Affiliate Marketing Primer

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Roy Reyer

Becoming an affiliate by promoting someone else’s products or services on your blog is a great way to make money online. You can earn commissions anywhere from 4% to 75% depending on what products you promote.

Here is how you can get started:

1 – Find a Niche

First you need to find a niche that you want to promote products for. We recommend focusing on a niche that you have a passion for. This is because you’ll be writing reviews, articles and perhaps creating videos for the products.

Example, lets say you LOVE to fish for bass and you live in Arizona.

While you’re doing research for that new fishing pole or thinking about your upcoming weekend at your favorite fishing hole, ask yourself, “Can I develop great article and video content about my experiences that others would be interested in?”

If the answer is yes, move on to step 2.

2 – Do Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important step in Internet Marketing. If you get this step wrong you will fail no matter what tricks you try.

One of my favorite keyword research tools is Market Samurai.

Look for those keyword gems that have a lot of search and very little competition so you can easily rank.

In this example the keyword phrase “Arizona Bass Fishing” averages 720 searches per month and currently there are 36,000 other web pages that Google recognizes that are optimized for this term.

For a more mature website, this would be a fairly easy term to target, however since you’re just starting out you may want to look for some easier terms.

An example would be the term Lake Pleasant fishing (popular bass fishing lake in Arizona) that has 1600 searches per month with very little competition.

3 – Find and Register a Domain Name

When thinking about a domain name for your new website it would be in your best interests to include keywords in the URL.

Therefore if you decided to target bass fisherman who fished at Lake Pleasant you may want to consider registering the domain LakePleasantBassFishing.com (available at the time of publishing this post)

4 – Find Web Hosting

As you are searching for a hosting provider for your website make sure that they support WordPress and that they have exceptional 24/7 customer support.

Because of this I personally recommend HostGator as their technical team will take the time to walk you through the process of installing WordPress if this is your first time.

5 – Get a Paypal Account

As most affiliate programs pay through Paypal, it will be important to register for your own Paypal account.

6 – Develop Content

Now that you have a blog and a way to collect your monthly paycheck the next step is to create content for your website.

If you decided to register the domain LakePleasantBassFishing.com your first bit of content may be information about the lake and your experiences fishing at the lake.

From here you would build out additional content, which may even include YouTube videos.

As you build out your content you will be signing up for various affiliate accounts and one of the first I would recommend is Amazon.

However, Amazon only pays 4 to 8% commissions you will want to search for affiliate programs and products that have a higher commission and payouts.

A real life example from one of our SEO Alumni was their review and promotion of a $50,000 telescope on their stargazing blog. Since doing a review of that telescope several years ago, they sold 3, earning $30,000 in commission.

7 – Promote

Now that your blog is live you need to start promoting it.

Share it on Facebook, chat about it in forums, bookmark it, tweet about it.

Bottom line, build links to drive traffic to your site.

Are you interested in learning more about affiliate marketing and how you can easily start your own home based business to make money online?

If so check out our affiliate marketing video training program and our in person SEO Training program.