Mastery is knowing the basics and doing it better than most people. I am here to share what I learned during my 2 years of experience in affiliate marketing. When I started, I didn’t have any mentors to teach me and if you are an avid reader of this blog, you will know about my failures in this industry. But now, I am confident enough to tell you how I do things.

I do not guarantee that this will work for you. But I guarantee that what I am about to share worked for me and if you put enough effort into it, I know you’ll be successful as well. This is the basics of affiliate marketing and all the things you need to know how to successfully make an affiliate site will be talked about in detail here.

2 Things You Need To Know

There are 2 things that you need to know how to have a successful affiliate web site that can earn residual income (a.k.a. passive income).

Keywords & Landing Pages

I will explain both in detail.

Keywords Tell Stories

Keywords are indicators. They are also the basis of your market research. Knowing what keywords to go for will depend either you’ll be one day free from your day job or just enough to pay the hosting bills. Contrary to popular belief, not all keywords are created equal. Not all high traffic keywords are equal.

There are keywords that will get you traffic and money for a short period of time. Also known as current events. And there are keywords that will give you security and earns you money for years and years to come. This is the keywords that we will be targetting. Current events are good and I heard many people earns a lot from it. But I’m a lazy guy… I want to work once and get paid for years. This is what we call in business terms, leverage.

Leverage is using your time, money and energy once to build a site (or portfolio of site) that will earn money. Leave it after it is done and create another site and do it again. This will compound and you will have a vast number of sites earning you money PASSIVELY.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Focus on keywords that will bring you money for the long term. Sometimes being lazy is good right? ^_^

How To Pick The Right Keywords

Choose Your Tools

There are literally millions of ways to go about this. But lets do this one by one. First, you need something that can gather keywords and their statistics. The tool I use is keyword elite. Its expensive but I just think of it as a business investment. And by the way, I will also list a free keyword tool and probably one of the best out there.

• Google Keywords Tool

Now that you have a keyword tool. Fire it up and try to get a few keyword ideas for the niche you are going for…

Choosing A Niche

In choosing a niche, pick the one that interests you. If I may warn you, if you’re new to this, stay away from “make money online” niche or keywords.

What Keywords to Pick

It is hard to explain how. I’ll just give you an example:

Short Tail Keyword :
Widgets

Long-Tail Keyword :
Blue Widgets

Uber Long-Tail Keyword :
Cheap Blue Widgets

Short-Tail Keyword :
Bags

Long-Tail Keyword :
Chanel Women’s Bags

Uber Long-Tail Keyword :
Cheap Chanel Women’s Bags

What Does This Means?

It means, focus your effort in building a site around the long -tail keywords or the uber long tail keywords. The more specific the keyword, the more people are willing to spend money. These keywords already told you that there is a demand in this “SPECIFIC” product.

Landing Pages

Landing pages affects conversion. Landing pages is the other half of the formula. You got the people into your site using the keywords you have and now you need to excite the visitors to buy. You already know that they are looking for something based on the keyword. You just need a little push to make them buy.

There many types of landing pages and works for different niches. What I want to share to you is one type of landing page that is one of the most effective.

When we first try to look for web hosting reviews on our very first internet adventure. Haven’t you noticed many sites that compare and review different web hosts?

This is one of the most effective landing page to date and is called review sites or comparison sites.

Developing A Landing Page

I am a web designer so it wasn’t hard for me to create a page from scratch. But I also want to think of the people who do not know how to create a web site. For review site landing pages, you can go to sites that sells review site templates. Personally, on a designer’s perspective the templates they have there are top notch and you won’t find anything close to that today.

And of course, not many people have the money to outsource the design and development of your landing page. That’s why buying a review site template is a good choice.

Just change the dummy texts and affiliate links to it and you’re ready to go.

Amazon Affiliate Program

Before I forgot, I am also an amazon affiliate and i do promote things from amazon especially books, since I love to read. There is a script called reviewazon that will let you create a review site in wordpress. Visit their site for more info.

I do use that script for some of my sites as recommended by a fellow marketer / friend. And they do make the job simple in adding products and reviews. Most of all, it runs in wordpress so all the nifty things you like about wordpress is still usable like seo plugins and social media plugins.

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