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Starting a blog to promote your affiliate products
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Blogging has become a powerful addition to the internet marketing arena since the past few years although it’s been around for pretty long time.
Since blogs are here to stay and everyone and his dog is blogging about something anyway, we as affiliate marketers should always approach them as affiliate monetization weapons to make us money.
You see, out of the millions of bloggers out there, most aren’t even ‘blogging for commissions’. Of those doing so (who are normally marketers), many simply don’t know what they are doing, or are treading the ‘dangerous’ path by putting up ’spam blogs’ that have no shelf lives. And why spend money on software when you can do it better yourself and for free?
If you want an ever-growing profitable blog that is sustainable for the long-term, don’t take risks – use the correct approach.
Here’s a 5-Step Affiliate Blogging Blueprint which is as simple as it gets:
1. Select a tightly targeted niche
First, make a list of topics that interest you a great deal. You are going to be spending a lot of time with this topic, so pick something you at least know a little about and are willing to learn more about, or something that you are an expert on.
With that list, go to http://7search.com/scripts/searchterms/top_paying.asp to see what the highest paying keywords are. Do any of your topics match any of those keywords? If not, look at those keywords, and try to pick one that you can ‘talk’ about.
You’ll notice that the top paying keywords are mostly about gambling and prescription drugs. In most cases, you don’t want to write about those topics, so keep going down the list until you find something that interests you which you can passionately work on.
If you don’t find anything on that list that toots your horn, visit Yahoo Search Marketing at http://www.overture.com and use their resources to find high paying keywords, or to find out how popular the topics on your list are.
2. Find Affiliate Programs For Your Niche
Make a list of good paying and high converting affiliate programs in your chosen niche. Here are a few places you can research on: ClickBank Marketplace, AssociatePrograms.com, LinkShare.com, CJ.com etc.
After you’ve signed up for the relevant affiliate programs, collect all the marketing materials and organize them in one convenient folder. Marketing materials may include articles, text links, banner ads, classfied ads etc. that you can use on your blog.
You can use articles as content, text links throughout your blog, and banners along the borders of the blog pages. You will need to know how to edit the templates in order to do this. If you need help, refer to your blog host for the FAQs.
3. Set Up Your Money-Making Blog
Once you have your niche and affiliate programs ready, it’s time to set up your blog! There are countless places online where you can set up a blog for free. If you have a website, you can set up a blog on your website as well. Check with your web host to see what blogging software they include with your hosting account.
If you don’t have a website (and many successful bloggers don’t) get a blog through a site such as http://www.blogger.com or http://www.wordpress.org. But no matter which blogging host you choose, just make sure that you will be able to edit the templates for the blog to add in your affiliate marketing materials.
Here’s the thing – if you’re using Blogger.com for example, use your main keyword for the niche you’ve selected in the blogger blog domain.
Next choose a name for your blog carefully. You don’t want to just name it My Blog or something. Now you should also use your main keyword as it is in the title.
4. Posting Keyword Relevant Content
There are various methods of getting content for your blog. A few good ones are:
- Free reprint articles (there’re over 21,000+ internet marketing articles here)
- Private Label Products (here’s a good collection)
- Writing your own
Lets talk about the last method as it’s something many have problems with. The best advice I can give is to “write like you talk”. Don’t forget that a blog is essentially for expressing your own opinion and to share your knowledge, while making good profits out of doing it of course.
Another simple method is to find related keyword content at forums which you can use on your blog. It’s not stealing, all you’ve to do is make it as a quote with a link back.
The ’secret’ though is to include your keywords in BOTH your post title and content for good rankings, and with the combination of keywords in domain and page title, you ‘can’t fail’. Basic SEO (which is also the safest) combined with relevant content and quality backlinks will do more wonders for your search engine traffic than any ’software’.
Once you’re set up, it’s advisable to follow a fixed schedule of posting new content every two days when your blog is new. Of course do remember to add in relevant affiliate recommendations within the content, this is why we are even discussing this remember?
5. Promoting Your Blog For A Traffic Avalanche
You will need to promote your blog as opposed to common thinking (at least when you’re starting out). This helps to get it ranked and build a readership for your blog.
First thing to do is to submit your new blog into the main search engines and directories; link it to another indexed website; buy links, etc.
Next head on over to http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/, http://www.pingoat.com and http://www.pingomatic.com to submit your blog.
Important thing in all your submission is to use your main keywords in both the title and description.
You should also re-submit your blog at the above directories each time you make new posts.
Remember – a blog is pretty much promoted just like a website. If you want an automatic program to submit your blog, “Blog Submitter Pro” is powerful and works very well though it’s kind of ‘controversial’.
There you go. While it will take some time to see results and build up your readership, you’ve already created a brand new ‘affiliate blog’ which you can monetize easily.
And if your posts are good, you’re focused to your target market, and promote your blog, I can’t see why you won’t make a ton of autopilot affiliate commissions!
Rinse and repeat with another blog or another niche.
To Your Affiliate Success!
Pat Sharp
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