Secrets of Affiliate Marketing Winning Entry

Congrats to Colin of FeedFlare.ca for winning the Secrets of Affiliate Marketing Contest. Colin will be receiving a brand new Flip Mino HD from our friends at Market Leverage. Here’s Colin’s winning entry.

Here are the steps I would take to start promoting an offer from Market Leverage, the offer I have chosen for this example is the AB Rocket offer. I choose this offer because I think anything related to health will always have a market online. Get ready though, this is not going to be a small comment but the over all outline I will be showing you here I personally know works as I use it myself.

Seeings how I am sure there are a lot of people like me who want to do PPC (pay per click) advertising but just don’t have the budget to get into it this is a great way to start to build a solid foundation for yourself online for making money. I personally believe if you want to succeed online you need to build your income stream on a few different levels. A great place to start is by building quality affiliate websites. As I mentioned above I am going to look at the offer from Market Leverage for the AB Rocket. I am going to assume that all my research is going to tell me that this should prove to be a good offer to run with, but for all of your reading this keep in mind this is only an example and if you try and copy this exact layout for the exact offer it may not work.

Step One – Buy The Domain

First thing you are going to want to do is check out what type of domain names are available that you can get that are related to working out or mostly working out your AB’s, seeings how the product we are working with or starting off with pertains to your AB’s, It would be good to get a name that fits are product. To do this research, I use Google’s keyword Tool. I will start off with a basic term like “working out” and see what other related keywords come up with the search. The goal behind doing this is to find a keyword phrase that fully relates to our product that has a steady amount of search traffic to it. Lets say we found a phrase using this tool that shows we have 2000 searches a month for it, and at a steady incline with a low AdWords competition. This term would be (example only) “working out abs”. Your next step would be to go to your hosting company ( I use BlueFur) and see if that exact name is open in either a dot com or a dot net name. It’s not open but for the case of this example lets say that it is. Before you register that name you want to see who is all on the first page of Google for that term. Google it and take a look. I am going to assume you have the SEO plug in for Firefox so you can check the PR of sites, there back links and there domain ages. This information is important because if the first page of Google shows that all the sites are very old with high back links and PR, it is going to be very hard for you to rank that site and get a steady amount of organic traffic to it. So lets say everyone on the first page of Google are all lower then PR 3, less the 10000 back links and they are all younger then 3 years. When you were looking at the first age in Google you also noticed that all the sites that rank for the term “working out abs” all have some sort of weird name for there domain name. That is perfect and I will explain that in a second. Now I would register that name. While you are waiting for everything to go through and for your new site to be pointing to your server, its time to get some content.

Step Two – Google Your Search Term

Google your search term you want to get ranked for again, and get idea’s for original content. Get a few article’s together and also search for related news articles to your product. For now, just copy and paste the news articles links and titles and save them somewhere. You will use them later. Finish writing up your content articles (don’t forget to sprinkle your keyword phrase “working out abs” through your articles and do a complete review of your product “AB Rocket” with a few bad points but focus a lot on the good ones. Also grab some pictures for your product. Try and use a reporters view on your product, not a salesmen’s view.

Step Three – Build The Site

Now that your new site is pointing to your server and you can start building your site, install wordpress on it. Find a theme that fits with your site, but is clean. I like using the Flexx theme from ithemes. Now that you have wordpress on your site and your ready to go, build your site, install your plug ins you like working with but also the wp-sticky post plugin. Your first article you are going to put up is going to be called “working out abs” and also post it under the category called “working out abs”and that post is also going to be your review of your product. With the sticky post plugin installed and activated, make that post the sticky one. It will always be the first post every visitor to your site sees first or your “sales page”. Your other articles just time stamp them to release over the coarse or a few months or so.

When your building your new wordpress affiliate site make sure you add a privacy policy page to the site as well as a contact page. You will also want to grab some other offers from Market Leverage that fit with the niche of your site. Seeings how you are building a site about working out “getting in shape type of thing” you would want to grab the ML offer for the nutrients pill they have. Do a small review of it and build a page for it, repeat this step if ML has a lot of related offers. The more pages your site has the better you will do. Do the same keyword research for that page that you did for your sites name. Now, you have an affiliate site focusing on two products or offers from ML and you are targeting traffic just with how you set things up. Regarding your news articles that you have links to and the headlines for you can either two do things with them. You can either build a page on your site called “related news” or something like that or you can hyperlink to the articles from a widget in your sidebar. The only reason why you want these links is to show Google that you are linking to other sites that are related to your product.

Step Four – Link To Your Products

Now that your site is built, you have links to your products, maybe a banner or two, 4 or 5 pages built of original content and everything is ready to go, bookmark the hell out of that site and every single article you have on it and the pages too. Do this over the coarse of a week. A good way to do this is to use “Social Marker dot com” After that is done just leave it for a while.

Did You Pick Up On The Secret To Ranking Your Site?

In a few days after you bookmarked your site you should see that you are on page one of Google for your chosen term “working out abs” The reason why you are on page one so fast is for two reasons. First is that your are using wordpress. Google loves wordpress! The Second is, your site is 100% relevant to your keyword of “working out abs”. Your sites name is your keyword, your first article’s title is your keyword which is under the category that is also your keyword, and you have used your keyword in your meta tags. Google loves you now because they know with out a doubt what your site is all about. I just used this exact method over this past weekend to take a 2 word (9 characters only) keyword phrase for a site name and place it on page one of google. I all ready have steady traffic to my site and clicks registering for my product I am promoting and one sale so far. Cool eh! The really cool thing about building a affiliate site this way is if you watch Google trends, you can have a site placed at the top of searches for term before everyone else and be ready for the wave of traffic.

What Can You Do After Your Site Is Built

Build more sites! If you set a goal of building 20 sites this way covering all different niches you will spread out where your income is coming from so if one niche or product lines falls off your not stranded with out money coming in. When you do get money coming in for your affiliate sales, bank it and use it for your PPC budget. When the time comes you have 1000 or so saved up, which ever product you have that is doing the best with sales and converting build a PPC campaign around it. Now that you have a site with good page rank that is converting your quality score for your campaign should be good because your already ranked for that term with your site. Ahh Haa! You guessed it, because of how you built your site using the keyword phrase or phrases you have you are now paying less in AdWords so by using this method of building an affiliate site you were able to pull off more then just one thing.

Another Strong Tip

Don’t be stupid by putting AdSense on your site. All you are doing is sending your traffic to OTHER AFFILIATE OFFERS! AdSense is the absolute last resort for making money on a website. If you are going to promote affiliate offers, stick with them.