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Part 2: Affiliate Networks

The other reason affiliate marketing is harder today than ever is because of increased competition. Now with any product that converts highly, you can be sure that all the paid listings AND most of the organic listings are eaten up by affiliates or real merchants who are better than you at SEO, PPC and probably everything about affiliate marketing.

Life is tough.

Back in the day you could grab any old product from Clickbank, slap up an affiliate site and be the only one in the market... claiming commissions left, right and center. Today, not so much.

In fact I've pretty much given up on Clickbank for promoting affiliate offers with a few minor exceptions. There's just no point. The competition is so high that your potential profit isn't even worth the money or the effort it takes to generate it.

The only way a new affiliate can succeed is by finding better and less “tapped” opportunities than other affiliates. That's the easiest way to gain an advantage and we'll talk more about that later.

In this same category, we have issues of products and their merchants coming and going.

There's more regulation of selling on the internet now than there ever has been, and it means that existing merchants selling their products are frequently forced to re-evaluate, or flat out stop selling what they're selling.

New affiliate offers are here one week and gone the next, and when you've built a whole campaign around a product only to see it disappear as soon as you begin to get decent traffic...

that's not so fun.

If you want to be an Unstoppable Affiliate, your model has to be impervious to devastations of this kind as well. Fortunately that kind of invincibility is easy if you know how.

That's All?

You know what's great about this? That's it. We're done now with the problems. Those are the worst things you have to deal with in order to have the ultimate freedom-generating, passive income business in the world. Not so bad right?

Now they're all out in the open, all confronted, we can move on to the good news, and then the STRATEGY!

Why Affiliate Marketing Is More Profitable Today Than Ever

Don't get caught in the doom and gloom. Everyone else is caught in it, and that's why they've given up. It's not that "affiliate marketing" is getting harder... it's just that "doing it crappily"

is getting harder. Doing affiliate marketing properly is getting easier as all the crapsters drop out.

Let me give you a concrete example.

You've probably heard about how EzineArticles.com got badly hit in this last search engine update right? Everyone's crying about how their articles don't rank as well anymore, worrying that “article marketing is dead” and panicking that the same will happen to their site.

Me? I'm stoked about it!

Think of all those crappy Ezine Articles that were ranking above you in the search engines without doing any work?! Think of all the shitty Squidoo lenses, and associatedcontent.com pages and ehow articles that were beating you.

They're GONE now! You just lost maybe 20% of your search engine competition for all those long tail keywords!! What are you crying about?!

Doing things better than ezinearticles.com is easy. They're short, crappy, Adsense filled article pages with hundreds of outbound links on them... and most of the time NO backlinks coming in. Anyone half serious about their SEO could nail them with even mild effort.

I'm telling you: The fact that crappy results are getting blasted in the search engines is a GOOD thing.

And it doesn't stop there.

Like I said, there are more opportunities for affiliates now than ever. There are more offers, more networks, more keywords, more websites with more traffic... just more!

Lots of new companies are seeing the benefits of selling online and making the move. That means new affiliate programs opening up daily. When a new affiliate program opens up on a product that has an existing reputation... it's like money in your pocket and there's NO

competition.

When it comes to search, that long tail that we all know about is always growing. New keywords are appearing each month even for niches that have always existed. New modes of search like mobile and tablets are growing in popularity, increasing search volume for keywords across the board too.

Whichever way you look at it, affiliate marketing is still the best online business model there is. And I say that having tried many others.

It's the easiest, it's the cheapest, it's easily scalable, it's the lowest effort, it's the most passive.

If you're thinking of giving up affiliate marketing, you may as well give up online business all together, because you're not going to find anything easier.

Finally, if you think affiliate marketing is too hard, let me share a story.

One of our previous customers set up a website a year or so back. They didn't work on it much.

They posted mostly other people's content, they did a tiny bit of link building, and kept their mini site updated with some RSS feeds. Not great techniques, probably not even anything that I'd recommend for the perfect affiliate marketer.

I caught up with this customer recently and found that they'd gotten some rankings for some random keywords that they hadn't even found in a keyword tool. Long tail keywords that they hadn't even specifically targeted.

They were happy because their site with only a small amount of traffic from some obscure keywords was generating a passive $200 a month in affiliate income.

Of course that's not a lot of money, but it wasn't a lot of work either, and mostly not even the right work!

The ability to easily generate income with search and affiliate marketing is as high as it's ever been, and even higher for people who know how to do things right.

The amount of easy money you could make... the amount of passive income... the utter level of freedom you could have in your life if you could only capitalize on all of these opportunities that are available to you, is completely beyond your comprehension.

Let's talk about capitalizing on some of that opportunity.

Unstoppable Niches

The first part of creating an unstoppable affiliate income is operating in “unstoppable” niches.

What's an unstoppable niche? This is an interesting discussion.

First, an unstoppable niche is “evergreen”. It's one of those niches that is never going away.

One that even in 20 years time, people are still going to be looking for information on it. They might not be looking for the SAME information, but they'll be wanting information. Evergreen is unstoppable ingredient part 1.

But telling people to enter evergreen niches in isolation is not such good advice. I've had sites in the weight loss niche that didn't make money. Ditto for dating, insurance, and many others.

There's more to this puzzle.

An unstoppable market is one where there are multiple quality products to sell for a good commission. That's for a couple of reasons.

If you're in a market with only one thing to sell, you can face problems. What happens if the merchant makes a change to their page and your traffic stops converting? Or if they change the commission? What happens if the merchant removes the offer? If you don't have contingencies, any one of these things happening will result in a hit to your income. Not to mention, when something like this happens after you've spent months attaining search traffic, that's a hit to your time, and your LIFE too. The possibility of promoting multiple, quality, high commissioned products... that's unstoppable quality number 2.

Next up, BIG and DEEP markets. You might think “evergreen” and “big” are the same, but they're not. Many niches are evergreen, they just aren't that big. Gardening is something that people are probably going to do forever but compared to other markets, it's not... BIG.

A BIG market is one with so much volume that even making a small dent in it gets you big traffic and big results. A BIG market is one where big money is being made. A BIG market is Copyright www.UnstoppableAffiliate.com - Page 10

one with a lot of competition, but so many small pockets that there's always room for more. A big market is slightly harder to break into, but the reward for doing so is disproportionately high.

What about deep? A deep market is where there are a large volume of keywords and keyword groups with revenue potential. If that's not clear, I mean, a large number of keywords that get a significant number of searches. The perfect Unstoppable Affiliate site is one where you're ranking and generating revenue from a large number of keywords. This means that even if a few pages on your site got hit for some reason, the remainder would generate enough traffic that you wouldn't be significantly affected. That happens when your market is both big, and deep, because it means you've got lots of profitable keywords & rankings that are each bringing you a significant amount of traffic.

Big & Deep: That's Unstoppable quality number 3.

In fact there are more characteristics of an “Unstoppable Niche” that we can't get into here.

You can head to www.unstoppableaffiliate.com to find out more.

The bottom line is that when you're in the right niche markets, making money as an affiliate becomes a totally different game. Great keywords are easier to come by, rankings are easier to attain, traffic converts at a higher rate and the commissions are fatter. Entering a great market is the key to having an unstoppable affiliate income.

Though of course it's only the first part of the puzzle.

Let's move on to Unstoppable Affiliate Sites...

Unstoppable Affiliate Sites

First up, it's time to rehash a timeless affiliate debate, hopefully throwing some slightly new light on the issue.

The question is constantly asked: Is it better to create one site per product, or create one site that promotes multiple products. I've done, and had success with both, so I can tell you a few things...

Both options have their pros and cons. Using one site per product means you can always use the exact keyword in the domain name, which is a big advantage in the search engines: means you can rank a lot quicker. In fact, months quicker in my tests. But at the same time, this model means you constantly have to create new sites. That's a bad thing because new sites are the hardest to get traffic to. Build one link too many on your new site and you'll face a sandboxing, which is now more intense than ever. More about that in the full UA course.

With the multiple product model, you face a greater challenge to generate those initial rankings, because you don't have the keyword targeted domain name, BUT you end up with a bigger, more authoritative site in the long run which makes it much easier to rank new content on. Further, you don't need to keep starting over with your link building. You're always building links to the same site, and with every new product you promote, it takes less and less link building work to get your results, because the domain you're building on is more and more authoritative each time.

There are even more factors than these though.

Based only on the above, I've at times leaned toward the latter. One problem...

When you work on the “one big site” model (or more usually “a few big sites”) then in a way you're putting lots of your eggs in few baskets. If that one big site gets punished in the engines (which even when you think you've done everything right, CAN still happen), you take a big hit in income. At least with the single product model, when one site gets hit it's no big deal –

there are many more like it, all contributing their little bit to your revenue.

Bottom line? An Unstoppable Affiliate site arsenal has both of these types of sites. You're fully diversified, you're getting the best of both worlds, and you're capitalizing on each individual opportunity that arises in a way that's most profitable and most unstoppable.

How An Unstoppable Affiliate Site Looks

I still call what we do, making “mini sites” but like I said at the beginning, “mini sites” aren't what they used to be.

If you think your 5 page mini sites are going to continue to stick for years in the search engines then it's time to give up affiliate marketing. What's needed is an efficient way to create bigger sites easily, and build them to the highest quality possible without wasting our entire lives.

So what do we mean by “big” this time, and what do we mean by “quality”?

A bigger site is one with more content, more indexed pages, more consistent updates.

Originally I advocated against adding new content to your sites. It can be very time consuming when you have multiple sites, and there was never much benefit to it for it's own sake. Today it's different.

Now if you're starting a new site, and you aren't adding content to it at least once a week or so, it's going to be hard to pursue a proper SEO campaign and quickly generate traffic & rankings.

If you have an old domain, registered before 2009 it's a different story. You can add no new content and you'll be fine.

I don't mean huge sites. Most of our sites have between 10 and 40 indexed pages of content.

That's not out of the reach of anyone reading this report. They're just not “mini sites” in the old school sense.

So “big” is easy this time. It's not really “big”, just “bigger”. What about “quality”? That one's trickier.

The reason we need more “quality” is mainly to please the search engines. We can sell to our prospects perfectly well without a lot of what the search engines require of us. In fact, taking a lot of the steps that Google requires of us actually hurts your conversion rate. So we're always walking that tightrope between the two forces: We need to be able to convert our readers to buyers AND have a site that a normal person from Google would say is good enough quality to be in it's index.

My definition of a site achieving both those aims is this: Quality Site: “One that when a visitor comes to it, they can quickly see that it contains what they're looking for and so they'll stay on the site, but only long enough to find, and exit via your affiliate link.”

As an affiliate that's the best you can do. You don't want a site where your prospect digs 10

pages into your content and stays for half an hour. That's what Google would want. But that doesn't make sales. That's our balancing act.

Note the two things we're aiming for here: First, to keep our visitor on our site. Factors like time on site & bounce rate are confirmed ranking factors and they seem to have become more heavily weighted in the algorithm after the recent Panda update. Having that user know immediately that our site is high quality and that it contains what they want are more important than ever.

Second is making sure they both find our affiliate link and desperately want to click on it.

So how do we achieve that? A few ways: Layout. Structure. Appearance.

Layout

In this area are some things that I've always tried to avoid doing, but more recently have been forced to accept as important, possibly even mandatory.

First, header graphics.

A quality header graphic can improve your “time on site” data, lower your bounce rate, and improve your conversions simultaneously. Worth spending $20 on? I think so. Instantly having your readers get the “sense” that your site is real, your content is trustworthy, and your opinions worthwhile is worth it's weight in gold. A nice header graphic can take you part of the way there.

Another point? Fonts. Seems like the most boring of all subjects for a report on making money, but since the Panda update, things like this are exceedingly important. What size is your font? I've been going with 14 or 15pt on our sites recently just so there's no chance of any of my readers squinting. What font do you use? Fonts like Georgia (this font) are actually made to be read on computers so are much easier on the eyes. Fonts like Arial are much harder on the eyes for extended periods of reading. When a visitor's eyes gets that hint of tiredness, they'll hit the back button. Again, we're increasing the time users spend on our sites, and by doing so, improving our search engine rankings.

There's plenty more we could talk about with regard to layout, but for the sake of fitting everything into this report, we have to move on.

Structure

For a small site (that includes us too – 10-40 pages is small) structure is pretty easy. Having a good structure means having a site that showcases your content as simple as possible and makes it as easy as can be for both humans and search engine spiders to navigate.

A good structure includes two sitemaps... both an XML sitemap for the search engine spiders Copyright www.UnstoppableAffiliate.com - Page 15

and a real sitemap for your readers. There are plugins for both of those in the WP database.

The XML one is easy to find, but for the human sitemap I use one called Archive Sitemap Generator: search it in the plugin database. They're both very easy to set up too.

A good structure means good internal linking. Each of your pieces of content should have a link to at least one other piece of your content, with of course, the anchor text of the keyword that, that piece of content is trying to rank for.

A good structure means a simple sidebar with only the most important elements: usually a categories widget for a bigger site, or a recent posts for a smaller one. My perfect sidebar sometimes also includes some blogroll links like to important posts on my site that I know a lot of people come looking for. For example, one product we sell gets a lot of searchers who can't buy from the regular affiliate link because they're not from the US. I put a link in the sidebar for the stores of the other countries, Canada, Australia, UK etc, and those links are some of my highest revenue earners. Those are the kind of decisions that you need some analytics to be able to make, but that are extremely profitable when made. Finally, this sidebar configuration doesn't include your ad banner which we'll talk about shortly.

Even with regard to site structure there is more we need to discuss but... you know the drill.

Appearance

Appearance is similar to layout but also in my mind includes the set of decisions related to how you position your affiliate links/banners. Appearance I think of as just generally how your site looks, both to a search engine and a human.

How does it look to a human? Ask yourself: What's the first thing someone sees on this page?

If a prospect came to the site, would they IMMEDIATELY know that it contained the object of their search? If not, how far would they have to scroll before they knew? Why is it not easier for them?

How does it look in terms of the users ability to gain value from it? Is it big thick blocks of text Copyright www.UnstoppableAffiliate.com - Page 16

that just seem like too much “effort”? Does it engage your readers with variation, bolding where needed, italic for quotes, pictures to demonstrate your points and keep the reader interested etc?

That's the human side. The search engine side?

We know from Google's own documentation that the algorithm makes calculations about what percentages of your page are taken up by advertising compared to taken up by content. They have ratios of content to ad space that they deem to be higher quality than others.

Here's an example of a classic conflict between conversion optimization and search optimization: It's recommended for higher conversions to have a banner or call to action right at the top of your content, above the fold. But when Google analyzes what's above your fold and determines too much of it to be ad space, you might see a disadvantage in the search engines. What do you do? It's that balancing act again.

Here's what we've been doing.

Any given piece of content contains a maximum of 2 affiliate links/banners. Then there's one banner at the top of the sidebar so a good part of it is visible “above the fold” without it cutting into the content. That seems to be the best tightrope walk possible and it converts extremely well.

The Key To Creating Unstoppable Affiliate Sites With Ease The whole reason affiliate marketing is cool is because it's supposed to be easier, less work than other models. And while it can't be as easy as it used to be, we can still create ways to do the things that have to be done with minimal effort. In short, to create quality sites with ease.

The absolute key to this aspect is: killer templates.

A template that you just repeat every time. So the same footer links, the same sidebar widgets, Copyright www.UnstoppableAffiliate.com - Page 17

same banner positions. It's not much harder to replicate quality than to replicate crap.

Replication is doing the same thing repeatedly - and that's always easy.

Once you have a Wordpress theme that works, banner placements that work, a footer that's got everything it needs, a sidebar with all the right elements, you can have it all “hard coded”

to your template, so all you need to do is upload it on every new site, and everything is done in one hit. You can find coders on any of the freelancer sites that will find it all too easy to do this for you for $20-$50 depending on exactly what you want.

While we're on themes: One of the best themes I've ever used is the free, premium Flexibility

theme. Get the elements you like hard coded to that and you'll be made in the shade!

Templates aren't just for your theme either. Content templates are perhaps the most important of all. How do you knock out lots of high quality articles that please the search engines, keep readers on your site, AND convert like crazy? A killer template. This applies whether you write your own stuff or outsource it.

A content template might be something like this:

First paragraph, introduce the issue of the keyword and tell the reader what's in the article (so they know it's just what they're looking for and they read on.

Second paragraph expand on it. Third paragraph introduce a solution (what you'll be promoting) but remain neutral and unexcited. Fourth paragraph, quote other websites where users of that solution have had success. Discuss the “reviews” this solution has had. Fifth paragraph talk about the price or value of that solution and whether there are discounts/bonues anywhere. Sixth paragraph make a recommendation and include a call to action.

Once you've written a few articles you can create an extremely specific template that can be applied very broadly to most niches you'll be likely to enter. You can either follow the template for every time you need to create a new piece of content or send the template off to your Copyright www.UnstoppableAffiliate.com - Page 18

writers and get back a high quality piece of content. So you say to them, “When I send a keyword like X, produce an article in the format and with all the same elements of this one here at X.”

Once you've replicated anything a few times, you start to find it very easy. Suddenly you're knocking out quality content, quality sites and pulling serious traffic from them, without much effort. The content Josh and I create for our minisites is usually 800-900 words an article and we bang out articles in half an hour... usually on subjects we know little about.

Repeat: Templates are vital. Anyone can produce crappy sites and crappy content quickly. But producing quality quickly requires templates... systems.

When you've got an Unstoppable Niche and Unstoppable Affiliate sites, all you need for big income is Unstoppable Traffic. Ahh, that all important subject. Let's explore...

Unstoppable Traffic

Before we talk about unstoppable traffic, there are some facts we need to lay down.

In short, the days of “fast traffic” - at least fast FREE traffic – are over. Really they were never here – not since 2005 anyway. You can get rankings quickly, maybe within a week or a few days, but that same ranking won't stick, you can almost be sure of it. FAST rankings that ALSO stick are difficult to obtain, BUT...

It can be done.

I don't mean “rank on page 1 in 48 hours” fast. I mean real, quality free search traffic, within your first month-2 months, that won't be GONE the following month. There are certain strategies you can use to make this possible.

Further, the obvious point must be made: Search isn't the only possible form of traffic. If for whatever reason you don't want to wait a month for your high converting traffic, you can bring high quality visitors from elsewhere. That's something we'll discuss further in Unstoppable

Affiliate.

Finally before we go further, remember: Our goal as Unstoppable Affiliates is to create fast traffic and fast income that LASTS. Our traffic systems need to be impervious to slaps, updates and whatever else could defeat it. Here's a little about how to achieve it...

So let's first remember that the things that stop our traffic from being “unstoppable” are always more to do with on site factors than your link building or traffic generation activities.

As much speculation as there is about it, there's really no way to generate a “penalty” because of some link you built. The one exception is the “sandbox” effect with new websites. Certain things you can do with your link building during that early phase of your site's life can cause your website to jump in and out of the index constantly, and that in itself is a penalty.

Anyway, all this means is that you can't generate unstoppable traffic unless you've done everything right up until this point... unless you have an unstoppable niche and an unstoppable affiliate site you can't get unstoppable traffic. Remember that.

Let's talk briefly about link building. As I said, incoming links to your site are judged by the search engine algorithm as having a value – let's say it's 0-10. The worst link you can get has no value. It does nothing to improve your site's rankings. There are no minus links. You can't get punished for a bad backlink because of the ease with which your enemies could manipulate such a system to attack you.

BUT... the value that any given link has isn't set in stone. Google can change their mind about how valuable they think a backlink you have is. So they might originally call one group of links you have, a value of 3 each. Then in a few months, they crack down on that type of link, and drop it to 1.

Using this “points” basis, let's say you were ranking in position 1 for your main keyword and you had 300 points (the cumulative total value of all your backlinks). Your competitor in number 2 has 250 points, and (for the sake of this example) let's assume the many other factors are equal in both your cases.

If suddenly 20 links you had, that were previously given a value of 3, come to be valued at zero, you lose 60 points... just enough to drop you down the rankings below that

Unstoppable Affiliate by Andrew Hansen - HTML preview

Part 2: Affiliate Networks

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