Affiliate Program Tutorial

It's your road map to success as an affiliate.

I've been earning a good living from affiliate programs since 1998. Based on that experience, this tutorial tells you the 18 steps to take to generate a useful income from affiliate programs. No tricks. No gimmicks. Just solid, reliable methods designed to work for years. You have the choice of many different ways of earning affiliate commissions.

In my experience, you'll have your best chance of success if you do the following. Find a niche and create a useful, interesting, content-rich, keyword-rich website on one topic and weave in affiliate links and AdSense ads.



1. Set a goal. If you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you're going.

Let's start with a modest goal. Say you aim to earn a total of $300 (US) a month in affiliate commissions and AdSense revenue. Imagine what you could do with that money. A holiday? A better lifestyle?

I've kept the amount low, because it's important that you believe you can do this. Achieve small successes first, see the money in your hands or in your bank account, and then increase your goals.

Perhaps you have much larger goals. That's OK. Whatever your goals, I strongly recommend that you serve your apprenticeship by taking these 18 steps. They'll give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.

2. Find your niche. Read Ken Evoy's free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits you and your interests.

Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times.

Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.

You'll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It's much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.

Choose a topic that is easy to write about.

Even if you've already chosen a niche, I urge you to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make you change your mind.

You can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck – and a bit of keyword research – you may be able to do both.

Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until you've taken the next two steps...

3. Choose a profitable niche. Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you've chosen. Because you're planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Overture and AdWords.

You're going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don't rely on guesswork.

You must do this BEFORE you start building your web site. That's critically important.

Here's a useful free tool I like using for Overture research: pixelfast.com/overture/

Type in a phrase, for example, "hiking boots", click "Go", follow the instructions, and you can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Overture network of web sites.

You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.

Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.

Go to Google's AdWords and find how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. Here's how. Pretend you're going to do and an advertising campaign. (You're not going to advertise – you're just doing the research.) Follow these steps.

In step 2, "Create Ad Group", you'll find you can click on "Calulate Estimates" and "Recalculate Estimates". These show you the maximum you would have to pay per click to advertise for particular keywords or key phrases.

If you use Site Build It you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought of without it.

4. Research affiliate merchants. Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match your topic.

You want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. You can search the AssociatePrograms.com affiliate directory for ideas.

Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.

If you're lucky, you'll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions – the sort reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com.

You'll earn repeat commissions when "your" customers make more purchases.

5. Build a useful, interesting web site on your niche.

Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.

Show your personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. You need to connect with your visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like.

There's no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a web site. For that, you'll need a good instruction manual.

If you're short of money, you can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies.

You'll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual written specifically for affiliates.

Here are the two best options:

• For keen do-it-your-selfers, I recommend James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook.
  
  James is a real been-there-done-that super affiliate.
  
  His instruction manual shows you how he builds sites using web authoring software.
  
  One particularly useful feature is his explanation of how he uses an innovative page-linking strategy to concentrate Google PageRank and send visitors to a small number of selling pages.
  
  He doesn't merely show how to do all this, with 40,000 words and 107 helpful illustrations. He also shows you his own network of successful affiliate sites.
  
  My only criticism is that he's a little brief in one aspect – researching and writing articles. I'd prefer to see more emphasis on building USEFUL sites rather than sites designed to be found in search engines.
  
  For long-term success, that's what I believe affiliates should do.
  
  As one observer noted, James comes across as a friendly shopkeeper.
  
  The most important fact is that James is highly successful, and shows you how exactly he does it.
  
  You can check out James's Affiliate Marketers Handbook here.
  
  
• For affiliates who want to simplify things as much as possible and automate the tedious techie stuff, I recommend Ken Evoy's Site Build It (SBI).
  
  SBI is a site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools, all in one place.
  
  Once you have SBI, you don't have to go scurrying all over the Net adding more tools and software. You have almost all you need in one package, so you can concentrate on the fun part – creating useful, interesting content.
  
  (Once you have SBI, the only addition you need to buy occasionally is a cheap, one-day subscription to Wordtracker. It's useful to double check the SBI brainstorming results against Wordtracker results.)
  
  SBI comes with a truly comprehensive instruction manual, a 600-page step-by-step Action Guide.
  
  SBI is the tool I give my assistants.
  
  Ken Evoy's instruction manual is doing my work for me. First it taught Rupert and now it's teaching Ros how to build a high quality, successful, revenue-generating site.
  
  You could build a site without SBI, but using it saves you time and effort by simplifying the process.
  
  SBI teaches you how to optimize your web pages so they'll be found in search engines. After building a page, you click the "Analyze It" button and it tells you what you need to do to improve it.
  
  The SBI technique really works. Two of the SBI sites that Rupert built are included in the case studies on the SBI site.
  
  See the proof in the SBI case studies
  
  

6. Add affiliate links. As you write the articles for your site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as you write the articles. Speak to that visitor.

Your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy.

One successful technique is to gradually lead your visitor towards a purchase. Start by outlining a problem, discuss a good solution that has worked for you, and end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, "Find out more here."

You task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that's the merchant's job) but to presell, to warm the visitor up, so your visitor is in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when he or she arrives at the merchant's site.

For superb advice on preselling, I strongly recommend you join Ken Evoy's 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. It's free to join.

Ken is an absolute whiz at preselling and he's renowned for working extremely hard to help his affiliates succeed. He has a superb program. It's been No.1 in my Top 10 for several years.

7. Place AdSense ads on your site.

If you have a good, popular site, it's remarkably easy to make good money with AdSense.

8. Get links. First, link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to you.

This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular.

Now you see why I said build a useful, interesting web site. If you do that, people are more likely to link to your site.

Here's an article I wrote describing how to get reciprocal links.

9. Anchor text. You'll also need to understand the importance of anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site.

To search engines, anchor text is very important.

10. List your site in major directories and niche directories in your industry.

11. Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them (more challenging). This step isn't absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if you do it. Now you understand why it was so important that you chose a topic that was easy to write about.

12. Add more pages and get more links. Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (you do research at Wordtracker for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to your site.

Make friends with other web site owners, and more people will link to you...

13. Be patient. If your new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and you'll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.

You're likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. You're likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk.

Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If you're persistent and get the details right, the process I'm describing works beautifully.

14. Expect to see signs of success. Eventually, because of all the links to your site on other sites, Google, Yahoo! and MSN will find your site and start sending you traffic.

Perhaps around the three-month or four-month stage you'll be receiving 100 visitors a day. Visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to you and asking you to link to them.

Keep at it. You're just getting warmed up.

15. The payoff...

About six months down the road, after little expense but quite a lot of hard work and research, you hit your magical $300 a month mark, from affiliate sales and from AdSense ads on your site.

Depending on the niche you've chosen and the skills you've learned, you might earn considerably more than $300.

Perhaps after 12 months, you'll be earning $500 to $1,000 a month from your site.

The checks keep coming in, month after month, even when you take a little vacation. You start telling friends how easy affiliate marketing is, and are puzzled when they're not convinced.

Of course, it's not really easy. It just seems easy after you've done the hard work.

...or the NON-payoff

If you've merely scanned the instruction manual and jumped right in without doing any research and built a "Make Money on the Internet" site, you'll probably earn very little. A search on Google for "make money" displays more than 4 million pages. If one of those is yours, you have a LOT of competition.

If you did this and it isn't working for you, go back to step 1 and start again.

16. Tweak your site.

To boost your conversion rate (your visitor-to-sales ratio), try little experiments, one thing at a time.

Try changing the heading on a page, the words, the colors, the placement of your links. With each change wait until about 1,000 visitors have seen the change, and monitor your affiliate commissions to see if they rise or fall.

You do this because you understand that if 1% of your visitors are buying and tiny changes boost your success rate to 2%, you'll DOUBLE your commissions.

17. The future

When you reach your goal of $300 a month, you wonder whether you should expand your site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an autoresponder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell ... and turn it into a portal. You dream big. Perhaps you even start dreaming of having your own affiliates promoting your reports for you...

Or perhaps you just research another little overlooked niche and start on your next simple little, low-maintenance money-generating site.

It can be done. The main ingredient needed is persistence. Been there, done that, and I have a very nice lifestyle to prove it.

The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that's all you earn, you've done something "wrong". You haven't chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, you haven't built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, you haven't learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or you haven't attracted enough good quality links to your site.

That's the wonderful thing about this business. You can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don't make TOO many mistakes.

18. Take the first step. That's the one that matters most.

I suggest you go back and read through this affiliate program tutorial again.

Picture yourself owning a successful Internet business. Picture yourself opening letters and finding checks in them.

Imagine yourself enjoying yourself spending the money, perhaps even giving up your day job so that you can concentrate on your own business.

Now take the first step.

And when you've quit your day job, please write and tell me. I love getting emails like that.