Affiliate Program and Martketing Blog

The time has come www.virtualaffiliatetrainer.com has been launched, there have been a few delays along the way but with such a sound idea with tons of potential, you expect the creator to be sure everything is up to standard and working properly before launching. The last outcome any new website needs is a bad start, that could cripple a website forever.

So what have I been doing since my last post? Well I have done quite a bit on my project, not as much as I wanted due to family life and work commitments but its definitely all taking shape now.  Lets have a look at what I have achieved since my last post and I will explain the reasoning behind what I have done.

I have spent the majority of my time getting my review site of www.virtualaffiliatetrainer.com up and running. Its located at the main domain of this blog www.affiliateprogrammarketing.net. I am going to be using the review site for the SEO part of my project, where I’m using stompernet’s and Brad Callen’s SEO products. I have design the site to be search engine friendly by using the techniques outlined in their SEO products. I have designed the website by using tables in front page, I did this so the first part of the website the search engine spiders crawls is the information that is relevant to the keywords I am aiming to rank with the search engines. I have also wrote my website title and description around my keywords so the search engines will know exactly what keywords I want to rank for.

What I have done to my website so far is referred to as on-page SEO by the experts. What I am basically doing is making my website search engine spider friendly, so when the search engine’s spiders my site they will find it easier to locate the relevant information they need to index my site.

I have design the website to control how the page ranking is filtered out through the link on the site. What do I mean? First let me explain how page ranking is shared between websites. When you link to another website some of the ranking of the web page your linking from is passed through that link. The ranking of a web page is shared evenly between all of the links on the page. So for example if you have a ranking of 100 and have 4 links from the web page, each link would carry a ranking of 25.

Stompernet explained it best in my opinion. Image your web page is a bucket, the water going into the bucket is from your SEO effects. The outgoing links are little holes at the bottom of the bucket that the water runs out of into other buckets, which are pages on both your site and other people’s.

So when I say “control how the page ranking is filtered”, I am referring to blocking those holes in the bucket were I don’t want the water to go. See, not as hard to understand as most of the Gurus would make you think. In later posts I will cover the techniques I am using to control the ranking flow on my site and if those techniques actually work.

I have also submitted 4 articles to various article and ezine sites. I wrote these articles around the keywords from my list of 40 targeted keywords. I have shared the outgoing links from the articles between this blog, my review site and the site I am promoting. The reason I am linking to this blog and my review site is so that I can build some one-way links for SEO purposes. When I am fully up and running I will be concentrating on getting link partners for one-way links, which will give me most of my ranking for the search engine.  “Every little helps” and those links from my articles could mean the difference between top ranking and 5th ranking.

Finally,  I have completed the research for my ezine advertising and have identified 10 ezines that I would like to advertise with and contacted the owners to find out more information about them.  I am making sure that the ezine owners have a good relationship with their subscribers as I do not want to waste my money with an ezine owner that will only try to sell to their list. If the ezine owner has a good relationship with their email list, my advert will have a better chance of being read. The key to ezine advertising is the more people reading my advert, the more people will click on my link meaning the more money I will make at the end of the day.

Articles marketing is probably the most reliable way to ensure affiliate profits for years to come. The idea is to write articles on your choosen niche, products, website or whatever you are promoting and to unload these articles to article directories with links to what your promoting in a resource box at the end of the article.

The two ways article directories work for you by sending visitors to your website when people click on your link after reading the article and allowing people to use your article as content on their site, ezine, magazine and so on, this helps spread your link over the internet.

To come up with ideas for articles that would attach targetted vistors I had to do some keyword research on the site I am promoting. I made a list of about 400 related keywords and using Google’s free keyword tool, I then used wordtracker free tool to extract about 40 targeted keywords from that list that had approximately 50 searchs a day.

As I will not be targetting the high volume keywords for the product the theory is there will be less competition for the search engine positions on the keywords I am targeting and with a little SEO I should be able to pick up some good targeted traffic. From the 40 keywords I expect to get about 35 articles and lets say I get on the first page of the search engine for just 10 of them, it would give me potentially 500 targeted visitors a day for free, not bad really when on average it only takes an hour per article.

Below is my first article, tell me what you think and please be kind…    writing is not one of my strongest strengths!

Why do over 95% affiliate programs fail?

The main two mistakes affiliate program owners make when starting their program is they recruit affiliate’s before their website is ready and they do not provide their affiliates with the right materials to advertise their site properly.

You see,  most affiliate program owners set up a website without any real testing, then post their websites at places like clickbank or paydotcom and expect the money to flow into their bank account from hundreds of affiliates promoting their website.  After a couple of weeks without any sales they wonder whats gone wrong? Well It goes wrong due to their website not being fine tuned for maximum conversion and at the end of the day conversion equals profits.

Before a site owner starts getting affiliates for their website they should have fine tuned their website to the best layout for conversion. Fine tuning aspects such as different titles, different colors, where to place the buy buttons, price of the product, different bonus for the product, layout of pictures and text, basically any aspect that would increase those sales.

Once the fine tuning is complete the site owner will have the conversion rate of the website which is a very important bit of information to have when trying to get affiliates to promote a website. If the site owner can turn around to their potential affiliates and say “From testing my website on average I have had 15 sales for every 500 vistors, giving me a 3% conversion rate” the affiliates will know what to expect from the affiliate program and feel more confortable promoting for the website owner.

When the website is up and running the owner should start supplying their affiliates with the materials to promote their website. What do I mean by materials? I mean the site owner should do all the hard work for their affiliates, so all they have to do is spead the material over the internet. Give them articles to post, pay per click ads, ezine ads, press releases, banner ads, viral reports, emails and even go as far as supplying keyword research for the website.

Seeing affiliate programs from the affiliate’s view is the key here. If you were an affiliate looking for a product to promote and had to choose from an affiliate program that offered you a free report, keyword research, prewriten ads, some banners, email series and a conversion rate of 3% or an affiliate program that is just listed in a affiliate directory with no materials, which one would you choose? 

Exactly, its human nature to go for the easier options in life and when it comes to affiliate marketing the first choice is definately the easiest option for an affiliate to succeed. When any site owner sets up an affiliate program they should be looking at their potential affiliates as potential employees and for employees to do their work properly they need the right information, training and materials. Imagine walking into a new job and there is only a table with a product on it and your told to sell it, it just would not happen, so why do over 95% of website owners set their affiliate programs up like this?