Getting Started as an Affiliate

Getting Started

Finding an Affiliate Program to work with, or coming up with your own idea for a product-based website, is the easy part. Honestly, it is. You can simply visit one of the many Affiliate Networks on the internet, and browse through the programs until you find one that catches your interest. Or you could just as easily start with something YOU are passionate about or experienced with. All you have to do is PICK a topic, or a product - and you can fine tune your plans for the project from there.

Often, when people think of a great idea for a website - or any type of business, they are immediately put off by the amount of competition. DO NOT let that deter you. I'll share with you how I use the amount of competition to my advantage in any project...

The First Step --> Research

Once you get an idea in mind, you can easily determine whether it has profit potential. Your very first step is Keyword Research.

There are a lot of tools that you can use, and a variety of ways that you can accomplish the task. I'll share with you what works for me...

I use a combination of WordTracker and Keywords Analyzer.

Keywords Analyzer accesses the Overture database, and is an *excellent* brainstorming tool. It not only shows  you the number of searches for any given keyword or phrase, but also shows you the number of results (web pages) in the search engines - AND the number of Adwords & Overture pay-per-click campaigns that are currently running for that keyword/phrase.

And actually - this is just a TASTE of what kind of data you can pull from the program. You can even analyze the PPC Ads that are running on Adwords and Overture for each of the keywords: see the headlines they are using, the URL's of their landing pages, etc. As you can imagine, this is helpful in determining if most of the competing advertisers are promoting the same product ;)

(If you are researching keywords for a PPC campaign, you can also wrap all of your keywords in "quotes" and [brackets] ... from right within the Keywords Analyzer program!)

You will get a very good idea about the profit potential of any product or market - in a matter of minutes... and "at a glance". Quite literally, it will show you hundreds of related keywords & phrases - and enough data to get a basic idea of how steep the competition is... or not.

---

I generally start with the Free Trial at WordTracker. I type in the most general keyword related to the topic or the product that I am researching. This gives me an idea of whether I want to dig deeper into the research, or drop it  and choose another product/topic altogether.

That intitial decision is easy: I am looking for a decent number of searches (ie how many people are looking for this product, or searching for things on this topic)... and I am looking for a good selection of keywords/phrases used.

--> At this point in the process, I am *completely* open-minded. I may or may not have chosen a product or an affiliate program - - or I may have already chosen the product, and am looking for a market or an angle from which to promote it. It simply does not matter, as there is no wrong way to do this.

Pick a word - any word - and dig in!

Let me give you an example. Off the top of my head, I'll pick "beanie babies". When you type this in to WordTracker's free trial, these are the results that you get:

beanie babies 1323
ty beanie babies 317
sell beanie babies 83
selling beanie babies 62
price guide for beanie babies 52
value of beanie babies 44
beanie babies value 41
beanie babies price list 40
how many beanie babies are there 30
beanie babies current value 26
buying beanie babies 24
beanie babies values 23
beanie babies for sale 22
ty beanie babies canada 22
uk beanie babies 22

My thoughts:

Looking over the list as a whole, it seems to me that most people are interested in selling their beanie babies, or finding out the current value of their collection. You can usually get a pretty good idea of what the 'majority' are "thinking" when they use certain search terms by looking at a group of related keywords like this.

I also noticed that aside from the general search term (beanie babies, with over a thousand searches a day), the search numbers drop off dramatically. There's not a lot of room for "digging deeper" here, obviously.

Out of curiosity, I checked "beanie babies" on Google

The first result is Ty's official site.
The first Adwords ad that I see is:

All Beanie Babies Cheap
Beanies as low as $.99. All
TY In Stock. Orders Ship Same day
beaniewonderland.com/

Pretty tough competition for a limited market. I would either a) drop it and move on, or b) come up with a very creative way for people to cash in on this 'dead hot market' - and develop or promote from that angle.

Let's look at another one. This time I'll do "tv" - and I'll tell you why. For the last several months I've noticed a growing number of commercials on television about new TV's. Now, I'm not a "tv person", so forgive my ignorance - but one that comes to mind is the flat one that looks like a picture hanging on the wall, and it has an ambience color effect.

Here it is - I found it by searching 'ambience color effect tv flat' on Google:
http://www.audioholics.com/cedia/cedia2004/philipsLCDambilight.php

(You can laugh at me now, I dont mind :p)

Anyway, in addition to those commercials... I noticed a whole new section at Wal-Mart for these flat TV's in their electronics department - and it was a very large and prominent display.

Anytime I see media and local retailers promoting the same type of products, I pay attention. They pay BIG dollars to get consumers interested... and you can easily step in and capitalize on this situation, where the buyers are "pre-sold" and coming online to get more information and find the best deals!

Back to the keywords, when I type "tv" into WordTracker's Free Trial, I see:

direct tv 9793
tv guide 8106
court tv 4827
tv listings 4537
tv 3478
as.seen.on.tv 2888
plasma tv 2566
satellite tv 2099
food tv 2091
lcd tv 1867
mad tv 1832
internet tv 1562
tv stands 1508
dish tv 1424
fox tv 1292

And I'll also go back and check the results for "television":

television 8888
televisions 1446
television without pity 486
interactive television 466
abc television 450
television reviews 424
television listings 417
internet television 379
lcd television 375
lcd televisions 349
plasma television 340
reality television 334
plasma televisions 298
television schedule 288
sony televisions 284

There is obviously PLENTY of room to "dig deeper" and research each of those terms individually. My next step, before immersing myself into days and days of in-depth Keyword Research, would be to make sure there is an Affiliate Program of some sort related to the topic.

I head straight to Google and type in: "plasma tv"+affiliate

The reason that I typed it in that way is because "tv affiliate" is going to bring up a lot of results about 'network affiliates' and 'tv affiliates' that have nothing to do with Affiliate Programs. So I chose "plasma tv" (putting it in quotes to tell Google to look for the entire phrase - not just the two words individually) and added "+affiliate" (with no spaces) to tell Google that I wanted to see web pages that contained "plasma tv" and "affiliate" within their content.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=%22plasma+tv%22%2Baffiliate

Bingo!

So you have a market, and you have Affiliate Programs. And you can determine all of that in under 10 minutes!

Next, you would look over several of the Affiliate Programs and determine which offers the best products, the best payouts, etc. You can compare this to the search terms you found at WordTracker, too, as you go... and then choose the program that you feel would convert well, that already has a decent demand, and that has a decent commission rate.

Now you are ready to REALLY dig in to your Keyword Research. You need to find out if you should promote a certain brand of television. A certain type of television. Whether you should promote it via PPC, or build a specific kind of website so that you can promote the products via free search engine listings.

In this next step, you'll really begin to dig into the keywords, and then work from there into Competition Analysis. By the time you look at this topic/product from EVERY angle, you will KNOW what your next step should be.

I'll tell you what I found when I was doing the research for my newest site. I found that there were A LOT of web pages for each of the keywords I looked at. I also found that there were A LOT of pay-per-click ads running for those keywords. I temporarily marked PPC off of my list - pending more in-depth research - and took a closer look at the SERPs (search engine results pages - or free listings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc).

What I found: Most of the web pages were very poorly optimized, and looked like homemade "geocities"-type websites. It wasnt nearly as competitive as it first appeared. In fact, after more research... it was going to be downright EASY to get Top 10 listings for most of my keywords.

In fact, ANYONE - with no prior experience whatsoever - could grab a cheap website template from BasicTemplates.com and create a better website than most that I found.

I'll close for now, and in next week's issue we'll talk more about in-depth Keyword Research and Competition Analysis, and how to begin using it all to create your website or advertising campaign.

I'll show you how to determine the best angle from which to enter a market (even a supposedly "saturated market"), and how to out-perform your competitors!

Source