You’re probably fed up receiving emails about how you can get rich quick through affiliate marketing – I know I am. Pay $10 or whatever and you’ll get an ebook showing what they did and how you can ‘copy and paste’ your way to success…. blah, blah, blah
Well, it doesn’t work like that and the only person getting rich will be the person selling the useless information.
But the thing is, you can make money from affiliate marketing. Good money. The kind that means you can quit your day job.
So, today I’m going to share with you exactly what I did to take a one product niche affiliate site from 893 visitors and $0 a month to 13,597 visitors and $3,934 a month in just 6 months. And the good news is, if you put the time in, you can do it too!
Oh, and just to be clear… all that traffic was free traffic from Google's organic search results. The only cost the site has is hosting at around $50 per month (I use Rackspace cloud hosting, which is not the cheapest, but worth every cent in my opinion).
And one final thing before I go on… everything I teach is 100% white hat. No dodgy tricks. You’ll be building a high-quality affiliate site that will rise up the search rankings and stay there, no matter what the next Google update brings.
A Little Bit About Me
Firstly, let me tell you a bit about myself.
The reason I think this is important is that I want you to be clear that everything I did to build the site and revenue can be done by you.
I have 15 years experience in internet marketing and SEO.
Is this an advantage? Yes.
Is it what made me the money? No.
Well, at least not directly. Even if you have no experience on the web it shouldn’t be an obstacle to building your own high-quality affiliate site earning good revenue if you follow my advice and put the work in. And it will take work… there ain’t no copying and pasting here!
Actually, let me caveat the above by saying that the bulk of the work will be in that initial 6 month period. I now spend about 20 hours a month on this particular site and it continues to bring in solid revenue month after month.
Choosing Your Product
Ok, first things first. You need something to promote. So, how should you go about choosing the product for your niche affiliate site?
Here are my few golden rules, which I’ll expand on in a moment: –
The product has to be popular
The product has to be at a decent price point
The product should be available from a number of retailers (with affiliate programs)
The product shouldn’t be oversaturated in the affiliate space
So, let me go into more detail.
Popularity
There’s no point promoting something obscure that no one is interested in buying. Sure, you can make a few bucks by going for a micro niche, but for the real revenue, you want something mass market.
So how do you find this golden product? This commission generating monster!
Well, you might be lucky and have experience of a popular product from a previous/current job.
This was the case for me with this particular site. I used to be a retailer of the product, so I knew how popular it was, but that doesn’t really matter in a way. It’s quite simple to find popular products to promote whether you have experience in the niche or not. Here is one of the best ways!
Amazon Best Sellers
Amazon is one of the biggest retailers on the web with UK sales alone of over £3 billion per year. They also have a pretty sweet affiliate program, which offers up to 8% commission!
So, if a product is popular on Amazon, you can be pretty certain it’s going to sell well. But how do you find the popular products?
Well, the good news is those lovely folks at Amazon tell you!
Here’s how to find the golden nuggets!
First, navigate to a subcategory. In this example, I have chosen ‘car seats and accessories’ in the Baby department.
On the left-hand menu, there will be a link for ‘best sellers’ (shown above).
You’ll now get a listing of the best selling products in the category, ordered by popularity. And if a product is in the top 10 sellers in a category on Amazon, then it’s safe to assume the volume is there to start promoting it!
So, it’s easy to find popular products, but here is where the other golden rules come in.
Price
The most popular product in this category happens to be a back seat mirror priced at £8.95.
At say 6% commission (Amazon operates a sliding scale of commission from 5-8% based on volume) that’s going to give us about £0.44 per sale (you earn commission on the net amount). Not great, we’re going to have to sell a lot to make any decent money.
So, how about the third most popular product, which is a car seat at £84.95? Well, at 6% commission we’re going to make £4.24 per sale – much better!
For me, a product at just below the £100 mark ($150) is ideal as it’s enough to get you a good commission, but not too expensive that you will have to work mega hard to achieve any sales.
Oversaturation
So, you have a product (or a few related products – say the top 6 car seats), which it could be worth building a niche affiliate site around. Next, you’ll need to check whether the market is already oversaturated.
If you are looking to promote iPads for example, you’re going to find huge competition and you are going to have to work extremely hard to achieve any sort of rankings. So do your research and take your time to find a niche that hasn’t really been fully exploited in the affiliate space yet. Trust me, they do exist!
There is, of course, a balance between finding a niche that you can exploit and also finding a product that will be popular enough to get the volume you require to make the site a lucrative proposition. Car seats was a good example as they will always be in demand – after all people are going to keep having babies, no matter what happens to the economy!
So, that’s some pointers on how to choose your product. Back to the story of how I grew my own niche site!
Month 1 (June 2012).
The site had been up for a few months, but at this point was basically was just full of placeholder pages (getting about 5-10 visitors a day). June was the first month where I started to proactively work on the site, build traffic and monetize.
My affiliate site runs on a custom CMS system I have designed, but for your own site, you can use WordPress, or your preferred content management package.
Ok, so a little bit about the product I had chosen to base my site around.
It is a high volume product in the fashion/beauty niche with sales of around £150million per year and a retail price point of just under £100. It sells very well online – I know because I used to sell it.
One of the most effective ways of monetizing a niche affiliate site is to offer price comparison for a product. If you can resell it with a great review and then tell the customer where they can buy it for the cheapest price, then your clicks are going to convert extremely well.
So, I decided that each of my product pages (there are around 10 variations of the product) would have the best review on the internet and an up to date price comparison table for 6/7 of the top retailers.
I have bolded ‘the best’ for a reason.
June was spent pretty much putting together highly detailed product reviews for each of the 10 products. Each of the reviews runs to 2,000 – 3,000 words and covers everything a consumer would want to know about the product.
How did I write these reviews?
Well, I know the product to an extent from selling it, but as a man whose morning regime involves rolling out of bed, into the shower and out the door in 5 minutes, fashion/beauty is obviously not something I can write about from personal experience!
So, I did a lot of research.
I took one product variant at a time and trawled through google and firstly collected all the features and technical specifications for the product. Next, I read every review I could find – good and bad (honesty is a good thing). I watched youtube videos. I read what bloggers had to say. I read and read and read until I felt like I was an expert on the product myself. And only then did I start to write…
And I say write because writing is what I did. Not copying. Not scraping. Not spinning. Writing.
I had researched the product to such a degree that I knew everything about it and could speak/write on it as an authority straight out of my head. It was easy for me to sell the product as I knew all the pros and cons like the back of my hand.
I repeated the same laborious research process for each product variant until I had detailed, lengthy, compelling reviews for each of them.
I didn’t start writing with a word count in mind, but as I mentioned above, each of the reviews ended up running to between 2,000 and 3,000 words.
The great thing about content this length is you will naturally use lots of different combinations of keywords and phrases without even having to think about it.
Keyword research is valuable in certain situations, but in general, I am a firm believer in write for your users, not the search engines and the recent Hummingbird update from Google has certainly rewarded those who write in this way.
Google indexes text and with my 10 detailed product reviews in place, I now had between 20,000 and 30,000 words on my site. By the end of the month, this increased text content alone was enough to lift my traffic from 5-10 visitors a day to around 40.