Earn Online Money with Affiliate Marketing: Tips and Strategies

If you found this article then you are interested in earn online money with affiliate marketing. I am here to tell you that this is not an easy business and it will take some hard work at first (unless you can make initial investments). To begin, I think it is necessary for you to have a website, an email list, and a social presence in order to maximize your affiliate profits. People who believe they can get by without these things will find their profits drying up. Ultimately, every affiliate marketer who earns money regularly has a strong plan of attack and consistently does hard work.

Affiliate Marketing Article Sections:

What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing – How To
Programs for Affiliate Marketers
Affiliate Marketing Softwares
Earn Online Money with Affiliate Marketing

This article is split up and in this order for a reason. I first want to start by giving you a background and an explanation on this unique business venture. Then, I will give you some programs and websites I have used and had success with. Finally, I will give you a strategy so you can earn online money with affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a type of unique business venture where one sells a companies or persons product for a certain percentage of commission. The typical marketer does not have to deal with customer service, but instead solely focuses on making sales of a certain product.

Most affiliate marketers stay within a certain niche and set-up a blog for that niche. Typically when you start, you want this niche to be a narrow group of people. For example, you might start with ‘weight loss’ and narrow it down to ‘weight loss for college girls.’ Now you have a narrow target market and the information you present will be extremely targeted to your viewers.

For example, lets say you have a strong background in social media. You can create a blog or video series that demonstrates your knowledge. As people continue to visit your blog, they might be interested in buying a software or an information product that can help their social media efforts. You can easily go into a website like Clickbank, find a social media related product, and set-up an affiliate link within seconds. Then, you would just want to refer your existing website traffic to this product. So if the product you choose costs $39 and pays out 60% to affiliate marketers, then you would make around $24 for every sale you make. Typically, the more traffic and clicks you can get to products, the more money you will ultimately make.

As you get more ad-versed in affiliate marketing, you will learn that you need to employ other forms of internet marketing like SEO, list-building, and visual advertising.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #1: Always do good research before you land on a niche. Look at your potential competitors, do keyword research, and make sure your niche is something you are interested in. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE TARGET CUSTOMERS WHO ARE WILLING TO BUY BEFORE FINALIZING NICHE SELECTION!

Affiliate Marketing – How To

There are many different programs and products you can promote. The first thing you will need to do is find the product you want to promote. In the next section, I will give you some of the top programs that I recommend.

How to Affiliate Market in 10 Steps

1. Niche Research & Selection

I am going to give you a quick overview on affiliate marketing niche selection. I will make it pretty simple and land on a niche that I feel would be profitable for selling products.

First I would start with an interest. Right now, I have a strong interest in fitness because it is almost summer. I decide that I want to narrow that down to weight loss. Now I go into the Google Keyword tool and I search the following:

I am focusing on keywords that have less than 5,000 local monthly searches. These are usually keywords that are not as difficult to rank for and they are typically narrowed down already. One of the keywords I see is ‘Weight Loss Food Programs’ and that peaks my interest. So I search it into Google and I see this: something that really turns me off. First off, having 38,000,000 results is a bad sign. Also, there are some seriously authority websites on the top page, so it would be unrealistic to expect to rank for this keyword.

I end up landing on ‘Best Weight Loss Product.’ I figure with this niche that I can focus on creating reviews for various weight loss products while trying to advertise one product as best. There are many different keyword ideas I can come up with just from this one keyword. I can also segment this down to ‘best weight loss product for men’ or ‘best weight loss product for athletes.’ All in all, if I put a lot of work into a blog around this niche, then I can definitely make money with it.

2. Pick a Merchant Program

In this step, this would involve you saying ‘okay I am going to use Amazon and promote their products.’ Amazon Associates would be the merchant program that you end up choosing and now you need to move on to products.

3. Pick Product(s)

I always say to start with just one product and do everything you can to sell it. Make sure this product coincides with the niche you picked in step 1.

4. Create an Affiliate Niche Blog

Head over to WordPress or Blogger and get started by creating your first blog. You can try 3W WebServices in order to pick a domain name and set-up hosting for your new blog. If you are completely clueless in this area, then check out my blog post on setting up your first WordPress blog.

5. Set-up your Blog

Create a contact, privacy, about, and disclaimer page. Next, you should download the ‘Google XML Sitemap’ and ‘Google Analytics’ plugins. I also typically download the ‘Google Analytic Dashboard.’ After that, download the ‘Platinum SEO Plugin’ and do some SEO optimizing on your website.

Google and other search engines look for these pages and if you blog lacks them then it can actually hurt your rankings. You might as well set-up these things now before you start creating content.

6. Do Keyword Research

I recommend using the ‘Google Keyword Tool’ plus Google Instant. You can also head over to Fiverr and pay $5 for about 100 quality keywords for your website. I have used Fiverr gigs in the past and sometimes they can be very helpful. Some will also give you domain name ideas, which can end up being a large help in the long run.

7. Start Creating Content Daily

Everyday you should post at least 1 article to your blog. Most blogs that rank high in Google have thousands of pages of unique quality content and you need to rank above them. The only way to do this is to stay consistent.

You might want to research SEO On-Page Optimization Factors so you can create content that is readable for humans and search engines.

8. Develop Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are not something where ‘The more the better’ is necessarily true. You want to get other websites to link to your new blog. Some of the best ways to do this is by blog commenting (see CommentLuv), forum posts, guest blogging, social bookmarking, submitting to directories, writing articles for directories, and creating link bait content.

Always focus on quality over quantity. You can also head over Fiverr.com and get some pretty good back link gigs for $5. Make sure you know how to use them properly though before you start paying people randomly.

9. Create a Social Presence

If you did not know already, most people on the internet are typically on a social website. Whether that is Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, or StumbleUpon does not matter. What does matter is that you are reaching people on social websites with your blog. The best way to do this is to create fan pages and accounts on each of these websites. Upload your content regularly and connect with bloggers similar to you. Try to steal their customers and continuously create content that people want to read.

As for YouTube, if you can create 1-2 videos weekly off the written content on your blog, it will really go a long way. Every business large and small is starting to create a presence on YouTube. Plus, YouTube videos that target keywords can sometimes rank really high in Google search results, which means targeted leads for you.

9. Create a Social Presence

10. Create an Email List

As you continuously get traffic to your website, you will want to keep them as long-term customers. One of the best ways to do this is to head over to Aweber, create an email list, create or buy a product to giveaway, and offer that product in exchange for a name and an email.

If you are a blogger that creates quality and trending articles, then people will want your information right away. With an email list, you can always update hundreds to thousands of people when you update your website. You can also send out targeted offers to make sales and increase your profits

Affiliate Marketing Tip #2: Focus on selling one product and just one niche. Every time you change your niche or set-up a new blog, you are pretty much starting over. Do not give up, be consistent, and always have persistence.

Programs for Affiliate Marketers

These are some of the top affiliate marketing programs out there today. These are really just websites that connect merchants to affiliates, but they are the most popular.

Each offers different products and different methods of selling. Some of these websites, such as Clickbank and JVZoo, stricly offer affiliate type products that you can promote and be paid a percentage for every sale. On the other hand, Peerfly is a pay-per-lead network so you get paid every time someone completes a survey or fills out a form on a website. Each network has some upsides and downsides, but you just have to find the best affiliate program for your niche.

Affiliate Marketing Softwares

These are a variety of affiliate marketing softwares, toolkits, analytic tools, content, and more. Make sure you do some research before purchasing anything from this section. There are so many different things to buy but you do not want to waste your money.

Keyword Research Softwares
Keyword Elite
KeywordSpy
LongTail Pro
SEOMoz

Social Media Software
Sales Force Marketing Cloud
Spro ut Social
Vertical Response

Email Marketing
Aweber
GetResponse
MailChimp
Vertical Response

On-Page Tools
Scribe Content

Highly Recommended
SEO Moz

Earn Online Money with Affiliate Marketing

Okay I am going to give you my official affiliate marketing strategy filled with tips, daily plans, and mistakes to avoid.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

1. First focus on your main keywords and building content for your blog. If you can rank in search engines for competitive keywords then you can make long-term profits.
2. Stay consistent and do not miss days often. Google likes blogs that are updated multiple times per day.
3. Always try to encourage visitors to share your content. You might even want to offer a free eBook to those who follow you on twitter, like you on facebook, or follow you on Google+.
4. Target certain keywords and stay narrow in the beginning. Try long-tail keywords with around 1,000 searches per month.
5. Build back links to your blog every single day. It only takes about 30 minutes to comment on 10-15 blogs once you know how to find them.
6. Pick products and niches that you have an interest in. Although it is not necessary, it helps when you are first starting.
7. Pick products that have professional sales pages and plenty of affiliate tools.
8. Look at a website like jvnotifypro.com to find out about product launches. If you are the first to promote the new big product, it can really go a long way.
9. Work on one product first, then expand. The biggest mistake I made and consistently see is people going too broad. Focus on one narrow niche at first and try to make money in it.
10. Your ultimate goal should be your email list. Marketers who can build a large email list can make thousands of dollars every time they send out an email. Plus you can get loads of traffic every time you update your website.

Affiliate Marketing Daily Plan

Here are three daily plans that I have used to build content, links, and find targeted leads. These are in no particular order but they give you some ideas on how to gain traffic. The main thing to focus on are your social profiles, email list, and website traffic. You should be trying to get traffic from as many different sources as possible.

You could honestly do what it says in Day 1 for five straight days and then do Day 2 only once per week. I am just giving you some ideas and ways that I spend my own time. Also, never limit yourself to 1 blog post, that should be your minimum.

Day 1
– Create 1 blog post around your keywords.
– Submit blog post link to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Dropjack.
– Comment on 10-15 blogs. Look for CommentLuv blogs and you will find them faster.
– Use Dynamic Tweets to schedule 10-20 tweets related to your niche.
– Post on a forum related to your niche 10 times. Make sure a link to your website is in the signature.
– Answer 5 questions on Yahoo Answers related to your niche and link to your website in the source.

Day 2
– Create 1 blog post around your keywords.
– Submit blog post link to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Dropjack.
– Create a PowerPoint presentation based on your blog post and upload it to Slideshare.
– Create a YouTube video using the PowerPoint presentation and upload to YouTube.
– Embed the Slideshare presentation and YouTube video onto your blog post.
– Buy a back link Fiverr gig to your YouTube video.

Day 3
– Create 1 blog post around your keywords.
– Submit blog post link to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Dropjack.
– Create an email list through Aweber if you do not already have one.
– Buy a PLR product related to your niche at Master Resale Rights.
– Create a squeeze page with an email sign-up form to your list.
– Load 7-10 autoresponder messages.

Follow these three Affiliate marketing game plans and you will definitely get traffic. It might take 60 days of hard work, but it will all pay off in the long run.

10 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

1. Do not continuously change your niche and create new blogs. Focus on one thing at a time and try to make it profitable.
2. Never try to sell products that are old. Always look for new product launches and try to switch things up. Also, the products you sell must have a well designed sales page that converts well.
3. Always write for website visitors and use your own quality, unique content. If you do not want to write, you can hire some good freelance writers online and post that content. Either way, you want to make sure it is of a high quality and unique.
4. Start narrow and broaden as you become more successful. The larger your target market is at the beginning, the harder it will be for you to be successful.
5. Never put your blog to the side for a month. If you stop updating your blog you will lose search engine rankings faster than you can imagine.
6. Sloppy web design does not sell. There are plenty of free WordPress themes to make your website look professional.
7. Do not sell low quality products. It is likely people will just ask for a refund and you will not get paid.
8. Instead of focusing on research, just do the work. The more you look through forums, watch YouTube videos, and read through other blogs, the less time you will spend working on your own blog.
9. Focusing on TOO many keywords can spell doom for you. Start with one keyword and narrow it down as much as possible.
10. Not starting a list. If you are not doing email marketing and creating a list full of subscribers, then you are missing out on profits.

In Conclusion

This post was seriously long. Please comment below and ask any questions you might have. Also, if you have any websites that are helpful for affiliate marketers I would be more than happy to list them. I hope this was helpful for people who might be looking to try this out. If you need any help, please just comment and I would be more than happy to assist you. I will help whether you have a question about setting up a WordPress blog, or if you want some help with keyword research.

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What is Affiliate Marketing?