Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

8 Steps to Affiliate Marketing

Eight Steps to build your website and compete in the affiliate marketplace. In this eight step plan we go over the essentials of building out your site and using SEO to reach organic rankings and traffic.

 

Market Research- Use tools like Market Samurai to find keywords with low competition but relevant to your product with high commercial value.  You want keywords that deliver a fair amount of traffic but have lower number of competition. Start with 3 or more word phrases.

Select a domain that is easy to remember but keyword rich. Having your keywords in the domain does give you an advantage. You can use Market Samurai’s domain finder to assist you.

Build a website- WordPress  is the easiest and best platform to build a site. Most web hosts have one click installs for word press. You can easily manage content and with a few plug-ins you can add SEO functionality to your new wordpress site. Yoast SEO plug in will take care of most of your WordPress SEO needs including a sitemap. One other plug in is the iRobots.txt SEO plug in, which is a must have to ensure proper spidering of your site.

On page optimization- content and navigation- Use your most important keywords in the navigation, titles, descriptions, categories and tags. Interlink your pages in the text of your pages. Use H1 Tags for your headings with you keywords and don’t forget to bold important phrases.

Test your Conversions: Test traffic first using PPC. Measuring true traffic for a particular keyword and the actual commercial value. It is important to know what your conversion rates will be for specific keywords and your offer. A small test with pay per click traffic is the quickest way to test a market and see what words are profitable before putting a lot of effort into creating content for worthless keywords.

When testing make sure you are using “exact match” by putting the keyword in quotes in your campaign. Also remember to use negative keywords where it applies. Words like scam, free, and other words you don’t want to be associated with your query.

Content Creation high quality content is key; write for the reader first not the search engines. Each piece of content is re-purposed several times in many different medias to expand your ability to increase back links as well as visitor engagement. Examples-good quality articles, Video content, audio content, info graphics, white papers.

Building Back links- Getting links from other sites, by using social bookmarking, Article Directories, Video, blog commenting, forum posting , press releases and building out pages on web 2.0 sites like ,squidoo, weebly, and hubpages.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

When deciding to get started in affiliate marketing there are four major things to consider. Discover these four major building blocks.

When deciding to get started in affiliate marketing there are four major things to consider.

Interest- is there enough interest in your niche to sustain itself? Doing good keyword research at this point will help you determine the levels of interest in the market. You should consider using tools like Keyword Competitor, WordTracker or our favorite Market Samurai

Traffic potential – When looking at the Google Keyword Tool   You can easily see the search traffic for both Global and local searches. This should help you determine if there is enough search traffic available and uncover new phrases and terms that are related to help you build out additional content ideas and structure for your website. Another tool we highly recommend is WordTracker. Start with a root keyword and let WordTracker find all of the phrases for you that have a high KEI value ( less competition but good potential). Focusing on a long tail search three or more word search term or niche marketing is key to a successful affiliate venture.

Domain availability– When possible you want a domain with your keywords in it. Domains are very cheap as little as 7.95 from GoDaddy

 

Product with affiliate program Start a search for “your keyword Affiliate program’  If you do not find anything consider Amazon of Ebay as viable alternatives.

The next thing to consider is content creation. Can you give the visitor added value with your content ? Content can be video,images, text, a PDF, or audio. Unique content will Give you an advantage not only with your visitors but also with the search engines. If you are having difficulty writing articles we recommend TextBroker.com as a reliable source for creating articles. Provide a good description of the type of article you want for best results.

When building out your website be sure to mask your affiliate links. This has been shown to improve click rates as well as quality score in Google. For wordpress sites we recommend Ninja Links word press plugin to cloak or hide your affiliate links. It will also track clicks and insert links based on keywords in previous blog posts as well as future ones.

Plan a strategy for adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis. Things like fun facts, tips, trivia and general information about your product.