Affiliate Marketing (AM) or also called Internet Marketing (IM) is pretty easy to understand.
There are companies like Amazon, eBay and ClickBank (and thousands of others) that sell products, both tangible and digital.
They have their own websites to sell their stuff and to further increase sales they have affiliate or partner programs.
If you become an affiliate of one of these companies, they will pay you a commission anytime you refer a visitor to them and that visitor makes a purchase.
The commissions can range from about 4% (Amazon’s lowest rate) to ClickBank’s (sign up for ClickBank here) rate which pays from about 50 to 70%.
You can place a link anywhere (emails, newspaper ads, classified ads, business cards, forums etc…) that will direct someone to the exact site that you’re an affiliate for and if they buy, you get the commission. This is called direct linking.
Or you can place a link on your own relevant website that first warms up the visitor then refers them to the site you’re an affiliate with. Generally speaking, your conversion rate will be higher doing it this way then direct linking.
The basic principle is easy. Direct someone looking to buy to the appropriate site and if they buy, you make money.
The steps one must do to get their link in front of the buyer is easy enough though tedious and time consuming and this is where the problem lies for most people who want to start their IM career.
There are so many “how to get rich on the internet fast ” programs that most beginners actually believe it’s fast and easy.
Frankly, up until the recession hit, it was pretty easy. All you needed was a Google Adwords account, some decent keywords and some products to sell. Working an hour or so per day would generate hundreds dollars of profits each day.
People aren’t pulling out their credit cards that easy anymore. Yes, internet sales are still huge. No, crappy websites or ads still bring visitors.
And all the major search engines aren’t giving high rankings (imperative to getting traffic) to websites just because they’re there. You have to have unique, relevant content on your website or you won’t be ranked high enough to get traffic.
Without traffic, you’re better off with a part time job at Burger King then you are trying to be an IM.
Since WordPress has become the website builder of choice whether or not you’re an avid blogger, many developers have come up with Auto Blogging programs (plugins) that you install on your blog, set it to automatically scrape content and products off the internet and they run on their own. Hence the name Auto Blogging.
Again, before the recession and the search engine changes, auto blogging was great. In reality you could build a website and use the auto blogging programs to get your content in a matter of an hour or 2. and it would run by itself. That was really cool.
Now the auto blogging plan won’t work anymore and if you know of sites that are still ranked, that’s plain dumb luck which will end as soon as a human from Google reviews it. Don’t think for a minute real humans don’t look at websites. Google has thousands of employees who do nothing but.
The plan that must be implemented now (I do it every day) is about 30-50% auto blogging and the rest real content that’s posted regularly and it’s unique .
In other words, I set my auto blogging plugins (these are the ones I use) to scrape the Internet for content and products and publish it every 2 -3 days.
Then, I write original content (usually product reviews or can be anything) for the most often used keywords that people use to find my sites ( Search Terms Tagging2 is great for this) and post that content on the other days as sticky posts so they are always first on the home page.
And of course I spend considerable time back linking (back linking is discussed here) to these sites to further improve my rankings.
If you’re having trouble understanding what I’m talking about, ask a question in the comment section and I’ll explain it better.
By constantly having new posts both original and scraped, the search engines will continue to visit my sites and rank my posts and pages which is the key to getting traffic.
The higher you’re ranked, the more people will click on your listing.
To see what I mean by ranking, type in any word into a Google search box and hit enter. Directly under and to the right of the search results will be paid ads and they will be noted as ads. If you don’t see any, refresh the page a few times. If ads still don’t come up then no one is advertising using the search term.
Directly under the top ads are what are known as organic listings and this the where we all want to be listed as high up as possible.
According to Google, the top listing gets most of the clicks from searchers then #2 and 3 get clicks but considerably fewer.
You will still get clicks even further down the rankings but no where near what you would get if your were ranked #1, 2 or 3.
The type of affiliate websites I make are all WordPress blogs and are in about 15 different niches.
All either use Auto Press or Amaniche as the auto blogging plugin then I use another premium plugin called Affiliate Product Dominator that I use to post additional content that I write.
I have experimented with links on the home page that immediately direct to the site I’m affiliated with and with only linking to pages inside my site then that page links out to the affiliate site.
There is no question that the inbound linking sites are ranked much higher then the sites that link out.
Not only do those sites rank much higher, a secondary benefit is the visitors stay on your site longer. Google looks at the length of time your visitors stay and is part of their ranking algorithm.
I strongly suggest that all of your affiliate websites do not link out to another site on your home page. Use your home page to link to another one of your pages or posts then link out from there.
Again, if you don’t understand, all you have to do is ask me a question in the comment section and I’ll reply pronto.
Recent Comments