Researching the best keywords for your niche is more of a black art than a science.
There are tools available to help you but most of them are either chargeable or come with a “catch” (Google’s keyword tool is a case in point – it changes over time but you need to be logged in to your account and spending money).
And there are several bigger problems:
Everyone’s got to start somewhere and affiliate marketing is no exception. To a large extent, you can learn as you go along providing you’re at least kind-of sensible in what you’re doing. Which means that it’s best to have some kind of road map for where your affiliate marketing is heading.
The main thing to remember is that you won’t be an overnight success. These things take time but keep plodding away at your affiliate marketing and, gradually, you’ll start to see signs that it’s working.
Email autoresponders have been around on the internet for almost as long as it’s been in existence.
But what do they do and why should you use them?
Not all long tail keywords are equal.
Some have searches but hundreds or even thousands of pages competing for them – the chance of you getting ranked for those anytime soon is next to zero.
Others come up in the suggestions but have next to no competition.
The clue here is that they show in the suggestions – that means people are actually searching for the phrases that show up. And, because Google is suggesting the phrase, they’ll select it and click on it.
That’s what you need for niche (or affiliate) marketing – quick wins.
Recently-ish (actually the last few years) I’ve been concentrating my affiliate sites on stupidly long tail keywords.
Not the 3 or 4 or 5 word phrases most people say to target.
Much longer…
5, 6, 7 or more words (the title of this article is quite short at just 7 words)
There are lots of different ways to do affiliate marketing but sometimes it’s useful to have examples of how people are carrying out their affiliate marketing campaigns to give you some ideas to get you started.
That’s good so long as you get started – there are lots of people who use the excuse of too many different ways to do something to do nothing at all.
When you’re starting out in your affiliate marketing career it’s important to do things (actually, that’s important part for all the time you’re active in an industry) because that’s the only way to find out whether the technique you’ve chosen works for you.
Most affiliate marketing techniques work to at least some extent. OK, maybe sending out a spam email to millions of unknown people may not be a good way to keep your affiliate account. But that’s an exception.
Review websites are one of the easiest (and in my view best) ways of setting yourself up as an affiliate marketer.
Finding buyer keywords is easy – you add words like review, comparison, suggestions, recommendations and similar words to the product name or generic description.
They work in any niche – although some niches are crazily competitive, so you need to do some research before you start.
Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and most reliable ways to get started with internet marketing.
A lot of the potential barriers are handled for you:
You’re acting as a commission-only sales person for the products. If someone you introduce to the product purchases it (or sometimes even if they merely raise their hand and sign up to an email list) then you get paid some money.
A question that gets asked a lot in affiliate marketing is whether or not niche sites still work.
A few years ago, there were lots of products out there that claimed that if you picked a topic, got something close to an exact match domain (BuyBlueWidgets that kind of thing) and put up a few short-ish pages of content then you’d get traffic and make affiliate sales.
Of course, there were the usual “gotchas” – you needed to pick quite low competition keyword phrases, there couldn’t be too many big authority sites in the results, that kind of thing.
Which often meant that you’d spend more time searching for the perfect niche than you would creating the site itself.
In practice there’s no real difference between creating a website for affiliate marketing and creating a website for any other purpose.
The search engines don’t serve up different web pages like that – they deliver pages that their computer algorithm decides (in the blink of an eye) are the best fit for the search.
Also – despite comments you might read to the contrary – the search engines don’t care how you build your website.
It can be “pure” HTML or HTML with CSS to make it look pretty or it can be a programming language like PHP that creates the pages.
Don’t worry if that sounds like double Dutch to you.
The end result is a web page that can be viewed on whichever device and whichever browser the site visitor cares to use.