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What I Have Learned From Affilorama
Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on July 17, 2009
Mark Ling From Affilorama
- Praise where praise is due: In this post from 3 August, 2006, Mark talks about the importance of giving praise where it is due and gives a shout-out to three Internet Marketers he sees as mentors:
- John Reese: http://www.jrreport.com/ (You’ll be able to download a free copy of his Reese report here, along with how he made $500,000 in his first year in Adsense. I’m a member of the Reese Report and strongly recommend it, even if it’s not for you right now, you should download your free copy and keep it in mind for the future)
- Brad Callen: Visit http://www.affilorama.com/downloads/seomadeeasy.pdf to download and print out his free book on search engine optimization (Simply fantastic).
- Ken Evoy: Visit http://aff-masters.sitesell.com/download9.html for his free Affiliate Masters Course ebook. This is even more great free information for you about how to make money from affiliate programs.
- Viral e-books: This post on 25 August 2006 is about a lesson in creating a viral e-book and takes the example of an Affilorama student who created a viral e-book http://wealthywal.com/Resources/wealthywal.pdf that was informative, engaging, not particularly “salesy” and it’s definitely something you would pass around to your friends in the make money online niche. A niche he doesn’t particularly recommend for beginners. Good informative post and related material, in any case.
- An Easy Way to Earn More From AdSense: This post from 29 September 2006, Mark talks about how to maximize earnings from AdSense via ad placement (above the fold) and how the use of tables in a web page determines the way content will be read (and the quality of the ads displayed). My takeaway was not to use tables (when I can) and to make ads look like an important resource rather than an irritating distraction.
- Finding Profitable Niches – “HELP ME! WHERE DO I START?”: This post on 13 October 2006 talks about how to systematically find a profitable niche. The basic points of this post is to do the following:
- Keyword research: Do research to determine there is a market for what you intend to promote.
- Payouts: Products paying 60 – 75% commission or a high-price, low commission physical products to promote that earns you the same amount.
- Merchant Sales Page: Is it compelling to you as a potential customer. If it is not then you’ll have to spend a lot of time on pre-selling.
- Competitive Analysis: Analyze the competition and if you are a beginner then stay away from the ‘make money online’ crowd. Are people already making money in this niche?
- Contextual Advertising: Determine whether you should use an PPC ads to drive traffic. If yes, whether it should be Yahoo or Google. Note: I prefer free traffic sources so I ignored this part but maybe I’ll use PPC in the future. Who knows.
- Search affiliate program directories.
- Get ideas for B2B sites from B2B directories. The good thing here is that it’s all categorized for you already. Take some of these topics and plug them into the “view bids” tool in Overture to see what people are willing to pay, then use inventory.overture.com to see what the traffic is like. You might need to have a dig around until you find something suitable.
- Visit sites like About.com to get ideas. About.com gets money from advertisers paying for listing on their site, so they’re not likely to create articles/topics that aren’t profitable?
- Visit eBay and have a dig through their categories to get ideas for products/niche topics that people might be interested in. For instance, dolls. There are people bidding big dollars for dolls — there’s probably a doll-geek community that you could market to. (You could place eBay product ads on your site and earn a percentage of eBays revenue from successful sales, or for referring people who become eBay members.)
How to find topics: The key to finding good, profitable niches is brainstorming, lateral thinking, and research. Visit lots of sites to get those brain juices going. Remember that most good sites are getting money from somewhere. For each site you visit, as yourself: how are they making money? Here are some good places to start your brainstorming:
- How to Make Money From Affiliate Programs – Your Questions Answered: This was the first post of 2007 and I need not elaborate more as the title says it all. The audio as at http://www.affilorama.com/blog/blog_content/audio_blog1.zip and PDF notes are at http://www.affilorama.com/blog/blog_content/how_to_make_money_from_affiliate_programs.zip.
That;s what I have learned about affiliate marketingfrom the Affilorama blog. I’ll update the list as I go along and find notable posts.