7 Steps to Affiliate Marketing Profits

Income Boost Blueprint

Affiliate marketing is a lucrative and easy way to make money online. As an affiliate, you sell other people’s products for a commission. So you don’t have to create a product or offer customer support. Your only real job is to promote the product.

What’s even better is that you can set up your business in a way that everything practically runs on autopilot. Once you set it up, you can make money for several months, or possibly even years, without touching the website again.

Following this 7-step process will quickly get you making money in affiliate marketing:

1. Choose your niche. This is certainly one of the most critical steps for success in affiliate marketing. If you choose a niche that’s too large, there’s likely to be too much competition for success to come easily. Choose a niche that’s too small and you’ll never have enough customers to be really profitable. Tips for choosing a niche:

1. Sell solutions. What is a common challenge that many people have that you know how to solve? If you’re familiar with the dilemma, it will be easier to market products that offer a solution.
   
   
2. Cater to cherished hobbies. What topics are you knowledgeable about that many are fanatical about? Promote products related to popular hobbies and activities.
   
   
3. Meet an emotional need. What are people afraid of? Most of us are afraid of being alone, missing out on the good things in life, or not being successful. Sell a product that resolves those fears.
   
   
4. The three most successful niches tend to be love, money, and health. Narrow one of these broad topics down to a sub-topic. For example, in the love niche, sub-topics can include getting back your “ex,” finding “the one,” dating success, and many more. You can narrow it even further by catering to one gender.

2. Find your keywords.Spend some time researching good keywords in your niche. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is one of the most popular methods of discovering popular keywords that people use when looking for information or products in your niche.
   
   
   • What you’re looking for is a keyword related to your niche that is getting a significant number of searches, but for which there is not too much competition. The Google keyword tool is pretty self-explanatory when it comes to these numbers. A good minimum is 1,500 searches per month.
     
     
   • Your keywords will be the cornerstone of your marketing plans. All of your marketing efforts will revolve around these keywords.
     
     
     
3. Choose a product. There are several affiliate network sites, but Clickbank is certainly the largest. Also, take a look at my Recommendations. Obviously, you want to consider how much you will earn per sale, but that’s not the only important detail.

• Take a look at the sales page. How does it look to you? Does the sales page peak your interest and make you want to buy the product? If you wouldn’t buy it, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to either. Ensure the sales page looks professional
  
  
• Does the product have a guarantee or a warranty? How good is it? Would you be wary of buying this product with the guarantee or warranty that is provided?
  
  
• Perhaps most importantly: is this a product that people in your niche would be willing to spend money on?
  

• Get a domain name. Your domain name also contributes to your sales success. This is the first place your keyword will come into play.
  

• Include your keyword in your domain name. For example, if your keyword was “lose 30 pounds in 30 days,” your domain name could be “lose30poundsin30days.com.” It’s very likely that the domain name you want won’t be available, but there are ways around this issue.
  
  
• For example, the domain name “lose30poundsin30daysnow.com” might work for you. Or perhaps, “lose30poundsin30dayseasily.com” would work well too. Just try to be sure that your keyword comes first in your domain name. Add anything extra at the end.
  
  
• Most studies have shown that .com endings are best. Most top affiliate marketers avoid other suffixes, with the exceptions of .net and .org.
  
  
• There are many places to register domain names. I recommend NameCheap.com
  Avoid all things GoDaddy, they are not affiliate & marketer friendly.
  

• Build a website. The easiest way to a full-blown website is by using WordPress software. You can get it free at wordpress.org and look over the tutorials about how to upload the software to your hosting. Many hosting companies also have “1-click” installation for WordPress.
  

• Post content on your site every day for the first couple of weeks, and then 2 or 3 times a week thereafter. This will keep your readers and the search engines coming back for more.
  
  
• Put a newsletter sign-up form on your website and communicate with your subscribers regularly. Your subscribers are your list and your list is like gold. Cultivate a relationship with them and they’ll buy from you time and time again. A popular autoresponder service is SendSteed, and there are many more as well.
  

6. Create lots of backlinks. One way to make your website more relevant is to create a lot of backlinks. These are links that point back to your website. Search engines place a high value on these.
   

• One good strategy to create backlinks and gain some readers is by writing articles and posting them at article directories. These articles will contain a short bio with a link to your website for promotion.
  
  
• Other ways to create backlinks include posting on forums, posting on blogs, and registering your website with the numerous website directories. Don’t forget to create a Facebook page and Twitter account.
  

7. Keep repeating the process. One website and one product to promote are unlikely to create a large amount of income. It will be necessary to promote several products, each with their own corresponding website. You can stay within the same niche or you can use a new niche each time.
   

7. Once you have a process that works for you, it becomes easy. Simply repeat the process over and over again. Keep in mind that some of your websites might fail to make money. But a few of your websites will make a lot of money. So it only makes sense to create multiple sites with multiple products.
   

As you can see, making money with affiliate marketing is not that difficult. It can be time-consuming, but it’s also possible to outsource a lot of the work. Many successful affiliate marketers hire someone to build their websites. They also hire people to write their articles. The most important part of the process is finding profitable keywords and products.

Always ensure you are in a niche that appeals to have a sufficient number of customers. Remember that someone has to actually buy the product for you to make any money.

Take note of what works for you and what does not. This process lends itself to constant improvement. Don’t wait! The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see some profits.