Affiliate marketing is one of the best and easiest ways to make money online. Unlike every other ways you can make money online, affiliate marketing is the easiest because you don’t have to work on getting product ideas, creating products, offering customer support and many other problems associated with creating a product, the product owner faces all these, all you need to do is promote. Another great benefit of affiliate marketing is that if you do things right, you can set everything on autopilot and even be earning money months after you haven’t touched your affiliate site. This post will be talking about 7 steps you have to take if you want to make money online from affiliate marketing.
1 – Choose a Niche
This is one of the most important steps you will take when trying to make money online from affiliate marketing. When trying to make money online from affiliate marketing, you can’t just get up and start promoting any product without any research, it won’t work like that. The first thing you have to do when trying to make money online from affiliate marketing is to research a niche. There are several ways you can get a niche and some three things to consider when trying to find profitable niches are the passion, problems and fears of people. What is it that people fear most and you are knowledgeable about? What is it that people are passionate about and you are knowledgeable about? You already have a niche idea! If you are not clear yet, I will be using an example. For example, lets talk about the fears of people, many people fear having their computers infected by a virus and I am a tech junkie, I have enough knowledge about computers and networking so I have discovered a niche in the antivirus industry – this same process applies to any field, just think hard and you will come up with a niche idea.
2 – Find a Primary Keyword
One of the steps that make newbies get excited is the process of finding a niche but I must tell you that is only the beginning. Tapping into niches is another important thing to do and that can be done by finding the right keyword.
There are several steps to finding a keyword and one great and free tool you can use is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It is very important to effectively research your niche to see if it is really profitable, for example, you wouldn’t want to go into a niche that nobody is interested in, you have to make sure your niche is profitable and that there are people who need what you want to promote – this is the benefit of keyword research. When researching keywords for your niche, it is very important to make sure your primary keyword has a decent number of searches every month, the minimum amount of monthly searches I will suggest is 1000. Once you find the right keyword with enough searches we can then go to the next step.
It is also better to make sure your keywords are in the long tail because this type of keywords convert better and also have less competition. For example, the keyword “how to cure antivirus on my computer” will convert more and will also be less competitive than the keyword ‘antivirus”.
3 – Get a Product
The reason I am suggesting this step first is because if you work on getting a product first before registering your website you will be able to see clearly and avoid any mistake ahead of you, for example, many people register their websites first only to see that they have no product to promote.
The first thing you should do is to find a product to promote, and which other place is better than the largest affiliate network, Clickbank? When finding a product, I will not advise you to just promote a product because of its large commisions but you should make sure it is the right product by checking to see the following are in place.
- Does it have a good sales page? You can know this by reading the sales page with the intention of a buyer, if you would not buy it if you were a buyer then its sales page sucks!
- Does it have a good customer support?
- Does it have a strong guarantee?
- Once you have verified the above and you are sure you have chosen the right product you can now move to the next step.
4 – Register a Keyword-Rich Domain Name
This is one advantage you have over the competition, if you register the right keyword-rich domain name you will have a lot of advantage over your competition and you will be able to dominate the search engine rankings easily. The reason why it is very important to register a keyword rich domain name is that most of your traffic will be coming from the search engines and if you could get the right domain name then you have simplified your process of ranking in the search engines easily.
A keyword rich domain name is the one that has your primary keywords in it, for example, if your primary keyword is “buy antivirus online” your domain name can be “buyantivirusonline.com”, I know it might be difficult to get something like this because many people would have chosen the goodies, but in this case you can add a modifier to your domain name. For example, you can use the domain name “buyantivirusonlinea.com” or “buyantivirusonlinenow.com”e.t.c. Just make sure the keyword “buy antivirus online” comes first in your domain name. It is also important to make sure your domain name is not too long and you should also make sure your domain name does not have any hyphen.
Another thing you must note is that .com domain names are the best.
5 – Write a Killer Review
After you have gotten a keyword rich domain name, the next thing you will do is to write a keyword rich and professional review. When writing a review, you should not make it obvious that you are writing the post because you are promoting something but you should make your link and call to actions obvious. Here are some elements every killer keyword-rich review must have.
- It should have the primary keyword in its title.
- It should have the primary keyword in its meta description.
- It should have the keyword properly used in the main article – It is very important not to just load your review article with your keywords because this can incur some search engine penalties.
- It should have a strong call to action.
6 – Build Backlinks for Your Website
After you have put everything in place, the next thing to do to make sure you get the best in terms of search engine traffic for your website is to build backlinks to your blog. There are several ways you can build high quality backlinks to your blog and one of the best and most effective ways is article marketing.
There are many article marketing directories you can submit your articles to but my advise is that you should only select ten high quality article directories. After you have a list of the article directories you want to get backlinks to, the next thing you should do is to come up with some short 400-500 words articles, after you have come up with these articles you can now begin to submit one article to three article directories – don’t submit your articles to more than 3 article directories because this can bring about the search engine duplicate content penalty thereby leaving your articles with no value.
It is very important to use your anchor text when writing your articles, for example, if your primary keyword is “buy kapersky antivirus online”, it is also your anchor text and you will make sure that you link it to the review post you wrote in every article you submit to article directories.
7 – Rinse and Repeat
The above 6 process should already be making you money but if you want to make serious money from affiliate markting you can rinse and repeat all the steps either by starting entirely in a new niche or by finding new products to promote, it all depends on you.
Making money online is not difficult as many people see, sometimes all it requires is you having a formula. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online and the above formula is all you need to start making money online from affiliate marketing.
Onibalusi Bamidele is a young entrepreneur living the internet lifestyle, he has prepared a free traffic report for you called the ultimate traffic formula. You can get the free report at ultimatetrafficformula.com