An Affiliate Marketing Strategy That Works
Here’s a variation of a free affiliate marketing strategy that I have used several times over the years to get a lot of affiliate sales. It can be a great way to make some extra money online and every once in a while it works well enough to pull in some major money that can continue to come in for a long time. It’s not overly complicated or very difficult to do. It can also be done for free or very cheap, so almost anyone can do it if you are prepared to take the time and do the steps necessary to make it work. The hardest part is usually finding the right niches to promote, and then all it takes is some time and effort.
Anyway, here are the steps you need to take in order to make money from this free affiliate marketing strategy:
1) Research and find a potentially profitable niche market.
There are plenty of research tools, information products, articles, and tons of other resources that will teach you how to research niches or actually help you do it. This topic would be an entire (very long) post in itself so I won’t go into detail on how to do it here. Just do some searching on Google how to do niche research or how to find profitable niches and you shouldn’t have much trouble finding information on how to do this step.
2) Find an affiliate product in the niche you chose.
Once you have found a good niche you need to find an affiliate product to promote so you can make money from your work. You can usually find an information product for about any niche on Clickbank — but if you can’t find one there you should be able to find one by searching on Google or on other affiliate marketplaces.
Here are some popular affiliate marketplaces to check out if you don’t find what you are looking for on Clickbank:
* Shareasale
* Linkshare
* Commission Junction
* Paydotcom
3) Write a review and post it on a blogger blog.
Write a review of the affiliate product you found in step two and make it a good one. You need to really give the pros and cons of the product in your review. Don’t make it all positive because that is not believable to your visitors. Every product has something negative about it. Dig deep and write something that is much better than the average review you see all over the internet about products and services. This is one of the most important parts of this affiliate marketing strategy because it’s where you funnel your visitors who will hopefully buy from your affiliate link, so don’t slack off here!
To do this right you should actually have the product to check out and write a real review of it. This might mean having to bite the bullet and actually purchase it. However, you can usually get it for free if you email the owner and tell them that you plan to promote it and you have a very good strategy for doing so, but you want a review copy first. They are potentially losing out on a lot of money if you decide not to promote it so it’s in their best interest to give you a copy.
You also need to start a blog to post this review on unless you already have a review blog with a lot of authority, but I suggest starting a new one so it’s all about this one particular product. Don’t worry this is free and very easy to do. Just head over to blogger.com and follow the steps to start one. Make your blog title and address(URL) something that reflects the niche and product you are reviewing.
4) Post a high quality “main article” on another general topic blog.
This step works best if you already have a “general” blog with some authority that isn’t specific to any niche to post on. But most people don’t have those and it’s okay, you can simply start one using any free blogging platform of your choice (blogger, wordpress, typepad, etc…) or actually get a domain and host to set one up on.
Write a long, useful, well thought out, informative post on a popular topic related to the niche you picked in step one and the product you picked in step two. This shouldn’t just be a quick post you write up like you might on a daily basis or maybe like you would if you planned to just submit it to directories. You want this to be some very high quality work and quite a bit longer than your average article. Post this article on your general blog with keyword anchored links in it that point to the review you posted in step three.
5) Write a few more articles to submit to article directories.
This is where you write at least three articles and submit them to article directories. These should still be of good quality and useful but they don’t have to be as awesome as the one you wrote in step four. They should obviously be on a topic related to the niche you picked in step one just like everything should be in this strategy.
Submit these articles to anywhere from three to five of the top article directories. Here are some good ones to get you started:
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.goarticles.com
6) Build a Squidoo Lens, Hubpage, and Infobarrel around the niche.
Write up a few more articles or pages of quality content on various topics related to the niche. Build a squidoo lens, a hub, and an infobarrel to post this content on. This should be really good content that is well-written and keeps the readers attention but leaves them wanting to click the links you will post to your main article. This will take you some time but it’s worth it. Make sure to link all three of them to the main article you wrote in step four with keyword anchored links.
7) Link everything to the main article you posted on your general blog and link that article to the blogger blog review.
This isn’t actually a step of its own as it should have already been done. But it’s very important and ties in with other steps above and I wanted to be sure you got it…
Link every article you submit in step five and every page you build in step six to the main article you wrote on your general blog in step four. And link the article you wrote in step four to the review you wrote in step three. All with keyword anchored links.
Re-read the above paragraph carefully as it might sound a little confusing at first but it’s really not.
8) Submit the main article on your general blog to social media sites.
Finally, you want to submit the link of the blog post you wrote in step four to several social bookmarking sites. This is just for a little extra link juice and a quick traffic boost to get everything flowing. Don’t expect to make any sales from these visitors, although you might get a few if you’re lucky.
Here are several popular social bookmarking sites to submit it to:
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Delicious
Slashdot
Stumbleupon
That’s it! Now you just sit back and wait for the money to roll in… And pray it does! ;-)
Doing all of these steps exactly as explained above should bring in some direct traffic and sales pretty quickly but more importantly it helps to boost your main article and review in the search engine rankings, which will hopefully bring in traffic and sales for a long time into the future.
Every step of this strategy is important but it all starts with researching and finding good niches to target. Fail to do that and it probably won’t work. You need niches that don’t have an overload of competition but do have enough of a buying market for you to make money from.
It all sounds like a lot of work and it kind of is, but you have to do these sorts of things if you want to really make money online. It’s not difficult to do and can be done pretty quickly once you get the hang of it. This free affiliate marketing strategy won’t always work for everyone and it certainly won’t work well every time you do it, but it can be a great way to earn an affiliate income if done correctly and consistently. The more you do it will add up over time and could increase your income significantly.
Now, you just need to get started!