Beginners Guide to Affiliate Marketing

SunnySusie

First off, I'll risk mentioning the hosts I've used before (MSE mods = I hope this is OK, it is a genuine recommendation and I do not work or have any affiliation with either!)

• eukhost.com
• uk2.net

Both seem up front on costs, you can pay for longer periods and get a discount. I'd suggest eukhost's copper as a good starter for example. A year will cost you £30. It is easy to switch to a higher plan if/when your sites do well.

Aurelia wrote: »

I've been looking into affiliate marketing for a while and this thread has told me more than I had found out elsewhere, so firstly I wanted to say a big thank you for starting it and to everyone who has contributed their knowledge so far!

You're welcome

Generally the more niche your site the more Google will think your site is the best answer for questions on that topic. It is much easier to get going with concentrated subjects. However in the long run you may look back and wish you had a more generic site. The problem with starting more broadly is that your site may never get going. It's not easy!

I would recommend beginners stay very focused. But, have a more generic site that all your micro sites feed into. The generic site can cover the same topics - don't reuse your content, just rewrite and enhance. Whenever I've started more generic I have always struggled to get going. Of course if a generic site gets going then it can be a real winner so it is always worth trying! I have a few on the go that I hope will one day build a steady stream of traffic, but until then it is my focused sites that actually make money!

Sparhawke wrote: »

I have a question I didn't see answered on the first page, I live in a town with a lot of tradespeople of various skills, mechanics, builders, roofers, electricians, pub landlords, cooks, yada yada yada...

Generally, if you can get a community site going then people will actually just contribute for free. If you allow them to mention their own sites and enrich their reputation then they will still win. Have you considered setting up a forum/community site for your local area? <MyTown>forum.co.uk for example? People in your local area will often google their town name followed by a service, this will ensure you have a much better chance of ranking against the big service providers as Google will know your site is a better match for people in your town. Local trades people can give you some content in exchange for some publicity, users will feed back and new users will know that these people are genuine skilled people who will offer a competitive deal. Soon you can sell space to your local restaurants, or if in a tourist area there are many hotel affiliate schemes to join.

My most successful site is a community site with a lively forum where no one gets paid for writing me content. Another obvious example is MSE. This thread is now ranking in google for "Beginners Guide to Affiliate Marketing", its a few pages down but my work is now getting Martin new visitors. And I'm not even allowed to link to my own sites for the privilege. Yet I still do it because I like helping people !

Plenty of people do outsource their content. I was looking only yesterday at a company that offers to write articles of a certain length for a certain fee. I am very tempted to put aside a month's earning to trial it.

Sparhawke wrote: »

examples of blogs that are banned from WordPress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of “spam blogs”, or splogs, and will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported)

I understand blogger.com is a little more tolerent. But ask yourself the question... is my blog a spam blog? And be honest. If you are just writing in the hope to get a few affiliate sales then you will be fighting a losing battle. If you are there to answer people's questions, engage, be helpful, provide something useful then you'll have no problem. Concentrate on writing decent articles and from time to time add an affiliated link that is relevant to your audience. Get the targeting right and they will buy.

I can't offer any advice on how to avoid a spammy blog getting banned other than: don't make spammy blogs!

LA2019

Aurelia wrote: »

I've been looking into affiliate marketing for a while and this thread has told me more than I had found out elsewhere, so firstly I wanted to say a big thank you for starting it and to everyone who has contributed their knowledge so far!

There was something I wanted to ask though because so far everyone has talked about having multiple domains, one for each niche topic, but I have several topics I would like to write about and use affiliate marketing with but they all fall under one "umbrella" subject. If I created a site that had the usual standard pages (about, privacy, etc) but also had pages pointing to separate blogs/posts about each topic, would that work as well as having them all under a different domain name? Or would it work better because it can draw customers in for one thing but because they all fit under an umbrella subject those people would also find interest in the other topics too?

For example, say I wanted to write about a new brand of washing powder due to launch soon, a new vacuum concept from dyson and a window cleaner (random examples there hehe!) they are all separate topics but all fall under "household cleaning".

Not the most exciting example, I know, but hopefully you get what I mean

It really depends (and I only know roughly how Google operate), it can do well either way, depending on your content, the SEO you perform on that content and how Google initially crawl your site.

If you think you have a lot to write (I mean hundreds of articles) then I would go for a main keyword domain covering Household Cleaning and then use sub domains for each separate wordpress site you intend to setup for your site.

If however you are not sure, or have a feeling you might not have enough content, then all under the same banner but bear in mind the tags and category names, as well as each title of each post.

If you are going to choose a UK affiliate then I would recommend a .co.uk name only if you intend to keep your whois public.

Sparhawke wrote: »

Obviously if you are getting others to work for you, you should be paying them at least for their time I believe, otherwise you could end up losing the one thing that sets you apart...

I think the cheapest going rate I've seen on the net for articles is $10 for 500 words, that's trustable I mean, maybe you can find lower and outsource that way, I have dabbled in this but got mixed results back, might be worth developing your own blog style and launching a brandable if you are not clear on what topic you want to focus on, inviting over bloggers you meet online and get on well with to make guest posts for you. It's worked for a fair few sites I see online but then there are probably thousands doing the same getting nowhere, aka phantom blogging.

Sparhawke wrote: »

And here are some examples of blogs that are banned from WordPress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of “spam blogs”, or splogs, and will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported):

Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (“Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). This includes multi-level marketing (MLM) blogs and pyramid schemes. To be clear, people writing their own original book, movie or game reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.

I have written an article on a very common problem that hasn't been addressed, and added a clickbank affliate thingy which is very targeted as advised and got this page <_<

How to get around it?

Auto blogs and spam blogs do not do well at all, I've tested auto blogs and although I've seen many a person claim they do well, they haven't for me and one I did have that did well with google got shut down by my host because it was on a shared host and was consuming too much cpu, basically google loved it, no real person did, though the site was only online 2 weeks.

I've seen others try to market spam blogs but when you see a spam blog your brain switches off the ads and unless there is something in that post a visitor needs and is pretty sure is on there, your site won't last 15 seconds in their browser (an educated guess based on how I feel and how I react when I see a spam blog).

Lastly, the USA FTC has brought out a new guideline regarding endorsements and advertising, if you post in a blog or site is purely to endorse the product you are advertising and you have no experience personally with that product, then you could be in breach.

You can find a PDF from their site here:
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf

SunnySusie

LA2019 wrote: »

Lastly, the USA FTC has brought out a new guideline regarding endorsements and advertising, if you post in a blog or site is purely to endorse the product you are advertising and you have no experience personally with that product, then you could be in breach.

You can find a PDF from their site here:
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf

This may or may not have relevance to UK bloggers! I would however follow the advice if marketing to the US. Not sure what jurisdiction the FTC have over UK bloggers selling through US based affiliate programmes but a US company could easily boot you off their programme for a breach. Given that Amazon.com is by far my biggest earner this would be a bad thing!

I wouldn't worry about it too much if setting up a UK site on a UK programme, but personally I think it is worth disclosing your position anyway, it will hopefully induce trust with your readers if you don't try to hide which links you profit from, and which you don't. Although some people will go out of the way to ensure you don't get a commission, many people will specifically come to your site to click through if they like and trust you. Writing about products you do not know about will result in weak sites that offer no more than the 1000s of other rubbish sites discussing the same topic. You'll struggle to get any where.

I tend to promote every day items that I would clearly have experience of anyway! The rules are more of an attempt to control the more sinister activity of people promoting some kind of service as the answer to all of their problems when they clearly have never used it. You'll know what I mean if you have ever read certain popular "make money online" blogs with their continuous promotion of very expensive products which will supposedly make you lots of money - but I wonder if the only person who makes money is the person promoting it and the person selling it!?

I don't intend to find out for myself !

Sparhawke

Thanks for the answers

I have a question, I have got a blog running which suits me..I can talk of my expertise and I have got someone who is an extremely well known blogger in that world who is going to mention me bigtime in a day or two to get me some good traffic, she has actually known me and my ways for months now and has always been a bit jealous at my natural skill with it lol

She owns one of the most read blogs in that place, the biggest free to play online games in the world so networking will not be such an issue now...

What my problem actually is that when I first set up my blog for adsense I was getting 0.12p-0.15p for each thousand page impressions, but now it is down to 0.03 with more articles and more readers to come!

How do I optimize my adsense to give me a much better rate?

I see nothing mentioned of note anywhere for this

Another thing, I have noticed that the served adverts are in breach of the ToS of the game that I write about and are very unlikely to be clicked on due to it being pretty much the reviled practise of selling game gold or accounts for real money, would switching to something other than adsense for my blogger blog be worth it and how do I go about doing that?

djkaizen

Another option I have found to my benefit is using local businesses and providing affiliate marketing for their business.

they set up a promo code and anyone using this code, automatically gives me 10% of profit.

Alternatively, I get a commission for generating leads for businesses.

Remember that all business doesnt operate online

borders_dude

For 2 forums I run, they are very much for the city audience where I reside.

I had considered giving up national banners and offering banners for local businesses. One off fee per year to have a banner on my site.

Aurelia_2

Well, I've started my blog. I already had a google adsense account from a while ago - never used it but had signed up a few months ago after I'd been doing research into money from blogging. A quick question though, if I wanted to put a "donate" button into my blog at a later date what are those donations classed as as far as tax returns go? If I remember correctly, donations are classed as gifts and thus not taxable but is that correct?

It's not something I will be adding yet at all but wanted to ask about so I know what I'm doing in the future if I decide to add one then. I'm using blogger for my blog and as far as I'm aware they don't have any issues with people putting the donate buttons on there.

level200

Hi

It is very easy to insert a donate button using Paypal, just look through the paypal site for more info.

Try this: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donate-intro-outside

Cheers
John

Thorpeedo944

Yes you can Dave.

If you join an affiliate network they give you code to enter into your page. Often, this code remains the same when a retailer brings out a new promotion. This means that whatever banner you enter into your blog, it will be updated automatically by the network.

Few affiliate networks to join are:

• TradeDoubler
• Commission Junction
• Buy.at
• Affiliate Future
• Affiliate Window

These are all free to join.

Hope this helps.

Matt

Dirty_Dave wrote: »

Can you do AM with static blogs? By static I mean cotent that doesn't get updated every week, do you even need to use a domain name as I need to try and save every penny at the mo.

sunnys01

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