Affiliate Idea Factory

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.

Discover where to get ideas for hot niches and research your keywords for free.

Ebay

Http://pulse.ebay.com

Discover current trends, hot stores, popular searches and even drill down into specific categories

Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/movers-and-shakers/

From here you can see the hottest new items gaining in popularity updated hourly. There are also tabs for most wished for items, new items, best sellers, and gift ideas.

http://www.amazon.com/b/104-1396879-7435108?ie=UTF8&node=15372101

See items people have pre ordered from Amazon. Items not yet available but are already generating orders.

Twitter

http://www.twitter.com/search

See what the hot topics are right now. Enter in key words to discover current comments and twitter streams about a specific topic.

Popular Products on Click Bank:

http://www.cbengine.com/popular-clickbank-products.cfm

Popluar ClickBank Marketplace Products with the highest Gravity, Momentum, Ranking Change, Payout Averages & more.

Trends:

 Http://www.Trendhunter.com

http://www.trendwatching.com - Focused on consumer trends, get a free trend briefing

New York Times Tag Cloud

http://www.nytimes.com/most-popular-searched?period=30&format=tagcloud

Discover the most  searched, blogged about articles, most popular and emails topics from the New York Times.

Yahoo Search Trends

http://buzzlog.yahoo.com/overall/

See what the world is searching for. Check out the FAQ on BuzzLog

http://buzzlog.yahoo.com/faq/

Google Trends:

http://www.google.com/trends

Also See the Google Insights tool for more advanced research:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

AOL Search Trends

http://search.aol.com/aol/trends

Top Squidoo Lenses

http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top

Updated daily to give you the top lenses based on quality, freshness and reader activity

Keyword  Phrase Ideas

http://www.Soovle.com – Enter in a keyword and get phrases back from Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, Answers and Bing

http://www.UberSuggest.org – Google Suggest Scraper. come up with additional keyword phrases from one root word or phrase.

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.

There are several things that factor into my decision to join an affiliate program and market a product. One of those decisions is going with an in-house program or a network program.

Many merchants will have programs on multiple platforms: IE an in-house program running on IDev Affiliate or Post Affiliate Pro and a network based program running with PepperJam, LinkShare, ShareASale, or Commission Junction.

Advantages of in-house programs:

• The average in-house program will have higher commissions because they are not paying out the fees to networks
• The linking structure is direct to the merchant
• Direct relationship with the merchant
• Most are managed by an OPM or in-house employee
• 2 Tier earning opportunities
• Multiple payment options
• Lower minimum payouts
• Opportunities for exclusive deals and coupons

Advantages of Network Programs

• Standardized statistics and reporting on clicks, sales
• Statistics on the merchant in the network like average Earnings Per Click for affiliates as well as information on each banner’s performance.
• Access to feeds and instant shop building tools/widgets
• The merchant must keep a certain amount prepaid in escrow to ensure affiliates and network fees are paid.
• Alerts on low balance Merchants or suspensions
• Payments are consistent

Before making a decision on which platform to join, it is important you do two things:

1. Carefully read the affiliate agreement
2. Contact with the person in charge of the affiliate program.

Make sure all of these questions are answered:

• When do they make payments?
• What is the minimum Payout?
• How are payments made?
• How many customer return days (Tracking Cookie Life)?
• Are there any PPC or SEO restrictions?
• What is the refund policy?

Article Marketing- writing and distributing articles to the directories. Article marketing is not dead, while less emphasis is put on the links back being of SEO value, articles still have value as a way to make yourself the expert in a niche and drive targeted traffic to your site.

Social Bookmarking - Posting links in Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon and various other networks.

SEO  Traffic.- Target long tail keywords and write content for your site the is highly relevant. And geared toward the user not the Search Engines. It is the User that you want to come back to your site , so it is important you write content for them.

Pay Per Click or PPC Traffic – With the advances in PPC traffic you can segregate your campaigns by geo targeting as well as age and groups of interest. Narrowly target your best demographic for best performance of your campaigns.

Blog Commenting –  Post comments on another bloggers sites. Make them relevant to the blog post and don’t just write canned comments. This also can give you free links back to your site from higher PR sites.

Guest Blogging- write articles for other blogs in your niche

Forums – Place your links in your signature file and participate in forums specific to your topic or niche. There are some forums that have paid announcements for as little as $25. These types of announcements get lots of views and more importantly get traffic .

Press Releases – Doing a press release about a new product or service on your site is one way to generate large amounts of back links and traffic .  You can use a Paid service or Free service to distribute your Press Release

Video Marketing – Use channels like YouTube to create a “what is in the box” or “how to” short video. If you don’t want to be on camera do a how to or guide videos using a slide show presentation and screen recording software like Camtasia.

Groups Marketing- Similar to forums there are groups, which exist on FaceBook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Google Groups. The groups is notified via email when a new post is made and commented on. The nice part about Groups is they are highly targeted and active internet users. Join Groups in your niche and respond to posts as well as contribute to the groups in a meaningful way. Do not just post links with offers in the groups, it will get you banned.