Affiliate Product Blogs
Posted on June 10th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Local Directory
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Where to start? That’s likely the most frequently asked question in Affiliate Marketing. People on forums generally say they have $xxx to get started trying to make some cash online, and don’t know where to begin. Unfortunately for most of them, throwing a bunch of money into it in the beginning is the wrong approach and will likely discourage them and teach them next to nothing. What most people need is a good way to get started that requires very little investment and also helps them learn the ropes. This way, when they’re ready to dump a few grand into ppc traffic, they know how the industry works (if they’re not braindead) and hopefully be ballin outta control.
Affiliate product blogs will work both for the complete newbie and seasoned veteran alike. The general idea is to make a blog telling a story about your experience with the product as if you’re an actual satisfied customer. It may seem pretty basic, but it’s a great way to get a high conversion percentage and also rank in google for free traffic, as well as great for PPC if you decide to pay for traffic down the road.
So what do you need to get started? Well, you’ll need a domain and hosting obviously, but hold off on that until you pick something you want to promote. You’ll need to find a product or service that you want your site to be about. If you’re not signed up to any affiliate networks, check the newbie guide link at the top of the page for a few good ones. The best offers to promote are most likely going to be self improvement type things of some kind. Offers that require a customer to pull out a credit card really shine here. Niches like weight loss, beauty, fitness, dating, money saving, travel, debt relief, will all do well. Stuff you want to avoid are things like zip submits, ringtones, gaming, entertainment, or anything where you will actually need intimate knowledge of a complicated field, like finance, in order to appear credible enough for the customer to buy.
Once you’ve picked your offer, you will need to do a little quick keyword research. There are few great paid keyword services out there like wordtracker and wordze, but the Cakes’ favorite keyword research tool is free, and most people don’t know about it. Check it: Microsoft Adlab. For quickly researching high traffic keywords that are likely to convert into sales, nothing beats the demographic data that microsoft has. Pick one high traffic, high converting keyword to rank for, or if you want, you could just use the name of the product if it’s branded well enough that you think people are (or will be) searching for it in decent numbers. Try and come up with several other keywords you want to rank for as well.
With that out of the way, you’ll need to get some hosting and a domain. If you’re a reader of this blog, you probably have hosting and know where to get a domain, but if you need recommendations, Nicky would suggest namecheap for domains (coupon code ROSEMONTH for june 08), and whatever hostgator plan allows you to host unlimited domains. Try to pick a domain that has some or all of your main keyword in it and also looks legit, like hotpockets-weightloss-experience.com. But not that long. Don’t spend too much time on the domain part. Pcnames is great for finding unregistered domain names.
Once you have your domain and hosting set up, grab wordpress and install that sucka on your hosting. If you can’t figure out how to install wordpress, then either pick a new job, like at mcdonalds, or go drink some draino for the sake of humanity. Grab yourself a nice simple wordpress theme. Setting up wordpress shouldn’t be too hard. Make the title of your blog either your main keyword, or the product name, or something like “how i lost weight with hot pockets diet”. Get some plugins like “all in one seo pack” (nickycakes too lazy to find the link for you so just google this stuff).
Alright, now you need some content. Not everyone passed 5th grade language arts class, so you may need to outsource this if you’re incapable of writing more than a paragraph without asking mom for some applejuice. Wickedfire forums have a buy/sell section where you can find some good writers that actually speak english as their first language as opposed to the ones you’ll find on like digitalpoint. What you will need for your posts is pretty simple. First you will need to make some static pages. A generic about-me page with like a before and after shot that you can likely grab off of flickr or someones similar blog, and you’ll want to re-use in other places on the site should be there. A page on ordering whatever product it is that you’re selling is a good idea as well. For the actual posts, you’re going to want to tell a story basically. Start from like 5 months ago or something, and work up till today telling the story of your problem that this product solved for you. The first post should be something about what the problem is and how you just found out about this product and you’re going to document your progress, or lack thereof, on this blog for everyone to see. Mix in some posts about why you chose this product over some alternatives, what benefits you’re seeing from using it or whatever, but keep it realistic. Make sure to mention your main keyword a few times in each post without being obvious about it. When you get all the posts written up, you can put em into wordpress and set the dates chronologically. You will want one “money” post that will be featured at the top of the front page no matter what. You can find a “featured” wordpress plugin pretty easily that will put your “money” post as the first post on your main page. This post will have the before/after shot, a short summary of your “story” and all the amazing things that your product did for you. Also explain how many alternatives you tried and how many times you were scammed by them, which should help as well.
As for inserting your affiliate link, there are plenty of places to do it, but try not to make it look like the intent of the site is to sell something. Having some banner ads for your product is cool, and even putting the link in your posts. Just don’t begin and end each post with CLICK HERE TO BUY THE AMAZING HOT POCKETS DIET.
Now all that’s left is link building, really. Make sure you remember to use varying anchor texts so you don’t get sandboxed too bad when the blog is first getting indexed. You want the text of almost all your incoming links to be your main keyword, one of the other keywords you chose, or some variation. Affiliate product names are usually pretty easy to rank for and will get you lots of converting traffic from people researching that particular product. Others like “fix my credit” may be much more of a challenge.
So, as Nickycakes mentioned earlier, it’s a pretty simple idea. But why even post about something so simple. Well, because it works, for a few very good reasons. When Nickycakes goes to buy a new hard drive on newegg, does he sort by price? No, he sorts by average user rating. Feedback from other customers is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. If your site IS customer feedback, then it’s going to be a slam dunk for selling, as long as you can maintain credibility. Also, blogs with lots of content rank well compared to crappy affiliate “monkey pages” (you know, the click here for your free ringtone one-pagers). It’s also very easy to set up, and once you get the hang of it, you can crank them out pretty quickly, especially if you find a good content writer or two to outsource the articles to. It requires very little startup money, and helps you learn almost everything you need to get started with both affiliate marketing as well as SEO.
As an added bonus, once your site is indexed and ranking a little bit, there’s no way you’re going to be getting hit bad for quality score on your main keywords. And ads that look like they’re made by concerned customers like “I got scammed by the lean pockets diet, PROTECT YOURSELF YOU PARANOID FOX-NEWS WATCHING SOCCERMOM!” are awesome clickbait.
Keep it real.
