How to Make Money With Your Blog Part II — Affiliates
By Desty on Jul 24, 2007 in Blog Business, Offline Business
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Affiliates are, simply, the fastest way to create wealth using blogs. Notice that I didn’t say easiest, cheapest, or best. Affiliates are other companies that you enter into an agreement to promote and sell their products. You’re a salesman, pure and simple. Well, not so simple.
A straight forward approach to marketing an affiliate is to post ads (banners), write articles reviewing the products, generally promoting the product to your readership base in hopes that someone will buy something. Where as 3rd party advertising turns your blog into a billboard, affiliates turn your blog into a store.
Promoting affiliates only with your blog, while can net you some leads and sales, is an extremely poor way to promote your affiliate. This is where you have to take a step back from your blog, your niche, and take in the BIG picture, the Internet. The key to getting sales over the Internet is leverage. The more eyeballs you can get to see your product, the more sales you can make. Even if you get a conversion rate of 1%, look at the numbers. If you have a readership base of 5000 views / RSS subscriptions per day, that’s still only 50 sales. Looking at the big picture, bid on some keywords through Google’s AdWords, put your ad up for 100,000 potential customers, 1% becomes 1000 sales.
Leverage is the key, and the curse. AdWords campaigns are costly and no sure thing. You are the person who has to write ad that catches the potential customer’s eye. You have to do the pre-sell that turns a click into a sale. You have to know what keywords to bid on, how much to bid, and have the guts to run a campaign that might cost you money 29 days out of 30.
Properly marketed affiliates offer the greatest rewards for those will to do the research, invest in their ‘on the job’ experience, and take the gamble. I’m currently in the research / planning phase to start my own campaigns. I have not selected a product, as I’m still in the learning cycle. As I finally get my feet off the ground and actually start the business, I’ll detail the steps I take in bringing this new business off the ground.
To the readers who actually have experience in running keyword campaigns, any suggestions as to reading materials would be greatly appreciated.
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Thanks. Very interesting. I never tried affiliates stuff, but now might be a good time.
Yes, very interesting indeed. I’m researching what method to get into. At the moment I’m leaning towards Perry Marshall’s system on PPC.
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