Alert: Embrace Affiliate Marketing For A Life That Matters – Part 4 of 5

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Say ‘Yes’ to life-long learning – to re-invent yourself – and to up-skill in this digital age.

To be perfectly honest, there has never been a BETTER time to WORK ENTIRELY ONLINE, work WHERE YOU WANT and earn a sustainable income.

Many people think it’s beyond them. Or they think it’s rubbish or a scam. Or they think it won’t work for them.

We’re sure you’ll agree that those are simply Excuses. Excuses standing in the way of a new, better, freer lifestyle. Excuses keeping people trapped in a rut.

You’re different than most people.

You’re learning about affiliate marketing because you’re willing to plumb the depths of the online world.

And you dare to dream.

So before we dive into the second step you need to focus on as an affiliate marketer or online entrepreneur, which is: Choose The Best Places To Advertise, let’s quickly recap Parts 1-3 of this training series:

Part 1 explains why affiliate marketing is by far the easiest way for a beginner to start making money online.

Part 2 delves into affiliate marketing lingo and the steps you need to take to succeed as a winning affiliate marketer

Part 3 is about selecting the right affiliate products to promote

affiliate marketing advertising

Billboards, Banners And Bus Stops

As you can appreciate, driving traffic is THE KEY to successful affiliate marketing. No traffic = No customers= No Commission 🙁

When it comes to affiliate marketing, one of the biggest points of confusion is exactly WHERE to advertise your affiliate links.

As traffic is a meaty topic – let’s break it down into bite-sized chunks.

So when it comes to advertising there are TWO main routes to take.

[1] You can do paid advertising or paid marketing like pay per click, solo ads, eBay classified ads.

[2] Or you can do free advertising methods like blogging, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), or video marketing.

We recommend you do ONE of each – so one paid method and one free method.

The reason why we suggest one of each is: free methods take a long while to gain momentum, but when they do gain momentum, they snowball and are almost impossible to stop. Paid methods deliver the goods (that is, targeted leads or traffic), but the traffic stops the second you stop paying.

And you need balance.

River vs. Hose-pipe

Liken free traffic methods to the River Amazon – many hundreds of little tributaries build-up to a flowing river, just like many hundreds of blog posts and articles and tweets, slowly trickle together to create a momentous flood of traffic that’s unstoppable.

But paid traffic is more like a Hose Pipe – pay, and the tap is turned on instantly to deliver traffic to the exact spot you want it. Stop paying, and the tap gets turned off, just as instantly. No more traffic.

So we’ll help you pick the best free method and the best-paid method to advertise your affiliate links.

With the Strict Proviso: you stick at that one method ‘through thick and thin’ until you get really good at driving traffic. And by really good, we mean, so you can drive traffic with ‘your eyes closed’!

We see too many people ‘dabble’ at driving traffic for 5 minutes and when they don’t get results so give up!!! It’s such a shame.

Understand?


high ticket affiliate program

Proof Of The Pudding

You probably think there are a million places to advertise, but the real “proof of the pudding” is knowing the most effective places to advertise your affiliate links.

Because not every advertising medium is created equal. Nor is every advertising platform is affiliate friendly.

Take Google for instance. It’s great for search and getting answers, but it’s not that fond of affiliate marketers advertising on it’s pay-per-click (PPC) platform. Largely because too many rogue marketers have taken too many liberties in the past to spoil things for the rest of us.

affiliate links

So Google like the search experience for their users to be quick, relevant, and informative.

So they don’t like marketers advertising links through to lead capture pages or to sales pages.

They like their search customer to be provided with information, navigation, and choice.

What about banner advertising?

We don’t believe it’s worth considering for most people either.

Banner advertising is where you post little promotional images, or banners, on other high-traffic websites, and (hyper) link the image through to the affiliate product you’re promoting. It’s become quite expensive for the best websites that have loads of quality targeted traffic, making it not economic for promoters of lower-priced affiliate products.

And advertising banners on the cheaper “warehouse” style websites are simply a waste of money, in our view, because there’s too much competition and visitors to those sites become ad-blind i.e.: all the ads are just “noise”.

What we’ll do today is share with you the ad media we use and recommend to affiliate marketers.

We’ll take paid marketing first.

Fast And The Furious

We highly recommend Facebook PPC – you know those little ads you see on the right-hand side of Facebook? Well, NOT those!

Facebook is a hugely powerful advertising platform for affiliate marketers, because:

  • it’s affiliate friendly
  • it has 1.9 billion users
  • it’s targeting is better than any other advertising platform
  • it’s affordable
  • you set your budget, so you can’t overspend

Now before you wrinkle your nose and run that shudder down your spine – thinking, “but Greg & Fiona, I can’t stand social media” – there are two parts to Facebook. There’s the social part where people spend, on average, 18 minutes PER VISIT, scoping each other out. And then there’s the advertising side. The advertising side is Facebook’s business model – it’s how they make money and keep their shareholders happy 🙂

If you have this “thing” about Facebook – just get over it! Embrace Facebook, else you won’t be a successful affiliate marketer!

Most people using Facebook socially have a profile, but to advertise your affiliate offers you need a Facebook page as well. So you might not have many friends on your personal profile, but you can still advertise offers on your Facebook page. There’s a distinction.

Facebook makes it easy to create a page:

promoting affiliate links

Why do you need a Facebook page?

Two reasons:

1.         Place affiliate links on your page as it’s like a business website, only it’s on Facebook. It takes moments to do, and can really pay off.

So your Facebook page can reflect you and what you stand for in the world. There’s no right or wrong content to post on it – just stuff you like, and your affiliate promotions too of course.

When people visit your page, they’ll get to know you more, by liking what you share – images, news, information (links!). And some of them (not all) will be curious as to how you’re doing and how you’re creating a sustainable income online.

So they’ll click around on your page. And when they click, they’ll click through to your affiliate offers and possibly even buy something.

This form of advertising is totally passive and costs you nothing but a bit of time. What’s sad is, most affiliate marketers overlook it.

2.         Run Facebook PPC (pay-per-click) ads to posts on your page

The wonderful thing about Facebook PPC ads is that they’re ultra-targeted and aren’t that expensive either.

Insider Tip: before you go anywhere near the Ads Manager on Facebook, draw up an outline of who your target customer is exactly. Who is your perfect customer?

Get real specific.

•           Male/Female?

•           Age Range?

•           Where they live?

•           Interests?

•           What do they read?

When you’re totally clear on what their problem is and what they do and like, you can use the targeting on Facebook in your advertising so much better.

Facebook‘s ads are so targeted you could reach all 30-year-old women named “Linda” who live in New York. If you wanted!

If you want to know the best-paid platform to advertise your affiliate offers, you should seriously consider Facebook PPC, but first, get totally clear on who you want to reach – and let Facebook do the reaching for you.

And . . . do post links to your affiliate offers on your own Facebook page too.

For more training on Facebook PPC, get instant access to our personal training for a measly $47 when you click here:

best affiliate marketing program

Slow And Steady Wins The Race

So we’ve covered our preferred PPC platform for paid advertising – what’s our preferred free method?

First things first though – we need to clarify – free doesn’t actually mean free!

Because with all allegedly ‘free’ methods of advertising, there are always little out-lays required along the way to support the traffic strategy! That’s the truth of it.

That said – our preferred almost-free method of sharing affiliate links is blogging. Hands down!

The reason why is: if someone reads a blog post review about a product or service, and they want to know more, they’re way more targeted than someone from a Facebook PPC ad who’s had their ‘social’ time interrupted, and sidestepped down a rabbit hole, so to speak.

They’re already part educated about what it is you have to offer.

Also – a blog post only needs to be written and published once, but it keeps ‘working’ for you over and over again.

We get opt-ins and make sales from blog post reviews we wrote three years ago! That’s what we mean when free traffic starts working – it’s hard to stop. Just like the River Amazon.

The thing about blogging is, you do need a website to post on, and you need to invest your time to write reviews and articles about the product/s you’re promoting.

We recommend the Digital Business Lounge as the one-stop-shop for your blogging requirements because it has every marketing tool you’ll ever need – like domain purchasing, multi-site hosting, WordPress website builder, WordPress training, Article Writing service, affiliate link cloaking software, lead capture page creation software, and tracking software. All this and it’s only $1 to get started.

affiliate offers

Yes, there are free blogging platforms out there like Blogger and Blogspot. BUT . . . this is your business – you want to be in control of it – and the ONLY way to do that is to have your own domain, your own website, your own online real estate which can’t be taken away from you!

Two-Pronged Approach

Blogging works in two ways:

[1]        Use Attention-Grabbing Headlines

Use benefit laden blog post titles to attract your prospective customer to read your post.

Then distribute your post on as many social media platforms as you can. You need to ‘tell people’ your blog post exists, so they can find it, go read it, and click on your affiliate link in the post.

Here are links to our favourite headline generators:

https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer

http://tweakyourbiz.com/tools/title-generator/index.php

http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker/

[2]        Keywords and SEO

Keywords are actually the keyword phrases people type into search engines like Google and Bing to find what it is they’re looking for. Use keyword (phrases) in your blog post so it can be found organically by the search engines, like Google.

To pick a keyword phrase that's relevant for the product you're writing about and that's a phrase which is actually searched for on Google, use Google's own Keyword Planner tool.

You do need to have an Adwords account (which is free to set up) to use the Keyword Planner tool, but you don't actually have to use that Adwords account!

(CAUTION – when you set up an Adwords account, Google force you to place your first ad before they give you access to the Keyword Planner Tool so be sure to make the ad squeaky clean and un-hypey, place a link to a fully compliant website in the ad, bid only $1 per day, then pause the ad once created. This is to protect your new Adwords account should you want to use it in future, either on Google or YouTube!)

When writing a blog post which Google will love, use your keyword phrase, a reasonable number of times throughout the post.

This is known in the industry as SEO – which stands for search engine optimisation – which means using a keyword phrase a deliberate number of times in your post so Google is left in no uncertain terms as to what your post is about.

WARNING though – if use your keyword phrase too much, Google WILL assume you're trying to game them and will blacklist your post forever! Not good.

best affiliate marketing training

So, here’s a little checklist for what to do:

How To Get Google Love

The idea is each blog post be centred around only one keyword phrase, which is sprinkled throughout the whole article, as follows:

Blog Post Title – the blog post title should start with your keyword phrase, followed by a hyphen, and then have some kind of descriptive phrase as to what’s in the article.

For example:

Email Marketing Software – What You Need To Know

Lose Weight Fast – How To Eat Healthily

Cure Acne – How To Take Clear Up Acne

Blog Post Body – should be 700 – 1000 words in length, with the keyword phrase, used 12-16 times, including:

  • In the first sentence
  • In the last sentence which should redirect the reader to a resource (i.e.: your affiliate product).  For example, “For more information on [keyword phrase], check this out [link to your affiliate promotion]”.
  • 10 – 14 times in the body, where one is formatted in bold, one in italics, and one underlined

Include your affiliate links wherever they're relevant.  That’s how you make money!

Posts should include a relevant image, where:

  • The image is renamed to match the keyword (example, keyword-phrase-here.jpg)
  • The alt tags of the image are the keyword phrase
  • The caption of the image is the keyword phrase

Spread Like Wildfire . . .

Writing the keyworded affiliate product review in a blog post with an attention-grabbing headline is only part of the work.

Next, you need to syndicate and distribute your post to get it working in each of the two ways. There’s simply no point writing it and publishing it if you don’t syndicate it and publish it.

This is only a small sampling.


how to chose an affiliate program

The 1,000 Foot View

The biggest affiliate marketing lesson we can share is:

Use one free and one paid traffic source that's reliable, affordable, and affiliate-friendly.

Do that, and you can succeed in selling any product, whether it be an affiliate product or a product of your own.

And for the fifth and final part in this blog series teaching you how affiliate marketing can help you quit the 9 to 5, live anywhere and join the new rich >> CLICK HERE <<

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