Have you ever experienced having to decide on what keywords to optimize, what products to promote but still, the money isn’t coming in? I have, and through my experiences, I have come to find out that there are 4 factors that should be met, to have a successful campaign in affiliate marketing, blog or any other online business.

Market Research

People are using the internet to find what they need, what they need to know or need to buy. Therefore, it is only logical to think of the search term they enter on search engines as potential market. Like for example, web design is a market and affiliate marketing is another market. And these market may be subdivided into different sub markets like real estate web design, small business web design or web 2.0 web design. If people are entering those keyword terms in the search engine, they want to know about those terms or buy products related to those terms. It only makes sense to know which keywords are used by the market to buy a product or search info about the product.

Searches

Are there people looking for a product or a solution to their problem? If there are, there is opportunity. Like the Law of Supply and demand.

Competition

I used to be afraid of going to competitive market. Simply because I am still noob at this that I look for market that are high in traffic and little to no competition. I have come to find out that this is wrong. The best market out there are those with high competition. Because many people are there, the market can sustain the spending of your competition in advertisement. I am now more afraid to take on no competition market because there must be a reason why no people are in there. Maybe the market isn’t buying.

You can easily do a market research by using google and their tools. One of the best tools out there and is free is google’s keyword tool at google.com/keywords.

Traffic

Bloggers are master of driving traffic to their site. They are good at creating and spreading buzz all over the intarweb. I am always amazed by how good they drive traffic to their site that my server crashes. I’m not mad or anything, just amazed. But with regards to this topic, are we getting the traffic that are related to our market?

There are 3 kinds of traffic

1. The Browser - People that are just passing by. Probably a friend or someone that knows you that want to check out your site from time to time. Maybe they buy, maybe not.
2. The Iffy Traffic - People that are on the edge of buying but still hesitant. They arrive at your site and decided to buy later.
3. Trickle Traffic - These are people that are ready to enter that credit card details. Trickle traffic is sometimes defined as low but laser targetted traffic.

With this in mind, are you getting the best quality traffic from the search engines?

Conversion

So you have a market and you got traffic going to your site and the people visiting your site are the right people. The next question is, are they willing to spend? There is no other way to test the market for conversion rate but to promote something and test it out for a week. Sometimes I will use amazon affiliate to test the market out or pepperjam offers. If someone buy within a month’s time, you know you got a winner market. According to survey, for every 200 visitors you should get 1 sale, this is to know if the market is feasible.

Product

Once you got your market, drove traffic to your site and you know that people in the market are actually buying, its time to find a real product. This can be your own product or services or focus on promoting affiliate product.

As you can see, the 4 factors should be done accordingly. People sometimes jump to the next phase as developing the product first before they promote and drive traffic to the site. Or they drove traffic to their site first before actually knowing if there are people searching for it. The good thing about the internet is that, you can never guess.

I believe in the saying “The best investment you can never go wrong is YOURSELF”. I have been messing around for this past week with paid search internet marketing (PPC) and so far I have wasted $250 (Php10,000) worth of clicks and got no sale.

If my parents found out I wasted this kind of money I know they’ll be angry, but hey, this is extra money, money I earned and I’m willing to spend to learn a few things. We still can eat for months even if this money is gone.

I’ve bought tons of ebooks on affiliate marketing before and all of them really are thrash and you can’t learn anything from them, so I’ll just use my own money to learn my way. Self study to say the least. Scary, yes. But its just, well… money. “Take risk while your young” kind of thing.

After this epic crash and burn in PPC Affiliate Marketing, are you still willing to give another shot? Of course, though, I’ll stay away for a while to focus on my ebay affiliate sites so I can make money and leverage that money to PPC internet marketing.

I’ve been doing a little affiliate marketing and my first campaign with eBay is doing great so far. I would like to share what I’ve come to learn to save you all the time and money in starting out in affiliate marketing.

Find A Merchant

As for example, eBay, they have an in-house affiliate system that lets you earn money per sale of item. A percent of the price of the item is given to you as a commission.

You may come and apply as eBay’s affiliate by signing up, its free, but you’ll need a website to apply. Payment are sent by Paypal with minimum of $5 per month. Payments are sent every 25th of the month.

Not all merchants have their inhouse affiliate system. This is what Ad Networks do. They have the system, the tracking and the merchants, all they need are internet marketers or affiliates to help them promote the merchant’s product.

Money are made differently with these type of networks and will vary from merchant to merchant. An example is a Mortgage Company, they will pay you if you get a visitor to sign up and fill up a valid form. This is called Pay Per Lead. If the merchant offers CPA, they want sales, and they will pay you for every sale, its called CPA, Cost Per Action. The thing I’m doing with eBay is CPA.

An example of an Ad Network is PepperJam Network, I’ve been using them and eBay is also advertising on PepperJam. There are tons of ad network around like Commission Junction, Azoogleads, but personally, I say that PepperJam Network is the easiest to get into. CJ needs legal papers that you have to fax them and Azoogle doesn’t accept applicants from the Philippines.

Get An Affiliate Site Up

Buy a hosting and a domain this is by far the best way to start in affiliate marketing. So when you mess up a site and its reputation, you won’t mess up your main site. But if you have your own way to promote products or give a review on your personal blog, that’s your choice.

After you found a merchant. you can go talk to your affiliate manager on how to go about promoting the merchant’s product. But you can also go on ahead and build a site around it without telling them. If you are going to make a site around the merchant’s product, keep in mind that you should have the 3 important pages that Google wants in a site. It is, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and the Contact Page. An affiliate website should contain this pages so not to regard you as a spam site when visual inspection happens.

Some affiliate call this a landing page. But years have changed that google doesn’t allow landing pages anymore. Landing pages today is a mixture of a 1 page with sales pitch and a blog or a review of the product. Making the site as legit as possible in the eyes of Google.

Promoting Your Affiliate Site

There are 2 ways to promote affiliate products.

• Organic SEO Traffic - Traditional link building and optimizing of pages for organic search engine results. Most people prefer this one because its free. The only drawback with this kind of internet promotion is that it takes a while before you see results.
• PPC, Paid Search - Most of the big time affiliates invest in PPC or Paid Search internet marketing. The benefits of this is that you can see results instantly. The only drawback is that it costs money to promote. And sometimes will cost you even more when you messed up. I suggest not to mess with PPC or Paid Search unless you know what you’re doing.

Other Way

• Social Media Promotion - I think to best describe this is an A list blog. When an A list blog make a review of a product, you know that a percent of his readers will buy that product. There are no drawbacks and the promotion is free.

Tracking Your Sales

PepperJam Network has their own tracking system. You can track the # of clicks and the amount of money you earn. And by using other programs like Tracking202 to track the clicks and the keyword they used to arrive at your site, the percent of conversion, you can easily scale your campaign to a larger profit.

Scaling Your Affiliate Earnings

Scaling is the last part of affiliate marketing and is the make it or break it part in this industry. For example, if you can earn $400 this month, be sure to scale what you’re process of obtaining that $400 per month and SCALE it to make it to possible $500 per month. Know what makes your earnings and scale. An example scenario is that an affiliate marketer has been promoting in MSN. Earning $500 per month. He decided to scale his campaign, went to Yahoo Paid Search then in Google Adwords, he netted from 500 to $5000 per month.

Affiliate Marketing has a huge potential and many people are silently earning millions of dollars per month at home.

I’m a web designer, a Filipino, and when I started in SEO and internet marketing, I felt like shit. Shit traffic, shit post, shit blog all tons of shit, I also do shit comments on other blogs. That was really awful. I was perfectly clueless and don’t know what to do to get traffic from the search engines. Today, I don’t apply them on this blog. You might see that there are no advertisement here and I would like to keep it that way. I apply them on other sites that make me money online.

I would like to help the newbies out there on how to get started on their blog. I won’t tell you to go and comment on other blogs, stumbleupon, entrecard or twit your blog. That should be your last resort. Never ever try social networking to promote your blog, unless you just want to be famous. But if you’re in this business for the money and for the killing, woo Big G and the other 1st and 2nd tier search engines.

SEO, internet marketers and all those people that make money online know how search engine ticks. If they don’t know how, they’ll starve and I’m one of them. I have to pay the bills, help my family and save some more for future education. But for the sake of this article, I’ll be pertaining to google since it has the biggest market share.

What does Google wants?

There are many things that make google ticks but lets focus on this most important part of SEO. Google loves content. And the fresher the content the better. Do I need to say more? Ok, I’ll explain, Google loves content, long related targeted content. That’s what google loves.

If you’re making a blog post, talk about a topic that is really targeted. Meaning, post a content that will give your page an authority. Specify a certain keyword for this post. Bold it, italics it, H1 tag it etc. Don’t put any other unrelated keyword in there. Just focus on that word. Talk about it, as lenghty as you want. But be sure its still human readable.

Never Give Up On Your Site

This is not an inspirational paragraph. I’m telling you this because if you’re site is new and its been a month and you’re not getting traffic, most likely you are sand boxed. You’ll know you’re sandboxed when you have a steady traffic day after day then you suddenly lost all the traffic. Do not worry, this is normal. Its google’s way of welcoming your site in the internet. After that you’ll be ranked accordingly. How long do you have to wait to get out of the sandbox? 90 days. This is the normal thing. Sometimes even longer. Sometimes even years. But don’t lose hope. There is a way to make it better and faster. What? Just add more content.

How Often Should I Add More Content or Post on My Site?

Ok, I’ll be borrowing the lines of bloggers “Have a posting frequency”. This is true. You should update often and have a posting frequency. But, on the safe side, remember this.

If your site is 90 days old and is getting 0 - 15 visitors a day. Do not make any more post. Optimize what you already have.

After you get out of the sandbox, you’re ranked accordingly by google. Of course you’re ranking is shit. Don’t expect anything yet. You’re the new guy. But don’t blame the site. It’s your fault and it’s only you that can make the site better. Just keep getting links, submit from directories, submit articles, do SEO, optimize your page. Again, no social networks (if you want to make money that is).

After 30 days of optimizing, getting links and SEO. Check your stats. You should be getting more visitors now.

If you’re getting 15 - 50 visitors a day. You should at least, update your blog with 2+ pages or post per month.

You can still stick with your posting frequency but keep it at least 2+ post per month.

Now let me tell you something why I wanted you to optimize your site without using social media. Those visitors that you see on your stats are coming from organic traffic / search engines… Those are traffic that you can convert to money. You can make money out of that traffic. With adsense, you can make your CTR boost up to 20% with that traffic. I went as high as 50% with my other sites. Because these people are buyers, searchers that are looking for a product or service, if they saw your ads, even if they know its an ad, they will click on it. Social media traffic, these people are just having fun, blog hopping, stumbling, just reading other blogs. They wont convert and will just ruin your CTR. This is the secret to making money on the internet. You want organic traffic.

Ok, lets move on. Never stop optimizing your site. Keep posting, keep getting links, keep submitting and keep optimizing your pages. By the time you get your visitors up to 100.

If you’re getting 50 - 150 visitors a day, you should at least update your blog or site with 2 pages every week.

This is a no brainer. Google loves fresh, unique content. The spiders will always crawl your site every day and your pages will be indexed immediately.

150 unique and organic visitors a day is pretty number. If you want to increase that number, just keep posting more blog posts and keep on getting links. Never do social media. Never. Don’t ruin your CTR. As I will say, that is pure traffic, search engine traffic that you can make money of. Don’t pollute it. Google will reward you with a strong stream of traffic that can last for years. You will increase your CTR and in turn Google will place high cost per click ads on your site. $1 a click is peanuts for you if you have a high CTR. Even if you missed a posting date, it won’t have any disastrous effect on your blog.

Ok, I won’t be making this post longer. To close this out, just keep getting links and update frequently. And G Almighty will reward you till kingdom come. That’s how you do SEO the Google Way. Good luck on making money online.