This is the second of six articles on how to earn a living with affiliate marketing. In the last report I took you through the process of finding a niche, we ended with you having reached the point where the niche had been found and you have to prepare the ‘bait’, or should I say a free report on your specialist subject in order to tempt people to sign up to your newsletter or purchase a product from you, this needn’t be your own product, although if you have one in the niche you have chosen that’s brilliant, but most people will be finding a suitable product to promote as an affiliate.
There is a very important interim step that you need to perform to ensure the report which you will create will lead to sales of your product, what you don’t want to do here is ASSUME there will be plenty of products to promote to your chosen market, you should check NOW to make certain you do not waste your time creating reports, and then find there is no product to sell – make sense?
Right then, the obvious question is, “how do I find out if there are products available to promote to my chosen market”? Well this is what you do; first of all we re-visit Clickbank, but this time for a different reason, last time we were looking for niche ‘ideas’ this time we are looking for products to sell to our target market. Go to Clickbank.com, click on ‘Market Place’ and in the keywords box type in the main search-term that you are looking for, lets say you have decided that fat loss is what you want to create your report on and that you wish to sell a product to that particular target market, so in the ‘keyword’ box type ‘fat loss’. As of the day of typing this report I note the first page has a number of products to promote, there are two links available on each listing, one to the ‘pitch page’ this is just the sales page for the product that your clients would be taken to if they clicked on the link that you would supply them, the other is the ‘Hop-link’ this is the special code which you are supplied by the product owner in order to supply this to your clients, it is unique to you and anyone who buys the product through your unique link will earn you the current commission, usually anywhere from 50% to 75% of the retail cost. You need to sign up to as an affiliate first, but this is straightforward, and full instructions are supplied by clicking on the ‘sign up’ tab on the Clickbank home page.
Good, that’s Clickbank sorted, you know there are products to promote, next go to Google and type in the name of your niche, in this case ‘fat loss’ followed by the words ‘affiliate products’, without the inverted commas, like so: fat loss affiliate products, hit enter, and as you will see, there are more products, to be precise 219,000 in one way shape or form as of the time of writing, if you wish you can be more specific, e.g., type in ‘(niche) eBook affiliate program’ ‘(niche) membership site affiliate program’ ‘(niche) DVD affiliate program’ or other combinations that may spring to mind.
You now have your niche and you have found products to promote – next the report. There are two ways to find the information you require, first the no cost way, go to Google again and type in the words ‘niche’ information, in this case ‘fat loss information’, hit enter, and again at the time of writing there’s a page full of report information, in fact thousands of items, all you need to do is visit some of the sites, or one particularly good site, read the information, disseminate it and RE-WRITE in your own words, please NEVER plagiarise, not only in this immoral and unethical you can end up in trouble with copyright law, don’t be tempted to lift complete sentences either from the selected text, RE-WRITE in your own words, there’s nothing wrong with ‘learning’ something from a particular source and/or your own personal experiences and then imparting that information in your own personal style and adding to it from other information which is gleaned from elsewhere, and by doing so improve and generally enhance the report in question. Make the article interesting, make certain it does provide help and assistance to your target audience, read it back to yourself after completion and place yourself in the shoes of your target market, does it HELP them, bear that in mind when re-writing what you learn, it MUST prove beneficial to your market, will it help them? Even in a small way to move towards solving their specific problem, if the answer is yes, great, if no, alter the content accordingly. If you feel your English is not up to scratch, then find a friend, relative, colleague or anyone who has that skill, we aren’t looking for someone with a degree in English, although if you know someone like that fine, just yourself, or someone else who can finalise the final report and make it readable is all you require, the report only needs to be about 750 to 1500 words and that shouldn’t take long to complete, in a day, easily, if you work at it. If you prefer a more automated search there are some free software downloads available, one I suggest, which is available for free is at: http://www.download3k.com/Install-Article-Ideas-Software.html after downloading,simply fill in the main field together with a sub category if one exists of you niche, hit enter, and the software will go to work finding information from all over the net for you, remember to re-write as suggested – but again – DO NOT plagiarize.
To go down the paid for route there are many article research items of software, just type into Google the aforementioned words to find a plethora of information – personally I would avoid the paid for route, and one other word of advice, don’t believe the ‘spin’ if any software promises to do all the article writing for you, some may be better than others in collecting information, but you will still have to have some kind of personal input as far as the actual writing of the article is concerned. To finish off the report you must include ‘long tail keywords’ within the text, these are the words that Google and other engines will search for. If your report is key word rich it will help it be found in the search engines and enable you to achieve a higher ranking than would normally be possible. Look out in the next report for how to check competitor keywords as well as how to optimise your own website to obtain search engine ranking. If you wish to obtain these reports in advance of publication, sign up for my weekly newsletter, further details are contained in the ‘bio’ box. Until next time.
Adam Cadell is an experienced internet marketer who specializes in affiliate marketing. His weekly newsletter is available from his website at: http://www.adamcadell.com/.