Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
Start Your Affiliate Marketing Website
By Ibrahim Dahy
For beginner affiliates I always recommend to start your affiliate website as a blog. Blogs are easy to create and even easier to grow because your blog grows as long as you keep adding valuable content.
Disclaimer: This post was written by a guest author. The techniques and opinions in this post are not necessarily reflected or endorsed by the owner of the website.
First thing to consider when running your blog is how it will look. Having the default blog theme is not a good idea because it makes your blog looks unoriginal.
There are many free WP themes out there that you can download, but try to pick a theme that looks relevant to your niche. For example a green theme will work best with health & green affiliate products.
Add Valuable Content
After you design your blog and get it setup, you need to write around 10 blog posts in your first 2 weeks and that’s before you drive traffic to it.
To get ideas on what topics to write about, go to Google and type the your niche keyword + “a,b,c”
By doing that, Google will suggest for you keywords that people are searching for. And you can see how these keywords make great topics for your blog.
Not only you will be addressing niche related topics that people want answers for, but you will be also targeting keywords that are being searched for every month. And with a good on-page optimization you could rank your posts easier on Google.
Building Your Online Reputation
After writing your posts, you need to attract comments on them so you can start establishing yourself in the niche and presenting yourself as an authority figure that can help people.
The secret to attracting comment on your newly written blog posts is to go on and comment on other blogs in your niche. You need to find blogs that are relevant to yours and that have its own followers.
Do a simple Google search for “KEYWORD “15 comments”” replacing “15” with any number to get different blogs each time
You need to write an in-depth comment that adds value to the post. Leave your real name along with your website.
But don’t leave your blog link in the comment body; instead you should leave it in the “Website” field in the comment form.
And when people read your comment and see that you are expert on the topic, they will click on your blog link and read your posts and leave a comment there.
You also need to analyze the visitors on your affiliate blog to know if you have succeeded in establishing trust or not.
The good news is that Google Analytics allows you to determine the level of trust that your blog have generated (If you didn’t setup Google Analytics yet then you should do it right away).
Login to your Google Analytics account then head over to the “Audience” tab on the left sidebar.
The green portion of the stats pie shows you how many people who visited your blog more than once.
If this value is over 20% then it means you are beginning to establish trust with your visitors and they are coming back seeking more content on your blog.
Once you have achieved 20% returning visitors, you can start writing reviews for your affiliate product.
You will see that your sales conversion rates will rise to the roof as opposed to writing product reviews when your blog is just getting started.
Writing Product Reviews
I recently stumbled upon a blog for one of the top affiliate marketers out there, and I noticed how he generates immediate sales by just writing reviews for products.
Such great sales conversion was attributed directly to how many returning visitors he had, and you can see that when he writes reviews he gets instant comments
And you can see from some of the comments he got that people actually bought the product the second they read his product review
In addition to commenting on other blogs, you should also run an SEO campaign and try to rank for niche keywords.
Don’t go for keywords with over 1000 search a month because those are crowded with competition and are harder to rank for and take a lot of time and effort to do so.
Instead you should rank for long tail keywords. They are more targeted and lead to higher affiliate sales conversion rates.
Head over to Google Keyword tool and type in your main keyword
You will see tons of highly targeted long tail keywords with good amount of traffic that can be generated from them.
Don’t look down at keywords with 200 or 100 monthly searches, because when you rank for 2 or 3 of these keywords you are basically driving a good number of potential buyers to your affiliate marketing website.
Some products are very popular to the point that there are people who are looking to read some reviews on them before buying.
If you are an affiliate for any of these products then you should write your own review for the product and place your affiliate link there.
Then rank your product review page for these keywords. These are “money keywords” meaning that most of the people who search for them are potential buyers.
Affiliate marketing for beginners is not a pipe dream; it is just something that you need to work hard for in the early stages of your business.
You will see your affiliate marketing website grow over time, and that will boost your confidence level. So don’t give up after one or two months, you should be patient and eager to learn.
There are many affiliate marketing training and tools (like Affset by Ibrahim) that can help you with the various aspects of affiliate marketing (including the technical ones), don’t be shy about trying new methods because you will learn from the experience you get from success and failure alike.
