The Quick Start Guide to Affiliate Marketing
Though I have written quite a few short guides for you in this blog. But I was yet to write something on Affiliate marketing. So here’s my Quick start guide to affiliate marketing.
Before I start I am going to assume you know few things
1. What is affiliate marketing ( I really don’t want to give definitions on this stage)?
2. You know SEO, site building 101 (Again, if you don’t know about this you better download my sitebook It will teach you everything about website building, getting traffic and much more…)
3. Understand there is no easy way… If there ever was, we all be making millions now… You have to work… ooops I just said the dreaded word “WORK”. Dictionary is the only one place where success comes before work.
Now here’s Your…
The Quick Start Guide to Affiliate Marketing
With all the software, ebooks and tutorials people tends to get into paralysis analysis state. They are wondering what to do… So this quick start guide will put you into right direction.
Step 1 : Finding a Product.
Your first step is finding a product that is selling well. Now if you know the market thats an additional advantage, but it really doesn’t matter. You should only remember one thing.
People in this market should be buying. Often I just go into clickbank and decides it on the product/sales page/ and marketing tactics used by sellers.
Additional notes :
Find out if people buys digital products or hard goods. (now you can just go into any busy forum and ask a simple question)
Step 2 : Buy Your Own domain and Hosting.
next step is buy your own domain/hosting. You can go for the cheapest route in this case. As you don’t need dedicated connection.
Step 3 : Create your own Name squeeze page
You should create your own name squeeze. I have accounts with aweber and getresponse. I use both of them to build my list. They are irreplaceable services you should subscribe to.
Now here comes the main secret of affiliate marketing… behind your name squeeze, you can re-direct your visitors to affiliate products. So with this technique You’ll be building your list and as well as few sales to the affiliate product.
Read my 4 step methods to create powerful name squeeze blog post.
Step 4 : Building Traffic
Next step is getting traffic. Now if you have experience with Pay per clicks then you can just get PPC traffic but otherwise I recommend you to not start with PPC if you are new or never tried PPC before.
So Here are some of my free methods to generate instantly 100-200 Unique traffic to website.
Step 4 a : Building Traffic Via Forums
Now I wish if I had a software which can post to forums… but that won’t do… because you are supposed to post high traffic forums. If you are spam posting then you’ll be banned in no time.
So you have to do this manually…
Find 5 high traffic forums on your topic.
Find another 5 Related forums on your topic. Now this can get confusing… But let me explain… If you have a weight loss site, then your related forums can be bodybuilding forums. Now bodybuilding is almost opposite of your niche. But there are tons of overweight people who goes there…
Now create a great signature about your website and start interacting in the forums… Notice I said “interacting” not spamming or any other crap like “wow nice post” or “I disagree with you”. This is all childish play…
Step 4 b : Create traffic Via blog commenting.
Now all the rules of finding Forums apply on this step… Find 10 different blogs where you can leave comments and leave comments responsibly. I get enough spam on my blogs with childish comments (Great post, or I found your blog through technorati).
Paul Forcey has a great tool called comment hut. You can find it at commenthut.com.
Step 4c : Write articles and get traffic.
Now write down 5 articles and start submitting them to article directory. Now this is hard work specially if you never wrote an article. But you have to do it… There’s no work around this step…
Article marketing still get traffic, no matter what SEO experts, marketing gurus are teaching you…
Your plan is to write 5 articles daily and submit it to ezinearticles, articlecity.com, goarticles.com. If you want to write high quality articles for traffic then check out my article marketing package.
Lets talk about the quality of article. Your article don’t need to “Time” standard. But if they are completely crap, it’ll hurt you.
Step 5 : Building Massive traffic.
So far we are just playing with traffic. Now its time to build massive traffic.
Step 5 A : Youtube traffic
Now marketers are not telling you this, but Youtube can work gangbusters. The most common complaint I heard was, How in the world I’ll create youtube video.
Here are few ideas for you.
1. Use your Webcam and shoot your movie. Window XP have built in media editor, You can use it to edit your movie. Make it funny its better that way…
2. Create a slide show with powerpoint and shoot it with camtasia software. Add some music and you are all finished.
Find other youtube videos on your niche and leave comment on every single one of them. Don’t forget You can also make video responses too.
Step 5 b : Bookmarking
Tag your Videos, bookmark your websites, youtube videos on every social networking site you can find (You can use Onlywire.com to tag multiple websites).
Here’s a Note about bookmarking : Tag Often, Tag multiple sites. you can read more website traffic with this challenge with bookmarking and other methods.
Step 6: Build Your list and promote products with them
With all the traffic generation techniques you are getting traffic and now its time to build your list and promote them. (remember name squeeze page?). I wrote a very simple strategy on how to gather content and send it to your list subscriber.
Some Helpful tools:
Now most of these tools aren’t necessary, but they’ll help you save some time. In fact you can use this guide without any of these tools and make money.
Increase Your Affiliate commission with Ninja Cloaker.
You can use ninja cloaker to cloak your affiliate links. But Thats not the only thing it can do… If you want you can send your visitors directly to the sales page instead of marketer’s lead capture/name squeeze page. That’s why You use ninja cloaker to send traffic after you’ve added them to your list.
The best part is you can send your visitor to any of his page without worrying about your affiliate commission. It’ll stealthily cookie your visitor.
Instant Article Wizard.
This is one tool that can help you write articles without much hassles. What this tools does is find text content related to your keyword and then you can edit the content to create your own article.
Now it looks like creating a spammy article. But it does not. It’ll take text from many different sources. This helps you in not only writing but also with ideas to write articles on. Get Instant Article Wizard.
Finding Niche Markets with Niche Inspector
Niche Inspector can help you find niche markets if you are not good with researching manually. Its a nice tool that should be in your tool box.
How to find market the easy way
How to find market for online business the easy way.
In most Internet Marketing bible’s you’ll find there is extensive methodologies to find & research market for business. Today I am going to show you how to find markets the easy way.
After you are finished with this list, you will be busy for months to come.
One of the biggest mistake with beginners is that they don’t appreciate their own skills or hobbies. If you start a business in something you love, you have more chances of succeeding online.
Trust me your hobby isn’t that unique. There are people more weirder than you. 
Find something that you either Love
You need passion to go through all the hardships of building a business. There’ll be times, when you ask yourself “why you are doing this?”. In those moments your passion for the thing will keep you working.
This is why I am giving you this simple You quiz. It’ll help you know more about yourself. I suggest you to write down in details all the thoughts while you are finishing this quiz.
Your Personal Demographic
Your first market ideas will come from your own demographic. Do you think your age or location or gender can help you generate ideas?
I know a women, who is in men’s market and making a killing with this market. Being a women gives completely different perspective.
I also know a person whose location was great business idea. He created a traveler site for tourist coming into his city.
What makes you different? Think hard you might find few ideas here..
- Age
- Gender
- Geographical location
- Type of home (apartment/house/trailer, city/suburbs/country)
- Number of children/grandchildren
- Ages of children/grandchildren
- Single/married/divorced/widowed
- Religion, political affiliation, family income range
- Other pertinent information
Your Background
Now you might not think being a computer geek or a boring 9-5 job might not be good idea for building business. But I have created websites in market that belongs to my background.
- Companies you worked for
- Positions you held
- Organizations you volunteered for
- Community activities
- Groups you belong to
- Diplomas/degrees you earned
- Classes or specialized learning programs you completed
- Any other accomplishments
Your Hobbies & Interests
Hobbies and interests are also good ways to find your next niche market. I am someone who can be labeled as fad chaser. And when I do something I do it right or I don’t even try it. So I ended up having many hobbies that includes Hypnosis/NLP, magic, astrology, sports/fitness and many more…
I ended up creating websites on almost every single hobby I have. Most of them are pretty good if I might say.
- Past and present hobbies
- Personal collections
- Things you’ve “always wanted to do”
- You favorite books and genres
- Your favorite songs and types of music
- You favorite movies and/or television shows
- Pets past and present
- Anything you do for fun
Your Hangouts
- Places you spend time in
- Places you’d like to spend time in
- Your dream vacation destinations
- Your favorite restaurants
- Your favorite stores
Your Friends Demographic
If you are the most boring person around, then check out your friends, relative and acquaintances. You might find people who might give you good idea to start a market.
- Your friends’ ages
- Your friends’ geographic locations
- Your friends’ family types, styles and sizes
- Personality traits you like
- Personality traits you dislike
- Where your friends live
- Where your friends work
- Activities you enjoy with your friends
- Hobbies you share with your friends
Again, I hope by now you have a great number of things you can do or research for online business. Now all you need to know is if your idea is good enough or not..
How to find if Your Market Sucks or not?
One of the easiest way to find the right kind of market is to check on your competitor. The more competition you have, the better the market is and the hard you have to work to beat your competition.
I have this rule if people are buying in the market, then I’ll be selling to them.
Now all you are left to do is creating/finding a product and sell it to them. I have written a lot on creating and selling but Here’s small ideas to get you start
1. Improve an existing a product : In many markets, you can easily improve an existing product or service and sell it to crowd.
2. Repackage number of products :Re-packaging can be good idea if you have quite a few number of competitors selling multiple products. You can re-package multiple related products and sell it. The perceived value of a product like this is High.
3. Adapt a product :Take a product idea from another market and sell it to your crowd.
4. Tap a trend : If you notice in Internet marketing how many marketers are trying to tap web 2.0 craze. From $10 ebook to $1000’s of dollars in membership sites.5. Find the gap : You can find problem areas in your market and provide a product/service. This gap can be obvious and not so obvious.
Like Paul smith did with his product Xsitepro. He created a product to create SEO optimized websites in no time. That product was/is one of its kind in this market.
I hope I gave you few ideas to start your online business with. You can check this blog for more information on product creating, traffic generation and other important topic. You can also participate in 30 day online business challenge.
There are many ways you can start your business. The only thing stopping you is YOU. Don’t hold yourself back. God speed to success.
7 Steps to succeed in IM in next 7 days
I am going to give you a complete method or blueprint for next 7 days… It doesn’t matter if you are new to internet marketing or an old hand who knows all the trick (yet somehow never made more than few change).
There’s tons of information for you at the simple click of a mouse, then why aren’t you breaking the bank?
The answer is very simple.
Before I answer the question. Let me ask you…
How many ebooks, teleseminars, or mega products all of them which promised you instant bling bling $$ you have right now…
If you answered more than 1. Then guess what, here lies the problem.
You are not keeping things simple to the basics. There’s too much information around you. You might be too quick to jump on anything with a bling.
Let me tell you a story…
About couple of years ago… One of my friend wanted to know how to make money on internet (She noticed my success and was intrigued by it). She told me, she hate her job and what not… So I taught her blogging and couple of tricks to get traffic.
Well I didn’t heard anything from her for next 20 days or so. After 20 days she told me that she’s made couple of hundred dollars in 20 days…
She was happy about her new venture and well, guess what… she disappeared again (to make more money as she told me later). To cut the story short, in her first 2 months she made $1000.
Now what differentiate her and most of us is exactly this kind of attitude. She took one method and ran along with it… She didn’t subscribed to any newsletter, she didn’t bought any new gadget or $1000 quick fix… nothing, nada, zippo.
So today I am going to make everything very simple for you. There’s no marketing lingo, no geek speak,
Here’s Your Internet Marketing Blueprint for Next 7 Days.
Step 0 : Before you start Here are few ground rules…
I like to put some ground rules before you…
- Stop checking your emails every damn hour (No Seriously Stop checking your emails).
- Stop checking your affiliate account every hour (if there’s wasn’t any cash an hour ago, chances are there isn’t any right now too)
- Don’t read any of the newsletter for next 30 days.. (don’t worry, you won’t miss any instant cash idea or next bling-ed $1000 product).
- Stop visiting any marketing forums for next 10-15 days (Again, you won’t miss any insider information, trust me, you have all the insider info that you need).
- and last but surely not least… Work Hard… If you are thinking you’ll make money while you sleep. Wake up.. it ain’t gonna happen… You have to spend a few nights awake before you could sleep while your cash register rings…
Step 1 : Check your Hard drive…
Check your hard drive and pull out all the PLR ebooks you have. I know you have tons of those… so Dig out all your plr articles, products you have. It’s time you start working on them.
I am using PLR to save lot of my time. Often those plr ebooks are written about a decent market size. So you can be sure it’ll sell.
One quick peek gave me 20 different ideas in Health & Fitness market. Another look into one of my folder gave me 10+ some products in self improvement market.
So there are lots of stuff you have that you can use.
Now, I know you might be wondering, every one and his dog is selling those… how can I compete with them?
Well that brings us to our next step
Step 2: Trim Your PLR product
Pick one of the PLR product idea and research on it. You can read my earlier blog post on How to research your market.
How to Research Your Competition
In most of cases your PLR products have 70+ pages. And trust me you can trim those pages like crazy to make them more valuable (why, of course most of them are same repeated, re-hashed stuff over and over again).
If you do all the editing, it’ll take you couple of hours and it’ll trim it down to 30 pages.
Don’t worry about the size of the ebook/product right now…
Step 3: Fatten up your ebook
Spend another couple of hours fattening up your ebook. Here are few ideas you can improve your ebook.
1. Research on wiki-pedia and add some links to wikipedia and make few related anecdotes from it.
2. Add your own related story or your spouse or neighbours or even your mailman. Like I added my friends story. I could have added my own or few other people I know or taught to make money on net.
3. Find examples of other people’s story related to your product (when you can’t find any stories as talked about in 2nd point). Again you’ll find tons of stories…
$$ NOTE : Heck go to related forums and ask for people’s personal stories. Talk to them how they dealt with the situation… Take a small online interview. You can add this as a bonus chapters (internet marketers have been doing this openly)
You’ll be able to easily add upto 20-30 pages with these tactics.
Step 4: Create a Lead generator Device…
Now you need something that you can give it away for free when someone.
There are few things you can do…
- Write your own lead generator ebook (4-8 pages).
- Get it ghostwritten…
- Go to ezinearticles.com and check related articles. Use them to create a few pages e-report you can give out (of course you have to give links to author but don’t worry about it… share some karma :p).
- Or if you don’t want to give out links to other authors. Re-write the articles in your language on same topics (but I prefer give them as I’ll tell you why).
Step 5 : Create a sales page and lead generation page.
Now don’t get too artsy or too sales or may be try to write the PERFECT sales page… Just write the darn thing down. You can find more good links here
Advanced Sales writing 102. Again don’t get too complicated. I try to stay on QUEST formula (you’ll find link to it) as close as possible.
Step 6: Start on bringing traffic.
Use article marketing, forum marketing, blog commenting to bring in the additional flood.
Now I know some of you might say, article marketing or forum marketing doesn’t work. It isn’t so… just couple of days ago I created a small e-report. And wrote 2 articles on it and submitted to ezine articles… in 24 hrs I generated 284 views sand 40 clicks to my sales page.
Now granted those 40 people didn’t buy but I got 30% of them in my list. That’s 12 subscribers (of course this isn’t the Internet Marketing niche). Now I am adding more articles on daily basis.
My Aim with sales letter to convert at around 1%. If I can convert than I know how much traffic to bring to make my first 100$ with this product.
Moreover I have written tons of articles on this blog about bringing traffic and selling… I suggest you to print’em out and read.
Click here If you want to know how to write articles and market with them.
Never stop promoting (this is one bit of advice that I learnt the hard way). You have to promote yourself on daily basis. Otherwise in few weeks, you’ll wonder where all your traffic and income went.
Work Hard.
My last bit of advice here is Work Hard. It’ll be this. Work hard, play hard. This is the simplest of methods you can use to make money.
Day 5 - Resources for Today
1. Buying Domains : http://www.namecheap.com . Godaddy might offer low price but when it comes to domain control. You’d love namecheap.
2. Hosting : http://www.hostgator.com They provide the best customer service and they are reliable.
3. Here’s how to Find lots of articles with high demand topics on ezinearticles.com. First go to Yahoo answers and search for your keywords. You’ll see some questions are getting repeatedly asked. Take notice of those questions and then search on ezine articles.
Why I am asking you to gather all these article? Well don’t worry right now… I’ll tell you about this tomorrow. Trust me you’ll love this strategy.
4. Two great post on Mindset “Quality and Contribution and Abundance Mentality“. I recommend you to read them…
Day 2: Market Research and Action Resources
In today’s Action resources I’ll start with few places where you can go and do your niche research while sitting on your computer (you lazy bum).
1. Ebay Pulse : They have something called Red Hot Items (Please note its a PDF file).
2. Google Trends: They have a small column called “Top USA Trends”. It’s worth while checking. Too much of a junk in there so Dont forget to change the date and try to find things people are BUYING. Yes that’s the secret word you need to remember
BUYING…
3. Amazon.com: You can go to amazon.com and start looking for ideas.
4. Google adwords tool: Now most people don’t use this tool, but it can be quite good tool to do your niche reasearch. Go to the tool link and then click on “Site Related Keywords”. Enter any Big website (ie. weightloss.about.com) and you’ll get tons of keywords to decide on micro niche. Do it for few big websites…
You can read more here
Google Products : Something like Google trend but the best part is people here are searching for products live. What that means? Means they are BUYING… again. Play with this tool for a while (refresh it) to see more products.
SEO pro tools Article : Are you doing these mistakes in your research? Good articles and focusing on few important points.
Google Blogsearch: After you have your list of niche, you can try out to see how many people are blogging. This is very important. Do not miss this step… You’ll understand why in coming days.
Well, what do you think about today’s workload? I am quite hard taskmaster after all..
Edit: Video Part I is based on my article “How to find Hot rabit Buyers -I”. Here’s your video on “Niche Research Video - I”
The Video Based on Niche Research article “how to find Hot, rabid buyers -II”. Here is the link “Niche Research Video -II”
Varun Pratap
PS: I am uploading Video right now, it’ll help you a little on doing niche research.
Day 1: Action Resources: 30 Days to Online profits
Ok Guys, here’s your Action Resource for Day 1. I’ll have you watch few videos and read few blogs today. So I hope you are ready for some hard core stuff…
Well, If you have read your the Day 1 : 30 Days to Online Profits. Then Read it right now…
One thing I want to say about these actions resources… I’ll add them in chronological order. So you are supposed to view them in the way I have gave you. I am going to open the Questions time for you…
First Action Resource
Video No : 1
Steve Jobs Speech at Stanford University Graduation. Great Great Speech. This is Highly Recommended to watch.
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA]
Video No : 2
John Reese’s Video on “Face Your Reality”
Article : 1
Stephen Pierce’s Article on Changing the Way we think can change our lives
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