Affiliate programs are a great way to earn an income online in
a few easy steps. However, if you don't have a plan you are
going to fail. A smart webmaster plan includes some pretty basic
steps that you should follow every time.
A website is a lot like a business on the corner. Your
advertising methods might be a little different but you still
have expenses, and you need to plan for growth. The expenses for
a website are usually hosting, domain registration, and some
form of advertising.
I don't want you to even think for a moment that being an
affiliate isn't a reason to be your own webmaster. There is a
reason that 95% of affiliates never make a sale. The reason is
they aren't doing what the 5% making money are doing. It's about
time you treated your affiliations like a real business.
A real business plans for everything, before spending the first
cent.
Step one: Don't register a domain name, don't get hosting, don't
do anything yet. Let's think about what we want to accomplish
with our plan. For our example we want to promote a service site
for webmasters. (It makes sense to sell shovels to the coal
miners.) We are going to set things up to generate recurring
traffic and high page rankings.
Step two: Choose your affiliations wisely. Many affiliate
programs don't pay, or won't be here in 6 months. When your
planning your website, don't make it dependent on one affiliate
program. I like to review products that I personally use. For my
example here I am going to use Xarawebstyle4 as our affiliate
product. The reason is that it is an established company, I love
the products, and I use them daily. What better to promote than
something I believe in and USE?
Step three: Set up your target market. In may case I want
webmasters that want to make their own graphics and website
templates, but don't want to purchase an expensive solution like
Photoshop with a high learning curve.
Step four: Research your keywords. There are tons of places to
research keywords, and you can spend up to 400 bucks for this
type of software. Let's start slow though O.K.? Here is a
growing collection of webmaster tools:
http://stmadeveloper.com/tools.php. I don't recommend going for
broad reaching keywords. Micro-targeting your keywords will get
you a better result than going for the term that is already
ranked for 10 billion websites.
Step five: Now that you have your chosen your product or service
that you wish to affiliate with, target market, and keywords
it's time to get going to development stage. I'm sure you don't
have millions to spend, and the good news is you don't have too.
Service review sites are quite affordable to create, they
usually have a simple logo, and just a "layout." A good
webdesign company can make you a great "template" for this for
about 20 dollars.
Step six: Your all set, you have your template now, either made
yourself or you have hired a designer. It's time to start
filling pages with content. What I do first is make an index
page. Every other page I create will be linked to the index
page. It's going to be your websites "featured" product pages.
This page and all your other pages need some content in regard
to your products. You will want unique page titles that use your
keywords, and you need to make your meta-tags as well. There is
a great meta-tag generator at
http://www.submitcorner.com. that
is free to use.
Step seven: Write your content and reviews. If you need help
there are plenty of copywriters out there that can help you. A
review should be keyword rich and should actually recommend the
product. You should add many pages of content. Even if you need
to use other people's articles, the more you have the better. A
great site might have 200 pages of relevant content.
Step eight: It's time to let the world know about your site.
While we are doing that we will make sure the search engines
find it as well. I like to use a website called
groupmarketingsolutions for my first exposure. They get spidered
frequently and I get to pick my keywords for the page. You can
find them at groupmarketingsolutions.com. There are also plenty
of forums that allow you to have a signature in your posts. They
are a great way to send traffic and an extra incoming link from
the search engines.
Step nine: Trade some links or purchase links outright. Links
all over the web in targeted websites will net you immediate
traffic and increased search engine rankings. There are also
many free directories where you can list your website with a
description.
The end result here is a website that will increase in traffic
daily, get listed in the search engines and eventually be worth
much more than you are making in the affiliate income. Wouldn't
it be great to sell your site for what you make off it in a year?
There is another step here as well though, and we are going to
call it "rinse, wash, and repeat." Once you have done this for
one or two affiliate programs, you should keep going. There is
no rule that says you only have to have one site. A good tactic
is dozens of sites (Or even subdomains) that promote a variety
of affiliate programs and that grow weekly. The more often you
add content the more visitors and sales you will have.
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