6 Fail-Proof Tips for Newbie Affiliate Marketers

Hi folks,

In today’s article I want to change tracks just a little and talk about something that is not of interest to SEO professionals necessarily. If you are a fledgling affiliate marketer, it may be of use to you. If you are a seasoned veteran marketer, you may already have this all figured out.

I was talking to a student of mine today who wants to try his hand at affiliate marketing. When we got down to brass tacks, it became clear that he had no experience in organizing or researching his affiliate marketing mindset whatsoever.

Here is a short list of things that you may want to consider before you enter into the affiliate marketing side of the internet.

1. Pick your affiliate programs based on themes

Yup, you still can’t get away from themes. As the internet ages, the “instant cash” available to the affiliate newbie lives in the deeper micro-niches and niches. If you already know that you will be selling affiliate products before you build your site, research affiliate products and opportunities first.

The first place you should go to research a niche is Click Bank. The reason for this is that most of the CB products that are successful follow the order of hierarchy reflected in my document called the 4 Million Dollar Marketing Questions.

I strongly recommend that you:

2. Look for affiliate products online that deal with tangible products besides Click Bank

Although CB is a good place to start, I would not bet the farm on it. There are professional affiliate marketers (like Jerry West) that will run circles around you and eat your lunch because they promote dozens of CB products at the same time. These guys are talented and create “affiliate systems” that require years to learn. They don’t give away their best tips. The super-affiliate will go wide and deep. This is not what you want to do as a beginner.

3. Go “deep” not “wide” if you are a beginning affiliate marketer

Don’t try to manage more than one website or blog until you are making money with one. Don’t try to “swallow your market whole” if you are a work-at-home-mom or have very little budget. Even if you have a big budget the money you dump into your multiple-projects will create a big administrative nightmare and will probably go nowhere. Until you memorize a process map that actually earns you money, hold off on building a skyscraper. Dig deep into a particular niche after you have researched the niche in Krakken or The Last Keyword Tool. Memorize the process of setting up a profitable site. Go through the process of learning to promote it. Stay focused.

4. Pick something you are passionate about and make sure you can say yes 3 times.

When it comes to picking a niche I have discovered something that seems like common sense, but is now scientifically documented in my own experiments with students over the years:

Pick a topic that does not bore you.

I suppose that is different than saying; “pick a topic that you are passionate about” but at the very least it should not bore you. It has become perfectly clear that when somebody cares about a topic, things get done faster and with more loving-care than when they are bored crap-less. Furthermore, web design and marketing copy that are created with love, belief or passion tend to attract and convert far more prospects than automated soul-less garbage.

If you can say “yes” at least 3 times to the questions laid down in the 4 Million Dollar Marketing Questions you are doing well. If you can say yes 4 times and also LOVE the niche you are building in, you are literally sitting on a goldmine. In fact, you will do better than your competition that does NOT have a passion for the niche, but can say yes 4 times. Irrational passion is a success wild-card.

5. Use Spreadsheets as if you have a Gun to your Head.

Here is something that may not come easy to some of you. I had to learn it the hard way. You need to find a method of keeping your affiliate programs, codes, logins, videos and sales pages in a single location.

Use spreadsheets.

Don’t give yourself any wiggle room on this one. You need to have easy access to the exact location of your various programs and promotional codes.

Here is a rule of thumb.

It should take less than 3 minutes for you to grab an affiliate code for a specific product from one of your vendors and place it on a website page or blog post related to the same theme. If it takes you longer than that, you are facing an organizational nightmare.

Spreadsheets are the easiest way to do this. Until you get yourself under the “3 minute rule” you should not proceed to the next affiliate website and you should not let yourself get distracted. Become the “fastest affiliate code slapper” in the West. Then you may get more ambitious. Later you will probably learn “heavy hitter” tricks to automate all such matters.

6. Cloak your affiliate links

Many of your affiliate vendors will automatically cloak the link they provide you depending upon the affiliate programming software the use to pay out. For example, you almost have nothing to worry about if the affiliate technology is Idev Affiliate. This application will automatically hide the aff ID. But there are less robust or self-coded systems that provide individual sales letters that are not coded. Click Bank is an example of an unprotected affiliate system. Unless you cloak the link, many unprofitable things can happen to your profit margin.

If you are using blogs to run your affiliate programs, don’t bother using any plugins to cloak these links even though they are available. The reason for this is that when you actually get to a place in your skills where you are managing more than one blog profits center, you are not going to want to spend the time to enter into each blog and set up a link cloaker plugin. It is probably better for you to have a server side link cloaker that does all of this for you- sot of like your own in-house version of Budurl or tinyurl, except under your control. One version of this type of thing is Easy Redirect Script which is very nice. But . . . you can cross that bridge when you get to it.

In the meantime, just stay focused on your first website. Once you make your first 100 bucks online, you can multiply that by 1000 times fairly easily. When you make your first 100,000 online, you can multiply it again with more sites or one MONSTER site.

Make sure to do the RESEARCH first. Use Krakken and TLKT in order to look at the value and traffic around niche keywords.

See you on the inside!

Russell Wright and the TZ Team

If you find out blog posts informative, we invite you to attend our next Theme Zoom Certification.  A webinar with details will be announced shortly.

Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.

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