If you want to earn residual income with affiliate programs you can read hundreds of articles, ask many questions in forums, buy some over-priced ebooks... Or forget all of that and read this affiliate marketing guide. This comprehensive guide will show you 99% of everything what you need to know in order to earn good money with affiliate programs. Of course, when speaking about good money I don't mean one-time affiliate commissions, but residual income.
Since this is not a get-rich-quick article, but real affiliate marketing guide, you will need to come back to learn next steps time from time. For this reason, I recommend to bookmark this page (CTRL + D).
So what will you need to start earning money as an affiliate?
1. Join good affiliate programs
2. Start your own website or blog
3. Drive traffic to your affiliate website
4. Analyze the results
Continue reading to find out the detailed description of these important steps.
Note:
For some strategies like PPC (pay per click) is not your own website necessary, but you are limited to only a few ways how to promote the affiliate programs. These ways also need more experience than using your own affiliate website. So it is very good strategy to start with your website or blog.
If you come across webmaster forums you will very often see the same question: Which affiliate program is the best? And you will also see hundreds of different answers. Why?
Because for every website work another affiliate programs. Ideal affiliate program should be related to your website. E. g. if you have a blog about internet marketing, you should promote some related product like web hosting. Many visitors of internet marketing weblog may be interested in web hosting because internet marketers need website for their business. But if you will promote e. g. electric cigarettes, you cannot expect too much sales. The success comes with targeted traffic. It means that you must offer to your visitors some product which they may be interested in.
If you already run some website simply browse this affiliate directory and look for affiliate programs related to your website. If you plan to run a new website which will be designed to promote affiliate programs simply choose any of the residual income affiliate programs. All of these programs pay recurring commissions. You will earn with them many times more than with one-time commission programs in the long term. Affiliate programs offering one-time commission usually pay a little more, but considering the fact that residual income programs will earn you money again and again, they are the best choice.
It is a good idea to sign up for multiple affiliate programs. Some of them will earn your more and some less and it is impossible to guess which will be the best without trying them.
Always use the real data when filling in the sign up form. Your name and address must be entered correctly if the company uses cheque as payment method. Correct email address is important if the application must be approved by the affiliate manager before you are accepted.
Wait some time until your application is approved (if you have website related to the affiliate product there is 99% chance that you will be accepted). Check out your email for the username and password. Some programs don't require approval so you can login in your affiliate control panel right after the registration.
In the control panel can be found your stats. You can see there how many sales have you generated and how much have you earned. The affiliate control panel also contains your affiliate link.
Affiliate link is the way how you can refer customers to the company and earn commissions. Paste this link to your blog or website and every time your visitors click the link and order the product or service which you promote, you will receive commission. Affiliate program scripts use cookies and sometimes track the IP address too. For this reason, the referred customer will be assigned to your affiliate account and you will get commission even if he leaves the website and buys the product later.
The affiliate link may look like http://www.affiliate-website.com/track.php?id=your-username. To paste this link to your website and make it clickable use the following HTML code:
<a href="http://www.affiliate-website.com/track.php?id=your-username">Some text here </a>
In most cases, you will find the HTML code mentioned above in your affiliate control panel. There usually are some examples of the text links and also some codes for the banners. If you want to use banner on your website, simply copy and paste the HTML code provided together with the banner. Paste the code in the page source code at the place where you want to display the banner. Don't worry about that if you don't know how to edit the page source. It is very easy and we will have a look at this later in this guide.
This task may need 10 minutes or a few weeks, you can get it for money or for free, you can do it with or without HTML knowledge. There are many solutions and every has some advantages and disadvantages. Let's have a look closer at the options -- below are listed the most common ways how to build up your website, sorted from the easiest to the hardest options:
Pros: The sign up process is quick and easy and you don't need to know HTML. You simply choose some template and in the administration set up the name of your weblog, categories, etc. Then you can start blogging -- in the administration fill in the article title and the text you want to publish. So if you can type you can use Blogspot and similar blogging systems. This solution is 100% free (you don't pay for the script nor for web hosting).
Cons: You are very limited. You can use only functions which the blogging system offers. It may happen you will need to use something what is not supported by the blogging system. In such situation there are only 2 options: sacrifice the functions you need to use or build up new website elsewhere from scratch. It may also happen that the blogging system owner makes some changes in its terms and conditions which will affect your business. E. g. they can put advertisements in your blog, disallow your own advertisements or completely cancel your weblog. So if you haven't already set up a blog with Blogspot or similar service check out rather another options how to build your website.
Pros: You have everything under control. You can change anything, anytime. If you will learn HTML or PHP in the future you can improve the site built by the website builder. Website builders are easy to use. If you can use Blogspot you will have no problem with the website builder. In the website builder administration you can choose the design that you want to use, set up the names of pages which will your website contain and add text for every page. That's all.
Cons: There are other webmasters who use the same website builder. It means that more people will use the same website design. However, if you are not going to offer web design services with your website this cannot hurt you.
Pros: You don't need to know absolutely nothing about website creation. If you choose a good web designer you can have very nice website.
Cons: It is the most expensive way how to build up your website. You need to spend serious time to find somebody who is really good and who can you trust. There is always an option to hire somebody at Scriptlance -- there are freelancers from all the world and if you hire a web designer from some 3rd country the price may be many times lower. But again -- you must choose very carefully. Hire somebody with good reputation because many so-called web designers only steal designs from the internet and sell them as their own work.
The most popular CMS for blogging is WordPress, for creating classic website try Joomla or Mambo.
Pros: You have every aspect of your website under control. The best CMS give you the option to install various plugins which will add extra functionality to your website. These scripts can be used for free and easy installed in your web hosting space. Some web hosts also offer automatic installer so you will not need to install them yourself (even though it is not difficult). When is the CMS installed it works like Blogspot. You are doing all the publishing from the administration. In fact, the only (but very important) difference between this solution and using services like Blogspot is the fact that you have everything under your control (you can decide how will your website look, if it will be a weblog or classic website, which functions you want to use, etc.).
Cons: If you have never installed CMS you will need to spend some time of reading manual of the script you want to install and learn how it works. However, you don't need any special knowledge. It simply requires some time to understand the system.
How does it work? The WYSIWYG editors (WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get) are designed for people who want to design their own website from scratch, but have zero HTML knowledge (HTML = Hyper Text Markup Language; HTML is used to create websites). The editors work like MS Word -- you type the text, if you want you can add some images and save the result as HTML page. Then upload this page to your web hosting space and your website is online. How to choose web hosting, upload the page, etc. is explained later.
There are many free WYSIWYG editors. Just google for free WYSIWYG editor and choose that one which you will like most. Even MS Word or Open Office can be used as WYSIWYG editor. When you create a text document click at File -> Save as and from the bottom menu choose the .htm or .html file extension. Your text document will be saved as a website.
Using text editors like MS Word is the quickest way. However, I recommend to install some specialized WYSIWYG editor. The HTML code produced by specialized WYSIWYG editors is much better. Your website will be displayed correctly in all browsers and if you learn HTML later you will be able to edit the HTML tags easily.
Pros: You have under the control every aspect of your design. The website can be designed easily without HTML knowledge.
Cons: If you learn HTML and will try to edit the page source you will see that the code is not 100% clean. If the website was created using MS Word it would be hardly possible to edit the code. Code produced by quality WYSIWYG editors is possible to edit without problems, but it is not perfect.
Probably most popular store of professional website templates is TemplateMonster.com.
Pros: Very nice looking designs. Your website will look really professional. Choosing the template requires much less time than finding a good web designer and explaining him how should your website look.
Cons: Templates are sold multiple times so it is possible that other websites will use the same design like you. Editing the template requires at least basic knowledge of HTML and graphic editors. Most of the professional templates are not SEO friendly (it needs additional work to change the HTML code to be optimized for search engines). Authors of these templates often use graphic menus instead of links -- it means that you must work with graphic editor to change every text used in the menu. This is time-consuming and graphic links are SEO unfriendly. So choose professional HTML template only in case you are pretty good in the HTML and graphic editing.
There are many websites offering free HTML templates. Google for free HTML templates to find them.
Pros: Free templates have the same advantages like the professional templates. Additionally, they are for free and most of them are SEO friendly. Personally, I use free website templates for many projects for this reason. Not to save a few bucks, but to get a SEO friendly design. Most free templates use less graphic than professional templates so it is easier to edit them.
Cons: Some knowledge of HTML is needed. More webmasters may use the same design like you (but it is not real problem). Some free website templates look really ugly, but in these days there are so many free designs that it is possible to find some so good that they will look like professional work.
In fact, when you are going to run an affiliate website you don't need top class design. Visitors will buy nothing on your website. They will make the decision if to buy or not to buy on the merchant's website. More important than nice design is the usability. The navigation must be clean and visitors must be able to find the information which they are looking for quickly.
Pros: If you are good web designer you can create exactly what you need.
Cons: It may be a little time-consuming.
There are free and paid web hosting services, good and bad companies. Choosing the right one is very important because if you sign up for web hosting with a lot of downtimes (downtime = time when your website is not accessible, e. g. due the server problems) you will lose visitors and it means less affiliate sales. So what to look for?
First, make a list of a few companies which suit to your budget. Nearly 100% of web hosts offer features which are needed for an affiliate website (enough disk space and bandwidth, PHP, MySQL database, email accounts, etc.). Some of them offer more disk space than you can ever use even if you upload all files from your hard drive. It is only marketing strategy how to attract potential customers. More important is the reliability, especially customer support and uptime (uptime = the percentage of the time when your website is accessible; e. g. 99% uptime means that your website is down 14,4 minutes a day in average). If you plan to run multiple affiliate websites make sure that you buy web hosting package allowing to host multiple domains under one hosting account.
Try to find some reviews in forums about the uptime and customer support. You can also send an email with questions to every hosting company on your list and watch how quickly they will reply and how qualified are the answers. There are also some independent servers providing uptime stats. To find as much information about the company as possible google for phrases like company-name review, company-name uptime, company-name problem, company-name scam, company-name scam, etc..
I can personally recommend ResellersPanel, which is originally designed as free reseller program (advanced affiliate program where you get your own web hosting store and earn lifetime commissions for referred clients). But you can sign up as a free reseller and buy the web hosting from your own store. It means that you will get it for the wholesale price. Uptime of their servers is good (better than 99.9%) and support answers the questions in one hour (there is a one hour response guarantee which really works). If you are looking for a free web hosting, try FreeHostia, which is run by the same company and is probably the best free hosting service around. Both, ResellersPanel and FreeHostia provide clients with the scripts installer. It is possible to install the CMS scripts mentioned previously using this installer.
When signing up for a web hosting account, register your own domain name (domain name is for example moneytoplist.com). This is especially important if you decide for free web hosting. If you will have problems with your web host you can move your website to any other web hosting company without losing your visitors. But if you will use their sub-domain (e. g. your-username.freehostia.com) you can never move your website elsewhere. Domain names cost about $10/year what is a reasonable price for peace in mind.
In the paragraphs above, I mentioned both, free and paid hosting services. What is the difference?
Free Web Hosting:
Expect more downtimes.
Offers no or limited customer support.
Many free hosts place ads on your website.
Some of them don't allow to host your own domain.
Some of them don't allow your own ads or affiliate links.
Paid Web Hosting:
You can use your domain.
They never put ads on your website.
The customer support and uptime are much better.
So if you decide to start with a free web host make sure that you run the website on your own domain so you can move it to quality web hosting later. Starting with a free web host is a good idea when you build the website, when you learn the affiliate strategies or when you have not so many visitors that you lose too much money when your website will be down.
After ordering a web hosting account, an email with your account information will arrive. Use these information to connect your web hosting space using FTP (FTP = file transfer protocol; it is a way how to copy the page from your computer to the server). Download some free FTP manager or use TotalCommander (it is very popular file manager with FTP client) to upload your files. Since TotalCommander can be used for many other tasks like managing files on your hard drive or editing your affiliate website (you can edit the .html files when you click on the file name and press F4) it is a wise idea to use this software. To create an FTP connection click the FTP connection icon, then click the new connection button and fill in the fields. In the Session field you can type anything, it is simply the name of the FTP connection. Next three fields, host name, username and password copy from the email which you got from your web hosting company. Leave other fields blank unless you know what are you doing and click OK. Then double-click the connection name (as you set up in the Session field) and you will be connected to your web space. Total commander will work with your webspace like with another hard drive -- one panel will display files on your hard drive and the second panel will display the files on the server. You can copy your files to the server using F5.
It is possible that there will be a specific directory on the server where you need to upload the files. Some web hosts will let you to upload them to the root and other create special directory for the files. This directory may have different names, most common names are yourdomain.com, public_html and www.
If some of the steps described above fails, don't hesitate to contact customer support. It's their job to help you to use their service.
In the welcome email message received after the registration should be also URL of the web hosting control panel. Control panel is the place where you can create email accounts for your domain like something@yourdomain.com or run the script installer.
In this moment, you know how to choose the right affiliate program and how to create your website. It's the time to end up the boring theory and start to talk about ideas how to monetize your website. Continue reading to find out working models of affiliate websites.
If you decide to promote some niche affiliate programs, e. g. Forex affiliate programs, create an informational website for people who may be interested in affiliate offers which you are going to promote. In our example, you can write a blog about Forex trading, create some website about Forex signals or create any content which may interest your target group.
When creating niche website it is important to make the content as targeted as possible. I will use another example -- let's say we are promoting a web hosting company. If you have a website about dogs and put a banner promoting the hosting company to every page you can expect very low conversion ratio (conversion ratio = the percentage of the people who buy the product after clicking your affiliate link; e. g. if 100 people click your affiliate link and one of them buys the product the conversion ratio is 1%). Yes, it is possible that somebody who is interested in dogs will also need a web hosting account. But you need a lot of clicks to get some sales. If you create a website about internet marketing and services, your visitors will be webmasters. They will be more likely interested in web hosting. More of them will click your affiliate link and conversion rate will be also higher. But the ideal solution for web hosting affiliates is a website about web hosting. People visiting your website will be interested in web hosting, the number of clicks on your affiliate link will be much higher and the conversions may be many times higher too. When I speak about higher conversions I mean really higher -- not about 10% or 20% better, but maybe 10 times or 20 times better depending on the quality of targeting. I will use the example with the web hosting affiliate program again. To increase conversion rates as much as possible learn something about the products you are promoting. If the web host which you promote offers e. g. multiple domain names under one account, create a website which will provide visitors with information about multiple domain names hosting. Make your website keyword-rich and using SEO (SEO = search engine optimization; it is a way how to display your website in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing in the top of the search results for particular keywords -- the search engine optimization is explained in the next parts of this affiliate marketing guide) drive hyper-targeted traffic to this web. The more specific niche, the higher conversions and less competition.
Targeted traffic is one way how to increase the number of clicks and conversion rate. Another way is placing the affiliate links to your content. You will get better results with an affiliate link in the content (in the blog post or in the text on your website) than with banners anywhere on your web. Sure, banners work and you can earn money with them. But many people ignore them, some of them use software which blocks ads so they never see them. So affiliate links in the content may be your main income stream and if you want to use banners think about them like about small additional income.
How to use your affiliate link in the website content? Let's use the example with the hosting affiliate program again. When you write some content, create related links at the end of the page. Put there some hosting affiliate links. Or in some suitable place in the text include a sentence recommending one or two good web hosting companies. You can see an example in this guide in the chapter about choosing and using web hosting service. There is used my affiliate link.
Join multiple niche affiliate programs and create review or comparison website. When you use SEO wisely your website will be visited by people who want to buy some of the niche products, but are not sure from which company. Your website can help them to make the decision. When linking to the reviewed products or services use your affiliate link.
You can also use some PHP script which will allow to your visitors to add their own reviews. This way, they will create the website content for you.
Create some niche forum and use affiliate links in every page. Good place for the ads is below the first post of every thread. People looking for the responses to the first post cannot overlook the ad. Be creative and don't place only banners there. Create your own text links which will more likely attract your visitors.
Use sticky threads to promote affiliate programs. For every affiliate program which you promote choose the most relevant category of your forum. Since sticky threads receive most of the traffic you can expect good results.
Most forums are powered by vBulletin. This script is paid, but it has so many features that it has no serious competitors. If you want to start with a free forum script the most popular are SMF (Simple Machines Forums) and phpBB.
In the beginning, nobody will post to empty forum. The first threads should be created by you. If you have some friends interested in the topics discussed in your forum invite them to participate. You can also hire some forum posters for the beginning.
Write an ebook and give it away for free. When recommending some products or services in the ebook, link them using your affiliate link.
Make sure that you write something what will be really useful for your readers. Think how to help your readers. The commission from the affiliate links must be only bonus for you. This is the only way how to build some reputation and how to convince your readers to buy the products which your recommend. If your ebook will be full of affiliate links and without quality content people will recognize that you only want to sell something and don't want to help them.
Create website tutorials or so-called how-to pages. I will use the previous example with web hosting affiliate program. Create tutorials explaining how to use FTP, how to download emails using POP3, etc. In every tutorial mention the companies which offer FTP, POP3, and other features that you are describing.
Create a website where people can download free designs. The most popular are free website templates and themes for various CMS (WordPress themes, Joomla themes, etc.).
In every template place link back to your website (when authors upload their work they must agree with your link in the template). This way, you get a lot of SEO friendly backlinks and direct traffic from these links. More and more people will come to your portal to download free templates.
Use zip files for the downloads. In every zip add a readme file with some recommendations of quality services for webmasters. Of course, use your affiliate links for the recommendations. Webmasters who need the design will probably need web hosting for their websites or internet marketing services to promote them.
Create a section with these recommendations on your website too. Place relevant affiliate ads everywhere where they can attract your visitors.
Traffic is the key to your affiliate profits. Try to combine all of the marketing strategies described below. If you employ all of them they will bring better results than using only one strategy.
The goal of SEO is to rank high in the search results for keywords related to your website. E. g. if you promote electric cigarettes you may want to be in the top of search results for keywords like smoking, electric cigarette, cigarettes, etc. This way, your website can get extremely targeted traffic. Poeple searching for these keywords may want to buy the product which you promote. There is no better traffic than from search engines.
If you type some of these keywords to any search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing you will see that there are thousands of websites in the search results. So what to do to get your website to the top of the search results?
When you optimize your website for search engines you should start with keyword research. The goal of keyword research is to find keywords which will bring you good traffic (keywords which are often searched) and which have not big competition (so you have real chance to rank in top 10 results).
There are many free keyword research tools which can help you to find the best keywords. Use Google to find some of them or use the most popular one -- Google keyword tool. It is located in the AdWords account so if you want to use it you must sign up for the AdWords account first. It is not necessary to run any campaign to use the keyword tool so it is 100% free.
Using the keyword research tool is quite simple. You type some general keywords and the tool suggests more specific keywords. E. g. if you let the tool search for keywords related to internet marketing the result may be something like internet marketing tool and similar keywords. Use these specific keywords to find even more specific phrases. These phrases are called long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are phrases which consist of about four and more words. The example of long tail keyword may be internet marketing tool for newbies.
Your task is to find as many long tail keywords which are relevant to your website as possible. Then take a list of these keywords and search for them in Google. The goal of this search is to find some long tail keywords which are not too much competitive. Click on the top 10 results and check out the pagerank of the every website. Install Google toolbar or some Firefox extension like Search Status to see the pagerank. Do the same with every phrase in your list and select those for which the websites in top 10 search results have the lowest pagerank. What is pagerank and how to deal with it will be described later. For now, you need to know that if for the top search results have low pagerank the competition is not big and it is easier to rank well.
So you have selected some long tail keywords with low competition. In the next steps you will optimize your website for these keywords.
There are two factors in SEO. The first is called on-page optimization and refers to improvements which are done on your page. Off-page optimization covers everything else what is not done on your website and has positive impact on the position of your website in search results.
There are some parts of your website where you should include your keywords. If you use CMS your keywords will be included to the source code automatically. CMS users just need to know that they should use the keywords in the title (up to 65 characters) and mention them a few times in the content. If you have some HTML knowledge you can do a lot of on-page improvements and increase the SEO effect. Next paragraphs explain what to include in your source code in order to increase the SEO effect.
The most important place where to put your keywords is meta tag title. Google displays about first 65 characters of this tag in the search results. So you need to place your keywords there in the way which will make sense for visitors and will motivate them to visit your website. To learn how to properly use the title meta tag and other tags mentioned in this part select any page of this website and click the right mouse button. In the menu, find something like show page source. Select this option and you will see how are these tags used on this website.
Another important place where to put your keywords is meta tag description. Description should have about 130 characters and usually consists of 2 short sentences. The description is also displayed by search engines in the search results (under the title). So it is very important to include your keywords in some way which will attract people to visit your website. Never put only list of your keywords to the title or description. It would decrease the percentage of people who will visit your website and it may be considered SEO spam. If you will use SEO spam your website can be penalized by search engines. Penalization means worse rank or disappearing from the search results.
For the headings, use H1, H2, H3, etc. tags. You can define the font attributes like size using css if you are not satisfied how the headings look. Search engines give very high value to these tags. H1 has higher value than H2, H2 has higher value than H3, etc.
You keywords should be presented in the anchor text. Anchor text is the text which you use in the links (the clickable text). E. g. if you look at the menu to the top right column on this page you will see links to affiliate program categories. These links contain the keywords which visitors use to find this website.
Also don't forget to use your keywords in the page content. The ideal keyword density nobody knows, but most internet marketers agree that it is somewhere between 3% - 6%. There are many online keyword density tools which can be used for free to check out your keyword density. Use Google to find some of them.
Don't try to optimize your homepage for all your keywords. Optimize every page of your website for a few keywords only (no more than you can put in the meta tag title, which is limited to about 65 characters). Optimize your homepage for the most general keywords (e. g. Forex brokers comparison and reviews) and sub-pages for more descriptive keywords (e. g. Independent Forex-Company-Name Reviews).
Very important on-page factor is quality of your content. Is it useful for your visitors? If yes, good for you. Search engines are very clever in these days and they developed a lot of ways how to find out if the website is useful for the visitors or not. So always think about your visitors first and then about SEO -- it really pays out.
Here starts the real SEO. While the on-page optimization of every page of your website can be done in a few minutes, off-page optimization is long-term process which requires continual work.
The most important off-page SEO factors are the number of links pointing to your website, the quality of these links and anchor text used in these links. Search engines expect that if a lot of quality websites link to particular website than the linked website has quality content (people will not link to worthless websites).
The more links is pointing to your website the more "points" will your domain get in the search engines. You should gain links from different domain names. Multiple links from single domain are good, but only the first link gets the full value. Every next link from the same domain has a little lower value than the previous one.
Quality of the links is determined by the relevance and pagerank of the page where is your link placed. If you run webmaster related website, link from another webmaster related website has higher value than link from unrelated website (e. g. link from weblog with jokes).
Pagerank is the algorithm which can determine the importance of the page in the internet. This algorithm is very complicated, but in short, every link pointing to your website will give you some percentage of the pagerank of the page where is your link placed. So if you get one link from page with high pagerank it may increase pagerank of your website more than 100 links from pages with low pagerank.
Anchor text (the clickable text) in links pointing to your website is another off-page factor. At least some of your links should contain your keywords in the anchor text. But rather than having 100% of links with the same anchor text create a few variations. It will look more naturally from the search engines point of view. E. g. if you run an affiliate website with web hosting comparison and reviews build links with these anchor texts: web hosting reviews, web hosting comparison, hosting reviews, hosting comparison, web hosting, hosting -- simply create as many meaningful combinations of these words as possible.
Build your links consistently. If you build 100 links in one day, then no links for a few weeks and then 100 links again, it will have not too positive impact on your website rank. On the other hand, if you build a few links every week your website will rank better and better.
If you build too many links in a short period of time, use too often the same anchor text, your keyword density on the page will be too high (over 10% or more) or if you use excessively any SEO strategy it may cause so-called over optimization penalty (OOP). If this happens, your website will rank worse for some time (the time may vary, but it can be quite long time). So always make the website for visitors and not only for search engines.
Sandbox is an effect which may happen if your website is only a few weeks old. If you target very competitive keywords it may fall in the sandbox. As the result, your website will rank very bad for some time (usually 3 - 6 months). What to do if this happens?
Simply continue with link building as described above. One day the sandbox effect disappears. If you will build links in the meantime your website will go to the top of search results quickly like a rocket when the sandbox effect finish. If you will build no links, your website position in the search results will not be improved and if you will start to build your links too quickly when the sandbox effect disappears it may happen that your website will be sandboxed again. So don't care about the sandbox and promote your website.
There are many ways how to build links pointing to your website. For the ideas, check out the next chapters. They describe other strategies how to drive traffic to your website (these strategies can be used even without SEO) and most of them are used for link building too. E. g. in the forum marketing people answer questions in forums and as a benefit they have the right to put link to their website to the signature, which is displayed under every post they make. The signatures are used to promote their websites (for the direct traffic), but they are also good as links for SEO.
You haven't to be an expert to start with article marketing. When you build a niche website you probably know something about this niche. This is a chance to help to the people who are looking for some information.
When you finish an article use Google to find a list of article directories. Article directories are websites where you can submit your article with the resource box. Resource box usually consists of 2 - 3 sentences and 1 or 2 links.
Use the resource box to link to your website. These links will be a part of your link building campaign (they help your website to rank higher). Remember that you should to use your keywords in your links for maximal SEO benefit time from time. Most of the links will probably lead to your homepage, however, link sometimes to some of your sub-pages. This way, you can direct your visitors to a page with information which they are looking for and search engines consider such linking more natural.
But link building is not the only reason why to start with article marketing. You can get very targeted traffic from your articles. Make your resource box attractive, give to the article readers reason to click the link in your resource box. Use call to action -- ask them to visit your website and explain to them why they should visit it.
Here is an example of the author's resource box:
Author invites you to visit his directory of residual income affiliate programs. This website will show you how to build up passive income with affiliate programs.
The traffic from the resource boxes in not too high, but is very targeted. I will demonstrate the quality of the traffic coming from your articles on this example:
Let's say you are promoting some internet marketing affiliate program. You write an article called 3 ways how can webmasters increase the website traffic. When you submit this article to the article directories it will be indexed by search engines. People will find your article using some keywords which you have used (usually using those in the article title). So your readers will be people who are right now searching for something what you promote.
Since there are hundreds of article directories you can build a lot of links to your website and get solid traffic from them. If you submit an article to the directory, other webmasters have the right to use your article on their websites. Of course, they must use the article together with your resource box. So it is possible that you submit article to hundreds of directories and it will appear on thousands of websites. The better articles you write the more webmasters will publish them on their websites.
99% percent of article marketers agree that the best website to submit your articles is EzineArticles. This article directory has high traffic so your articles will be read by many people. Most article marketers submit their articles there and when the article is indexed by Google they submit it to other directories. This will cause that Google will consider EzineArticles as original source of your article. Since EzineArticles has high pagerank, your article will rank higher in search results than with another article directories.
Every article directory has a little different author's guidelines. While EzineArticles requires at least 250 word articles many other directories will not allow you to post an article which has less than 500 words. It is a good idea to create 2 article versions -- short and long. Use the short version everywhere where the author's guidelines allow it. Shorter articles will result in more clicks in your article resource box. People must read the whole article to come to your resource box. They will more likely read the 250 words article to the end than 500 words article.
There are many ways how to submit articles to the article directories:
By Hand
This way is good for those who submit articles only to a few top article directories. Simply write your article in notepad and copy the text from the notepad to the article submission forms (don't use MS Word because it uses special invisible characters which can cause an error when you submit the article).
Roboform
Roboform is a toolbar working with all most popular browsers. You can use it to store your login details and login by one click. It also offers the possibility to define custom fields. Use these fields for article title, summary, article body, category and resource box. When you turn on the autofill function you can submit your article by two clicks -- click on the stored name of the article directory you want to login. You will be logged in and the submission form will be filled in automatically. Check out if all fields are filled correctly and press the submit button (it's the second click). Roboform can be used for free with the limited number of custom fields. The full version has no limitations.
Article Distribution Software
Article distribution programs work in the similar way like Roboform. You can store the login details and you are automatically logged in and the article submission form is filled. Some of these programs work in automatic mode and some in the manual mode (and some of them let you choose which of these modes you want to use). The automatic mode means that you only pick the article directories where you want your article submit to. The software logs in, fills the submission form, submits the article and continues to the next article directory. This is very easy way, but I recommend to avoid it and use the manual mode. There is very good reason for that -- no program can correctly pick the correct article category in 100% cases. In the manual mode, you can review the category and change it if necessary. Then you click the submit button. Article directory owners very often delete articles which are not submitted to correct category and sometimes bann authors.
Article distribution software has also some additional features for article marketers. E. g. Article Post Robot which I use for article submission is able to rotate different article titles and author resource boxes. This is useful if you want to optimize your article for multiple long tail keywords. E. g. the code How to choose {{{the best|right|good}}} {{{hosting|web hosting|hosting company|web hosting company}}} will randomly rotate 3 * 4 = 12 different article titles (one of the keywords in the brackets is picked randomly). This simple example will cause that your article will rank in search engines for 12 different long tail keywords. Of course, you can create unlimited number of combinations. Another good feature of Article Post Robot are regular updates of article directory database. It saves a lot of time which would you spend by searching them. Article Post Robot is commercial software and it is worth of the price in case you will be submitting many articles to hundreds of directories.
Online Article Distribution Services
Websites offering these services are rather additional option than alternative to the solutions mentioned above. They are not able to submit articles to the top article directories. But they usually cooperate with a large network of publishers who display articles on their websites. These services are paid, some of them charge some amount per article while others offer unlimited number of submissions for higher one-time or regular fee. Using such service is very easy -- you fill in one form, which is similar to submission forms in the article directories. When is your article approved, it is distributed to many websites around the internet.
All of us visit some weblogs time from time. We are visiting them to find some information. But we can get more from them when we submit a comment after reading the blog post.
It works similarly like article marketing -- you can get quality links pointing to your website and also some direct traffic. There are 4 fields to fill in when you post a comment:
Make sure that you write something useful there. People reading your comment will more likely click link to your website if they will be interested in the content which you post. Nobody reads low quality comments like nice weblog and people ignore links associated with them. And weblog owners hate them -- such comments are usually deleted. 99% of weblogs don't publish comments until the weblog owner manually approves them so posting low quality comments is only losing of the time.
You should also avoid to post links in your comments. There is a special field for the link to your website. Posting links in the comment body may cause that your message will be marked as spam.
Most weblogs require to fill in your email in order to post comment. Even though most of them will never spam you it may sometimes happen. For this reason, is better to create special free email account with Gmail or Yahoo for this purpose. You will also utilize this email with other marketing strategies (e. g. when you submit articles to the article directories or when you add your website to link directories).
Simply type there the whole URL of your website including http://. E. g. http://www.moneytoplist.com
Your name will be used as anchor text of your links. For this reason, some marketers use their nick or keyword instead of the name. It is difficult to recommend you what is better. While using the keywords may give you higher SEO benefit, some bloggers don't like that and delete such comments. If you want use your nick or keywords instead of your real name have a look at previously approved comments. This will give you some insight what the weblog owner allows.
All links from weblogs can bring you visitors. Especially if you comment weblogs which are very related to your website. But not all of them will be counted as backlink by search engines.
Some time ago, when a lot of people started to use weblog comments for spamming, Google came with a solution how to make the spamming more difficult. They came with link attribute called nofollow. Search engines ignore links with this attribute (these links can't hurt your website position in search results, but they will not help). Only so-called dofollow links are taken into account by search engines. Dofollow links are normal links without the nofollow attribute.
If you are going to comment weblogs mostly for the link juice, you will need to recognize which links are dofollow and which nofollow. Fortunately, there are some tools which can do that so you don't need to check out the page source. Search for some Firefox extension which can highlight nofollow links. I use SearchStatus which can do that and has a few another nice features like displaying pagerank and alexa rank.
From my own experience, even if you will post very useful comments it may happen that your comment will be marked as spam by some blogger. A lot of WordPress weblogs use service called Askimet. When some bloggers mark your comment as spam it may happen that your comments which you post on other blogs will be automatically flagged as spam by Askimet. If this happens, blank page after submitting the comment appears.
Don't worry about that and continue posting quality comments. Your comments will end in the possible spam folder and the weblog owner must review them before they are published. But they are not deleted (only if you post low quality comments, then the bloggers will probably delete them).
There are two ways how to promote your website using forums. Again, you can use the forum marketing to receive direct traffic and get some backlinks which will help you in search engines.
When you sign up your first step should be reading the forum rules. Pay special attention to the signature rules. Some forums require to be member at least a few days and/or have some number of posts in order to set up the signature. The number of links which are allowed in signature vary forum from forum. Read carefully the signature rules and respect them when creating the signature.
In the next step, go to your control panel and set up link to your homepage which will be displayed in your profile page. Then setup the signature (or make the required number of posts and/or wait the required number of days before you will be allowed to create the signature).
If the signature allows more than one link, consider to use one link for your homepage and others for some sub-pages. Make the signature catchy to increase the click rate (the percentage of the people who will click it after seeing).
If the main purpose of your forum posting is link building, before joining make sure that the forum is SEO friendly. First, use the same tools which were mentioned in the chapter describing forum commenting to find out if the signature links are dofollow. Some forums display signatures only to the members (if they are logged in). So if you surf the forum as a guest and don't see any signatures, search engines will not find them too.
Most of the forums have advertising sections. Check out the forum rules to find out if you are allowed to advertise your affiliate website. If the forum rules allow to advertise your website, create some catchy text which will motivate people to visit your website. Don't forget to call to action and give them reason to the action -- explain to them why they should visit your website.
Forum owners usually require some number of posts before you can post to the advertising section. The post count is not always updated in real-time. It is possible that you make the necessary number of posts, but you will need to wait up to one hour before you will be able to post in the advertising section.
Of course, join the forums which are related to your website. Traffic from such forums is more targeted and links more relevant for search engines. Needless to say that you should never post links to your website in your posts. The signature and forum profile page are the only places for your links. All forums have moderators who quickly bann users who don't respect this rule.
Create (or participate in) interesting threads where you expect a lot of replies. More replies means more views of the thread and also more views and clicks on your signature links. When somebody replies to a thread it is bumped (displayed in the top in given category -- threads are sorted by the time of the last reply). So threads with most replies will be more often displayed in the top where more people will see them and visit.
Post in sticky threads (if you have what to say, of course). These threads are placed on the top so they get most visitors and have higher pagarank. It means that they will pass more pagerank to your website through your signature links.
Organize your posting to the advertising sections. Most forums have some limit how often is possible to advertise (e. g. 1 post a week). Create an Excel sheet where will be these columns: direct link to the advertising section, date of your last advertisement, number of days which you need to wait before posting next advertisement and in the last column create a formula which will return the date when you can advertise again (date of the last post + number of days). Then you can anytime sort the list of forums by the last column to have the forums where you can post first on the top.
Link exchange is another way how to get some traffic and build links to your website in the same time. The idea of link exchange is very simple -- you place link to the partner's website and he links back to your website. There are different ways how can be the link exchange done:
In these days, most people use link exchange for SEO purposes only. They place reciprocal links on pages which are done only for link exchange. These pages are indexed by search engines and have good pagerank, but are not visited by humans. Such link exchange is better than nothing, but they are losing the potential which link exchange offers.
This way is much better. Both link partners place the links on the homepage. Since homepage is the most visited page of the website, these links drive real traffic to the partner's website. The SEO benefit of homepage link exchange is also higher because homepage has in 99% cases higher pagerank than any sub-page.
This is another effective way how to exchange links. Both webmasters place link to partner's website on every page of their websites.
This is probably the best way how to get real traffic. The SEO benefit is also very high because such links look very naturally. When using this type of link exchange, both webmasters link to partner's website from the content in any page. Good example of content link exchange is recommendation of partner's website in some article on your website.
Since Google gives lower value to the links achieved by link exchange, some webmasters use so-called 3-way link exchange. While site A links to site B, owner of the site B links back to site A from site C.
Most common way is searching in Google for something like your-keywords + link exchange. This way, you will find related websites offering link exchange. Some of them come with contact form which can be used for link exchange request, sometimes you will need to send email with link exchange request. Others use some script similar to link directories. This script contains a form and HTML code of the reciprocal link. Use this code on your website and fill in the form. The script will check if you have placed the reciprocal link on your website and then will your link appear on the partner's website. Sometimes the link will not appear immediately, but after the website owner's approval.
Many webmaster related forums have link exchange section. You can post a request there. It is a great way how to find link exchange partners and also get link to your website from the forum signature.
There are also websites like Linkmarket.net where you can register your website and receive link exchange requests from other members. You can search link partners by website category so you can easily find a lot of related offers.
Before you send out any link exchange request, place partner's link on your website. This will increase the percentage of successful requests. Create also a page with instructions for potential link partners who may be interested to contact you. Explain where will be their link placed, let them know your requirements and provide them with HTML code of your link. Don't forget to use your keywords in the anchor text.
Some webmasters are using dirty tactics when it comes to the link exchange. Let's have a look at these tactics and how to fight with them.
Some webmasters will contact you with link exchange request and tell you that they already placed link pointing to your website and will provide you with the URL of the link. But they didn't place your link on their website. The link is placed on website of your existing link partner. These cheaters simply know that you don't remember all of your link partners and try to get link without linking back.
Another trick is much easier. Your link partner will place reciprocal link, but after a few days or weeks will delete this link. The solution how to fight with this and previously mentioned dirty tactics is creating Excel sheet with database of your link exchanges. You should note the locations of your links and check them at least once a year. When you get new link exchange request, check out if the URL is not already in database.
Before you agree with the link exchange, check out the quality of the page where will be placed link to your website. Make sure that the page is indexed by search engines (search for site:partners-website.tdl/link-page.url in Google). Make sure that your link is not nofollow. Don't accept low quality links from directories or pages where are hundreds of other links.
There are thousands of link directories on the internet. The link value for SEO is very low and only the best directories send a few real visitors. However, these links are free and it is possible to add your website to many link directories in a short period of time. And link with low SEO value is better than no link.
To start directory submissions you will need some good list of link directories. A good one can be found at DirectoryCritic.com. It contains the list of niche directories, the newest directories, you can sort them by pagerank, etc.
First, start with directories covering your niche. Links from them will have higher value than from general directories. Then continue submitting to other directories.
Good strategy is to submit your website to the newest directories. They have no pagerank, but most of them will get it during the time. There is pretty good reason for this strategy -- many directories cancel free submissions after a few weeks. Since they have a lot of links they look established and accept only paid submissions.
Some directories require payment or reciprocal link in order to approve your link. Since the directory link value is very low I don't recommend such deals.
When submitting your website to the directories use some freemail which will be used only for the directory submissions. You will receive a lot of newsletters (usually you must agree to receive their newsletter if you want to get the link). Some of them sell the emails database so your mailbox may be full of spam soon.
Email marketing (not spamming) is a process when you try to convince your visitors to allow you send them regular emails. These emails can contain a newsletter, some online course or anything else what your visitors agreed to receive when they subscribed to the mailing list. You can see good example of the mailing list in the right column of this page -- visitors can sign up to receive notifications when new residual income affiliate program is added.
You can use some paid service which will provide you with all the tools needed to run your mailing list or install some PHP script in your web hosting space. There are many good free mailing list scripts at PHP script directories like Hotscripts.com.
If you decide for the second option you will also need a mass mailing software. Since most of the web hosts doesn't allow sending more than 100 - 200 emails per hour using PHP scripts, mass mailing software is a solution how to avoid this problem. In the admin section of your mailing list export the email address and import them to the mass mailing program. Use Google to find such programs. Some of them are free and very good.
There are also some limitations when sending the newsletter using mass mailing software. The SMTP server which you use usually has some restrictions regarding the number of emails you can send every minute. However, good mass mailing software will allow you to set up the number of emails per minute or send one email to multiple recipients in the blind copy.
When your visitors sign up for your newsletter they should to confirm their email address by clicking a confirmation link. This way, every subscriber can sign up only with his own email. Make sure that your mailing list script has this functionality.
Every mailing list script should send unsubscribe link together with the newsletter. Don't forget to include this link to your emails if you are using mass mailing software to send out the messages. Without respecting this rule your messages can be considered spam.
You can use the same way which you see on this website. Your visitors will be able to sign up for your mailing list if they are interested in the information you are going to send them. Don't expect too many subscribers, but these people are really interested in your messages and the conversions are higher than with other methods.
Offer Something For Free In Exchange For Newsletter SubscriptionYou can write an ebook, design a free HTML template, create some useful PHP script or create anything useful what people may want to download. Before you allow them to download the freebie, ask them to sign up for your newsletter.
Promote the page with your offer using free methods like posting in advertising sections of the forums. This way, you will also build links for your website.
These people will sign up for your newsletter because they want the freebie and not because they are interested in your information. For this reason, many of them will use emails which they never check or unsubscribe when they receive your fist email. However, not all of them will do that and you can create huge mailing list quickly using this way.
Offer Free Services In Exchange For Newsletter SubscriptionTypical example of such service are link directories or article directories. People use them to get free link to their website. You can ask them to agree to receive your newsletter when they sign up.
When sending an email to your subscribers you can promote your affiliate programs directly by sending them a message with affiliate links or by linking to a page of your website where they can learn more about the offer which you promote. The second option will allow to pre-sell the product and increase conversions.
Always keep in mind that your visitors didn't subscribe because they want to buy products which you promote. They are interested in some kind of information. Your newsletter must be designed to give them information which they are looking for. Use affiliate links only as a way how to recommend them some product which will help them to solve the problem you are writing about. Don't forget that if you start to send useless messages many people will unsubscribe from your mailing list.
If your website is powered by some CMS like Joomla you can take advantage of RSS feed. The RSS is generated by the script so you don't need any technical knowledge in this field.
Using RSS can be displayed the titles of new articles on your website and a few first words of every article. Syndication websites display these data with clickable title. It means that when visitors click the title they are redirected to your website. These links are also counted by search engines and have positive impact on SEO.
Use Google to find some lists of RSS syndication websites and submit your RSS feed to as many websites as possible. It is another affiliate marketing strategy which drives visitors to your website and helps to build quality backlinks in the same time.
Using of free classified websites is as easy as 1-2-3. These websites allow to post advertisements for free. Simply create an account with them, fill in the submission form and submit your advertisement to the best fitting category.
Use tools like Roboform to manage the list of free classified websites and quickly login and post your ad by one click. Remember that your advertisement can be found not only by people surfing the classifieds website, but it will be also indexed by search engines. For this reason, use relevant keywords in the ad text. Some of these websites allow clickable links in the advertisement. Take advantage of this feature if possible -- you will get another backlinks which will improve your position in search engines.
Social bookmarking websites will allow you to add link to any interesting website including yours. The best social bookmarking websites have very high traffic so if you submit some really interesting URL (it can be any page of your website, not only homepage) you can get good traffic.
Most of the bookmarking websites use nofollow tag. So if you want to use them for SEO purposes only a few of them will help you. I recommend to use them only in case you want to get direct traffic.
Social networks like Facebook have good viral potential. You can create a group, which is in some way related to your website and invite your friends to join the group. Ask them to invite their friends and use your imagination to find some good ways how to invite people to join the group.
When your group will have at least 100 members start to cooperate with owners of related groups. They will invite all their members to your group and you will invite your group members to join the partner's group.
Except link to your website in the group you can also contact the group members. Work with the members base like with mailing list -- send them some useful tips and give them reason to buy some of the affiliate products you promote on your website time from time.
Try to get natural links. People will link to your website without asking them if you create useful content. Give them information which they are looking for or develop some tools which will help them.
One of many examples of this strategy is this guide. It took many days to write all the information you can find here, but it is something what cannot be found elsewhere so it is worth to link it.
Create some content which will your visitors resend to others. If you are successful, it will work like a virus -- your visitors will send link to the other people and some of them will do the same, etc.
You need to create something unique, what is funny or controversial and also related to your affiliate business. In the viral page use the "Tell a friend" script to make your visitors easier to tell others about this page. Use some of the scripts which allow them to bookmark your website on social bookmarking websites and social networks. This will increase the viral effect.
Even though it is not easy to come with a fresh idea leading to the viral effect, it is worth of your energy. The incoming traffic may be significant.
Develop free HTML template, WordPress theme or some PHP script. Submit it to the websites where people may download it for free (templates websites, script directories, etc.).
There are two benefits:
1. The websites where you submit your template or script will usually create a page with your profile and place a link to your website there. Most of them have high pagerank so it will help to improve your position in search engines a lot.
2. Place link to your website to the footer of the template or script. People using your work will be required to leave the link intact (of course, some percentage of them will delete it, but most of them will leave it -- it is simply about the numbers). These links have also SEO effect and will drive traffic to your website. Keep in mind that if somebody uses your template or script he will use it month after month and you will also get traffic from these links month after month.
Advertising cost money, but offers quick results. You can drive traffic to your website in a few minutes using paid advertising. The most popular paid advertising solutions are:
Google AdWords
When you search for any keyword in Google you can see sponsored results in the right column (and sometimes in the top too). These sponsored results are AdWords campaigns. You can choose some keywords and when people search for them your ad will appear. You pay for every click on your ad (PPC = pay per click). Another option is to advertise on the websites which display AdSense ads. Yahoo and Bing have similar PPC systems too.
Advertising Networks
Advertising networks sell ads on PPC or PPV basis (PPV = pay per view -- you pay fixed price for every 1,000 impressions of your ad) or charge fixed price per day. Different networks offer different solutions, from the text and banner advertisements to new advertising formats.
Buying links on related websites is questionable strategy, but since many affiliate marketers use it I will mention it here too.
These links are usually bought to improve search engine ranking. However, Google fights against marketers using this strategy and if you are caught your website may be penalized. They have also some techniques how to automatically recognize paid links and devalue them.
Matt Cutts on his weblog suggests to buy only links with nofollow attribute. These links are ignored by search engines so buying them has sense only if they can send you good traffic.
Paid weblog reviews are one of the ways how to buy links to your website. Using them means the same risk as I mentioned above.
However, since the paid weblog reviews may pre-sell the products which you are promoting, the traffic coming from them may convert very well. If you want to use them you should avoid buying the blog reviews in bulk through some network offering paid reviews because these weblogs are penalized by Google as soon as they join the network. Better idea is to contact directly owners of quality related weblogs.
When you achieve some decent traffic you should analyze your results. The milestone when you should start with the analysis is about 1,000 clicks on your affiliate links.
You need to compare the profits generated by the affiliate programs which you are promoting. There are 2 criteria:
Residual Level
How long do you receive commission for referred client in average? Do you promote quality services which will the clients use for many months or years? Are there some services which the clients use for a while and then leave? Answers to these questions will help you to recognize which affiliate programs offer the highest residual level. Keep in mind that these analysis are not 100% accurate because some clients may be charged on monthly basis and others annually.
Earnings per click
Earnings per click (EPC) show the amount which you earn in average per every click on your affiliate link. Let's say you promote two affiliate programs. You send 500 visitors to affiliate product A and 1,000 visitors to affiliate product B. You earn $250 from the product A and $300 from the product B. Then EPC of product A = 250/500 = $0.50/click and EPC of product B = 300/1,000 = $0.30/click. So even though the affiliate program B earned more cash, the earning per click is better for the program A.
Take into account the EPC and residual level to decide which affiliate programs will earn you most in the long run. Concentrate on these programs and time from time join another one and compare the results.
Congratulations! If you have read the whole affiliate marketing guide you learned a lot of things. If you take the steps described above you are ready to start earning residual income.
Rather than waking up every morning and going to work for the rest of your life you will be able to work from your home after a few months of hard part-time work. So choose some residual affiliate programs and start to earn money with them.
Good luck!
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