Exposing Profits on the Web

Skinning the Affiliate Marketing Cat

If you’re trying to make money with affiliate marketing, you may have found out that it is not as easy as some have claimed. If you’ve been using pay per click for any amount of time, you’ve realized that you can lose your shirt pretty fast if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you usually have to burn some cash up front. Often, you’ll burn that cash only to find out that the campaign you chose wasn’t for the best offer, and you’ll have to start over.

If you have a website, you may have found that getting traffic is hard work, and getting quality traffic is even harder. If you’ve been trying the affiliate marketing route and it’s not getting you where you want to go, consider this…

Allan Gardyne had a great piece of advice in one of his newsletters once. He said that success in affiliate marketing comes down to only two things. Yup, just two.

One method of affiliate marketing that Allan subscribes to involves bringing people to a content website, and then monetizing the traffic with Adsense ads and affiliate links.

In order to be successful at this, he says to do only two things every day. One, create unique content for your site. Two, get a link back to your site.

That’s it! Or is it? Well, it’s not that simple, but it’s so easy to get caught up in the complexities of how to make money on the web, that this advice really makes sense in a big way.

There are so many ways to skin the affiliate marketing cat it’s not funny. For a while, I was buying info-products left and right. Each one had some great ideas, and I learned something from almost all of them.

But if you try to chase after all these separate techniques and systems, you’ll just be chasing your tail. The 80/20 rule takes over and it just becomes totally unproductive. In addition, most of the info-marketing products hold something back. Well, actually, some of them hold a lot back. Sometimes, this is by design, and sometimes it’s simply the nature of the beast.

You NEED focus.

After a while, if you don’t get down to basics, you won’t have a viable business. All you have are a bunch of half done tasks and half baked failures that don’t amount to any real traffic, or any real money.

What you need to do is plug into systems that are already working for others. Without buying any courses, without buying any tools, and without getting distracted by anything else, plug yourself into a system. A very simple system is the one that Allan describes. Create content, and get a link.

So, if your traffic is not where it needs to be, or your visitors are not converting into cash, try this. For 30 days, focus on nothing but these two things, every day…

1. Create unique content for publication on your website. By that I mean write on-topic, keyword rich articles for the most profitable keywords in your niche.

2. Get a link back to your site. This can be from a directory, or a related website, or by submitting an article to the article directories. It could even be by blogging and pinging, and/or using trackbacks. If you can guest blog on someone else’s blog, even better.

I used to work on getting listed in directories, but I’ve found that for the most part, it doesn’t give me that much benefit. The exception might be some niche specific directories. You’ll have to decide whether you think it’s worth it in your niche.

Seriously focus on this and try this for 30 days, and your business will improve. It usually takes me two to three months to really see the effectiveness of my efforts on this, but it will come.

Tips:

1. I highly recommend submitting articles to get links. That should be your primary method of getting links back to your site.
2. Use an article for your site as the seed to write the articles to be submitted.
3. Use the Unique Article Wizard to submit your articles to the directories to ensure unique content throughout.
4. Submit to ezinearticles.com manually.
5. Rinse/repeat.

One last thought. I highly recommend that you start thinking web-centric rather than site-centric. Start thinking in terms of setting up web-based profit centers, and don’t marry yourself to any particular website, theme, or product. Do what works, and fine tune and refine other people’s working systems to suit your needs. I’ll talk more about what it means to be web-centric as opposed to site-centric in upcoming posts. For now, follow Allan’s advice for 30 days and see your results improve. Enjoy.