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.

You may copy this post as long as you keep the links intact and link back to this article.

I am seeing a lot of Filipinos, especially bloggers, getting into affiliate marketing. This is good news because earnings in affiliate marketing can outweight the earnings from adsense by a thousand. But there are also road blocks ahead that can hinder your success to be an affiliate marketer. One of which, is the lack of information to get started in affiliate marketing. And since a lot of people has been emailing me lately to teach them affiliate marketing and lines like “Can you be my mentor?” crap. I decided to go with this idea.

I have been thinking lately that it must be a time for me to give back to the community and help others to get started in this field. I started affiliate marketing mid year 2008 and I know for a fact that there are only 2 ways to be disappointed in affiliate marketing, either you know nothing and give up or you know too much and be overwhelmed.

How can a supernoob help?

I’m planning to write a report about how to get started in affiliate marketing. This will contain all the information and basic foundation you need to get started in the industry. Things to avoid and tools you need. Also information that are kept secret by the gurus to prevent competition. I won’t hold back on this so be sure to be the first one to get the report.

However, I need to know what are your problems in affiliate marketing so we can address this in the report. So if you have a problem or suggestion just drop in your comments below. I’ll include them in the report.

Also, I won’t be releasing this report to all. Why? Affiliate marketers HATE COMPETITION. So I will only send this report to the first 50 people that will sign up below. They will receive the report once it is out. If you’re interested in affiliate marketing and struggling to get started, I recommend you act now and sign up. You have nothing to lose.

Get A Copy Of Report for Free

Only for the first 50 person
If you are already an intermediate affiliate marketer, please do not sign. Let’s give more chance to beginners in the field. By intermediate affiliate marketer I mean, earning at least $1000 per month.

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.