Internet Marketing Secrets For Beginners

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

Welcome to “Internet Marketing Secrets for Beginners”. In this video series and accompanying ebook, I am going to be sharing with you the amazing world of affiliate marketing. I will be taking you step‐by‐step through the process of beginning affiliate marketing, selecting a product to promote, setting up a basic website blog, and promoting your site. Let’s go ahead and get started with a basic discussion on affiliate marketing.

Wikipedia defines affiliate marketing as “A method of promoting web businesses where an affiliate is rewarded for every sale through their efforts”. Now the good news is that just about anything that you can find on the internet, has an opportunity for affiliate marketing.

Let’s say, for example, that I have a website that I created to simply share some tidbits about dog training. I started it just for fun and over time have built up quite a nice little site. There are people coming there every day because they want to learn more about dog training. How great would it be if I could advertise a product to them, simply by creating a basic ad, and every time a visitor clicked on the ad, and made a purchase through my link, I would get credited for the sale!

Initially I dismissed the concept of affiliate marketing. I think it was because I didn’t feel like going through all of the trouble of selling something when I was only going to get like a 5% commission on the sale. Boy, was I wrong!
It is not uncommon to find affiliate products where you will get to keep over 50% of the sale!

Take, for example, that dog website I shared with you. There is a dog training program on clickbank that pays you 75% of each sale that you make. This means that if a customer buys a product that costs $40, you would get $30 of that. Isn’t that incredible?

To hear more about affiliate marketing, please refer to Video #1.

Video #1

WHY AFFILIATE MARKETING IS AWESOME

Before we go any further, I would like to talk about the basic advantages of affiliate marketing: Why Affiliate Marketing is Awesome

Countless “everyday” people are successful with it
You don’t have to stock physical products
You can sell anything you can think of
There are many, many tools and resources available for help
Easy to scale once you are successful
It’s free!

As you can see, there are a lot of reasons to be doing affiliate marketing. Believe me, doing this is not as hard as you may think. In fact it is about a million times easier, and less involved than opening a physical business. With affiliate marketing, you don’t need to carry stock, have a physical store, heck, you don’t even need an office. If you have a computer, you can do affiliate marketing!

To hear more about why you need to be exploring this opportunity, be sure to check out Video #2.

Video #2

FINDING A PROFITABLE NICHE

The first thing you need to do is figure out what type of market or “niche” you want to get involved in. Just about anything that you can imagine can be a niche. Take some time and think about your hobbies, and things that interest you. One great way to brainstorm for niches is to walk into a magazine store. If there is a magazine about a certain subject, there certainly is enough interest in that market for you to make it your niche.

Here are a few tips on finding a profitable niche: Finding a Profitable Niche

Is there money in this niche?
Is there enough interest in this niche?
Can this niche be “sold to”
Do not be intimidated by the “super hot” niches

Just make sure that whatever niche you choose, there is money in it. An example of a poor niche would be a group of people that try to get items for free. If they are looking for free stuff, they probably aren’t going to want to buy your product!

Please view Video #3 to learn more about choosing a niche.

Video #3

CHOOSING AN AFFILIATE PRODUCT

Once you have a niche, it is time to start looking for an affiliate product. One great way is to simply type your niche + affiliate into the search box in google. You could also try going to one of the bigger affiliate groups, which include:

ClickBank.com
TurboAffiliates.com

These companies specialize in bringing together tons and tons of companies, and connecting them with affiliates. In the next video, I will be talking specifically about working with Clickbank, whom I feel is an excellent affiliate company to start with.

Here are a few additional tips to consider when looking for an affiliate product: Choosing an Affiliate Product

What is your niche “hungry” for?
Brainstorm by performing searches and looking at ads
Review the clickbankmarketplace
Is the product selling well?
Review the history of potential affiliates

Please refer to Video #4 to learn more about choosing an affiliate product.

Video #4

THE ADVANTAGES OF CLICKBANK

If you are just starting out with internet marketing, I am going to suggest that you work with Clickbank to make your first affiliate sales. There is no place quite like Clickbank. Signing up for an account there (which is free by the way) gives you immediate access to over 100,000 products which you can then sell.

Here are a few reasons why I like working with Clickbank: The Advantages of Clickbank

Gives you access to over 100,000 products
Easy to get an account
Established company with a positive reputation
Everybody else is!

Please refer to video #5 to see me talk a bit more about Clickbank, and show you around a bit.

Video #5

ANALYZING THE CLICKBANK MARKETPLACE

Now I would like to show you how you can browse through Clickbank’s thousands of products and find ones that are worth pursuing. Please note, not every product on Clickbank is a guaranteed moneymaker! There are a few key things to keep in mind when browsing through the marketplace:

Clickbank Stats
I would like to give you an overview of the most important stats that Clickbank provides you with when analyzing their products

$/sale: This is the total amount of money that you will make from each sale of this product.
%/sale: This is the percentage of the sale that you get to keep. It is not unusual for this to be above 50%.
%refd: This is the percentage of sales that this vender makes through other affiliates. In other words, this tells you if the vender is making a majority of the sales him or herself, or if the affiliates are doing it.
Grav: Stands for “gravity”. This is a number that gives you an idea of how popular and in demand the product is currently on Clickbank. A gravity above 4 is considered to be pretty good. If a product has a gravity above 20, it’s selling like hotcakes!

Please refer to Video #6 to see me talk a bit more about how to analyze the products in the Clickbank marketplace, and what you should be looking for.

Video #6

CREATING YOUR HOPLINK

Once you have chosen a product, you will need to get your personal affiliate link. Affiliate links are called “hoplinks” at Clickbank (and every time someone clicks on it, it is considered a “hop”).

To get your own hoplink, simply log on to your Clickbank account and head to the marketplace. Once you are there, do a search and locate your product.

You will see a link entitled “create hoplink”. Simply click on this link, and enter your Clickbank ID in the box. It will produce a link that looks something like this:

http://AffiliateID.productID.hop.clickbank.net

Once you have your personalized link, all you need to do is send people to it and once they click on it and purchase the product, you’ll make $$$.

Take your hoplink and paste it into a notepad or spreadsheet file, so you can keep track of it. We will be using it in a bit.

Please feel free to review Video #7 to see me create a hoplink at Clickbank.

Video #7

CREATING A FREE BLOG

Now that we have our very own hoplink, it’s time to create our very own website. Actually, we are going to create a specific kind of site called a “blog”. For those of you that aren’t aware, blogs are a fantastic platform that are very user friendly. With just a few clicks we should be up and running with a personalized blog in no time, all set to sell our product .
This guide is going to focus on creating a free blog at WordPress.com. Some of you may be wondering why I am not recommending that you run out and get your own hosting and domain name. You are certainly free to do that. However, the purpose of this guide is to keep things as simple (and free) as possible, allowing you to completely focus on setting up your first site and making some cash. Once you have the hang of this, I am going to strongly suggest that you do buy your own domain and hosting. But until you have the basic hang of affiliate marketing, why complicate things?

Signing up for a free blog is very easy. Just head to : http://wordpress.com And sign up for a free account. I suggest using a free email account rather then your own, to protect yourself from needless spam. I like to use gmail when creating blogs on WordPress.

To see me talk a bit more about WordPress and sign up for a free account, I suggest you review Video #8.
Video #8

PERFORMING EFFECTIVE KEYWORD RESEARCH

If you aren’t doing proper keyword research before you build your blog, you are taking a stab in the dark at your pages becoming popular. Just writing on your niche isn’t enough, you need to be spending time researching and discovering the best keywords to target.
The basic premise of keyword research involves finding keywords that have:

A reasonable amount of searches per day/month
A reasonably low amount of competition on the internet for that specific phrase.

I highly suggest and recommend using Matt’s Free Keyword Tool to do your keyword research. You can download it for free here:

http://MattsFreeKeywordTool.com

There is also a free video series that comes with the tool. I am going to highlight the keyword research process for you here.
You basically want to avoid two problematic areas:

Keywords with too much competition (you would not be able to rank high enough)
Keywords with too little search volume (you may rank high, but still get very little traffic)

The keyword tool will help you find keywords in that “sweet spot”, where they are receiving a fair amount of hits per day, and there is little competition. Just how much competition should you aim for?

Matt’s Keyword Gauge

Please refer to video #9 to see me talk more about Effective Keyword Research.

Video #9

CREATING AN OPTIMIZED POST

Now it is time to start creating content that we can put up on our pages. You might be wondering where in the world you are going to get content. Here are a few easy solutions: Creating Your Content

Research your niche and find out what people what to hear
Review products that you are trying to sell
Pull content from article directories and write an introduction and conclusion
Use public domain material
Pay someone to write content for you

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure your content is going to be interesting to your target audience. One thing I like to do is research the niche I am working with and find out the types of things that people have questions about. For example, if I am working in the “dog training” niche, spending a little time in dog forums will teach me that a lot of people have a problem with their dogs chewing up their furniture. Sounds like a great subject to write about, especially if I can offer some solutions to these desperate people!

Once you have your content created, there are a few things you can do to “optimize” it. By optimization, I am referring to getting the content ready to perform well in the search engines. This can be done by taking key parts of the content, the keywords we want to rank for, and emphasizing them to the search engines. Here are a few things we can do to optimize:

Pay Attention to Keyword Density: It is helpful to make sure you are using your main keywords a certain amount of times throughout your content. To put it plainly, we don’t want to use the keywords too much, or too little. I have found a comfortable density to be around 2.5%.
Emphasize Important Keywords with Bold, Italics, and Underlining: When creating your page, you can usually use simple HTML tags to emphasize your main keywords. Here are some examples:
Bold: your keyword
Italics: your keyword
Underline:your keyword
Header Tags: A header tags is a part of your page where the font is larger, and is reserved for the most important text on the page. To create a header tag, simply use this syntax:
<h2>your keyword</h2>
There are actually different levels of headings, 1‐5. I typically use h2 when emphasizing my keywords (the larger the number, the smaller the text will be, i.e. “h1” is seen as the most important).
Utilize Related Keywords: When creating your content, try to use a lot of related keywords. This means that if you are talking about dog training, you will also be using keywords like dog collar, dog leash, dog obedience, etc. This is typically done naturally as you write your content, but I wanted to point it out here. Sometimes people really try to focus completely on one keyword, and having diversity in your page and including other related keywords seems to help in the search engines.
Utilize Anchor Text: When you are linking to your website, make sure that you are making good use of the anchor text in the link. By “anchor text”, I am referring to the words that show up as the clickable link. An example of good anchor text would be: “Dog Training Tips”. A bad use of anchor text would be one that does not include the keywords we are optimizing for, such as “Click here for more information”

To see me talk a bit more about creating and optimizing your content, I suggest you review Video #10.

Video #10

POSTING TO YOUR BLOG

Once you have your content created, it is time to start making your blog posts. You will want to be sure that you continue to use your keywords at key spots including:

The Title of Each Individual Post

PROMOTING YOUR BLOG: AN OVERVIEW

Congratulations on getting this far, but don’t even think about stopping just yet, because we haven’t done the most crucial part yet, promotion!

A key mistake that many newbies make is to not promote their sites. For some crazy reason, people seem to think that just building their site is enough, that people will somehow find it. Nothing could be further from the truth!

To get people to come to your site, you need to promote it. Period.

The next few videos are going to focus on the most popular forms of promotion. Good news, they are all free! Here are a few key points to keep in mind during the promotion phase:

Promotion Should:

Consist of getting as many high quality and relevant links as possible
Be natural over time
Be consistent
Intensity of promotion should be based on your competition

Please feel free to review Video #12 to hear a bit more on promotion.

Video #12

PROMOTION: ARTICLE MARKETING

Article marketing is one of the best ways for people just starting out to get some fantastic links and exposure for their sites.

Article marketing simply consists of writing articles (don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds) about your niche, and then posting them to the article directories. When the directory accepts the article, they allow you to link a few times to your site. The good news is that these article directories are well respected in the search engines, and a link from there will carry some weight.

Plus, it is not uncommon to get quite a few visitors from the article directories, themselves, as long as the quality of the writing is decent.

There are literally hundreds of directories out there, and I am going to suggest that you only focus on the top ones, including:

http://ezinearticles.com
http://goarticles.com
http://searchwarp.com
http://isnare.com
http://articlecity.com
http://articledashboard.com

Please refer to video #13 to learn more about article marketing.

Video #13

PROMOTION: SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Social bookmarking is a very popular and also easy way to get a ton of free but yet quality links pointing towards your site. Social bookmarking sites are social websites that encourage it’s users to share their favorite websites with the world by publicly bookmarking them. The search engines look at this by thinking “if a site is being bookmarked by the social bookmarking sites, it must be popular, and worth checking out”. The good news is that you can bookmark your site yourself for free. There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites out there, but I am going to suggest that you stick with the most popular ones, which include:

http://digg.com
http://technorati.com
http://del.icio.us
http://propeller.com
http://stumbleupon.com
http://reddit.com
http://mixx.com
http://fark.com
http://kaboodle.com
http://bloglines.com
http://blinklist.com
http://netvouz.com
http://furl.net

Please view Video #14 to learn more about social bookmarking.

Video #14

PROMOTION: BLOG COMMENTING

Blog commenting involves simply finding blogs that are related to yours, and dropping comments on them. You then leave a link back to your site. This is a very simple, yet effective way to get some fantastic links pointing towards your site.

After you have found a related blog, make sure you don’t just leave a short comment like “Awesome blog, check out my site” as it is going to be seen as spam and get deleted. Take the time to read one of the blog posts, and leave a thoughtful comment. You will find that more often than not, people will be thrilled that you took the time to read their post and make a comment.

To hear me talk a bit more about blog commenting, please check out Video #15.

Video #15

ADDITIONAL PROMOTION TIPS

Promotion is so important, and I would like to share with you a few additional promotional tips: Additional Promotion Tips

Purchasing links
Submitting to directories
Video marketing
Advertising
Anything you can do to get the word out!

Please review video #16 to learn more about these additional promotional tips.

Video #16

BRANCHING OUT

Once you begin to find success with your first site, don’t stop there! I would suggest that you do two things:

Do whatever you can to continue to grow your site and make it more profitable.
Start developing additional websites in other niches.

I’m a big fan of branching out. I never know how successful a niche will be until I try it. To hear me talk a bit more about Branching Out, please review Video #17

Video #17

CREATING YOUR OWN WEBSITE

Once you begin to feel more comfortable with affiliate marketing, I am going to strongly suggest that you start buying a domain name for each site that you build. This also means getting your own hosting. A .com domain can be picked up for less than $10, and hosting can be picked up for about $10 a month.

Once you have a domain name and hosting, you will actually “own” the website, and this gives you a lot more flexibility than if you are just working with blogs on a free host such as WordPress.

I think you will find it is well worth the trouble.

To see me talk a bit more about this, please review Video #18. Visit

Video #18

CONCLUSION

Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to earn a living. Nothing beats coming home from a vacation to find out you’ve continued to make money, even though you haven’t lifted a finger all day!

I want to encourage you to get out there and start experimenting with this today. You won’t regret it!

Take care,
Rich Thurman
www.sbcacommunity.com