The Affiliate Marketing Process
Affiliate marketing is a relatively easy process to follow, hence it being a good starting point for many Internet Marketers. The landscape has changed somewhat with the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies, but essentially the process remains the same.
Previously, you would have just promoted your affiliate programs using article marketing. With the advent of sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages, you don’t need to just limit yourself to article marketing and can create websites on these sites too.
The most effective affiliate marketers are those who combine article marketing with Web 2.0 technologies whilst building a list.
Before we start talking about how you marketing affiliate products, we need to speak about building a list.
It is vital that you build a list whenever you are working as an affiliate marketer. If you send traffic to a website directly then you have lost that visitor and can’t market to them again.
If you capture their email address then you have the potential to not only make the original sale but to also market other products to them and make sales on those too. This means you earn more than once from a person rather than just rely on the single sale.
When you are working as an affiliate marketer you need to make sure you are capturing email addresses. One of the best and cheapest autoresponders you can use is Aweber.
When we talk about affiliate marketing here we are going to assume that you have an autoresponder but you don’t have any webpages or domains. If you do then you can set up sites there to capture email addresses and provide information, building your own virtual real estate. We are also going to assume that you have picked a niche and product you want to promote. You are also assumed to have done your keyword research and know which keywords to use.
Article Creation
The first step is to create your articles. You can either do this yourself, which many people do as it doesn’t cost anything or you can outsource it or you can buy PLR articles.
Your articles need to be based around your keywords. Typically target 1 to 3 keywords in your articles and write naturally for human readers, not search engine spiders. Search engine spiders don’t have any credit cards!
Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. If you make $10 an article (on average) then if you write 1 article a day you will make $10 a day. If you write 10 articles a day you make $100 a day and if you make 100 articles a day … well you can work it out.
In order to get the biggest bang for your buck, I strongly recommend spinning your articles. Yes, this does take some time – it can take up to an hour sometimes in order to really spin it well. However, the time is well spent, after the hour you click a button and you have 50 or more unique articles.
Autoresponder Series Creation
You are going to be capturing leads through your article marketing so you need to create an autoresponder series relating to the niche you have chosen that promotes products. You need to balance information with blatant promotion.
Review products, recommend products and talk about them. If every email is a blatant promotion then you will find people unsubscribe. You’ve made a lot of effort to get them on your list and you want to keep them there, so long as they are buying.
Article Distribution
Once you have your autoresponder and articles ready you need to start making sales. You need to distribute your article across the Internet so that they will start driving traffic.
If you create some Squidoo Lenses, Blogger Blogs, Wordpress Blogs or anything similar you can use these as the basis of your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Create a separate one per niche or product. If you have your own domains, you will use these as the center of your marketing. Remember to have a way to capture their email addresses here to feed people into your autoresponder.
Use some of your spun content and some of specific unique content on these in order to attract the search engines. Remember the focus of your efforts is to make affiliate sales, so don’t put distractions on your pages like Adsense, eBay / Amazon products (unless that is what you are promoting). This will take away from the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing.
Once these sites are in place, start distributing your articles to the article directories. Ideally, you want a unique article on each directory, hence the spinning of the articles earlier. Be aware that the article directories can take days or even weeks to approve your articles, so you may not get quick results.
Make sure your article goes to the most popular article directories such as www.EzineArticles.com, www.GoArticles.com, www.ISnare.com and www.SearchWarp.com. There are many others which you can check out and also submit to – just search in Google for Article Directory and you will find them.
Your Resource Box
Make sure you include a resource box that points to your Squidoo lens or wherever you want to direct people. Each article directory has different requirements for the resource box, so make sure you check them out and make sure your resource box confirms.
The point of the resource box is to get the click through to your website. It needs to persuade people to come through to your site. Offer a free report or information, which is delivered by your autoresponder.
Make sure you include your keyword as a hyperlink in your articles and if you can, your direct web address. This will help you in the search engines.
Drive Traffic
Driving traffic to your sites is important for you to keep your earnings up.
Submit your Squidoo lenses (and the like) to sites such as www.OnlyWire.com, www.Ping.in, www.Digg.com, www.StumbleUpon.com and more. These will get traffic to your sites.
Your article submissions will help to improve the search engine rankings of your main site and get you organic search engine traffic (which doesn’t cost a penny).
Capture Leads
As you send people to your Squidoo lens (or other site) you are going to have to capture the leads. Make sure you make it very obvious how they sign up and offer them a gift for signing up to your list. This could be a free product or report relating to the niche, which can of course contain affiliate links to make further sales!
The affiliate marketing process is not difficult and once you’ve done it once or twice you will have got the hang of it and find it easier the next time. As you learn more about the process so you can add to it and refine it even further.
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