Beginners Guide to Affiliate Marketing

quatrofromageo

I just did community link building to get mine to rank in google.
Then got more links from posting good content.

But google traffic doesn't seem to be as good as direct traffic for making sales

save-a-lot

red_devil wrote: »

i have a domain name which could be used a gift list wish list site. There are so many out there though I know it wouldnt be worthwhile! Do people even use them anyway?

I know I would pay someone to set it up and it wouldnt take off you need lots and lots of sign ups too many out there!

If anyone has any other ideas that would be good!

Try affiliates4u forum and see what responses you get there. The collective skill and knowledge there will help you find something.

martinsgiftstogo

quatrofromageo wrote: »

There's no way I could go full time on affiliate sales like this.
Or do full-time affiliates have hundreds of sites?

I have been reading some beginners' affiliate advice recently from Rosalind Gardner and she suggests having multiple themed sites, adding one new one every few weeks to start with.

As has already been said on this site...a great start would be to have separate sites/blogs with themes that highlight a problem and also includes possible solutions.

The affiliate links can then be added to the sites/blogs so they continue the theme of the content.

I had a chat with one of my affiliate brokers this week and she suggested that having a forum is a good way of getting lots of people together in one place. My sites can have a forum added and that's what I will be working on next.

SunnySusie

I see there have been a few responses since my last visit, but for what it is worth I will add my own experiences too

DanJackson wrote: »

1. Where do you find the best earning affiliate schemes? Is there a directory that lists them all or is it a case of going to certain sites like Amazon and just trawling through to see who offers the best schemes?

As mentioned above, most of the schemes are grouped up and run be networks. This is handy as you can sign up to a couple of big players and have most of your bases covered. I use AffiliateWindow and CJ mostly for no other reason than the stores I like operate through them.

However I actually send most traffic direct to Amazon. Amazon converts well, people already have accounts, people trust them, they offer competitive prices. Amazon also have a massive range of widgets so you can easily manage products all from a nice back end system.

I do wish Amazon could automatically geo locate (send traffic to .com/.co.uk/.fr/etc) and I do wish the non-UK sites could pay by bank transfer (eg .com pays in dollars by cheque!)

DanJackson wrote: »

2. How many different affiliate sinks do you link to on your blogs? i.e. If you have a blog about item X do you only link to one or two sites that sell Item X or do you link to as many as possible?

Just for ease I often tend to stick with Amazon. I have tried covering several basis and many people advocate price comparison, but for the work I'm not sure it makes all that much difference. I like to put up a site with some content, implement some Amazon widgets that will automatically update with top products, pop in an astore, and then move on to another site. No worrying about continuous updates and checking products are still available etc. It just works. I also like adsense based sites for this reason too. Just put the ads up and forget about it.

DanJackson wrote: »

3. How many hits do your blogs get per day and how long did it take you to build them up to the level they are now so that they are earning good money?

I have some sites that get about 10 hits for very specific search terms. And maybe 2 or 3 of those will convert to an adsense click. This only works because the site is built around a search term that will attract people who are likely to click through. Get this wrong and you can have 10,000 hits and one click through (for example "social" traffic from digg converts extremely badly as users of this site are savvy and adsense aware - yet ironically so many beginners are desperate to get on the front page of digg!).

My biggest earning site nets about £300 a month, but this is an exception rather than a rule. It got to that level within month 1, and has maintained it for almost a year now. The "secret" here was to get a site up first for a new product, I got the site up quickly, I promoted it hard and fast, and once it hit the top for this new niche it has been hard for anyone else to get near. Could you do this? Sure. But you need to spot an opportunity: build a new community site around a console, the Win7 entrepreneurs will do well I'm sure,
pick up on an upcoming pop star, a new TV show, etc. The real skill is getting there first - easier said than done! Be careful not to infringe any trademarks.

I did it with a new electrical product. I set up a support forum and thankfully the product became massively popular. A combination of luck and skill !

DanJackson wrote: »

4. How much money do you invest in each site? Do you pay for adverts on Google etc?

I have only ever paid for my hosting costs. I won't mention who I use as MSE are not fans of advertising (although I might have linked in post 1 - I can't remember).

Many affiliates swear by PPC , buy traffic in at one price, sell it for another. But I just don't have the time or cash to play with. I also love the idea of keeping costs at almost nothing. I love the idea that I could stop doing all this tomorrow and the money would still drop in for years to come (I imagine it would start to tail off!).

Affiliate marketing and website building can be slow to start but it's that long term reward that attracts me.

martinsgiftstogo

save-a-lot wrote: »

Hi

Try this thread, pretty much covers the main players, however it is a 2 year old thread.
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=482439




add to this, and now my main affiliate network partner. https://www.webgains.com because of the type of merchants they attract are in my niche.

I would also add

www.cleverat.com

I first registered with them last year but explained at the time that I was really tied time-wise as my daughter (I was her carer) was still at home but would be moving out shortly.

They were very understanding about it and now they know I have more time (daughter moved out in February) they phone several times a week with info on new campaigns + they hand out marketing tips and help me with ideas on how to organise my websites and my time.

Not at all bad to get all that for free....lovely people to work along with :j

StaffsSW

Something that I haven't seen much mention of yet is relevant and focused content, which tends to increase Click-Thru-Ratios and Earnings Per Click.

It's all very well having a blog site with lots of adverts from companies that pay out good revenue rates, but if the traffic is not targetted, then the ads are worthless, or if there are too many ads, then the traffic is diluted. Quality of traffic is much higher on my priority list than quantity of traffic. There is no point sending 1000 people per day into a product, if none of them complete the sale. There are far too many amatuer sites which are nothing more than a collection of flashing gifs and banner ads, with no substance about the site at all.

One of the (many!) sites I run focuses on one specific niche product, and consists of around 120 individual, hand-written, content-rich, keyphrase-heavy pages, each focused on one variant of that niche product. This is not a blog site, but in essense it works the same way - each page is effectively one article, and has only two separate affiliate campaigns that promotes the one sole product on that page. What I am doing is capturing natural search traffic from Google, and increasingly Bing, and focusing each viewer into an either or scenario, and in effect a very small scale shopping comparison site.

I also have various related content pages attached to the site, not promoting any (or minimal) affiliate programmes, but instead focusing on other aspects of that niche - readers stories, latest youtube videos, rss feeds coming in from news-sites etc. It all builds the site to a one stop resource for my niche, and the beauty of it is that it only takes an hour or two every couple of weeks to add a new page.

Somebody once described Internet Marketing as a game of chess - a short time to learn, and a lifetime to master.
I was lucky enough to find two VERY good niches, pay off my mortgage and quit work within 3 years of learning HTML. I am now in a position where I can spend a few hours a week tweaking existing sites, and building new ones, researching keywords and niches.

I'll be at the A4Uexpo conference next month, which is well worth the entry fee for anyone who is in anyway serious about taking affiliate marketing to the next level.

grayslick

A really informative thread, thanks to everyone!

One basic question, if I link to Amazon items does it have to be amazon supplied items in order to get paid or can it be marketplace as well?

cheeseslice

Hello all,

I've been doing a lot of reading on this over the past couple of weeks and I think it is something I would like to try my hand at but I have 2 questions I was hoping someone might answer for me.

The first question is about hosting. I understand that it isn't possible to advertise here but can someone give me a hint about who they use for hosting. I have a hosting pacakge at the minute which I use as a test server for applications I use in work. It is £7 a month but I am restricted to only being allowed to host one site/url. I understand that a lot of people use free blogging hosts but if I was going to do this I think I would prefer to buy the domain names and host them myself, just in case I managed to make it big(so to speak)!! There is no way I could afford £7 per month per site.

My other question is about the google keyword tool. If I search for keywords there and get the average cpc does that tell me what it costs to advertise for this on google? I can't quite get my head around how this tool helps an affiliate marketer.

Thanks

86ianh

cheeseslice wrote: »

My other question is about the google keyword tool. If I search for keywords there and get the average cpc does that tell me what it costs to advertise for this on google? I can't quite get my head around how this tool helps an affiliate marketer.

AdWords provides a projected CPC for a keyword or phrase that is based on factors including what competitors are bidding, what position (ie how high up the results) you want and what geo-targeting you specify (eg UK-only).

However, what you will actually end up paying per click is also influenced by changes in competitors bids and the ads 'Quality Score'.

The AdWords system calculates the Quality Score for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query (and also to the landing page content). A keyword's Quality Score is frequently updated and is closely related to its performance (particularly the click through ratio). In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click.

The key thing to do is keep a close watch on actual costs, make sure the ad. relevance (Quality Score) is as high as you can get it and monitor the affilliate income generated by that ad/keyword to make sure you don't lose money!

competitionscafe

cheeseslice wrote: »

I have a hosting package at the minute which I use as a test server for applications I use in work. It is £7 a month but I am restricted to only being allowed to host one site/url. I understand that a lot of people use free blogging hosts but if I was going to do this I think I would prefer to buy the domain names and host them myself, just in case I managed to make it big(so to speak)!! There is no way I could afford £7 per month per site.

You could go for a basic hosting package with somewhere like lunarpages or justhost for example, which works out at about £2 per month (£24 per year when paid 1 or 2 years in advance) - but if you go via a cashback site like topcashback you get around £60 cashback which means effectively you get 2 years or more of free hosting!

I agree that buyng the domains (I use 123reg) and hosting them yourself is a good choice as if the site proves popular you control the domain name and can also change hosts.