Affiliate Marketing Basics
Arguably one of the most effective ways to make money online if you don't have your own product to sell is with affiliate marketing basics as your income engine, which I will explain here.
It is relatively easy to get into when you work at home and can be started with little to no capital, depending on your resources, your available time and your work ethic.
So let's get back to basics in this post with the focus on affiliate marketing. Now, while a common question among newcomers is, "how can you do affiliate marketing without a website," I will cover that in a separate article.
While it is perfectly possible to do this, in this article I want to focus on using your own website or blog to generate an affiliate income. Here are a few tips on how to boost sales and rake in more commissions from your affiliate links placed in your own web properties.
Getting Traffic to Your Page
The first rule of making money with affiliate products whichever source you like to get them from, be it Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare or Amazon for example, is you need to get people to see your stuff!
That means you need attract traffic to visit your site and see what you have written.
If nobody is getting to your website, blog, or mini site then nobody is going to click through your affiliate links and you are not going to make money with a blog or website.
That's a pretty simple observation, you might think. But you'd be surprised at how many newcomers to this business model fail to achieve success at this first major step in the process.
I've seen my fair share of people that will spend weeks putting up a site, make it look all pretty and then go and ruin it by filling it full of duplicate, often copied/pasted content, or worse, spun articles that are awful to read.
Then they'll add affiliate links to a bunch of Clickbank products (because that's the first affiliate program they signed up for) and then sit back and wait for the money to roll in.
Your Site Needs to Rank in Search
To get that money, you need traffic and the first rule is to get that traffic one way or another. The best way is to get it from the search engines using "buying" keywords to attract attention to the site.
However, to do that you have to rank high in the search engine index for those buying keywords. To rank, you need to be backlinking each article for each product so that each article will rank for a bunch of related keywords. Buying keywords are made up of the product you are selling plus prefixing words like "discount..." "cheap..."; "buy..."; "best prices..."; "where can I buy..." etc.
While your busy trying to get that traffic you might also want to take a look at the content in that blog or website. If its duplicate scraped or PLR junk, chances are Google at least will not rank your site at all for anything, leaving you to rely on the lesser traffic from Yahoo and Bing and the rest.
That's okay, but you really should be doing whatever you can to get ranked in Google for your keywords as they control over 60% of all worldwide searches.
Your Content Must Sell
That means dumping the PLR or spun or copied junk and writing your own reviews of each product. That way you'll find you are much more valuable to Google as a good resource and anyone landing on your site from their index will get a decent visitor experience.
That's because they will be able to read something that is coherent, informative and just might be good enough to convince them they need whatever product you are selling.
It's all about creating original, well written reviews of the product in question and putting it up in its own page here on the site. That way, people can find the exact product in search, and get a review that is actually worth reading.
All too often, training newcomers to affiliate marketing are in such a rush to get their sites up and attracting commissions, that they skip this important step and instead go for the fast option of putting up an Amazon widget of some kind that lists a bunch of stuff they sell.
It might look nice and fill a site up with affiliate products to market, but people are less likely to find them because there is no useful content around them and the search engines are only going to rank useful sites these days.
Ok, some rogues will get through in the short term under a barrage of spammy links. However, in the long term, they will fall by the wayside and the "real" sites with good content, good reviews and an overall good visitor experience will float to the top naturally.
Products to Promote
That leads nicely onto the next point and that's the products themselves. Sure you can do well with Clickbank stuff, but really, most people that are looking to buy something are not really interested in an eBook that's trying to scam them into some system or other to make money.
Most ordinary people are searching for stuff to buy online because its cheaper and more convenient than going to the stores. So all you need to do is think of what people buy when they go to the stores and you can bet there will be comparable stuff online that is cheaper.
It's really up to you what you want to review and write about. It can be anything from clothes and fashion, gadgets, to kitchen appliances or even a home popcorn maker!
You'll find this stuff at Commission Junction, Amazon etc and you'll be amazed to see that some really big stores have affiliate programs.
This is a better way to sell stuff because you are selling real goods to people that want them. You are brokering the deal because you, as an affiliate, control the traffic (or you should be) and the big stores understand that.
You become a salesman and the Internet and its search engines become your leads that you pre-sell with your website and its product review pages to send those prospective buyers on to the stores to buy their products at a discount and everyone is happy. The buyer gets their stuff cheap, the store gets their sale and you get your commission for bringing the two together.
So that's how affiliate marketing works and all you have to do is write great reviews worded to sell the products, then get the traffic to your site so that lots of people read them. Bottom line is:
"Affiliates Control the Traffic"
Remember that and you will make money.
Affiliate Marketing Basics was originally posted: Thu, Jan 27 2011
Latest UpdateL Wed, Dec 2 2020
Comments
Virginia White wrote:
Dear sir, we were trying to find a cooling unit for our house and I happen to come across your web page and so I thought if possible you could give us a price on the portable cooling unit on your web sight I would really appreciate it. Sincerely, Virginia
Bakeradio wrote:
Hey Virginia, prices fluctuate online with stores giving seasonal discounts and such which is why we don't print prices. The best way is to go back to the page you saw the portable cooling unit on this site.
Then click the image link for that unit and it'll take you to the online vendor page, like Amazon or eBay etc, that will display their best price. You can choose to buy it if you like the price, or if not, just close the page or click the back button and your free to go elsewhere.
Posted: December 2, 2020
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