Affiliate Marketing Tips – How To Succeed
Guide To Affiliate Marketing
I keep hearing stories about how people are struggling to make money through affiliate marketing. At first, I found this hard to understand because as a full-time Affiliate Marketer, all my websites are providing me with a steady income.
I listened to these stories and realised that people were making the same mistakes over and over again so I decided to write this article and give some affiliate marketing tips to help you succeed in your Affiliate Marketing business. To get a more detailed article, you can sign up to our mailing list.
The first thing to do is to find a niche or product that you want to promote. At the time of writing, the health niche is very profitable. You can join an affiliate network like Health Trader and choose a product from their list to promote.
You can also try other networks like Commission Junction. You must do a little research on the product before you choose to promote it.
The next step is to find a good, reliable hosting company to host your website. I use Glowhost to host my websites and I find that their uptime is 99.9% as they advertise and they also have a very good customer service.
Godaddy are also a popular hosting company used by many affiliate marketers but there are others that are good like this hosting company
Once you have found a good hosting company, you’ll need to install a CMS. I use WordPress as do most marketers as it is easy to set up and use, you’ll be able to install it on your host using the Softaculous “one click install”.
Once you’ve installed wordpress, you will need a good theme, you can use one of the free themes that you get with wordpress but I prefer to use a good quality theme to help showcase the product I am promoting, I think this is where most people go wrong. Genesis Framework have a good selection of wordpress themes that you can choose from.
Content & SEO – Affiliate Marketing Tips
The next step is to find good quality content about your chosen product. You can write this yourself if you know a lot about the product or you can get content written for you.
The guys over at iWriter have been writing content for years and they have built up a list of competent writers, you can get an article written for as little as $1.25, I usually get 5 articles written for websites from the list of Elite writers they have. Another good source for content is 99Centarticles.
Once you’ve got your content you will need to do some Onpage SEO, this Is where a lot on affiliate marketers fail. If you are new to search engine optimisation (SEO), there are plenty of plugins which will help you in this area.
One SEO plugin which has been around for a long time and used by a lot of affiliate marketers is SEOpressor, this plugin will help you with all your Onpage SEO including title tags, descriptions, keyword density e.t.c, this plugin is a must. I will go through the Offpage optimisation and Linkbuilding in my advanced articles.
So there you have it! the basics of starting your affiliate websites on a sound footing, follow the above Affiliate Marketing Tips and you will be on your way to start making some money.
BlackHat, WhiteHat or GreyHat Search Engine Optimisation?
Keyword Search Engine Optimization, Which SEO technique do I use?
BlackHat, WhiteHat or GreyHat?
This is a question I hear a lot from internet marketers and from the subscribers to my mailing list so I decided to conduct a little experiment to help you decide. Once again, this is a basic experiment but if you want a detailed review, please subscribe to the mailing list.
For this experiment, I built 3 brand new websites and I chose Exact Matched Domains. Once again, I chose Glowhost to host these websites and installed WordPress. I used the same plugins for all 3 installs and added the Prose Theme from Studio Press which I use for the majority of my websites.
I then signed up with Health Trader Affiliate Network and chose a weight loss product to promote. The reason why I chose the weight loss niche is because I know this niche is very profitable but also competitive enough to test my SEO skills.
For each website, I added 3 x 500 word unique articles which I had written by the content writers over at iWriter. I didn’t do any SEO or linkbuilding to these websites for one week and let Google index them naturally.
Monday morning when I started to work on these 3 sites :
Site 1 – BlackHat – I built 20 dofollow PR3 links everyday for the first week.
Site 2 – WhiteHat – I manually built 5 Web 2.0’s (one per day) Monday – Friday
Site 3 – GreyHat – I built a mixture of 20 no/dofollow links PR0 – 5 everyday for the first week
For more detailed instructions, please sign up to the mailing list.
After 3 weeks of using specific techniques on these websites and using SerpBook to track the keywords, I noticed a significant movement in the SERPs.
My BlackHat website was on pages 2 – 3 for all the tracked keywords, My WhiteHat website was on pages 3 – 9 and the GreyHat was nowhere to be seen!
I continued to use these techniques and after 3 months things started to settle down.
You might be surprised to learn that my GreyHat website was the one with the majority of keywords on page 1 – 3 and the other 2 websites were hovering around page 2 – 4
All 3 websites made me some money in this 3 month experiment. Here are the results so you can then decide which route you want to go down.
BlackHat = $1710
WhiteHat = $1260
GreyHat = $2160
obviously, this was just a basic experiment and the income is not guaranteed. Because I make money, doesn’t mean you will make any money.
