World’s Shortest Affiliate Marketing Guide

There are a bazillion affiliate marketing guides out there and most are filled with fluff. Stars above know I’ve bought my fair share of them. And now that I’m finally making a very good passive income from it – here’s what works for me and it’s only 10 steps.

Step 1
Think of a niche – nothing too exact… think of the last 3 things you bought, you got emailed about or something you’re passionate about.  Here are the most common words associated with niches: get rid of, cure for, natural cure, help, remove, removal, treatment, solution, relief, natural treatment, comparison, review, remedy, solution, how to, fix, repair, restore, buy, purchase.
For example, consider the last thing you had to get rid of….head lice, lemon of a car, a wife or girlfriend, toenail fungus…guess what? There are affiliate marketing programs for ALL those things that will pay you money when people click ads or buy products from your website!

Thought of a niche yet?
We’ll get to nitty gritty specifics later.

Research Your Niche!
Check your niche ideas in Google Insights for Search http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Look at keywords that apply to the niche you have in mind and use the ideas above to answer the “get rid of”, “how to”, “purchase” and so on and you’ll be on to a good niche!

Look for a steady or upward trend in the niche
Write down a few keywords that apply to the niche. You can be broad in your thinking right now – we’ll whittle down the ideas based on search numbers in a bit.

Under Filter I use : Web Search, Change Worldwide to United States and search 2004 to present in all categories to get an overall view of the history of the niche over the past few years.
Then search the past 12 months to get an idea of the recent demand of this niche.
The line of
For example – I have gotten spam emails in my Inbox every day this week for bamboo rugs, bamboo flooring and bamboo plants. So I’ll write down “Bamboo” and run that term through Google Insights. I see “Bamboo Plants, Bamboo Rug, and Bamboo Flooring” are popular so I write those down.

Step 2
Whittling Down Niches to Keywords
Go to Google’s Keyword Tool and input the Keyword(s) you just wrote down.
Use “phrase” to search.
Make a note of the keywords that have around 10,000 to 50,000 searches a month. Although if the keyword has a lot of clicks when I check the Traffic, I’ll go as high as 200,000 searches per month.

Some people target 1,000 to 9,999 searches to have even more targeted blogs and raise the possibility of higher and faster organic results.
In this case I see “bamboo rugs” has 40,500 searches per month, “bamboo flooring” has 165,000 searches per month and “bamboo plants” has 90,500 searches per month. Bamboo Flooring is a little higher in searches than I like to use but if it has greater than 20 clicks per day – I’ll use it because it means it’s a busy moneymaker .
These are my MAIN keyword phrases I’ll be building  blogs around. Depending on how Step 3 checks out – these could potentially be 3 different blogs.

Step 3
Estimate How Many Clicks Per Day
Go to Google’s Traffic Estimator and input the keywords you’ve decided on that meet the criteria and get an estimate of the clicks (sales) you can expect.
Remember to use “quotes” around your keyword phrase.
For my own research…
bamboo plants – 42 clicks per day
bamboo flooring-61 clicks per day
bamboo rug – 31 clicks per day

Step 4
How Many Competing Sites
Last but not least – go to http://www.google.com and input your keywords in “quotes” and see how many competing sites there are for the keywords. Try to go with keywords that have 100,000 or less competing sites, it’s easier to rank over those sites organically quickly but you can go as high as 500,000 competing sites and do okay. I only rarely, very rarely use a keyword with more than 500,000 competing sites because it’s generally not worth my time unless it’s garnering more than 20 clicks per day in Traffic.

Here’s an example of the research above applied
“Are there Ads?” refers to whether or not there are Google ads on the right hand side of the page when I do a Google.com search for the keyword – if there aren’t ads – it means no one is advertising and the market probably sucks.

Affiliate Programs column is basically notes to myself – will I use the keyword phrase to do affiliate marketing, Adsense ads or both? Not all keywords will have an affiliate marketing plan so sometimes it’s Adsense only.

Step 5
Decide the Rest of Your Site’s Keywords
Go to Google http://www.google.com input the keyword phrase in quotes and write down the URL’s for the top 2 or 3 sites for the keywords you want to beat out in search results.

Now in order to rank over these competing sites the fastest way is to get more backlinks pointing at your site than your competitor has.
Get that magic number here :http://www.searchbliss.com/seo-tools/google-backlinks.asp

You can get the keywords these sites are ranking for using the Google’s Keyword Tool and also use the wonderwheel in Google search will give you a listing of keywords that Google already considers relevant for your site – write down those terms here.

Try to get 10 keywords in addition to your main keyword you’re using.
[your main keyword]
1.                                                                     6.
2.                                                                     7.
3.                                                                     8.
4.                                                                     9.
5.                                                                    10.

Step 6
Setting up Your Main Site
Get a Domain, I highly recommend Web Host Giant.
Set up a Wordpress Blog – you don’t need a ton of SEO plug ins.
I have some I use as standard on every blog I set up – here’s the only two you really should use and then find more you like for your own individual needs.
Get them at the Wordpress site or go here : http://wp-plugins.net/beta/
Google Site Map Plug In – Excellent for Helping Googlebot index your site quick and clean.
All-in-One-SEO-Pack - Exactly what the title says Add more as you like but these are the two I usually run with first. Tweak this plugin under settings and then remove %blogname% from the preset info in the headings (you’ll see it) – it will enhance your SEO on your blog considerably.

Use keywords 1-5 for pages on the blog.
Each page should have a link to your affiliate marketing page.

Other “Must Have” pages are
* About Us – Tell briefly what your site is about
* Contact Us - How do people get in touch with you
* Privacy Policy - Do you collect info on your visitors and what do you do with it?

Icing on the Cake (you don’t HAVE to have these pages but it helps)
* Disclaimer - best for health, make money from home or legal themed sites
* Money back Guarantee - if your product offers a money back guarantee – talk about it!
* Facts Page - Cool facts about the product you’re selling (you can generally glean these off the sales page of the product)
* FAQ Pages - Ditto – just get it off the sales page
* Where to Buy the Product Page - Sometimes people will hit your site and just simply want to buy – give them the link to make a purchase.
all are pages Google looks for to create a meaningful surfing experience for your visitors. The more unique content you have, backlinks and meeting the needs of Google as to what makes up a good site in their eyes – the better your site will rank organically.

If you’re using Adsense, you can have 3 link units, 3 ad units and 2 search boxes per page.

I’ve found I can put 5 subdomains pretty comfortably on a main domain and since subdomains get indexed with the same authority as main level domains – it’s a good thing.
Generally I usually wind up doing subdomains in the same genre as the main topic. For example my main keyword might be “Make Your Own Dog Food”
Subdomains would be made for blogs that were in the realm of dogs such as “Dog Clothing”, “Dog Training”, “Homemade Dog Treats”, “Natural Dog Treatments”, “Home Dog Grooming”.  All linked from the Main Blog on Making Your Own Dog Food. If I have someone on the site that wants to make their own dog food, chances are they are a great dog owner and also might want to know about home grooming, keeping their dog healthy through natural methods, dog clothes and making their own dog treats.

Step 7
For Content
When you’re talking about setting up 100’s of blogs, you need to put them on autopilot.
But don’t put crap on the internet either. I like to make information portals for my site visitors where they can find Yahoo Answers, You Tube Videos, articles, Amazon products and news stories all about their topic of interest together in one place.

Personally, I set up WP Robot to pull in content and use those 5 keywords as the phrases it’s posting for.
WP-o-Matic is another great item to use if you don’t want to spring for WP Robot (it isn’t cheap) and WP-o-Matic is free.
WP-o-Matic will pull in RSS feeds, spin them, add your affiliate link stuff and post for you by keyword.
If you’re going automated – post 1 articles a day per keyword – no more – your blog needs to look like an honest to goodness human is doing this also I try to have some original content handy too. I will often get 10-20 articles written around some lesser searched keywords to help target traffic and then post them a few days apart.  This is another great way to keep the search engines interested in your blogs and showing up with some original content.

In the beginning, try to post 5 original articles yourself – targeting your keywords 1-5.
After that, honestly it doesn’t matter if you ever post again – just pop in once a week to make sure your blog is doing well and posting content as it should. BUT you’ll be higher in relevance and also have a more interesting site if you take the time to add your own content.

Step 8
For Backlinks
Set up sites pointing to your main site from places such as Tumblr.com, Twitter.com, Tripod.com, Blogger.com (use a freebie blog), Wordpress.com, 43things.com and so on. Set each site up around keywords 6-10. Using one keyword per site that you’re not using on your main site but is still recognized as part of the niche you’re going for. DO not sell anything on your sites that link to your main site – put Adsense on them if you want but no affiliate marketing – these are for getting your visitors interested, giving them information and driving traffic.

Alternative
If you don’t want the hassle of setting up other sites – just go the article marketing route and try Article Tool -www.thearticletool.com  you can post to 150+ article repositories at once for around $47 a month. For the time factor alone, it’s worth it to me.   Use keywords 6-10  in your articles and point the articles back to your main site in your author resource box. You can create thousands of quality backlinks in a single week if you post one article per day.
NEVER post an article you have used in article marketing on your own main website – you’ll get sandboxed for dupe content.

Step 9
For Affiliate Marketing and Adsense
Often I find niche markets THEN go in search of affiliate opportunities. For example, I found a cool niche market for Burberry Shoes and signed up through Commission Junction to sell Burberry shoes through two companies as an affiliate. I give my readers a choice and when they make a sale, I get a commission no matter which one they choose.

I do niche research for about an hour a day. Once that hour is up – I’m done.
It could be easy to waste hours and hours doing research but that doesn’t make you any money.

I set up one -two Wordpress blogs a day – I could probably do more but I have a life and kids and I want to keep this enjoyable. Normally I get up early before the family is up and do my research.
My goal for every blog is to get to around $5.00 a day – it takes about 4-6 months for a blog to begin earning steady in my experience – and although it doesn’t sound like much – if you have 5 sites plus 5 subdomains on each site earning $5 a day – that’s $4500 a month passive income.

Affiliate Marketing Sites

• http://www.clickbank.com
• http://www.markethealth.com – 50+ natural health products to promote.
• http://www.clickbooth.com – tons of affiliate programs here
• http://www.ncsreporting.com – credit related affiliate programs
• http://www.copeac.com – excellent source of affiliate programs
• http://www.commissionjunction.com – huge affiliate program market
• http://www.associateprograms.com/ – another place to find affiliate stuff.
• http://www.shareasale.com – Another great place to find affiliate opportunities.
• http://www.linkshare.com – More affiliate programs
• http://www.widgetbucks.com – I actually make more off this than I thought I would.

For Adsense, just add it as you please and you were already told the rules in Step 6.

Step 10
Learn to fail fast. If you have a blog that has a few hundred impressions but NO clicks, you need to tweak your blog’s landing page or change your template entirely. Above all, the page your visitors are landing on should always be easy to navigate.
If it still isn’t making money through Adsense or affiliate products – then leave it running but don’t work on it anymore.
It will create a small passive income but the niche either isn’t happening now or it’s not happening at all – either way you don’t need to put any more time into it.
Normally I give a blog 1 month to start pulling steady money – doesn’t have to be huge money – just steady – steady = growth.

Commit to doing your backlinks to your sites by either setting up other sites or articles daily for your blogs – and give each blog 4 weeks of attention – after that you can schedule them for once a month with an article or even a press release (tons of free places to release them) and you can create continued traffic for your blog and realize a good passive income for yourself.

98% of people will get discouraged when they don’t see money the first 1-2 months and lose interest. Go in with the understanding you probably won’t see a dime the first couple of months and if you do – all the better. You’re building up something to have momentum and it takes a little time but if you stay on it – you’ll realize a return on your efforts.

Now go make money!