This site is designed to be a no frills guide to making money as an affiliate marketer primarily through the use of article marketing techniques to achieve high natural search rankings which lead to affiliate sales.

I’m not going to waste your (or my) time trying to be cute or with web design (I purposefully made this site with no graphics.) What matters in the affiliate marketing world are techniques that work and that’s what you will find here.

The following series of steps can be used over and over again to target new niches/products to make money online with affiliate marketing. I know these steps work because I’ve been using them myself for years. This is a system that you can start applying right now to create long term “income streams” that can continue to make you money for years.

This is definitely not a “get rich quick” scheme. In fact, this method takes quite a bit of work. The great thing is that there is really no cap to how much money you can make using this step by step system. The only limits are your own creativity and how much time you are willing to put into it. Another great thing for those who don’t have much money to invest is that it does not require much of an upfront investment (you will just need web hosting and accounts with some article submission services.)

The reason I’m willing to share my “secrets” in this way is because it’s unlikely that you will choose to target the exact same niches/products that I do. There are millions of possibilities, after all.

Step One: Finding Your Market

In my 5+ years as an affiliate marketer I have promoted hundreds (if not, thousands) of different products in more different niches than I can remember. My point in telling you this is that I’ve only had great success in about ten of these markets. I’m going to try to steer you in the right direction (although I can’t give away my own specific niches because I wouldn’t want to create lots of competition for myself) but you need to be aware that there may be some trial and error on your part. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work the first time. Keep at it until you find something that works for you.

What Are You Interested In?

It’s a well worn cliche for sure but I’ve found it to be true in at least some cases: Work in a market you know and love and you will likely have more success (and you will definitely enjoy your work more.) For example if you love baseball, try to find affiliate programs related to baseball to make money with.

Think about how much easier it’s going to be if you can write about something you already know about to make money. With the system I’m describing here this is even more important because it requires a lot of writing (you will have to submit a lot of articles to get the rankings you will need, plus you will need to create content for your own websites.)

That being said, sometimes you just won’t be able to find a way to make money in your preferred niche and you may have to look elsewhere. For example, I don’t like writing about weight loss but I still make money promoting this online diet affiliate program.

Keyword Research

Before settling on any target market you really should do some keyword research. You need to make sure that there are people who are actually searching for whatever it is you are planning on spending your time getting ranked for. Keyword research is not a perfect science and the keyword tools that are out there (I usually use Google’s keyword tool) give results that sometimes don’t seem to coincide with reality.

Commissions

You are likely to be able to find an affiliate program related to just about anything you can imagine, especially when you consider that Amazon.com has an affiliate program and they have just about everything available on their site. Of course Amazon pays just 6% commission and only 4% on electronics (crowded market, I’d avoid it if I were you.)

You’re going to have to think about how much money you can make with each sale. Some affiliate programs pay out really high commissions, and others pay hardly anything. That said, there are people who do very well with low commissions but with very high volume.

Personally, I prefer promoting products that are going to make me a decent chunk of change when I make a sale.

Step Two: Create Landing Pages

The first thing you should do is get your own domain to promote. There are some people who work entirely with free landing pages (like HubPages and Squidoo) but I think that’s a very bad idea. In the long run many of those pages get deleted (and you have no control over that.) On top of that, you don’t have control over what the landing page looks like. How many ads are going to be on that page that are distracting people from your affiliate links?

If you’re serious about making a living, you need to have your own domains. Maybe not as many as me (I have over 70.) But you definitely need to get at least one. You are probably going to have more success with a market or product specific landing page. An example of a WordPress style landing site which is focused on a variety of keywords (check each of the individual posts) can be found here: Day Off Diet Review.

I’ve tried out a lot of different web hosts over the years and for the most part they’ve been good but there have been a couple that gave me too much trouble so I stopped using them. The web hosting companies that I recommend are all ones that I use myself.

Web 2.0 Landers

I said that I don’t recommend using free pages like HubPages and Squidoo as your ultimate final landing page but that doesn’t mean that they are not still good tools to use. It’s just that you should be using these to link to your own domains (your final landing site) rather than directly to an affiliate lander. These types of sites often have rules against doing that anyway.

Article Landers

I’m going to be talking a lot about article marketing submission services later, but there’s also article sites like EZineArticles and Buzzle that you may want to make use of. With these sites you need to create a unique article that’s different from the articles you will be writing as a part of your article submission process. These types of articles have to be relatively informative (try to keep the salesmanship to a minimum) and then they should include a link back to your landing page at the bottom.

I don’t recommend these article landers so much for link building, as it’s not very effective for that purpose. Instead I recommend them so that you can create more possible landers for the search engines. For example, there are some keywords where I totally dominate the Google search results because I’ve got not only my own domains ranking but also my articles on sites like Buzzle and EZineArticles and my HubPages and Squidoos too!

This is a great thing because it greatly increases the chances of me making a commission from someone searching for that keyword.

Remember that all of these free landers point back to your own domains. They are just a way to funnel traffic back to your site. And then of course there’s the whole issue of how you create a good looking lander that can make you sales. I recommend looking at other people’s landers and see how it’s done (for example the “review” site I linked to above.) You don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this one. Just keep it simple and make sure people have an easy way of clicking on your affiliate links.

Step Three: Building Links with Article Marketing

This step actually has it’s own “step by step” which can be found HERE. The short version is that I write and spin an article using Magic Article Rewriter and then submit that article via Unique Article Wizard, SEOLinkVine, ArticleRanks, Article Marketing Automation, and Free Traffic System.

These articles include embedded links back to my own domains (and usually to a lesser extent to my web 2.0 and article landers.) Often times what I’m trying to do is to get a ranking I have to go higher. For example if I rank #14 on Google for a keyword and it’s already making me some sales then I know that if I get it all the way up to #1 I’ll make a huge amount of sales, so then that’s a very high priority and I make sure to include that link in my article submissions.

Repeat

These three basic steps can be repeated over and over again. And the more links to you get back to your own domains the easier you will be able to get them to rank for things in the future. For example I now have blogs where I can just make a blog entry and it can rank for whatever is in my title without even getting any links to that specific post. This is because I have built up a lot of links to that domain and the search engines automatically give respect to my new posts.

The great thing about this approach is that it creates long term income streams because it’s all about getting high natural search engine rankings which can continue to make money for a long time to come.

Simplified

I will admit this is a rather simplified guide, but I definitely think it’s enough to get you started. In fact, if you get a bit lucky and work at it real hard you could be making a full time living using this system within a couple of months.

Extra Bits

• Social bookmarking & blog commenting are other link building techniques you will want to look into.
• Titles are extremely important as far as SEO goes. Make sure you have your target keywords in your page titles.
• The anchor text that you use on your links is important. Link to your target sites with the keywords you want to rank for. But make sure you mix it up. A big part of successful SEO is to make it look as “natural” as possible and having tons of links all with the exact same anchor text looks unnatural.
• I didn’t mention PPC because I don’t use it. I rely entirely on organic traffic. I find PPC to be too much of a pain in the ass to keep up with, personally. But that doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of people who are making huge sums of money with it. If you have some money to invest you can make a quicker return with PPC, but you can also lose your money much faster.