5 Step Affiliate Revenue Blueprint
Affiliate marketing is a good way of generating affiliate income online, however it usually seems very difficult and frustrating for the newbies. With proper planning and execution of simple steps, your affiliate marketing campaigns will get off the ground faster and start generating income.
Here are the crucial steps to follow for starting affiliate campaigns:
1. Proper niche and keyword research. You need to do your homework and identify a profitable niche with highly searched, low competition keywords. Finding the right niche is crucial for success. A word of caution for newbies is to avoid the oversaturated niches such as weight loss, get your ex back and make money online. If you are going for the internet marketing niche, it is much wiser to pick a smaller and specific sub niche such as list building or traffic generation using podcasts. You have less competition and much higher chances to succeed if you pick up a small sub niche within a huge niche. There is fierce competition in the weight loss niche, but if you go after a sub niche such as post-pregnancy weight loss with raw food diet’ you can build an extremely precise targeted traffic and prospect list.
2. Setting up your own domain. If you have a small budget you can spare, get your own domain and hosting account. You won’t need a web site or content, you can redirect your domain, subdomains or subfolders to various affiliate programs, or you can create a squeeze page and send targeted traffic there to build your list of prospects. Do not use free blogging platforms, these can be deleted by the owners of the platforms any time and without any notice or legitimate reason. Affiliate marketing is a business and you need to invest in it for generating affiliate income. Spending $10 (or less if you can find coupons) on a domain name is a great investment, since most article directories and other free advertising and marketing platforms do not allow posting affiliate links. They let you post links to your own web sites or blogs, so many super affiliates either use redirects or link to their blog posts where they promote the affiliate products.
3. Article marketing. The best way to do is to publish the content on your own blog first, wait for it to get indexed by the search engines, and then submit a slightly modified version of this to article directories. If you don’t want to build a web site, you can just go for the article directories. I suggest using the free version of Brad Callen’s article submitter software. You have to create the accounts manually, but the software stores the login, profile information and your articles, and submits them to the directories in its database. Write at least 2-3 keyword targeted articles for each affiliate product you are promoting and submit them to as many article directories as you can. Make sure to include your links in the resource box and your author profile.
4. Ezine marketing. You can search for free ezine directories and either contact the individual ezine owners to send your articles as free content (no one will refuse good quality free content), or buy solo ads on ezines. You can find ezines in every niche, some of them have small but very targeted subscriber bases, some of them have large subscriber bases. I suggest going for the smaller lists since it’s very inexpensive to advertise to those. You can either send them to your web site promoting affiliate offers related to their niche, or lead them to your squeeze page for building your list. The important factor here is to advertise in related niches. If you are in the violin lessons niche, then you need to go after the ezines related to violins.
5. Video marketing. In addition to articles, you should also create videos educating the customers about the solution you are promoting, offering some valuable free information and including a call to action to go to your URL. If there are too many people promoting the same product on YouTube and other platforms, you can try looking for synonyms and long tail keyword phrases with less competition and do the SEO to rank with these keywords. That way you can start generating affiliate income faster since your videos will rank faster over your competition. If you are not willing to do voiceovers, you can use a text to speech software or a slideshow style with some music. Animoto and Article Video Robot have a free services that help making such videos.
It is possible to outsource the article, ezine and video marketing tasks if you have a budget, but I recommend doing it yourself at least for the beginning in order to learn the process. If you know the process inside out then you will know what to expect from the outsources and you will be able to train them to do these tasks.
With carefully planned and executed steps, it is going to take less trial and error to start seeing income.