Affiliate Program Tutorial,
You've joined an affiliate program, Here are 18 steps to Take Next

Copyright © 1998-2005 Allan Gardyne

This Affiliate Program Tutorial aims to give you a quick overview.

It's your road map to success as an affiliate.

I've been earning a good living from affiliate programs since 1998. Based on that experience, this tutorial tells you the 18 steps to take to generate a useful income from affiliate programs.

No tricks. No gimmicks. Just solid, reliable methods designed to work for years.

You have the choice of many different ways of earning affiliate commissions.

In my experience, you'll have your best chance of success if you do the following. Find a niche and create a useful, interesting, content-rich, keyword-rich website on one topic and weave in affiliate links and AdSense ads.

This method – with the more recent addition of AdSense ads – has worked beautifully for me since 1998.

I urge you to master this basic method. It's a bit like serving an apprenticeship.

As part of your apprenticeship you'll learn SEO (search engine optimization) skills, copywriting skills and various other Internet marketing skills which will prove to be invaluable, whatever route you choose next.

With any luck, you'll have a bit of fun, too! I do.

I include Google's AdSense in this tutorial. Strictly speaking, AdSense is an advertising network. However, in many ways it's similar to an affiliate program. I think AdSense is fantastic. It's free to join, free to use and easy to use.

It's often much easier to earn good money from AdSense than affiliate programs, so it's essential that you include AdSense in your plans.

OK. Let's get started...

1. Set a goal. If you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you're going.

Let's start with a modest goal. Say you aim to earn a total of $300 (US) a month in affiliate commissions and AdSense revenue. Imagine what you could do with that money. A holiday? A better lifestyle?

I've kept the amount low, because it's important that you believe you can do this. Achieve small successes first, see the money in your hands or in your bank account, and then increase your goals.

Perhaps you have much larger goals. That's OK. Whatever your goals, I strongly recommend that you serve your apprenticeship by taking these 18 steps. They'll give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.

2. Find your niche. Read Ken Evoy's free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits you and your interests.

Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times.

Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.

You'll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It's much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.

Choose a topic that is easy to write about.

Even if you've already chosen a niche, I urge you to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make you change your mind.

You can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck – and a bit of keyword research – you may be able to do both.

Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until you've taken the next two steps...

3. Choose a profitable niche. Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you've chosen. Because you're planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Overture and AdWords.

You're going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don't rely on guesswork.

You must do this BEFORE you start building your web site. That's critically important.

Here's a useful free tool I like using for Overture research: pixelfast.com/overture/

Type in a phrase, for example, "hiking boots", click "Go", follow the instructions, and you can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Overture network of web sites.

You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.

Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.

Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. Here's how. Pretend you're going to do an advertising campaign. Start the process. Set up an ad campaign. (You're not going to advertise – you're just doing the research.) Follow these steps.

In step 2, "Create Ad Group", you'll find you can click on "Calulate Estimates" and "Recalculate Estimates". These show you the maximum you would have to pay per click to advertise for particular keywords or key phrases.

If you use Site Build It you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought of without it.

4. Research affiliate merchants. Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match your topic.

You want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. You can search the AssociatePrograms.com affiliate directory for ideas.

Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.

If you're lucky, you'll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions – the sort reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com.

You'll earn repeat commissions when "your" customers make more purchases.

5. Build a useful, interesting web site on your niche.

Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.

Show your personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. You need to connect with your visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like.

There's no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a web site. For that, you'll need a good instruction manual.

If you're short of money, you can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies.

You'll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual written specifically for affiliates.

Here are the two best options:

• For keen do-it-your-selfers, I recommend James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook
  
  James is a real been-there-done-that super affiliate.
  
  His instruction manual shows you how he builds sites using web authoring software.
  
  One particularly useful feature is his explanation of how he uses an innovative page-linking strategy to concentrate Google PageRank and send visitors to a small number of selling pages.
  
  He doesn't merely show how to do all this, with 40,000 words and 107 helpful illustrations. He also shows you his own network of successful affiliate sites.
  
  My only criticism is that he's a little brief in one aspect – researching and writing articles. I'd prefer to see more emphasis on building USEFUL sites rather than sites designed to be found in search engines.
  
  For long-term success, that's what I believe affiliates should do.
  
  As one observer noted, James comes across as a friendly shopkeeper.
  
  The most important fact is that James is highly successful, and shows you how exactly he does it.
  
  You can check out James's Affiliate Marketers Handbook here.
  
  
• For affiliates who want to simplify things as much as possible and automate the tedious techie stuff, I recommend Ken Evoy's Site Build It (SBI).
  
  SBI is a site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools, all in one place.
  
  Once you have SBI, you don't have to go scurrying all over the Net adding more tools and software. You have almost all you need in one package, so you can concentrate on the fun part – creating useful, interesting content.
  
  (Once you have SBI, the only addition you need to buy occasionally is a cheap, one-day subscription to Wordtracker. It's useful to double check the SBI brainstorming results against Wordtracker results.)
  
  SBI comes with a newly updated, truly comprehensive instruction manual, a step-by-step Action Guide.
  
  SBI is the tool I give my assistants.
  
  Ken Evoy's instruction manual is doing my work for me. First it taught Rupert and now it's teaching Ros how to build a high quality, successful, revenue-generating site.
  
  You could build a site without SBI, but using it saves you time and effort by simplifying the process.
  
  SBI teaches you how to optimize your web pages so they'll be found in search engines. After building a page, you click the "Analyze It" button and it tells you what you need to do to improve it.
  
  The SBI technique really works. Two of the SBI sites that Rupert built are included in the case studies on the SBI site.
  
  See the proof in the SBI case studies