How NOT to FAIL At Affiliate Marketing - Part II
Success-101: (Making Money With Affiliate Marketing)
This is Part II of our four-part tutorial on “getting started with affiliate
marketing to make money online”. So, let’s begin the step-by-step
process of setting up your affiliate marketing business for Success!
We’ll start with the basics:
1. GET AN AFFILIATE ID
If you’re going to be marketing Clickbank or Paydotcom products, primarily
(ebooks, tuitorials, software & membership sites) you’ll need to go to their
website and register as an affiliate in order to get your affiliate ID. It’s easy
& fast. If you haven’t already done this, go do it now.
There are other affiliate management sites like Commission Junction, Linkshare,
Shareasale and Clixgalore. You’ll sign up with those later, but for now
just do Clickbank and Paydotcom.
2. CHOOSE AN AFFILIATE PRODUCT TO MARKET
Some people think the best approach for selecting an affiliate product to market
is to choose products in an area that’s of interest to you. For instance, if you’re
crazy about cats, you’d market affiliate products dealing with cat training, cat shows,
cat health, cat products, cat scratching posts, cat toys, cat clothing, etc.
To some extent, I agree. Eventually, you’ll probably want to market products in
areas of interest to you. But for now, and until you’re earning serious money at this,
you want to ONLY market products that are “HOT”. Market Top Selling products that
are in great DEMAND.
I’m going to save you some time here. Listen very carefully… Good quality ebooks,
services and software that “Increase Web TRAFFIC” or “Generate Free
TRAFFIC” are in great demand and will probably always be in demand. THESE are
the affiliate products you want to market, Period.
Granted, there’s lots of MAJOR competition in this space. But don’t concern yourself
with that, there’s enough low-hanging fruit and ripe cherries lying on the ground in
this space for you to make a very good living… IF… you know what you’re
doing. Our goal is to get you marketing products that lots and lots of people are
buying… and if you play your cards right, a good many of them will buy their
products from YOU.
Another area that’s HOT and is only going to get HOTTER because of aging
Baby-Boomers, is “Health & Fitness”. My advice is to also select one or two
products in this space, i.e.,fat burning, resistance training, weight loss, anti-aging,
vitamins, candida cleanse, colon cleanse etc. Again, lots of competition, but lots
of low-hanging fruit.
3. SELECT YOUR DOMAIN NAME
Let’s assume you’ve decided to market a “web traffic-related” from Clickbank
that automates social bookmarking submissions. This is a tool that would save
time and potentially increase traffic for Internet or affiliate marketers.
Here’s a quick and dirty way to find a domain name made up of keywords that
people are already searching on. This means that from day-1, you’re likely
to get free, organic traffic coming to your site from the search engines– when
people search on the keywords that make up your domain name.
Try doing this domain name selection exercise now and see what you
come up with. I’ve provided links that will open in a new browser so you can do
the exercise while reading the steps below. I’ve included the results I got at the
time of this writing. But domain names come and go quickly, so when you do
this exercise, you’re likely to come up with different names.
Step-By-Step Guide
a) Click this link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to go to
Google Keywords Selector Tool.
b) Open another browser to www.GoDaddy.com, place your mouse over “Domains”
& then select “Bulk Register”.
c) Back at Google Keywords, input the words “web traffic” and check “use synonyms”
and press the “Get Keyword Ideas” button.
d) Don’t bother to read the search results. Just scroll to the bottom of the first list, see
“Download all keywords”, select “text”. This opens a text file of first list results.
e) Then scroll to the bottom of the second list on the keyword results page, see “Download
all keywords”, select “text”. This opens a text file of second list results.
f) Now, cut and paste the keywords from both lists into the “Bulk Register” window
at the GoDaddy site. Then select both “.com” & “.net”, enter the access code shown and
click “Go”.
g) This will bring back a list of the keywords that are currently available as either
a “.com” or “.net” domain.
h) Most of your potential domain names will be junk. But cut and paste this list into the
text document that you probably still have open. Scroll through and look for the “.coms”.
Select the “.com” domain names that are shortest and most descriptive.
You may end up with 2-3 good possibilities. Now do the same with the “.net” domain
names, you’ll likely end up with a dozen or more of these.
i) Now, go back to the open Google Keywords browser and enter “CTL + F”, then enter
your potential domain name WITHOUT adding the “.com” on the end and with a space
between each word. All you’re trying to do is scan for these keywords again in the
Google Keywords results. When you find it, see if the average search volume on
that keyword(s) is low, average or high.
j) I can almost guarantee that none will be high, one or two may be average, and most
will be low. The ones with “average search volume”, whether it makes a great-
sounding domain name or funky-sounding domain name, should be set aside for further
consideration. The ones with “low search volume” AND a really catchy-sounding
domain name should also be set aside as strong possibilities. The ones with NO search
volume should be discarded.
k) Now, go through that process with the “.net” domain names checking for
search volume.
Here’s The Results I Came Up With
TRAFFICTOWEBSITE.NET — Average search volume
WEBTRAFFICREPORT.NET — Low search volume
FREEBLOGTRAFFIC.NET — Low search volume
BLOGWEBTRAFFIC.COM — Low search volume
For our purposes here, average volume is great, low volume is good, and no volume
is rejected. As you can see, “traffictowebsite.net” has average volume. That’s great! But as a
domain name it sounds a little funky… not so great. It’s a “.net” instead of “.com”… also not
so great. This means I need to open another browser and see what “traffictowebsite.COM”
is all about. It’s a parked page with lots of sponsored links and no real content. Hmmm…
Next, I go to Google.com and enter “traffic to website” to see the top 10 on the first page
and total page results (8,7600,000). Now, check out the websites of the first 4-5 competitors
listed on page 1. In the final analysis, this domain name has enough minuses that I’d
probably pass on it.
In this instance, I’d probably go ahead and register both “blogwebtraffic.com” AND “webtrafficreport.net”. Both have low search volume but remember, for our purposes
here, low search volume is still good. It just means I’ll have a low, but steady stream of
targeted, FREE, organic traffic coming to my site indefinitely… simply because
I used this process to chose my domain name wisely.
4. REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN
Once you’ve selected your domain name, register your domain name with www.GoDaddy.com
They’re not the cheapest you can find, but there are a few things about GoDaddy that I
especially like. They offer proxy registration, meaning your name, home address, and phone
number won’t wind up plastered on the world wide web via whois.com. Another big plus is
they have real, live customer and tech support people you can talk to whenever you have
a problem or question, not just an email address or form to fill out. They also have a
user-friendly control panel interface, and they contact you by phone when your domain
is about to expire, so you don’t accidentally lose the domain and all the traffic you’ve
worked hard to build. In my opinion, you get a whole lot more bang for your buck when
you register your domain with GoDaddy. But, DON’T use GoDaddy for your Web Hosting.
By far, you’ll get a much better hosting plan with Hostgator.com.
5. SET UP YOUR WEB HOSTING ACCOUNT
The best web hosting service available, bar none, is HostGator. Their Baby Croc Plan,
at around $8 bucks a month, allows you to set up an unlimited number of add-on
domains, an unlimited number of sub-domains, and an unlimited number of
self-hosted, web 2.0 enabled Blogs. Now, if you don’t understand what this means,
let me just say it’s a very, very good thing for an Internet or affiliate marketer. HostGator
also has an easy to use control panel, and really competent tech support people that you
can get through to quickly without a lot of hassle. In terms of up-time reliability, so far,
“knock wood”, my sites have never gone down or crashed once.
IT’S A WRAP…
Well, that’s quite enough for one session. Next time we’ll cover step-by-step instructions
for transferring your new domain name to HostGator’s Name Servers, setting up a
self-hosted WordPress Blog on your domain for maximum Web 2.0 effectiveness and
profit, by– syndicating your blog with rss feeds, setting up your blog for easy social
bookmarking and tagging, and more– and we’ll set up your subscriber form to begin
automatically building a revenue generating opt-in list for you 24/7.
Whew! There’s a lot to cover next time… See ya then!
To your success,
Steve Campbell
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