Keywords: affiliate marketing, online marketing
More Details about:  Nutshell Marketing corner here.
Summary: Take time to build your business before you start.

When I visit Blogs or Forums one on the main themes is “I am not making money”. I say either they are doing it wrong or not at all.

Here is the one fool proof method of making money online as an affiliate marketer. This method involves a little work- grunt work, and it is tiresome and boring. But- if you follow these steps, and stick to the program, between 4-6 weeks you can be earning between $40-$200 each and every single day when you follow through. If you are long on time and short on money then this is the technique for you. When you do this technique you have to be patient, as I said it takes time and it will bore you. So don’t abandon ship too soon, stick in there, you might be right at it. With this method you don’t need any capital to set it up, it isn’t clever and also not stylish, but you get results, and results are what you want.

This technique is idiot proof, and is done in one way or another by practically all internet affiliate marketers. Basically what we are going to do is find an affiliate product, then write several articles (with a link to the product to be promoted) that rank well in Google, get free traffic for our efforts and repeat the process.It is of utmost importance that you do this the right way. If you do it the right way and repeat it enough times, you will generate $40-$200 a day in affiliate commission with zero investment. You will accomplish this within 30 days of reading this sentence.

Does that sound good?????

This special technique has 5 steps to it. So here it is… how it works… and how I do it….

First Step:

1- Select a product:          

this is not the only method that you can use, I will give you more later. I suggest that you have a constant portfolio of products that you intend to promote using this method.

a- go to Clickbank.com. Go to any category choose and make a list of 10-20 products and arrange them by gravity, the products should have a gravity of at least 100. Above 70 the product is already being marketed well, and below 40 the product hasn’t proven itself yet. Personally if you are new to affiliate marketing, recommend choosing a product with a gravity between 40 and 60,  which means hat the product is well on it’s way to becoming a well marketed product.

b- go back to your list and read through the sales letter of each product. Does it look persuasive. The good sales letter has a certain style to it--with lots of benefits such  as “Just now revealed” the ten simple steps to catapult you to financialfreedom-- things like that. A good headline-Lots of Testimonials-- they should have a very sales like feel to them. (see part II-- task 1 find*hot*niche products to promote APN manual) at

c- here are a few standard sales letters, go check some of them out-- and come back later. adwordsmiracle - horse betting racingsystem.com - Keyword elite.com - affiliate project x

These are only examples but you should try to note the commonalities in the writing style- the presentation should be clean in all cases. Never promote a product that is not presented well. EVER!

NOTE: ClickBank is repository with over 11.000 vendors and is a free service. If you don’t already have a ClickBank account go to Clickbank.com and register. Its “FREE”

Second step:

Research your Keywords:

When we write our articles we are going to get the majority of our traffic from search engines especially Google, we will also get some secondary traffic from Yahoo and MSN but largely from Google because Google tend to rank articles posted on website well. So it is better to concentrate on Google than the other way around. So what we do is to find keywords which are relevant to our product and write articles based on these keywords (I know that it sounds difficult but it’s not) and get free traffic off the back of Google and the articles site. Now, this method has allowed many affiliates to quit their jobs and work strictly from home- if we repeat this process enough times we will generate substantial income. It is slow and painful but a “fool--proof ” / “idiot-proof”, way to make money as an affiliate, if you have lots of time and zero capital then this is the technique for you.

In the beginning try and research keywords several times a day. When you use this method over and over again you will become proficient and eventually become a master at it. When we choose to promote a product often times we will be at a complete lost as to which relevant keywords to use. I’m sure that off the bat you can come up with a few terms for whatever the product is. There are a number of ways to collect keywords for our product, I tend to first draw up as many as I can and then filter them down. As I said this is brute force working not a clever set of steps or an exhaustive list.

Here’s what to look for:

what keywords are the merchant using ?- use them: but don’t stop there, the product vendor will often have an affiliate page with relevant keywords on them. Two points here, 1- do a quick check for competitors, check their affiliate pages out because they will have different keywords that you can also use, and 2-- vendors will often provide you with vague keywords that don’t convert well, so choose well.

Procedure: take a broad keyword (one word) and enter it into Google or Yahoos suggestion tool, this will produce new keywords that you can use-

Example: if you enter Project X into Google suggestion tool one of the keywords will be “Affiliate Marketing”. Go to .keyword discovery. or freekeywords.wordtracker.com for the suggestion tool.If you are truly serious about this method, once you start earning money I would highly recommend purchasing a copy of keyword elite for even more related and focused keywords. Take a keyword relevant to your product, (the more generic the better) go to Google and enter in the search “[keyword] directory” “[keyword] wikipedia” or simply [Keyword]. Browse through the dictionary with the related keyword and discover “niche specific” keywords that you didn’t have. You need between 30–100 keywords for each of our products and need to cut these down to a manageable number. If you would write a review or pre sell targeting the keyword of the title of the product or company, this can be highly profitable for two reasons.(1) anyone who is searching for a product by name is super targeted, with credit card in hand. (2) it is easier to rank well in Google by targeting keywords in the title of the product. Note: One of the keywords that you should always target is the Title Of The Product or service that you are promoting. It's extremely important that you bite your teeth and stick with it, as I said in the beginning it's boring, but you DO get results.

Third Step:

Filtering your keywords

Anyone bidding on a keyword that doesn’t convert usually pulls their Ad within a matter of days. Ads that show up on Adwords for a particular keyword will give you a clear picture of what people searching for that particular keyword are looking for.If you have ever tried to advertise a product as an affiliate on a competitors keyword, you know how hard it is to maintain good ranking. If we do a search on “Affiliate Project Nutshell” you will see that nine out of ten ads are promoting Affiliate Project Nutshell. If we type in our keyword and look at the ads being shown we can see what people searching that term are interested in.

If you notice that there are several products currently being advertised which are similar to the one that we are planning on advertising then it would a good idea to target this keyword with our article. Because chances are that it converts for products like yours. Google will rank you good for sites used to create your articles, but will rank you even better with a well established hub site. Also certain search terms such as “poker” or “credit cards” etc. are going to be very, very, very heavy and you will have zero chance in h*ll of ranking even in the top 100 searches with your articles using those terms. We need to rank in the top 10 for our search terms, and we will have to carefully pick our keywords. Too low and we won’t get traffic, too high and we can’t compete. There are some fairly popular terms out there that aren’t too hard to rank for and we are going to find them. Don’t get scared now it’s easy.

Here’s how:

So now you need to blast off and land at http://www.pixelfast.com/overture and enter the search term in question. Once the results are in check the figure on the right which is the number of  times that term has been searched for in the past month. Target the terms which have been searched for between 300-5000 times per month. If any of your keywords fall outside that scale cross them off the list they are too competitive. Now that we have the search volume down, we need to ensure that the term is not too competitive and that we are going to be able to rank on the search page. We can guess roughly how competitive a term is by looking at the results that are currently in the top ten. You only need to get it right most of the time.

Note:

In part I you received information about wordtracker to help you discover new search terms for your campaigns, here is an alternative method that I thought might be of interest to you. Use these two methods in combination with each other to help find related and focused keywords for your ads and articles.

Pay attention to three factors:

Alexa rank, Page rank and the title of the page. If you are a Firefox user (and you should be) you can get a free extension called Search Status at (http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus) which will display page rank and Alexa rank automatically for every page that you visit. This is a great time saver.

What is Page Rank

Page rank is Google’s way of measuring how many links are point to a particular web page. If for your keyword all the pages in the top ten have a page rank between 0-3 that’s a good sign if the page rank is 5 or higher, that’s a bad sign.

What is Alexa Rank

Alexa Rank basically measures how popular a website is- and the lower the number the more popular the site is.

If the majority of the pages in the top ten have Alexa ranks of less than 100.000 that’s a good sign. If there are only a few sites that have Alexa ranks of less than 20.000 that’s a bad sign.

Last but not least, look at the Title of each web page-- do the titles include your keyword in them??- if so chances are that web page has been “optimised” for that keyword, that means that the webmaster is deliberately competing on that keyword, thus making it harder to rank for that term, except in cases where your keywords have a search volume between 300-5000, and the competition isn’t too tough on Google we have a keyword that we can targe.

Writing your article

I recommend when writing your articles that you write article similar to ones which have already been written. If you are writing an article on “Adwords research” then look for articles on that subject, extract the points which you like and create your own article. It does not have to be a masterpiece but it does have to be a solid 600-800 word article. Now don’t just put anything together if you are unsure read other articles, copy ideas, but don’t steal whole articles, this is perfectly legal, in case you are wondering.

Keyword density

Keyword density is the number of times that a particular keyword or phrase appear on a web page. And this is what we want to achieve with our articles. If you would write a 600 word article using the keyword “tattoo design” and used it 6 times, your article would have a keyword density of 1%- try to aim for a keyword density between 3-6%. If the density is too low Google will recognize your article as not relevant enough for your keyword. Too high and Google will think that we are spamming, and that would not be very good- so make sure that your article is not stuffed with too many of your keywords. You can check keyword density for your articles by copying and pasting the article in this site at http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com/.

Make sure that you mention your keyword or phrase at the beginning of your article (in the first paragraph) and at the end of the article (in the last paragraph). Last you need to add a author resource box to your article which is the most important part of the whole article.

This is where you convince people to click through to your affiliate link. In your resource box you should have the following information:

-your name
-the product benefits
-a call to action

If you are a webmaster then you know what to do, if not this might be one part where you might need the help of a webmaster to do this correctly. Be sure to study other articles which appear under your term to see how their resource box works and link, don’t forget your affiliate hop link.

Submit your article

To make this work you have to submit your articles to different article dictionaries, and there are literally thousands to choose from. Be sure to choose carefully when considering which dictionary you want to submit your article to, be sure not to submit to too many at once with the same article. Google will penalize you for articles that are alike (called duplicate content), and many site owners won’t like you submitting duplicate content as well. But you can still do it to get some extra traffic from your articles, it’s just that Google won’t rank you well for them.

I suggest that you sign up for the following sites and alternate between them for best results.

Ezine Articles  http://www.ezineartiles.com 

Search Wrap http://www.searchwrap.com 

USFreeAds  http://www.usfreeads.com 

They all seem to fare well on Google. Can submit ads for free or become a paid member to help speed up the process a little bit. Once you have submitted your article you can expect it to show on the front page app. one week after submission and usually stay there between 3--8 weeks. Of course you will have to repeat this a number of times to make it work. I suggest writing two-three new articles per day using this method to earn $40--200 per day within a 30 day span of time. As I said before, if you are long one time but short on cash this is the method for you, but it takes lots of work and determination on your part, but remember this is a “fool proof” way to earn income with affiliate marketing. By using this method in combination with your Adword campaigns and by sending customers to your pre sell you can drive traffic to your site and eventually sell your product.  This is one of the techniques that the big "GURUS of affiliate marketing don’t want you to know about.

Congratulations, you now have a steady monthly income stream!