Choosing An Affiliate Network To Work With

Choosing An Affiliate Network To Work With

In this post we will be covering some more details about choosing a niche, what products to promote as an affiliate marketer and choosing an affiliate network to work with. I promote a combination of physical products and digital products and make very good commissions from both.

I promote products from hundreds of different merchants and sell in more niches than I can even remember. However, the majority of affiliate products I promote come from a few affiliate networks listed below.

If you are selling digital products I suggest you join Clickbank.com

The advantage of Clickbank is that they approve all affiliates immediately, which makes it a popular choice for people starting out. I think Clickbank have some excellent digital products and you can apply all the techniques I teach on this website to both physical products and digital products sites.

If you are new to marketing online I suggest starting with Amazon for physical products and Clickbank for digital products. Once you get the hang of it and start making affiliate sales, then you can branch out and apply for some other networks that target specific niches.

Amazon

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Amazon needs no introduction, they are a massive online company who sell pretty much everything these days. As far as promoting physical products as an affiliate, I recommend starting off at Amazon. There are a few reasons for this, one is that the approval process is quite easy, and also they tend to convert traffic reasonably well. In fact if you send any traffic over to Amazon and they buy even a totally unrelated product to the one you were promoting, you still get paid commission for that sale. This is great because people often shop around when they’re on Amazon and buy more than one item, so your overall commission can be high.

Shareasale

http://www.shareasale.com/

Shareasale are a great network and they have plenty of very good products that you can promote as an affiliate. They have all kinds of different products such as outdoor equipment, sports, electronics etc…and the payouts can be as high as 20% in some cases. When you join this network you won’t get automatically approved to promote all the products in the network, instead you have to apply to the merchant from within the Shareasale interface. Some merchants will allow anyone to promote their products, and with these ones you will get instant approval, otherwise you have to apply. When applying it’s always a good idea to have some form of website to show, and if it’s related to their offer then that’s much better, or you might like to stick to the merchants that auto-approve.

Commission Junction

http://www.cj.com/

Commission Junction are the largest physical products network there is. They have a huge number of products to choose from, including well know brands. They have a similar set up to Shareasale, in that you do not get auto-approved for all their offers, but must instead apply to each one.

Clickbank

http://www.clickbank.com

Most of you will be familiar with Clickbank, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but if you’re not, then Clickbank is a great affiliate network for promoting digital products such as ebooks and software. The commission are usually high, usually between 50 to 75% for most products, and the approval process is instant.

OfferVault

http://offervault.com

Offer Vault is a great resource for finding affiliate products to promote. They are a network of affiliate networks and some products pay very high commission for sales and even for leads. Getting paid for leads means you get payed when people just give their email address even if they do not buy the product. If you have traffic going to a page and can find a product that fits well with the niche you are promoting, this can be a great way to make some good money with online online affiliate marketing. The down side is these affiliate networks do not usually auto-approve and it can be a bit tough to be accepted in however, it is sure worth the effort. There are some commissions that pay $40-100 just for a lead!

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Related Posts:

• How to Choose an Affiliate Program
• Finding The Right Niche Planning an Affiliate Site

SEO Training For Multi Product Sites

SEO Training For Multi Product Sites

Here’s a quick SEO training tip. When setting up a new site I like finding multiple keyword variations and make multiple posts or pages centered around the main product keyword. Then I keep doing this with multiple products until I eventually have created a multi product site.

A multi product site is a site that promotes more than one product in the same niche. This works great if there are lots of products in that particular niche. With a multi product site you can keep growing your site over time, giving you more flexibility and higher profit potential in the long term.

The main advantage of a multi product site over a one product site, is you have more flexibility with the products and keywords you choose.

For example you might want to build a site that is about “cameras” in general and therefore can promote any brand of camera, not just one model of camera. What I do with this kind of site is start small like a one product site, with a few products and once I get traffic to these pages and am making money, I then add more pages promoting different products in the niche.

This allows you to have much larger sites over time, with the added advantage that you don’t have to build a new site just to make more money, you can just add more pages to your existing site. The other advantage of this site is that search engines like Google like to see sites that are growing, and becoming larger authority sites over time.

When you do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) each page or post on your site has its own chance to rank at the top of Google. This means is that if you have more than one page talking about the same product and write about that product in a slightly different way on each page, you will get more pages indexed and ranking for those keywords.

A common mistake that newbies make is they think that their website ranks in Google when in reality it’s not a website that ranks in Google, but a web page, and every individual page has its own chance to rank for a keyword.

For example, one keyword might be a product name like ´ Ralph Lauren ´, and another keyword might be ‘ Ralph Lauren for men’ OR ‘ Ralph Lauren for women’.

New pages you add to these sites get indexed fast by Google and rank more easily too, where as starting with new sites takes time for Google to trust them.

If you choose this style of site then you need to still aim for the same target of at least three keywords each one getting 500+ exact match searches or higher in the local market.

NOTE: Another advantage of this style of site when you are an Amazon affiliate is that you can add a page that promotes a low priced item, which will most likely have less competition. The reason you would want to do this, is because although this product itself won’t bring you in much money it will increase your overall Amazon sales for the month. What this means is that you will move into the higher commission bracket.

Amazon starts you off at 4% commission, but if you sell 6 items, you move up to 6%. So the aim is to get those first 6 sales for a low ticket, high search volume keyword.

I also like to make the most of my backlinking efforts targeting the new keywords with a WordPress plugin called Automatic Backlink Creator. <== You can read more about that by clicking this link.

When you create a site with multiple products in the same niche, it is a good idea to have at least 3 to 5 buyer keyword variations of each product and write a story or new post centered around each keyword and soon you’ll have an authority site in your niche. It takes time to do this but if you target the keywords correctly, each time you add another product to your site, you’ll get more traffic and sales as the site keeps growing.

For more info on how to get backlinks and find buyer keywords, have a look at some of the related posts below.

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RELATED POSTS:

• High Quality Backlinks
• Profit-Pulling Product Name Keywords
• Best Backlinking Tips To Rank Better On Search Engines
• Jiggling the Web for Instant Search Engine Rankings
• Backlink Or Die! 7 Ways To Optimize Your Backlinks
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Convert Visits to Sales with “Buyer Keywords”

Convert Visits to Sales with “Buyer Keywords”

One of the biggest lessons I learned in my Internet marketing career is understanding how to find people online that are ready and willing to buy! Once I worked out how to do this, my Internet marketing efforts really started to take off. In this post I’m going to share with you some tips to help you master this vital online marketing concept, buyer keywords and convert visits to sales.

Finding the Buyers

Keyword data is the biggest factor that distinguishes online marketing from the offline world. Before the days of Google and keyword data, businesses relied heavily on market research companies to provide insight into the mind of the consumer.

These days we can simply analyze the keywords they type into Google and base a lot of our decisions on this. You might think this is obvious, however you would be amazed at how many people fail to grasp this.

Commercial Intent

This leads me onto my next point; ‘Commercial Intent’. This is simply judging how likely a person is to buy, based on the keywords they use in their search.

Ideally, you want to be driving traffic to your sites on keywords with high commercial intent, as these keywords will convert visits to sales at much higher rates than more general, information-seeking keywords.

Example Searcher

Let’s look at an example to demonstrate this point more clearly. If a person types “acne” into Google, I would consider this to be a low commercial intent keyword, the reason being that we can’t tell what their intention is at this stage. They may just want to learn about acne and how many people have it, or the main causes of acne. These searches are known as “information seeking keywords,” and they’re not likely to result in high conversions to sales for you.

However, let’s say that the person who typed “acne” into Google did in fact have bad acne and needed a cure. The next thing he/she might do, after they browsed some websites about acne, is head back to Google and refine the search a bit more.

They might start researching the kind of acne they have, and type into Google “Types of Acne.” This is not a buyer keyword, but it may reveal to the searcher that they have a type of acne known as cystic acne.

So they might now type into Google “cystic acne treatment” and read some more webpages about possible acne treatments that you can use. At this stage, the commercial intent of the keyword has increased, and the conversions to sales also increase with it. We know exactly what the searcher’s problem is and that they are looking for a solution for it.

You can take this even further by getting very specific, and get extremely high commercial intent with keywords like “buy cystic acne treatment.” When you see the word “buy” in the search phrase, the searcher is blantantly telling you that they are ready to buy.

Conversions & Profits

Essentially, the higher the commercial intent, the higher the conversion rate for keywords and the more profit you will make. Therefore, it is important to build your websites on keywords that have a high amount of commercial intent.

What you must keep in mind, though, are the traffic stats for a keyword. It’s all well and good to be targeting a super-high commercial intent keyword, but if no one is searching for it, then you won’t make a penny.

When I look at keyword figures I usually aim for no less than 500 exact match searches a month in the local market I am targeting. I then start with half a dozen keywords and build my sites from there, with the intention to grow the list of keywords I’m targeting out over time.

Also, I will often target lower search volume buyer keywords as my secondary keywords for a page. For example, if my primary keyword for a page is “cystic acne treatment” I might target “buy cystic acne treatment” as a secondary phrase to collect that extra bit of buyer traffic to that page.

Although there are several more steps to creating profitable affiliate sites, building on a solid foundation of buyer keywords is the most important thing to get right.