You may have heard of affiliate programs, Or you may want a more in depth explanation. For all intensive purposes I'm going to outline what exactly affiliate marketing is.
Affiliate marketing is plain & simple – promoting other people's products on the web. I.E. John Doe has a product about “how to quit smoking in 7 days” & I have a website about the bad habits of smoking. John offers $25 dollars for every copy of his book that I sell though my website, blog or Pay per click campaign. (Google Adwords). By promoting this affiliate product on my website. I'm:
A). Providing relevant products and ads to my visitors.B). Earning a consistent income, without the work of making my own product.
If you didn't catch the example in point B. Then here it is again. Affiliate marketing allows you to pick and choose relevant products to promote alongside your website, product, or pay per click (Google Adwords). Promoting affiliates products saves you the time of making your own products & promoting. However you're doing all the work of promotion for half the earnings. Affiliate marketing is a large par of Internet marketing. You can setup websites targeted toward a specific affiliate product that you want to promote. Article Marketing also plays an important role in profiting from affiliate product promotion. You write quality articles that are on topic with the affiliate product you wish to promote. To promote & earn commission on the product you simply write an article and include your affiliate link in the reference at the end of the article.
Affiliate Products are found on what are called “Affiliate Networks” these networks allow products owners and advertisers to list their product or service on the network for affiliates to come and promote. A couple of popular affiliate networks are listed below.
CPAempire.com Clickbank.comEzine Article Marketing
This is perhaps on of the simplest forms of Internet & affiliate marketing. This is a multi-functional method of promotion. You can Drive Traffic, to your website, promote affiliate products, & even build back links. If you can master the simple task of article marketing, than there are not limits to how much you can make online.
The first step in writing an article that sells is to find out what keywords sell. Yes there are keywords that sell & those that don't. When users search Google they are either doing one of two things. Searching for information. Or Searching to buy something. Your goal as a marketer is to write an informative article while subtly pushing your affiliate product, service, or website.
The First thing you're going to need to find the keywords that sell is a keyword tool. This tool will find relevant keywords according to your niche & tell you weather or not the keyword(s) are getting any traffic from Google.
There are many great free keyword tools available to you. Some of them are listed below.WordTracker.com Keyword Tool
Wordtracker.com provides some of the best keyword research tools you will find on the Internet. It's a web-based service so you won't have to deal with figuring out software. Wordtracker gives you detailed information about your keyword(s) Such as amount of searches per day in all the top search engines: Google, Yahoo & MSN. Amount of searches per month. I like that Wordtracker shows you a detailed report of the completion of all the keywords you select. This way you can see wich ones are worth writing articles & content about. With keyword tools such as Wordtracker you can really speed up your keyword research and our what customers are really searching for. After all, you can't give them what they need unless you know what they're searching for.
To Learn more about keyword research in depth Wordtracker has put together a nice Free Keyword Research Guide for those that are still learning.While free keyword research tools are great to help you get the initial idea of what your customers are searching for, they fail to provide the finite details that some paid keyword tools can provide. These extra details can make a huge curve on your revenue for good or for worse. If you're one for details like me, I would recommend you try Keyword Elite for your keyword research.
You can preform some basic research right now. Pick out a keyword or phrase that best suites your topic niche. Navigate to Google.com in your browser and tpype in your keyword enclosed in quotes, then click search.
For Example: “entrepreneurship”Now look at the very top of the Google results. You should see something similar to the following: Results 1 10 of about 30,900,000 for "entrepreneurship"
Notice that the results returned over 30 million other competing pages for the keyword “entrepreneurship”. This means I would have to do a lot of work to rank or getting a decent amount of traffic for this keyword.
But Wait! - there's a better way. It's called “The Long Tail” which is taking the main keyword “entrepreneurship” and digging for other relevant keywords from that. Again this can all be easily accomplished with tools such as Wordtracker and KeywordElite.
Once you've found the keywords that are most relevant to your product, affiliate, or website than you can proceed with writing articles. There are some basic guidelines for search engine optimization within your articles. This will ensure that Google shows them the proper respect,and that they are most relevant to the users searches.
Below is a sample article example to show you how your articles should be setup with your keyword(s).Example of an Search Engine Optimized Article
A Long History of Search Engine Optimization
Before search engine optimization became the vogue, all that a web master had to do was to submit a page to search engines which do the job of content crawling through the use of a spider. The spider also searches for links and eventually indexes the relevant information. The search engine spider and the indexer basically did the hard work.
Web masters learned the value of optimizing a site’s position in the search engine results by mid-1990s. It was not until 1997 that the phrase search engine optimization was used to refer to this process. All sorts of SEO practitioners started sprouting from everywhere. Some worked for legitimate aims; others were out to do dirty business. One such dirty form of search engine optimization is the BlackHat SEO.
Notice: My keyword (search engine optimization) always appears in the title of the article as well as in the first couple sentences of the body content. This is the ideal way to layout an article for maximum exposure in the search engines.
We've covered a little bit of SEO & now you're ready to submit your article to Article Directories. Submitting to these directories will make you the expert on the topic. Users will find the articles in the search engine, read, and follow the advice in the article. Your goal is to see to it that they find your article interesting & helpful enough to follow the link in the reference. (your affiliate link, website, or product). Register and submit your articles to the directories listed below. Article marketing if done right can provide and nice stream of residual income, traffic and awareness for your company.
ArticleGold.com
ArticleDashBoard.com
ArticlePros.com
ArticleAlley.com
There are hundreds of article directories you can submit your articles to. To save you some time You can download a Free Article Submission Tool from TheDailyEntrepreneur.com.
The free article submission tool will defiantly save you some time with those article submissions. If you want something a little more advanced with more features and capabilities I would recommend this Article Submitter Software.