Q: I have a huge interest in building some niche Web sites for Affiliate Income purposes and am curious how to get started. With all the "Guru" material out there, hard to tell where to start or who to trust. Thoughts on Site Build It? Should I buy and begin with this and perhaps use Rosalind Gardner's book as well? What about the Secret Money Generator program that builds a lot of pages for you using data feeds from the source? Seems like this would be a time-saver and still allow you the ability to build/insert your own material? Any
advise would be appreciated ... thanks. A: SBI is a good all-in-one option for someone just starting out, with no prior experience. Ken Evoy offers the Affiliate Masters Course free - so you may want to read this before you decide. Rosalinds Super Affiliate Handbook is also a good read, and offers all of the resources you would need for a do-it-yourself site, start to finish. Rosalind really focuses on PPC (pay-per-click search engine marketing), though - and in a recent Teleseminar, she admitted that she doesnt focus on SEO (search engine optimization) at all. James Martell would be a good one to follow for that - as he talks about building multiple affiliate/niche websites and promoting them via SEO. Of course, you can find all of the information on your own, too - and invest in specific guides or programs as needed. For example, you can get a domain name at GoDaddy.com for 8.95, inexpensive web hosting at www.lindseywebdesign.com , and then take Sharon & Roy Montero's online SEO Class. You may need a website template (which you can get for only $5 each at Basic Templates), or you might design your own... and then you're good to go! As for SMG (Secret Money Generator) - I've looked into it, and honestly... it's as much work as doing it on your own. Also, there's another program out there about half the price. It is a little bit technical. Requires installation on the web server, some basic configuration... and then all of the pages generated will need to be checked and hand-edited (IMO). It's not a bad option, and does include templates - but if you can manage to create a template and locate a feed on your own... you can do just about the same thing yourself. You may not be able to generate pages as quickly, but by the time you edit all of those - - you could have created them the way you wanted them as you went. Again, just my personal opinion based on my own experiences. ? Have Questions about Affiliate Marketing... Join
us in the Affiliate Marketing category Getting Started Finding an Affiliate Program to work with, or coming up with your own idea for a product-based website, is the easy part. Honestly, it is. You can simply visit one of the many Affiliate Networks on the internet, and browse through the programs until you find one that catches your interest. Or you could just as easily start with something YOU are passionate about or experienced with. All you have to do is PICK a topic, or a product - and you can fine tune your plans for the project from there. Often,
when people think of a great idea for a website - or any
type of business, they are immediately put off by the amount
of competition. DO NOT let that deter you. I'll share with
you how I use the amount of competition to my advantage
in any project...
There are a lot of tools that you can use, and a variety of ways that you can accomplish the task. I'll share with you what works for me... I use a combination of WordTracker and Keywords Analyzer. Keywords Analyzer accesses the Overture database, and is an *excellent* brainstorming tool. It not only shows you the number of searches for any given keyword or phrase, but also shows you the number of results (web pages) in the search engines - AND the number of Adwords & Overture pay-per-click campaigns that are currently running for that keyword/phrase. And actually - this is just a TASTE of what kind of data you can pull from the program. You can even analyze the PPC Ads that are running on Adwords and Overture for each of the keywords: see the headlines they are using, the URL's of their landing pages, etc. As you can imagine, this is helpful in determining if most of the competing advertisers are promoting the same product ;) (If you are researching keywords for a PPC campaign, you can also wrap all of your keywords in "quotes" and [brackets] ... from right within the Keywords Analyzer program!)
That intitial decision is easy: I am looking for a decent number of searches (ie how many people are looking for this product, or searching for things on this topic)... and I am looking for a good selection of keywords/phrases used. Pick a word - any word - and dig in!
Looking over the list as a whole, it seems to me that most people are interested in selling their beanie babies, or finding out the current value of their collection. You can usually get a pretty good idea of what the 'majority' are "thinking" when they use certain search terms by looking at a group of related keywords like this. I also noticed that aside from the general search term (beanie babies, with over a thousand searches a day), the search numbers drop off dramatically. There's not a lot of room for "digging deeper" here, obviously.
The
first result is Ty's official site. Here
it is - I found it by searching 'ambience color effect tv
flat' on Google: (You can laugh at me now, I dont mind :p) Anytime I see media and local retailers promoting the same type of products, I pay attention. They pay BIG dollars to get consumers interested... and you can easily step in and capitalize on this situation, where the buyers are "pre-sold" and coming online to get more information and find the best deals!
The reason that I typed it in that way is because "tv affiliate" is going to bring up a lot of results about 'network affiliates' and 'tv affiliates' that have nothing to do with Affiliate Programs. So I chose "plasma tv" (putting it in quotes to tell Google to look for the entire phrase - not just the two words individually) and added "+affiliate" (with no spaces) to tell Google that I wanted to see web pages that contained "plasma tv" and "affiliate" within their content.
Bingo!
In this next step, you'll really begin to dig into the keywords, and then work from there into Competition Analysis. By the time you look at this topic/product from EVERY angle, you will KNOW what your next step should be. What I found: Most of the web pages were very poorly optimized, and looked like homemade "geocities"-type websites. It wasnt nearly as competitive as it first appeared. In fact, after more research... it was going to be downright EASY to get Top 10 listings for most of my keywords. I'll
show you how to determine the best angle from which to enter
a market (even a supposedly "saturated market"),
and how to out-perform your competitors! You can click here to continue with the next two issues: Creating Affiliate Sites (Part 2) Using Competition To Your Advantage
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