Strategy »

If you’ve been following the posts I put out right before the holidays, you’ve seen the Affiliate Marketing Blueprint.  The first 5 modules that I’ve posted all deal with assessing a niche.  My philosophy is that you want to waste as little time as possible figuring out which markets you can make a profit from. 

The problem is that it takes time to set up a website, an autoresponder, craft a sales letter or landing page, and put together affiliate links/banners/images, or even worse, create your own product.  If you’re not careful, you can easily waste a month on just these activities before you make any money from any given market.  It’s also possible to do all this work only to find out that you’re not ever going to make any real money from the effort you put in.

So the assessment phase of the blueprint is really important.  I put it together and use it to make sure that all the work I do will pay off.  It saves time and money.  If you don’t use this blueprint, or come up with some other way to assess markets before you spend time and money on them, you’ll likely end up burning yourself out and may give up.

If you’ve read the modules, you’ll see that I like to start with PPC campaigns, specifically Adwords.  I think it’s the fastest and easiest way to figure out which keywords directly match up with the product you’re trying to sell.  I like SEO and that’s my main method for getting large volumes of traffic, but it still takes some time, especially compared with the speed of using PPC.  You can set-up a campaign in about an hour or so with PPCS and start getting traffic immediately.  Even if you’re good at SEO and have a plan in place, you’ll be lucky to get a high volume page one ranking in several weeks.  So what I do is use PPC to find out the keywords related to my target market that will PAY me before I try to rank for anything.  Then after I figure out what keywords I’m making money from, I target those through SEO.  I know a lot of people don’t like to pay for traffic, but this is a great way to avoid wasting your time.  And time is something we’re all limited by.

I hope you’ll give the information I’ve put together in the assessment part of the blueprint a try.  And I’ve set up this post to address any questions you may have on any of the information I’ve covered so far.  I’ll do my best to answer your questions in the comments section below.