Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy

As with any business - and affiliate marketing is no different - you need to have a clear plan of action. I call this a strategy bcause it takes a broad, long term view of what needs to happen in order to achieve your objectives.

Choose a site concept

This is the all-important starting point where you must do the necessary work in order to establish the overall thrust of your web site and your specific market niche.

It is very easy to short-change yourself in this part of the process. By that, I mean that because of your eagerness to get out there and make money you neglect doing that necessary preparation.

Let's face it - there are a whole host of distractions in your face every day. Emails come announcing the launch of a super-duper product and inviting you to become an affiliate. Before you know it you've purchased the product, signed up for the affiliate program and then tried to find effective ways of promoting it - with little or no thought as to where this fits into your long-term plans.

Sadly, many would-be affiliate marketers are sucked in to this frenetic activity and flit from one market niche to another, one product type to another and with very little success.

So concentrate and do your homework! It will pay off in the long run.

So where to start on your affiliate marketing strategy?

Get a pencil & notebook or use your keyboard and make a list of your passions. What are the things that really interest and inspire you? Also - what are the things you are really good at?

Take your time and build up a good sized list. If you start running out of steam, talk to family, workmates and friends and ask them what they think you are good at.

Once you have a decent number of broad subjects, it's time to narrow it down a little until you get it down to three choices. There is nothing magic about this number - it is simply a reasonable number to work with.

Why not bookmark this page and go away and do what I have just outlined? You can the easily return and pick up the thread again.

Welcome back - got your three possible site concepts?

At this stage you don't really know which of the three you are going to run with? You have no idea whether or not they are going to be profitable for you. So... more homework is a necessary part of your affiliate marketing strategy.

Narrowing down to a specific topic or theme for your site

This is where it gets a little more complex - but remember - persistence is the order of the day.

It's time to use a few tools to help you in your researching of your site concepts. This is where you need to collect some data and the tools help you do that efficiently.

My recommendation is to use Sitesell's Site Build It This system contains a powerful brainstorming tool, second to none. It will help you generate your site concept in a way that guarantees your success. All you need to do is apply your brain, attitude and motivation (BAM). Find out more about Site Build It (SBI) by watching the video below.


Wait until The 3 Minute Shortcut has finished, or pause it, before touring these visual links...

Tube It!	Tour It!	Join It!	Tortoise It!	Doubt It?	Try It!
Videos From The Heart	How SBI! Makes You Succeed	SBI! Family Bulletin Board	SBI! Business Philosophy	Ask Anything To An SBI! Owner	Risk-Free Test Drive
(The middle four links above open a new browser window.)

Warning!! SBI has all the tools you need for building your affiliate business - all in one package. That may be hard to believe - but it's true.

Moving on though...the purpose at this point is to get a real handle on supply and demand in your chosen concept or theme. If you choose not to sign up for SBI then you need to use other tools.

My recommendations are as follows:

If you haven't signed up to get your free copy of The Affiliate Masters Course, offered on our home page, you can get it here. This is 152 pages of pure gold - a complete outline of how to become a successful affiliate marketer. If you signed up on our home page then I bet you are just loving it - it's so exciting, so revealing and so effective.
The Google Keywords Tool is a free service. If you have an Adwords account with Google it will return you up to 800 keywords, once you enter a seed word or phrase, and this will help you narrow down your focus and also to discover the most profitable niches.
Wordtracker is a widely respected and used keyword tool. It is a paid service (monthly) but it does offer a free 7 day trial and this may be enough for your present purposes. As your business grows, however, you may want to subscribe as the tool is excellent and offers top-quality information.
Market Samurai is another excellent tool, offering a wide range of information on keywords and the competition for those keywords. It is a paid service with a once only cost.

Moving on then with your affiliate marketing strategy...

We were at the point of choosing your site concept. You should have your copy of the Affiliate Masters Course by now and I refer you to pages 24-46 which cover, in considerable detail, the process of choosing and narrowing down your site concept. By the time you have worked your way through all the steps outlined you will have a great list of keywords that you can base your site content around. You will have discovered your niche market and all the sub-sets of it as evidenced by the keywords you have uncovered.

Earlier on I mentioned how important this preparatory work really was. The success of your business depends on it. And what you have just achieved is crucial - so give yourself a pat on the back.

And now for the next step in your affiliate marketing strategy...

Working Out How To Make Money

Funny how this comes further down in the list of important things to do in your affiliate marketing strategy. Usually, would-be affiliate marketers start with the money aspects and that's where so many go so terribly wrong.

So where to start with this money-making aspect?

Well - you have your niche and your keywords so now it's time to search out prospective affiliate partners whose products or services you may profitably promote. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways and I'm outlining some of these below.

Go to Clickbank (opens in a new window) and click on "marketplace" at the top of the page. You can then browse through the categories list on the left or use your keywords in the "find products" box at the top of the page. It's best to try and find three or four products you can promote. You may not end up promoting all of them, but certainly you will want to use more than one, as it's always best not to be totally dependent on one income source.

At this stage simply note the possibilities - you will do more detailed work on them later.

A second source of affiliate products is Commission Junction (opens in a new window). You will need to sign up for an affiliate account and give details of your web site and promotional methods. For this reason I advise you to delay setting up this account until after you have your web site up and running.

A third source is Click2Sell (opens in a new window) and sign up for an account. This quick and easy and you have a choice of Paypal or MoneyBookers for your commission deposits.

My fourth recommended resource is found at Affiliate Scout, (opens in a new window) where again there is a good range of products in a good list of categories.

Once you have explored these various resources, you should have no trouble in identifying five or six affiliate products in your chosen niche that will be profitable for you to promote.

Criteria for choosing the best products to promote

Choosing The Best Affiliate Programs.

Choosing a domain name

This aspect of your affiliate marketing strategy demands careful consideration. you will notice that I have placed it down the list of key tasks in developing your strategy. Why? Because many affiliate marketers make the mistake of choosing a domain name before they have determined their market niche and major keywords. It is very important that your domain name reflects your niche and main keyword. Let me illustrate this with some examples...

Our group has a website that is all about freshwater tropical fish and the proper maintenance of the aquariums or fish tanks. Our domain name is freshwater-tropical-fish-tanks.com. The domain name contains important keywords and reflects exactly what the site is all about.

And again, you may want to have a site, like this one, that teaches people how to become successful affiliate marketers. My keyword research showed that "affiliate marketing guide" was a good keyword and it dovetailed neatly in with the site concept. However, the domain name was not available. Instead I used "affiliatearketingexpertise.com" and incorporated "affiliate marketing guide" into the title meta tag and also into the title of the blog.

So give careful thought to your choice of domain name - it's very important for search engine optimization. Also, as your business grows, it will be an important part of your affiliate marketing strategy to have different domain names if you branch out into different niche markets.

You have chosen a site concept and narrowed it down to a specific market niche
You have determined how you will make money in this niche by selecting the most appropriate affiliate products to promote, using the criteria for selecting the best products
You have chosen a domain name

And now some further steps in developing your affiliate marketing strategy

Writing quality content to promote your chosen products.

Before getting into the content issues I want to talk briefly about your web site. This is the medium where you will show your content and refer people to the merchants selling the products you are promoting. So your web site is very much the showpiece for your content and the foundation stone of the business you are building.

affiliate web site

Back again? A web site and not a blog really is the best way to proceed to build your affiliate marketing business.

And now to the all-important content.

Your task now becomes to produce original content of high quality. That has always been important on the internet but is becoming increasingly so as the major search engines, particularly Google, refine their algorithms. Don't, whatever you do, simply regurgitate content derived from elsewhere.

The content you deliver has to pre-sell your visitors so that they will click through to the merchant's site in a buying frame of mind. It is not your job to sell the visitor on the product - that is the job of the merchant's sales page. You have to pre-sell and that is a concept that is not widely understood by many marketers. The two concepts of selling and pre-selling are fundamentally different and it is worthwhile spending some time in learning the differences and developing your pre-sellng skills.

The best resource I can refer you to is an e-book titled "How To Make Your Content Pre-Sell". Get your FREE copy by visiting this page.

A further step in developing your affiliate marketing strategy is to develop backlinks - so visit our backlinking page for detailed information and resources.

Once you have mastered the pre-selling skills you have completed your affiliate marketing strategy. With this strategy in place, you will be streets ahead of your competitors, believe me! Just keep applying this strategy in every market niche you decide to enter and I'm sure you will be successful.

However, why not go one step further? You have no doubt come across the term "super affiliate". This term refers to those affiliate marketers who are very successful and generate a large income and who have merchants lining up, asking them to promote their latest product.

You might think that's a somewhat premature concept to be thinking about if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing. However, you have just completed an important part of being a super affiliate - having a sound affiliate marketing strategy. Now you just need to take on board some of the other things that characterize super affiliates. Find out more by visiting our Super Affiliate page.