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Setting Up Your Own Affiliate Marketing Blog
Setting Up Your Own Affiliate Marketing Blog
When you decide to embark on an affiliate marketing career, an affiliate marketing blog is a must have strategy. It can seem a little overwhelming to set one up if you’re not technologically advanced but setting up a blog is actually pretty simple with a few easy steps and should be an integral part of your affiliate marketing plan
First, you’ll need to register a domain (use Namecheap). This is your website address – also known as your URL. Make sure you choose carefully when you choose your domain and see that it reflects the topic of the niche. You’ll have to pay a small fee each year to keep your domain name.
Second, you’ll need to set up hosting. A2 Hosting is one of the most economical and popular options for hosting and gives you great technical support. You’ll pay a monthly fee for hosting – unless you want to pay up front for a discount.
Once you have a domain and hosting, it’s time to set up your blog. The easiest way to do this is to use Fantastico. This is a program built into A2 Hosting that installs your blog on the website. It’s very user friendly and doesn’t require you to have a technical background.
You’ll need to choose a theme for your blog. There are many options – from very simple freebies to very detailed, paid custom designs. When you’re starting out, it’s best to choose a simple theme. Once you’re more comfortable with blogging, you may decide to install something more advanced.
WordPress offers free themes you can install onto your site. These are easy to use, and you’ll find that you can be up and running with your blog in a matter of minutes. After using Fantastico to install your blog theme, you’ll need to set up the blog settings.
It’s important to make sure your blog is set up to be searched by search engines. Under Settings, you’ll want to give your site a title and a tagline, which tells people what the site is about. You’ll also want to assign an email address and set up your date and time zone. Then you’ll need to decide how you want comments and posts to be displayed on your blog.
Finally, you’ll want to personalize your blog. You’ll select a header that reflects your niche. You’ll also want to create an about page so that people can understand who the author is. This is known as an About page. Make sure you share a photo so that readers can connect more personally with you. Create a disclaimer page that helps you abide by any legal rules or terms of service.
As you write posts, you’ll want to make sure that you’re personal and friendly and work to develop relationships with your readers. This is the best way to build a community of devoted readers who will trust your advice.
Setting up your own affiliate marketing blog is actually quite simple. As you go through the process, it will get easier. The more you work with your blog, the more you’ll understand about how it operates and how you can use your blog to promote products in your niche.
So, now you have your blog up and running, let’s have a look at the optimal way to do a product review, an integral part of your affiliate marketing strategy.
The Best Way To Review Info Products Online
While reviewing digital products isn’t completely different from tangible products, there are some differences in the best way to review info products online. First, you’ll want to purchase the product yourself and then begin to implement it.
You can’t really review an info product unless you’ve tried it yourself. But as you implement, you’ll want to document the entire process from beginning to end. Begin with the buying process. What did the sales page look like? What was the cost? How did the message affect you?
Then move on to the process of buying and downloading and explain how that went – including One Time Offers, Upsells and Downsells. In addition, look for customer service information and test it out. Even email the author of the product to see what kind of response time you receive. Write about all of these tasks as part of your review.
As you document the process you’ll want to share both your excitement about new ideas or strategies as well as any frustrations or disappointments you have with the product. You’ll want to share your feelings about the product as honestly as possible.
At the same time, you’ll want to avoid giving so much detail that your reader doesn’t need to buy the product. For one thing, it’s plagiarism to share someone else’s system once you’ve bought it. For another, consider the fact that you’re working as an affiliate marketer, and you want to encourage sales of the product.
Your review of an info product can take several days or even weeks depending on the product. You’ll want to write as you use the course so that you don’t have to back and remember what you were doing and how it was going.
As you implement the product, you should be open about what’s going well and what isn’t going smoothly. You should also make sure that you discuss any results you’re having. For example, if you purchased a course on list building, have you been able to actually increase the number of people on your list?
The cardinal rule for an info product is that you always have to be honest with your review. When you’re honest, your readers will be able to trust what you say. Then when you make positive reviews and recommendations you’ll have better sales.
If you’re dishonest and gloss over problems, your readers may discontinue their trust in your recommendations, and you’ll see a decline in your sales as well. The best way to review info products online is to share your experience openly and honestly – warts and all.
Now we’ve looked at the best way to do a review, let’s take a look at what you should avoid when doing any type of affiliate product review.
The Best Way To Ruin An Affiliate Product Review
As an affiliate marketer, it’s important to make sure that you don’t get in your own way and ruin an affiliate product review. First and foremost, you want to deliver a review that people can trust. That means you must be honest about what you’re promoting.
So the first rule of thumb is to make sure that you don’t lie in any of your reviews. If you say something is wonderful, but it turns out not to be, you’ll lose the trust of your readers. You can only make money with affiliate reviews if people trust what you have to say about the products.
That means that you’ll point out some things you like and point out criticisms as well. It could also mean that you just tell your readers there’s a bad product on the market. It’s better to miss out on possible commissions from that one product than to mislead people into wasting money.
As soon as you decide to lie and say that a product is perfect, you destroy your credibility. If you truly do love a product yet still find flaws, you can be honest about it. Just don’t try to pass off a product as perfect when you’re clear that it isn’t.
It’s also important to choose quality products to promote. You may think something is going to be great, but after you purchase it and take a look, you realize it doesn’t deliver quality. In that case, consider it a small loss of your time and money and move on to something better.
Don’t try to promote products that you know don’t deliver. When you recommend junk products to your readers, you won’t be trusted. You’ll diminish your reputation, and you’ll have trouble bringing in income from your reviews.
Instead, make sure that you’re always honest. Discuss the positive things about the product as well as the drawbacks. Promote products that are high quality and will deliver valuable information and tools to your readers.
With affiliate marketing, it’s important to build relationships and trust. When you have trust and recommend a product, people will be more likely to make purchases. But if you recommend shady products, your readers will not only hang on to their money, but they may even quit reading your recommendations.
The best way to ruin an affiliate product review is to be dishonest and promote bad products. But if you avoid these behaviors, you can build a following that will help you to bring in steady income.
Anyone can make a career out of affiliate marketing but not everyone who attempts to succeeds. You should be ready to work hard and choose those programs that are genuine and that will provide you with an opportunity to grow and use your blog to promote great products and keep your reviews honest.
I hope these affiliate marketing tips have helped, and if you want to know more about affiliate marketing check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
Common Misconceptions About Affiliate Marketing
Common Misconceptions About Affiliate Marketing
It’s common to find several existing misconceptions about something that people do not properly understand either because of knowledge gap or ignorance. As a business owner, it is important that you debunk these misconceptions so that you make an informed business decision.
Those interested in signing up for an affiliate marketing program should also be well prepared so that they get into it with the right attitude.
Whether you are running a company with huge turnovers or trying to get a startup off the ground, affiliate marketing can be a very effective method of enhancing your brand awareness and increasing the amount of sales.
You can achieve so much while avoiding the usual hustles associated with marketing campaigns. These are some of the misconceptions about affiliate marketing that you need to correct as an entrepreneur or as someone that is interested in earning money off of it.
- Affiliate marketing systems are easy to manage and produce quick results
This is actually not true at all. Some people imagine that immediately you set up the system, customers will start rolling in as the revenue grows. Affiliate systems require a lot of work and dedication to succeed.
You need to find the right team to work with, and that includes affiliates and other partners that will be part of the system. You also need to have relevant content that will appeal to customers and regularly keep the content updated.
It will eventually pick up but through time and effort.
- You must work in a popular niche
Some companies cannot even dare attempt to use affiliate programs because they assume that only businesses that operate in popular sectors can thrive with it.
As much as it’s true that popular niches find affiliate marketing more effective, being comfortable in your sector and using your insights and skills can turn the program into a success for your business.
You just need to find the right team that actually understands the business and industry and can help you realize your goals and objectives.
- It’s past its due date
Google made changes to its algorithms for SEO and somehow made link building outdated.
That may discourage affiliate systems that heavily relied on the old methods to increase awareness.
However, there are still several ways to make use of search engine optimization to enhance brand awareness. Affiliate marketing is also very much relevant to Google because it has provided alternative resources to users.
- Several sites for higher sales numbers
Never compromise quality over quantity. Getting your links on several sites does not automatically mean that you’ll get more conversions.
Find a small but dedicated number of affiliates that will do a proper job and generate higher sales numbers.
The program only makes sense when you have more conversions because that is what will actually translate to more revenue and ultimately higher profits.
Even though research has shown that affiliate marketing is not easy, you can really use it your advantage once you understand the basics. You just need to come up with a proper strategy and ensure that it is implemented well.
How To Avoid Affiliate Marketing Scams
The internet is filed with people trying to get rich within a very short time. That said, there are also several users on the internet who wake up on a daily basis to take advantage of those looking to make easy money by promising them things that are nearly impossible to deliver on.
Don’t be that person who thinks that the internet has all the solutions to your money problems. As they say, hard work forever pays so be prepared to earn your pay.
Affiliate marketing has presented a new frontier for internet scammers to prey on the unsuspecting public. How then can you spot these scams and avoid the stress of losing your money to people who only want to take advantage of you?
Genuine Programs Do Not Require Joining Fees
Maybe you have come across those affiliate programs on the internet that ask you to pay some joining fee. They conveniently ask you to do so using your credit card.
Those are scams that you should completely avoid. If a business wants to partner with you then why should you pay a joining fee? Isn’t the business interested in increasing sales and therefore should be the one to make efforts in finding publishers?
Do not pay any fee to join an affiliate program because a genuine merchant will never ask you for cash to be part of the system. Your credit card information may be stolen and none of the promises made to you by the scammers will be delivered.
Promises Of Big Income With Little Work
Some merchants will try to show you how you can be a millionaire within a few days. If that were the case then they’d be relaxing somewhere on a beach enjoying their wealth instead of convincing people to join their programs on the internet.
Nothing comes easy and you must be prepared to work hard. Anyone who promises you otherwise is simply trying to play games on you and should be avoided.
These scammers will purport to show you successful affiliates who have made it big by participating in their programs. They will display figures and statistics to try and convince you that their claims are true.
One thing is for sure, if those assertions were true, the merchant wouldn’t even need to talk about his program because information travels fast and people would be flocking to it.
Educate Yourself
Knowledge is power and if you are armed with information, nobody can take advantage of you. Most people get scammed on the internet because the fraudsters prey on their ignorance.
Learn about the basics of affiliate marketing so that whenever you are confronted with such a scenario, you can’t be a victim because you already have all the relevant information.
Many people also just hop onto search engines without any idea of what they are looking for. Arm yourself with knowledge and use it as a weapon against internet scammers.
Anyone can make a career out of affiliate marketing but not everyone who attempts to succeeds. You should be ready to work hard and choose those programs that are genuine and that will provide you with an opportunity to grow.
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
7 Steps To Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing
7 Steps To Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing
To succeed in affiliate marketing, you’ll need all the gears in your affiliate marketing ‘machine’ to be perfectly aligned so that the machine runs smoothly and generates sales like clockwork.
In order to reach this stage, there are a few factors that you must be aware of and make sure that they’re all optimized so that your marketing efforts yield the best results.
Getting them wrong can end in frustration and a loss of time, energy and money, so you need an effective affiliate marketing strategy.
Let’s look at an effective 7 step affiliate marketing plan to get you started in the right direction.
Formulate A Plan
If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. Before even getting started on the content creation or buying a domain, you’ll need to assess if your niche is worth targeting.
Is it overly competitive? Are there enough products to promote? Will you be targeting long tail keywords?
You need to know your plan of attack and exactly what you’re going to do. That is your first step.
Research And Reach
The second step is research and reach. You must do a lot of research before diving into the niche. It’s fine to even spend a week or two doing thorough research.
You’ll get a feel for the niche and know just how far your reach will be. Better to be well-prepared than to get started and be unprepared.
If the niche you are in has a very small audience, your earning capacity will be limited. While you can still give it a try, it’s inevitable that you reach an income ceiling that you can’t seem to break through. So, be aware of this.
Traffic
Traffic is of paramount importance. The more targeted traffic you have, the more sales you’ll make.
So, you need to know where you’ll be driving traffic from and what you’re going to do.
Focus a huge chunk of your efforts on getting the right traffic to your web properties.
Content Creation And Marketing
No matter what affiliate product you’re promoting, there will be some type of content creation involved.
You could be writing blog posts or creating infographics or just pinning images on Pinterest – whatever the case, it is content creation and marketing.
People come online looking for information. They’re looking for content. The better and more engaging it is, the more visitors you’ll attract and retain.
Your goal should always be to help the visitor out. Avoid appearing like a rapacious marketer who only hard sells and hypes products up. It’ll just turn off most people and cost you sales.
Promoting
When you’re online, you must promote your content. Actively post your images in image sharing sites, share your videos in as many places as you can, get in front of as many crowds as you can, etc.
There are people on Pinterest who love gardening. There are also people in Facebook groups who love gardening. Let’s not forget all those people who subscribe to gardening channels on YouTube… because they love gardening.
Guess what? Most of them are not on all 3 sites. The audiences will be different. So, by promoting your content on different platforms, you’ll reach more people.
Analyzing
Analyze your traffic stats, clicks, sales, conversions, etc. Even if numbers scare you, after a while you’ll get a hang of things.
Once you understand the numbers, you’ll know how to scale your efforts and improve upon the winning strategies while ditching the poorer performing ones.
Knowing your numbers is a crucial skill to learn for any successful entrepreneur or affiliate marketer.
Rinsing And Repeating
Last but not least, find out what’s working and keep repeating your efforts. Rinse, lather and repeat.
Consistency is everything and your repeated efforts multiplied over time will result in avalanches of sales.
Follow the 7 steps above and you’ll be an affiliate marketer par excellence.
Now you have a plan, let’s look at some of the folks you will need to deal with in the world of affiliate marketing.
Who Are The 3 Types Of People Involved In Affiliate Marketing?
In your affiliate marketing journey, it’s very important to know that you’ll encounter 3 different groups of people. Knowing who they are is very important because you need to know how to deal with them.
Each group is different and poses its own type of challenges. By understanding how the different people in the groups behave, you’ll be better prepared to handle them and be in their good books.
Let’s look at the groups now.
The Publishers
The ‘publishers’ refer to affiliates just like you. These are the people who create niche sites or run YouTube channels or Facebook groups. Even the affiliates who use paid ads can be considered as publishers.
The goal of most publishers is to put out relevant content or ads that attract people who will click on their links and buy their affiliate products. The publishers are your ‘competition’ and you must watch them closely.
If you have a niche site on fishing tips, where you promote fishing-related products, the other sites that show up on the first page of the search results are your competition. They could be affiliates or actual brand name companies selling their products.
You’ll notice that there can be an overlap here because affiliates can sell their own products too. Let’s look at the next group to get a better picture.
The Advertisers
The ‘advertisers’ refer to the companies who create the products you promote. They recruit affiliates to do the selling and they also advertise on their own to boost their sales.
An affiliate who promotes other vendors’ products but also creates his/her own products to sell, now finds himself/herself in the advertisers group. Similarly, the company that’s selling fishing rods and publishes lots of fishing tips and content on it’s official blog is now a publisher too.
So, the groups can overlap. What’s important to know is that while fellow publishers can be your competition, you can also network with them to promote their products if they’re vendors too. So, now your competition has become a mutually beneficial relationship.
At the same time, the vendor whose products you were promoting, might end up ranking for a lot of keywords that you’re targeting, because their marketing is on point. So, the vendor you were trying to support, has now become your competition.
Alas, the tangled webs we weave! Generally, companies try not to compete with their affiliates. But if you notice that the one you’re supporting is posing competition for you, you’ll need to reassess your marketing strategy and see if you wish to still support them.
The Consumers
This group is without a doubt the most important of the three. The consumers are the people who come online looking for information and solutions to their problems. Most of them don’t come looking to spend money or buy stuff.
They want help. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to give them enough information to help them a little and whet their appetite for more information that will help them solve their problems faster and easier.
If you have a website on back pain, the content in your site can talk about the different causes of back pain and natural remedies that could help. However, if they wish to bring much needed relief, you can mention that the special ‘Pain Away Pulse Massager’ has been shown to help many back-pain sufferers.
Now, not only is the visitor better informed about his condition and has a choice of home remedies that he or she can try, but they have been subtly introduced to a product that brings much needed immediate relief.
What do you think they’ll do?
Soak in that Epsom salt home bath which is a home remedy… or get the pulse massager to ease their pain quickly?
Most of them will get the pulse massager. The content you provide is a vehicle that not only helps them become better informed, but also transports them through the invisible journey that they need to traverse to go from reader to buyer.
Understand the different people who are involved in this affiliate marketing circle and you will be much wiser in your marketing efforts.
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
Niche Marketing Tips For Affiliate Marketers
Niche Marketing Tips For Affiliate Marketers
Every marketer worth his or her salt knows what the most popular niches are – weight loss, pet care, making money online, survival, baby care, etc. are extremely profitable niches with billions of dollars being spent yearly.
These astronomical sums are enough to make many affiliates salivate and want to take a bite out of this pie by promoting products through their affiliate links and this can be a very lucrative affiliate marketing strategy.
Niching Down
While you can make money in these niches, it’s imperative that you niche down to a level that you can compete in. For example, weight loss is just too competitive.
As an affiliate, you’ll struggle to go up against the big boys who have lots of money to spend on building websites, advertising and more.
In some cases, it’ll be next to impossible. But what if you targeted women’s weight loss? Now the market is smaller but it’s still too tough.
What if you niched down further and targeted weight loss for women above 40 who have diabetes? Now, you’re talking! This sub-niche will be much more manageable to target, and you’ll be able to find long tail keywords that you can optimize your blog posts for.
It’s be easier to rank for the low hanging fruit and your marketing efforts will be much more streamlined. The truth of the matter is that the same products that are marketed to the general weight loss crowd will also work with the audience in the sub-niche.
It all comes down to how you slant your content and show that the products will help the reader. If you can do that, your readers will become buyers.
Questions To Ask
Before even picking a niche, you’ll need to plan your attack. Is the competition manageable or is it beyond you? Are there products to promote? Will you be able to find places where you can drive traffic from?
All of these are very important questions that you need to ask yourself before diving into a niche. Jumping in blindly will mean wasting time and effort on a niche that’s either unprofitable or too competitive.
You’ll also need to search on Google to see what sites show up for the keywords you’re targeting.
Are there any affiliate sites? If there are, you have as good a chance as them of ranking. How optimized are their sites? Could you do better than them?
What’s their traffic like? Are there ads being displayed on their sites? What products are they promoting?
All these questions are market research that you should be doing before you even get started with your niche sites. By getting answers to them, you’ll be able to formulate a marketing strategy that will give you your best chance at succeeding in the fastest possible time.
Strategizing For Success
Take notes while doing your research for easy reference. Do not rely on your memory. Try to bulk your tasks. For example, when looking for affiliate products to promote, find as many as you can at one time.
If you’re doing keyword research, spend a day or two compiling as many keywords that you could rank for. By batching your tasks, you’ll be much more productive in the long run. Once you get started, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips.
Study your niche before you start your affiliate marketing in it. The extra time you spend beforehand will give you a much better picture of how to proceed or if you even should. This is something all experienced affiliates do. Now you know it too. So, do it.
Niching down is just one of a number of affiliate marketing strategies, but do you really understand what affiliate marketing is all about on a basic level?
Understanding Affiliate Marketing To Succeed At It
On the surface, affiliate marketing looks like a very simple concept. You find a product for sale and you recommend it to others who might buy it. In return, you get a percentage of the sale as a commission because you’re associated with it. It’s so simple.
Just like how it is with insurance agents, door to door salesmen and real estate brokers. Affiliate marketing is all about sales and commissions.
But here’s something you should know – simple and easy are two different things.
Trust
When you’re selling online, in most cases, you’re not face to face with the prospect. The human element has been removed from the equation. Visitors to your site can leave with a click of the mouse.
Someone who doesn’t like your email can delete it and unsubscribe in seconds. Selling online while highly profitable, is a slightly different ballgame.
For starters, people come online looking for information or to be entertained. In other words, they’re looking for ‘infotainment’… and even if you’re in a niche like gardening, golf or woodworking, the same rule applies.
Your content not only needs to help the reader, but it must hold their attention… and guess what? Social media sites, instant notifications and a short attention span are all waiting to rob you of that sale.
Door to door salesmen never had it this tough. There is much more rejection online. The only difference is that it’s not so obvious.
So, always make your content relevant, entertaining and useful. The goal is to get the reader to trust you. Use whatever it takes from infographics to videos to pictures of the product, etc. to remove all mental obstacles from the buyers’ minds and show how useful the product can be for solving their problems… and be subtle about it.
Traffic
The next thing you should know is that unlike real-life sales where the prospect comes to your store or you can go knocking on doors prospecting, when it comes to online marketing, things are a little different.
Building a website alone doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll get floods of traffic. You may not get any for years. To sell online, you need to go and GET traffic. It’s all about ‘getting’ and not sitting around waiting.
You’ll need to drive traffic on your own by using free or paid methods. So, you must learn a few traffic generation techniques and take action.
Tracking
When running an online business, you must track your results. Does your site have visitors? Do your products convert? Where is most of your traffic coming from?
Are your emails being opened? Which pages on your site see the most traffic? Which ads are performing well and which need to be shut down?
As you can see, there are many variables involved and by tracking your results, you’ll know where to multiply your efforts and scale up… and where your efforts are yielding no fruit.
You’ll also know where you’re not performing as well as you should and be able to remedy the problem. You’ll never know this if you don’t track.
So, remember the 3 T’s of affiliate marketing. Trust, traffic and tracking. If you follow these T’s to a T, you’ll succeed at affiliate marketing in record time.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊
Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation
Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation
Sometimes when you’re launching a new business, especially online when you’re doing it all alone, it can feel overwhelming not knowing how to find the best path to profits. You have to know how to research niches and products and people and keywords to decide where you want to grab your affiliate links. It’s enough to make anyone throw up their hands in frustration.
There are some easy tips that can help you conduct your research online. Researching niches is a piece of cake. What you’re looking for is competition. Some people will look at competition and feel like there’s no way they could go up against the other sites.
But competition actually means it’s a healthy niche – with room for everyone. If you find a niche that no one’s selling in, then it probably means there’s no interest in – and that should set off warning bells for you.
Look on bookshelves in your local Barnes and Noble and see what non-fiction topics have plenty of resources. Glance at the covers of the women’s magazines at the checkout stand the next time you buy groceries.
You’ll see everything from insomnia to nutrition and more. They’re good about showcasing trendy topics, too – niches that are just now growing big enough for major publications to pick up on them.
News sites give lots of good insight into trends within a niche, too. Most major news sites like FoxNews and CNN have categories for science, technology, health and more. Look at those to stay abreast of what’s happening in your niche.
Also, set up a Google Alert so that you get news and information delivered straight to your inbox whenever something happens – or in a digest version if you want to check it sparingly.
Product research is sometimes a bit more in depth. You first want to go to sites like Ubersuggest and see what kinds of things your audience wants to know about the product. Type in the product name or niche topic and get hundreds of results that help steer you in the right direction.
Then, go to the manufacturer’s website and see what the specs are on the product. You can even download instruction manuals to read more details about it and share that with your visitors.
If it’s something you can find locally, don’t be afraid to go into your store and look at the product and jot down some notes. You can even take some pictures or a video to put on your blog.
Researching people is easy if you trace their social media accounts. Look at their blog and the interaction they have with people (if you’re promoting an info product). Look at their Twitter account, their Google Plus and Facebook, too.
Keyword research is a cinch with free and paid tools that are available to you. Ubersuggest again is a great tool, but you can also invest in paid tools like Market Samurai that show you the competition and profit potential of a niche.
How To Use Kindle For Affiliate Marketing Purposes
Kindle is a fantastic resource for affiliate marketers – and the strategy you’re about to learn is one that few affiliates have applied, so the field is wide open. It’s going to require a small amount of product creation on your part, but there are double benefits involved.
Kindle is a platform on Amazon that’s 100% free for you to use where you can self-publish your eBooks and reports to a large global audience. But as an affiliate, your goal is to promote other people’s things.
Affiliates are like all other marketers – they have to produce a variety of content – for their blogs, websites, email autoresponders, opt in giveaways, and more. So creating a short report shouldn’t be too difficult.
Your goal is to create these short reports, load them onto Kindle for sale at a low price point of $0.99, and let the book sell to the masses – with your link in it! The link will go back to your affiliate site, or even to your squeeze page where you promise them another book (only free this time) if they sign up to your list.
So let’s say you had a site that promoted household organization products. You could write an entire series of Kindle creations about how to organize various rooms in your house (and outdoors, too).
Start with a broad “How to Get Organized” book and then branch off into more specific areas. Kindle has a Select program that you can enroll in, too – and this lets you give the book away for five days out of the 90-day period.
During this time, you’ll want to sign up to promote it at all of the major Kindle promotion sites that like to feature free books for the day. This greatly expands your exposure because you’ll get free downloads from all of the people who signed up for notification.
Plus, Amazon Prime members can borrow your book from the lending library if you enable that feature. But you still get paid for the borrow – sometimes even more than what you’d make for selling it at your cheap price point.
If you choose not to use KDP Select, which restricts your eBook from being sold elsewhere, then you’ll have the opportunity to sell it on your website, too. But you might want to try it out first for at least 90 days to see how it works for you.
Make sure you avoid linking to products inside your Kindle eBook. That’s against the rules. You want to link them to your site so that you can capture their name and email address and then promote items in your niche for a long period of time.
Is Affiliate Marketing Automation A Good Idea?
There are many automation tools on the ‘net that supposedly help you free up some time and effort in running your business as an affiliate marketer. There are definite pros and cons that you need to be aware of before you begin using them.
Automation helps you avoid tasks that you dread. This can be beneficial because there are so many little tasks that we don’t look forward to, so putting a few on autopilot helps us continue enjoying the affiliate marketing journey.
Automation helps you do things better than you do manually. Sometimes there are tasks that we’re just not good at. An automated tool might be able to do things faster, easier or more thoroughly than we do them ourselves.
Automation tools mean you get to work on something else. Freeing up time is one of the biggest reasons affiliates utilize automated tools in the first place. It’s certainly a benefit to have less work on your to do list.
But automation isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, either. There are problems that can arise, so it’s important that you recognize where they can hurt your business.
Automation can prevent you from seeing errors that arise. Tools like software and plugins can have bugs in the system. If you have a completely “hand off” system for running your business, then you could go months without noticing that things aren’t working right.
It’s usually only when sales begin grinding to a halt that an affiliate heavily invested in automated tools goes to check things out – and discovers that there’s an issue with the tool, or perhaps a necessary upgrade they didn’t see that keeps it running properly.
Automation removes that human element that makes a connection with your target audience. Most automation tools simply remove a small task from your to do list. But there are those that remove you from your site entirely.
For example, any automated tool that whips up content or automates comment approval means that your site won’t carry your natural voice in it. It will be difficult for visitors to engage with you or trust you enough to click through on your links and act on them.
Automation tools can sometimes get you in trouble with the search engines, too. If they’re black hat tools that do anything illegal, or unethical, then you could find your site plummeting in the search engine ranks. It’s better to approach affiliate marketing from a morally sound perspective so that your profits increase over time and there are many affiliate marketing strategies that are above board.
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