) with high search volumes and low search competition. To tell how much competition search terms have, you need to conduct a few different searches on Google. I use two:
- “keyword” – this shows how many competing sites there are. Aim for keywords with less than 500-1000 competing sites.
- allintitle:keyword – this shows how many sites have the whole keyword in the title of their page. This is useful because title tags are probably the most important part of SEO, and so if the numbers are low for this (less than 200) than it should be quite easy to rank well for.
Keyword research is important as without it you won’t rank for searched keywords in the search engines, which ultimately means your site won’t receive any traffic from them.
3. Now you will need to register a domain name. GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar so you can purchase one there. I also have one that you can use at LuxorDomain. In the domain name, do not go for one that uses the name of the product. Choose a domain name related to the niche of your keywords and that has the main keyword in it. This helps to boost keyword rankings.
4. Great. Now you have a product to promote and some keywords that can bring you traffic. What next? The part many beginners start at and fail at because of missing steps number 1 and 2. It is now that we create a website or blog to promote the product. I am assuming that you already have hosting. If you don’t then I recommend HostGator. You will need to choose between creating a blog or a static website. I would recommend a blog using WordPress hosted on your own server and domain, as these blogs tend to naturally rank well in search engines and there are many plugins to help with your blog’s SEO, such as the All-In-One SEO plugin. Once you have downloaded WordPress and modified the files as it tells you to, you need to upload the WordPress files to your server using FTP. A free FTP tool I use and recommend is FileZilla. Once these files have been uploaded to the subdirectory in which you want it installed of public_html, you will need to find yourself a free template to use. Just do a search on Google and you will literally find thousands of free templates. Use one that is clean and simple is my recommendation. Once you have downloaded it, unzip it and upload it to your templates folder, located at:
directory of WordPress installation/wp-content/themes.
When setting up your WordPress, make sure you set your title as having a main keyword in it.
5. Almost there… Now you will need to write the content (Yea, I know, it’s boring). Anyway, it must be done. Allocate one keyword that you researched to each post you make, using it as the title of that post. In that post try to keep the targeted keyword density at approximately 3-5% as it will help boost rankings. Don’t overuse the keyword and make it look spammy. Big no no. In each post add content about the product and how you recommend it, and put in the content and banners your affiliate link. This affiliate link should be hidden, so for beginners I recommend using TinyURL to hide it and for the more experienced use CPanel to cover the link. It looks a lot more professional and less sales are lost. Make sure to use images (of the product).
6. The last step is promoting your blog. This inludes the link building, social bookmarking and getting your site indexed. You should start to receive search engine traffic quickly but you may also wish to do a bit of PPC marketing as well (more on that in the future).
As the traffic comes in, so to should the sales.
Now stop procrastinating and get going! I wanna hear all of your success stories of how you make money online with affiliate marketing.