Around 2 week ago I wrote about how I made my first sale from affiliate marketing. I told you that there’s some good work involved in setting up an affiliate site, e.g. filling it with content or promoting it in order to get more traffic. I also told you, that such sites most times pay off for themselves in the end. Well…my little niche site has brought me yet another $30 in my Clickbank account!

As I first started to explore the world of affiliate marketing, especially niche marketing, I thought it would be way too difficult to actually make money from it. Now I see that it IS possible to make money from it, which doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult at all. All you need is passion about your “job”, work toward your own goals and you’ll reach them! Mhmm, I already sound like a super affiliate…

Should be all for now,

Cheers,
Querblogger

Today I will give you a real life example on how I made my first affiliate sale from a niche site. Before you read on, please don’t expect some secrets in this post on how to become rich overnight! If you really want to earn money online, you have to work hard for it!. Ok, now I will tell you everything I have personally done to make my first sale online, but please notice that I’m still a noob marketer! Warning! Long post ahead!

Although there are different techniques around, affiliate marketing basically consists of the following steps:

• Choosing a product you want to promote
• Finding and joining an affiliate program for that product
• Taking some time for keyword research on phrases people likely would type into search engines
• Creating a website, blog or landing page around your main keywords, filling it with usefull content while adding your affiliate links
• Driving traffic to your sites, the more the better
• Keeping your sites updated and optimizing them for better search engine rankings
• (Optional) Choosing the next product and repeating the whole process

Sounds easy and understandable? Well, it is easy, but that doesn’t mean there’s no work involved. Trust me, it’s hard work to reach a point where you earn a good amount of money (and I’m still working on it), but in the end it pays off for sure.

Ok, let’s go! See what I’ve done to make my first bucks from affiliate marketing…

Finding a product and affiliate program

The first thing I have done, was searching for the right product to promote. I must admit, this was the easiest step involved in starting my affiliate “career”. As I’m already a member of Clickbank, I thought: “Why not choosing a software title to promote?”. After doing some research on the CB marketplace, I finally found the right product for my upcoming niche site. I won’t reveal too much details here, all I can say is, that it was some kind of system optimizer for the Windows operating system.

I had choosen this product not only because I personally like optimizing my PC everday (I’m not a geek), but also because the product has shown some high gravity on Clickbank. Gravity? Yes, gravity! It’s only another word for the popularity of a product, so to say if it’s hot or not. Another reason for choosing it, was a high commission rate of 65% from the selling price, not bad compared to other affiliate programs.

So, first two steps done. Choosen a product, choosen an affiliate program. Perfect! Now, for some harder work…

Keyword Research – The free way

Before even starting to develop my niche site, I first had to do some good keyword research on the product I’ve choosen short before. I was mainly interested in the number of competing pages and the actual daily search volume for a particular keyword.

So I went to the free Wordtracker Gtrends Tool (unfortunately down at the moment) to enter some keywords that just came into my mind after thinking about the product’s features and benefits. It turned out that the actual name of the product (sorry I really can’t reveal it here) had the most searches and a relatively small amount of competing pages. I started the Gtrends tool for that keyword and found some other long-tail keywords and phrases that had nearly no competition, but at least some searches each day. Perfect keywords for a niche sites, chances were great to get some visitors to my site!

So, I now had the right words and phrases for my affiliate site. I’ve checked how many searches occured each day, and also found the possible number of visitors to a site that is ranked #1 in Google for a given keyword.

All in all, my niche site should get some visitors, even without optimizing it too much…

Creating my Website

After I had found the right keywords and key phrases for my future niche site about a system optimizer software, all I had to do was building the actual site.

The first thing I’ve done was searching for the right domain name for my site. Luckily, I found ine where I could directly put my main keyword in. I simply took the product name (again, I won’t reveal it here), added the words “review” and registered it on Namecheap, a very reliable domain registrar. Please note that I’ve asked for permission to use brand names in my domain, that’s really important in order to stay safe from legal issues!

The hosting for my site wasn’t that problem, because I already had an account on Hostgator, where I was able to host unlimited sites for cheap. So far, they are very reliable and I haven’t faced any downtimes or problems yet. I can only recommend them, especially if you want to start many small websites to make money from!

Ok, domain name bought, hosting ready. Now I had to build my niche site.

I thought about the best way to create my website and although I’m able to program a website by myself with help of HTML and CSS, I’ve choosen a far easier option, WordPress.

Yes, WordPress isn’t only a blogging software anymore. You can use it as a full-blown content management system (CMS) if you will. There are dozens of great plugins and themes available online and the best thing is, a WordPress based site is easy to manage, even for a newbie!

So, I had set up a WordPress install for my product review site, had choosen a nice template (which shouldn’t be too fancy and graphics loaded) and installed some useful plugins like the All in One Seo Pack or a Sitemap Generator for some SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The site was now ready to be filled with content, the main ingredient for getting quaility traffic and sales…

Content for my Niche Site

The next step involved in setting up my first niche site, was writing the actual content. After setting up the WordPress install, which I use as some kind of a content management system, writing the content was nothing more than writing skills (also I’m far from being a perfect good average writer) and including the right keywords.

My main focus was writing search engine friendly content that also appeals for readers who like to get a honest review on the product I promote on my site.

So, I’ve written only two blog posts that describe features and benefits of the system optimizer software, the product I choosed to promote and make money from (what else, hehe…)

Each post had a lenght of around 500 to 600 words and contained my main keywords, distributed throughout the whole text. That’s really important for your search engine rankings. Google, to name the big boss on the search engine market, gives more weight to sites that closely rely on given keywords. So, stay focused, but don’t look too spammy with too many keyword phrases.

After the posts were written, I added my Clickbank affiliate link, a banner in the left side menu of my site, and an advertising blog from Speedyads to monetize every kind of traffic that will come to my site.

I also cloaked my affiliate links with a simple PHP redirect. So, instead of having ugly and long affiliate links, I managed to get much nicer ones like domain.com/download.php for example.

So far I was lucky with my efforts, but something was still missing. Yeah!, traffic…

Getting Traffic to my Site

Now you probably think the hardest part of the work was finally over?! Well, I would say the work now really just began.

Driving traffic to a site is a very critical part in making affiliate sales. What would a well-written and keyword rich site be without any traffic? Nothing special in my opinion (and something you won’t ever make money from).

On my first affiliate marketing journey, to give it an other name, I mainly focused on getting organic traffic, meaning visitors from search engines like Google for example. In other words, everything but paid traffic. In order to get organic traffic, a website must at first be listed in search engines, which shouldn’t be a problem. But it must also be listed as high as possible in the search engine results pages (SERPs) , the higher the better.

There are different things you can do to improve your rankings. Besides wrtiting quality content, which I’ve already done, you have to gain backlinks to your site. Each link back to your site counts as a vote to your site.l The more votes you can get, the higher your rankings get and therfore the more traffic will reach your website.

Because the best backlinks come from high PageRank sites, my goal was to focus on gaining exactly those links.

The first thing I’ve done was submitting my site to some hundred online directories. I used a software called Directory Submitter to automate a huge part of this hard (and boring) work. I can only recommend this tool, the free edition includes some hundred directories to start with, worth a try!

The next, and probably best step was submitting articles to high PageRank article directories like Ezinearticles for example. This strategy, also known as article or bum marketing, helps alot in increasing your search engine rankings. I’ve therefore written some articles that deal about the system optimizer software I promote, most times background information and benefits from using that software.

Most article directories give you the option to include a closing paragraph, where you can set a link to the site you’re promoting. This way, after publishing the articles, you’ll get free high PageRank backlinks to your niche site. I submitted three articles to three different article directories. I haven’t submitted them all at once, but one after another over the course of one or two weeks.

The last step worth to mention, was writing a Squidoo lens about the software. Especially Google really loves Squidoo lenses, most time they rank very well in the search results. Of course I’ve also included links back to my site! Squidoo even allows affiliate links within your len’s content, a great promotion tool.

There are many more ways to drive traffic to your sites, including paid campaigns for example, but I won’t go any deeper here. Feel free to google your way to more information, I’m sure you’ll find what you’re looking for!

All in all, after some days my site received its first traffic from Google. I checked my current rankings and found my site at position 14 from over 300,000 directly competing pages. You see the power of article marketing?

Althoug my site rank wasn’t the best, I still received 5 to 10 unique visitors a day. It’s not much, I know, but mainly because I focused on a reall tiny niche. Anyway, the traffic was enough to bring me my first sale after only one month after starting this site. I was really surprised to see $30 in my Clickbank account!

Conclusion

Now you know how much work is involved in setting up even a small niche site. From searching a product and affiliate program, over keyword research and writing content, to driving traffic to your niche site, it’s a long way to make your first sale.

But it’s also really worth it. With some routine and a good amount of passion, everyone should be able to set up a niche site within only a week or so. If a site works out and makes at least some money, start the next one and repeat the process. It’s up to you. But don’t completely forget about your already started sites, optimization should be an ongoing task for you, although you won’t have to spend your whole time for it.

I hope you found my post at least a bit helpful. All things I’ve achieved the last month are nothing compared to what a “real” affiliate marketer deals with everyday. I knwo about this, but I’m proud enough to tell you my noob story here, it’s another goal I’ve reached. I now know that affiliate marketing really works and I would be dumb if I wouldn’t put any more efforts in it. Other projects are already in planning phase, so stay tuned!

See you soon,
Querblogger

PS: I’ll soon write about a new project from my friend Tiberius Burciu, owner of My PPC Advertising. Well…you’ll see!

At the moment I’m involved in investigating a really nice money making opportunity called Bum Marketing. Basically, it’s a way to make money online without investing a single cent. Therefore it’s called “Bum” Marketing, because even a bum from the street could (in theory) start earning a nice income online without paying anything for it.

The basic idea behind this marketing method is the following. First, you have to search a product you want to promote. It should be a niche product that people really want to buy. For example a uber-great ebook about magic methods for losing weight without doing any hard work on it (Ok, it’s probably an ugly example…

Second thing is keyword research. Look for long-tail keywords with high search volume and less competition (<5000 results on Google would be great).

Third part in Bum Marketing is writing articles with your long-tail keywords in the title and body. It’s really important to write your article with those keywords in mind to get the best position in the search results later on. You have to submit those articles to as many article directories you can. In the author box below your article you should integrate affiliate links to the products you promote.

Fourth step (the easy part). Rinse and repeat and watch your income grow. The more articles you write, the more money you’ll make from affiliate sales/leads. A single article won’t make you rich (it’s assumed that one article brings in $20 each month), but with 100 articles you will definitely see your earnings rise.

So far so good. That’s for the theory. But there’s is also the part with work involved. To actually test the income potential from Bum Marketing, I will do a long-term experiment on it. I’ll try to write some articles promoting different products (I think I’ll start with Clickbank first) and submit them to many article directories. Then I will see if one can really make good money from this marketing method.

Personally I expect to make far less than $20 a month from a single article, but that’s only a feeling, maybe I can make much more…

This post should only be a short intro to Bum Marketing. I’ll write more detailed articles later on. I will also report about my current progress (and my earnings). For now I have to do some more research on it….

See you,
Querblogger

In order to make money online, and here I mean more than just some 50 dollars a month, you have to learn a lot of skills and techniques, especially about affiliate marketing. So, I can’t help you by providing any in-depth knowledge I’ve already learned by myself (I’m still a noob), but I can give you some good resources from where you can start. The following list contains 10 useful (and free) resources to learn more about affiliate marketing. Beside many other resources, I personally use these tools and information I find them very valuable.

1. Wickedfire

Wickedfire is a real awesome forum that mainly concentrates on affiliate marketing. There you’ll find a lot of good infos about the different aspects involved in marketing. It’s also a great place to find ideas that you can easily adopt by yourself. But be warned, the forum threads contains more or less rude language sometimes, which is a matter of taste. I personally like their style because it’s far more honest this way

2. Digitalpoint Forum

The Digitalpoint forum is another wonderful place to find useful background information on afiiliate marketing. I think, compared to Wickedfire, this forum offers even more threads dealing about making money stuff. It would take years until everything would be read there.

3. Affiliate Masters PDF

One of the best free ebooks about affiliate marketing is probably the Affiliate Masters Course from Sitesell.com. It contains 165 pages loaded with many infos, from finding the right niches to creating good landing pages. It’s definitely worth the download, and it’s free!

4. Thirty Day Challenge

The Thirty Day Challenge was (and is) a contest held over the last years. The goal is to teach other people how to make their first 10 bucks online within a single month. Everyday there was released a new piece of information that helped the readers to start their own business online. Although the contest is over now and the next one will start at August 1st this year, you can still follow the last challenge from 2007. The information holds true even for today. Just sign-up for free and follow the instructions. Prepare for some well done (and sometimes funny) video tutorials by Ed Dale!

5. Adwords Learning Center

With affiliate marketing you won’t come around doing some PPC advertising on one of the major advertising platforms like Google, Yahoo or MSN. If you need some good tutorials on how to set up Google Adwords campaigns, feel free to check out their learning center. They offer dozens of tutorial videos, ranging from the Google quality score, over the right ad copy to budget management. Very useful!

6. Wordtracker GTrends Tool

Wordtracker offers a free keyword research tool called GTrends. And I think it’s a must have for anyone trying to make money fro affiliate marketing. With Gtrends you can find many long tail keywords (up to 100 in the free edition), check their daily search volume and find competing sites that were optimized for the given keyword. It’s a fast and easy way to find good niches with less competition (which will make the most money).

7. Affiliate Networks

Some good affiliate networks you could join are Commission Junction and the Pepperjamnetwork for example. They both offer a great service and a huge portfolio of different products and services you can promote. Also Clickbank is worth atry if you want to promote electronic products like software or ebooks. Feel free to check out that link to find many more networks!

8. BANS Process Series

BANS stands for “Build A Niche Store” and is a nice software that allows you to start your very own eBay store. The BANS process series is a really good step-by-step tutorial on how to set up your first store.

9. Quit Your Day Job

QuitYourDayJob is one of the many blogs I’ll personally read on a regular basis. Sure, I could name a few dozens more here, but that would make that list even…longer. Anyway, QYDJ is really worth a look. You’ll find a lot of brilliant ideas about affiliate marketing and many links to other valuable resources.

10. Deezer.com

Last but not least, I’ll present you Deezer.com. Ok, actually it hasn’t anything to do with affiliate marketing. But it may help you while reading all those ebooks, forum threads and blog posts. Deezer.com is a fully free and legal music platform. You can listen to almost every song in the world. Search for your favorite artist or album, create a playlist and start listening your music for free (you can’t download the music to stay on the legal way). I personally listen to Deezer.com while doing my researches, it helps me to relax a little and I feel a lot better.

Ok, that’s all for now. I hope you like my list, maybe I’ll start another one when I have found more useful affiliate marketing resources.

Until then my sson-to-be marketers!
Querblogger

Today I want to share some thoughts from what I´ve learned about affiliate marketing so far. This article won´t be any in-detail story on how to do marketing the right way, it´s only here to give you some insight in how to start marketing and what is involved in doing it. I´m neither an expert in this field, nor am I making a living from affiliate marketing, I´ve only done some research the past days and I want to share my knowledge with you. (Warning – Long article ahead!)

What´s affiliate marketing?

So, you´ve probably heard of affiliate marketing and what is involved with it? No? No problem, let me give you a short description.

Affiliate marketing is basically all about promoting products and services from different vendors to get some commissions on leads and sales. Let´s take shoes for example (don´t ask me why I´ve taken shoes here…). Say there is a company selling shoes. Let´s also assume that you have a website dealing about shoes, cheap shoes, small shoes, big shoes… So, affiliate marketing would be if you promote the vendor´s shoes at your own shoe website, when one of your visitors buys a shoe through some links you provide on your page, you´ll get a commission from that sale.

That´s it. You make money from referring people to services and/or products. You get a commission from sales. Or you get your money from leads, where people don´t have to buy anything, but only have to join a site or fill out a form for example.

How to start?

In order to start marketing those products and services yourself, you have to follow some basic rules, and I really mean BASIC because affiliate marketing is such a huge field with dozens of strategies, tricks, best practices and so on. I´ve simply put together some thoughts that will help you in getting your feet wet in affiliate marketing.

1. Choose the right (niche) market

In order to establish an affiliate business, the first thing you´ll have to do is to find the right market you want to promote. There are millions of different products and services out there, so it may be very difficult to join the right ones. The best way to find your market is to look at your own hobbies and what you personally like. If you´re an expert in search engine optimization (SEO), choose the SEO or webmaster category. If you like gardening for example, choose to promote garden products. The possibilities are endless.

A good way to find markets is to have a look at eBay for example, there you have different categories to choose from. Simply keep on clicking through the products directory and you´ll probably find a market that fits your needs. You can also take a look at the Google shopping directory to find more ideas on choosing the right market.

It´s really important that you choose a niche market! Find products that aren´t as well-known as mainstream products. For example, don´t choose “computers” for examples, but try to find a niche like “gaming laptops” or “desktop computer accessories”. If you choose a niche market, you´ll have better chances on making sales, because you have less competition from other people also doing affiliate marketing.

2. Find the best affiliate programs

After you´ve found the right product/service you want to promote, the next step would be to find the right affiliate program for the market you have choosen. You have different options on this. First you could go directly to the products/services websites and find out if they have an affiliate program. The most big companies have one, simply do some research for yourself.

The second option would be to join an affiliate network which brings advertisers (the guys that´ll pay you) and publishers (that´s you) together. They usually provide many advertisers (products/services) you can choose from. They also offer different advertising tools like banners or text links that you can integrate in your blog or website to promote a product or service. The best things is, they also manage the payments, so you don´t have to open dozens of different accounts, but only one where all your earnings come in. Some good affiliate programs to start with would be Pepperjamnetwork, Commission Junction or NeverBlueAds.

3. Find the right keywords

The next step involved in starting your affiliate business is to choose the right keywords. In order to promote a product or service you have to either have a website or you´ll need good keywords for starting some advertising campaigns. If you have a website for example, you would place those keywords in your content or as meta tags within your html code. So with both ways you need good keywords to actually bring visitors to your affiliate links or banners.

Here comes the “niche” thing again. I´ve told you to choose a niche market to promote, and the same goes for keywors you choose. To minimize competion with other people´s websites or ad campaigns you have to choose niche keywords. It makes a huge difference in advertising campaigns for examples, mainstream keywords may cost you some dollars per click, where niche keywords may cost you only some cents each click.

A good way to find keywords and new keyword combinations is the free Wordtracker keyword tool for example. Simply start with one simple keyword and find out different combinations that were actually searched on different search engines. The keyword tools also shows you the search volume from the last day, so you can find out if there´s a need for a product or service. Also check out the Google Adwords tool, you´ll find many extra infos there.

4. Start a website or PPC campaigns

After you´ve done your research on finding the right niche market, you´ve choosen the right affiliate program or network, and you´ve have established a good keyword base to work with, you have to either start a website (if you haven´t already) or an advertising campaign, where you´ll promote your affiliate links.

If you have a website, the next step would be to write good search engine friendly content around the market you´ve choosen. To stay by the shoes example at the beginning of this post, you could write about how shoes are made, all the different kind of shoes, materials, pricing…The more and better content you´ll have, the more likely it is that your site gets found via search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Remember to include your niche keywords within your text and html code!

If you would like to start an advertising campaign, you have to do some more research on the actual competition you´ll face. The higher the competition, the higher the bidding prices for advertising. For example, it doesn´t make sense to buy an ad campaign with $1.00 for each click, when you´ll get only an average of $0.50 per click through a visitor. Think about it. You may buy 1,000 clicks for $1.00 each, which is $1,000. With an average click through rate (CTR) of 2% and a commision of $25 for each click, you would get only $500 back and lose 500 bucks (so, it´s just an example).

Conclusion

The above article should only give a short insight in the affiliate marketing basics. It´s neither complete nor 100% correct. Feel free to do some research on your favorite search engine or check out this nice listing with affiliate marketing resources. Also check out Wickedfire, a nice forum to find ideas or infos on affiliate marketing.

All in all, affiliate marketing can bring you thousands of dollars each month by “only” referring people to products or services. It´s usually a lot of hard work involved, starting from keyword and market research to building and maintaining a website. But, if you really stay with your goals, you can definitely make it. Start simple, for example set your goal for making only $1 each day, if all works good, try to grow your business.

I hope to provide you with more in-detail information later on as I personally try to start some affiliate marketing by myself. So far I hope this article will help you to get the basics

Bye bye,
Querblogger