Affiliate Marketing Blueprint: Questions on Assessment Section
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.
Tags: affiliate marketing
Great post. Doing some sort of affiliate marketing has it ups and downs. Starting from scratch is one of the downs. Seo takes a while, so doing PPC first does make sense.
Hi,
I agree with most of the responses here that promote SEO along with PPC. Since PPC and other marketing solutions can be very easy and need investment significant investment too as compared to SEO. Though, SEO is a slow process but it yields good results in the long run.
Anyway, it is a great article and yet I have not gone through all of the modules. I hope to finish them soon.
- J.
Thank you Lisa. I am just starting out and your guides helped me a lot already.
I just strated aff mktg 4 years ago. played around with some affiliate network on that time and made some decent money from it. But it’s been a whole 4 years that I was out of this business and I have no idea what’s currently going on. I just staredt again to study and learn new methods and techniques about affiliate marketing. Looks like things have become harder!
There are many reasons why people want to start their own affiliate marketing business. It is important to note that there is a logical approach to operate a business and it is essential to follow a working blueprint so that you can start your business on the right note.
I’ve never had much success with PPC before, i’ve always thought it was an art and have concentrated on SEO (which is also an art!) but based on the info you provided i’ll give it a go!
I always run pay-per-click ads first before I SEO my website for any new keywords. I use the data to see what keywords actually convert. I’d rather not waste time optimizing for keywords that may bring traffic, but never convert.
Nice article!
To get the best seo results you need content, useful and unique content, and to get it you need to work hard to master your field.
WoW, Lisa. I haven’t know that the assessment phase of the blueprint is so important and crucial, until I read your article! Gosh, It looks like I found a treasure, after a long dive into the deep sea…
SEO ranking is a tough job. You got to constantly work at it to maintain your position.
PPC is great for discovering profitable keywords, if a keyword turns out to bring the right traffic and it turns out to get a high conversion rate it makes sense to go after it and spend a year on linkbuilding to reach top 5 in the serps. Pay per click is a great tool for research! Thanks for sharing your insights, I enjoyed the series.
Great post, I believe that affiliate marketing can be effective with the proper SEO methods and with the owners commitment to hire someone to get backlinks or do it himself.
Its a decision to make between developing a tidy, presentable page/products within a niche and actually making any money out of it – I kind of agree, don’t spend too long on the research/construction – get something up there to test but then be prepared to keep tweaking again and again
It is imperative that you work out which keywords will be effective for you. This is good advice Thanks..
your posts are truly a great help for affiliate marketers like us..
I really like your Blue print and I did get a chance to see those 5 points you put up, Thanks a bunch!
Affilate marketing is very profitable if you can assess your site from a visitor view. You can get a nice good template with some good offers and build good page with some nice images that attract eye and start driving traffic to your page by bookmarking, tweeting, SEO and payed ad campaigns. Thank you very much for the good information you shared here! More link to Ganhar Dinheiro e Renda Extra
Your modules have been a fantasic help to me, thank you very much
I was really intrigued by this affiliate blueprint thing as I saw alot of ads and promotion regarding this online lately. I appreciate your review and I am well enlightened. Thanks!
Excellent post, Lisa. Thanks for your guide, I’ve gained a lot of useful information now!
Very helpful, another thing is that a lot of people don’t realise that wordpress is no follow by default and need to decide if to keep it that way for all their links.
The modules have been a GREAT help to my sites success! Keep them coming.
Scott L.
Using PPC is a good idea to ‘test’ the water while you wait for the search engines to ‘catch-up’ and rank you for your keyword. I’m finding the returns for PPC are getting lower though as people shop around more for the lowest price and look at a number of options before purchasing.
Excellent post, Lisa. Thanks for your guide, I’ve gained a lot of useful information now!
That is true, (above comment) Wordpress gives no link love right out of the box. Many webmasters do not even know that they have no-follow on since you would have to visually inspect the code. I think Wordpress should make a statement, or better yet, a switch to turn nofollow on or off.
Regards
Dennis B.
Setting up a PPC campaign to test the market is not only essential for an affiliate marketing niche, it is also the best way to go for any business.
Excellent post, Lisa. Thanks for your guide, I’ve gained a lot of useful information now!
This has been a great and useful discussion happening here.I have onto this since a longtime.Especially the information posted by Lisa has been most helpful for me, thanks a lot for that.
Affiliate marketing has recently gained boost and not much people are aware of its importance.
As said by some mates here about SEO, IMO in addition to the traditional SEO methods,we need to find different ways of optimizing a website.Our task wouldn’t stop here, it is equally important to create an effective SEM strategy.
Excellent post! I have obtained more useful information about affiliate marketing and I owe it all to you
I agree that SEO is powerful but it takes time, I like the idea of using PPC because PPC campaigns and Adwords are the easiest way to targeting your keywords find out which keywords match up with the product you are selling.Many people earn a good living from it.
Yes, CommentLuv is a good plugin, although it doesn’t always link my posts correctly when I comment. KeywordLuv is even better because we can finally get to choose our anchor text without having to worry about whether or not the blog owner might be one of those anti-marketing people who will automatically delete any comments with keywords in them even if the comment is relevant. thank you
Excellent posts. I’ve just recently gotten involved in blogging and I’m trying to make sense of PR and SEO terminology. There’s a lot for me still to learn but I’m really looking forward to doing so.
It is very true that every one wants to see his site on the top rank of the search engine, Ppc is really a good option for promoting the web site, though its paid but its like an investment which will generate profit in the future by increasing the no of visitors.
Lisa,
This has been a very insightful post. I’ve been hesitant to get into affiliate marketing, but will begin to test the market out with a few of my sites.
Another great Post. Well, as seen in the other comments too, all agree that SEO is surely time consuming, just the fact that the Search Engine algorithms keep getting updated, the job just keeps getting more difficult.
I subscribed into your link. 100% I agree with you, in all kinds of work, you can never be successful if you don’t make any plan things, or even you do have a plan but you’re not following it. Every effort and time will be put into waste.
Excellent post, Lisa. Thanks for your guide
Setting up a PPC campaign to test the market is not only essential for an affiliate marketing niche, it is also the best way to go for any business.
Excellent post, Lisa. Thanks for your guide, I’ve gained a lot of useful information now!
The modules have been a GREAT help to my sites success! Keep them coming.
Great post lisa! kudos for this guide..Keep it up! I’m gonna come here often
Thanks lisa for this great guide
Hello all, Adwords is a great tool to earn money in online, but it requires great seo techniques. Other wise we will fall in to losses. But if we implement seo correctly and manage the campaign carefully and select the correct product to affiliate, Then we will get money. But all these steps are not so simple to tell. Experience gives results.