This is the 2nd part of our affiliate marketing rockstar that is one of the more up coming series that will guide all, in affiliate marketing. This is an ongoing case study and a guide. Some techniques used in this site are tested and has worked for me and it may or may not work for you. Do it at your own risk.

Howdy Partner

By now, you should already have picked your niche. If you haven’t done so, please read the previous post on how to do a niche research.

After looking for the niche that we want to delve into, we now have to find a partner that we have to promote to get affiliate income. Searching for partners comes the 2nd part of the entire research because we might want to design the site according to the main web site of our partner so the visitors won’t suspect that we are affiliate of the merchant.

I am using Pepper Jam Network to look for partners that is in line with my chosen niche from part 1 which is web hosting. If you are not yet a member of pepperjam, you might want to join, they are the fastest growing affiliate marketing company today. The tracking system is way better than CJ. And to make you even more happy, peppejam is giving away $10 if you got accepted as a sign on bonus for new affiliates. Only if you click on the special banner on the right side of my page or this link.

Then on the Find Partners page, I will search for web hosting companies that I can be an affiliate of.

After that, you’ll be presented with a list of merchants that want to be promoted. I will pick the highest paying merchant as shown below and join its program.

Once You Joined

There are two things you want to do.

1. Read the terms and condition about the company by clicking on their logo.
2. Talk to the manager and know more about the company and their affiliate program.

Some merchant will approve your application manually. Sometimes, it is automatic. Just wait for them. And when you are accepted, you’ll be given affiliate links, banners and pepper jam ads that you can put on your site to get commission.

I’ll be stopping here for now so we can wait for my application to get accepted and hopefully people can follow along. If you have questions just post in the comments.

This will be the first day of our Affiliate Marketing Rockstar series that will guide each and everyone of you, including me, to make a profitable affiliate marketing campaign.

What Do We Need

We need to find a niche that is profitable. We can go along and say the most competitive niches there is because that’s 100% profitable. The only draw back is that they are competitive.

In Selecting A Niche

In selecting our target niche we have to keep in mind what are our resources and if this niche would be enjoyable for us. I have been an advocate of go for profitability first before going for your passion, but in this case, affiliate marketing is a long term business so you might want to pick a subject that you can talk about and feel happy working for a very long time.

Who Are You

Ask yourself if you know much about something that you want to make an affiliate site for. If you know about cars, you might want to do affiliate marketing and pick a niche for cars. As for me, I know about web hosting since I’ve been in the business, own one and also as a web designer, I am always using web hosting for my clients. So I’ll choose the niche web hosting in this example.

The Demand

You must keep in mind that to survive in this business, you must know if there is a demand for the niche you’re targeting. Use freekeywords.wordtracker.com to find the topic that have sufficient searches per month. 10k searches a month should be viable.

The Supply

Now let’s see if there is someone supplying for the demand. By this, we can know if there are tons of competition in it. Or is it possible for us to compete in this niche. Let’s go to Google.com and see the competition. To check the competition, all you have to do is to type the keyword in quotes “web hosting“.

As you can see, its a very competitive niche. 101,000,000 is a tough battlefield to get into. You’ll be eaten alive. To know if the niche is safe, you might want to look for a niche that has 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 competing pages.

Just repeat this process until you found a good niche that you want to target. Stay tune for the next part of our affiliate marketing rockstar.

I had an idea of a new affiliate marketing technique that I would like to try out. After the success of my previous campaign with pepperjam network, I thought that its a good time to experiment with new, better and more risky type of affiliate marketing strategy. Since I have now the money to reinvest in this venture, I would also want to help the newbies out there and hopefully follow along as I uncover the new fields in affiliate marketing.

This Will Be A Series Of Post

About my development and updates about the affiliate marketing technique that I’m testing out. Hopefully some people can follow along or if not, give me some advice in case my campaign fuck up.

We All Have A Dream

My dream for now is to be an affiliate marketing rockstar!

Its ok to dream, its ok to wish but its a sin if that’s the only thing you can do. So, what the fuck have you done lately?

As all of you would know, I’m a web designer by heart. And I dedicate most of my time joining contests and doing freelance web design and development work for clients. But I am also an entrepreneur in nature, and whenever I get the chance to slack off from my web design work, I do some affiliate marketing on the side. I just got accepted to eBay US’s affiliate program where I go and promote products from eBay US. My first month was a disaster as I only made $22 (11 GBP).

But for last month (month of May 2008) is a good one. I made over $400 in commission.

Noticed I have GBP, to convert that into dollar its usually around x 2. So I managed to get $446 for this month. Around 18,000 Pesos. It’s not that big, its not small either. From $22 to $446. Not bad for a birthday present.

For those who don’t know, affiliate marketing is where you “market” a product of a merchant and you’ll serve as a middle man. Each referral you bring and converts into a sale, you get an affiliate commission.

It works best if you have a review blog of products (say high tech gadgets) with a large traffic / reader base.

With this kind of tactic, its easy to break the $1k in 3 months.

Everybody loves eBay!