Lesson 4: TurboCharged Campaigns
The majority of your time as an affiliate marketer will be spent setting up campaigns. Campaigns involve a series of tasks, including developing squeeze pages, landing pages and most importantly ‐ content pages.
Content pages offer information to visitors who land on the website, and essentially warm them up by giving them valuable information and then focusing that information about specific products.
For example, if you decided to promote a golf equipment package via Amazon's marketplace, you could create a content site based around golf.
You would offer a variety of resources including articles and resources that provided visitors with sufficient information about the niche, while promoting the golf package within the content.
Not only are content pages important in order to convert visitors into customers by providing valuable information, but they are important to your search engine ranking as well.
Search engines will see that your website provides a lot of great content and is targeted towards relevant keywords, and in turn, will rank your website accordingly.
This means you'll be able to generate very high quality, organic traffic to your affiliate based content sites in a very short amount of time ‐ and without paying a dime for traffic!
Here are a few ways to set up highly targeted affiliate campaigns:
Niche Based Websites
With niche‐based websites, you simply select 10‐20 products all based around a specific niche market. For example, weight loss or parenting.
You then construct an article‐powered niche website that features 10 different articles, and at the bottom of every article, you feature a direct link to the merchants website.
Niche based websites are very easy to set up, but just keep in mind that each website needs a specific theme. You want to segment your affiliate campaigns so that every website is focused around one specific market (or niche), so that you can funnel targeted traffic to your websites without convoluting the process.
Think about your websites structure from your visitors’ perspective. If you were interested in finding out more information about the golf market, and you landed on a content website that had multiple categories where golf wasn't the main focus, not only would you likely exit the site but you wouldn't think it was an authority site.
Authority sites ALWAYS focus on one specific market segment, so that they can deliver quality and informative content that warms up visitors and maximizes profits.
When creating your content site, hire a writer to create 10‐15 keyword rich articles around different areas within that market.
For example, if you were to create an affiliate based content site on weight loss, you could create articles on all different aspects of losing weight, from healthy eating guides to work out routines.
Then, match up each article with a relevant affiliate product, and feature an ad box in the middle and end of each article, or integrate text based affiliate links within the content itself.
Tip: You can download a free copy of XSitePro's HTML Editing tool to create your content pages quickly and easily.
Download: http://www.xsitepro.com
Product Specific Blogs
One of the easiest ways to create an affiliate based content website is to use the power of Wordpress blogs.
With Wordpress, you can download a free copy of their powerful blogging software, install it onto your own hosting account and have a fully functional, dynamic website created in under a few minutes.
Then, you can easily optimize your blog for the search engines using Wordpress's built in optimization tools, or download interactive plugins that will help to thoroughly optimize (and monetize) your blog for top search engine ranking.
Blogs always rank quickly within the major search engines based on their SILO structure. A SILO is a targeted websites that is broken down into segments or individual categories.
Then, keywords are used to clearly describe each area of the site. Since SILO's help search engine crawlers explore the website, and identify the relevancy of your website based on the keywords featured throughout the site, blogs tend to rank quickly AND rank higher!
You can grab a copy of Wordpress from http://www.Wordpress.org
When creating affiliate content pages either with HTML or with blogs, make sure to choose a keyword‐rich domain name that clearly defines what your site is about.
Depending on your niche market, you’ll want to make sure that your domain name encompasses primary keywords OR go generic if you plan to cover a variety of niches or sub niche markets.
For example, if you were focusing just on the weight loss market, you could set up a domain name such as www.WeightLossResources.com and then promote a variety of instant‐affiliate programs on your site, all focusing on the weight loss industry.
If you are interested in promoting a variety of topics based on a larger market (like ‘health topics’, ‘relationship topics’ or ‘business topics’), you’ll want to choose a domain name that encompasses all of your markets, such as: TopHealthResources.com
You can register a domain name at NameCheap.com or GoDaddy.com
You’ll also want to set up a proper hosting account, so that you can develop an online presence of your own!
You can set up a hosting account to house your website at a variety of hosting providers, with my favorite being http://www.HostGator.com
Host Gator not only allows you the opportunity to set up automatic hosting accounts, but they are the one of the most affordable providers online.
You could also use your domain name to redirect leads to affiliate products while cloaking your links to prevent ‘lost profits’. You can do this without needing a hosting account by just logging into your domain registrar and
redirecting the URL to transfer traffic directly through your affiliate link.
Prospects who see your link won’t even realize it’s an affiliate one!
Plus, if you plan on promoting your website with PPC marketing campaigns, a direct, keyword rich domain name will increase your click through rates. For example, if you are setting up an affiliate website focusing on weight loss, consider domain names such as:
- WeightLossReviews
- WeightLossIdeas
- LosingWeightQuickly
- HowToLoseWeight
- WeightLossHub
Review Websites And Pages
One of the easiest ways to create powerful, high performance affiliate websites is to use the power of a strong review.
Review based affiliate sites capture the sale as people looking for last minute information or reassurance regarding a product are always on the lookout for feedback and testimonials from customers who have purchased and used the product.
When creating your review website, you want to again, focus it on one specific topic.
Don't create a multi‐level review site that spreads out its information or coverage across multiple niche markets, because you want potential customers to put faith in your review, and it's difficult to do that if you are writing dozens of reviews on various products in the same market, and giving each one a "thumbs up"!
People will only be motivated to purchase a product after reading your review, if they believe it is honest and thorough.
People want to know that you’ve done your homework, or that you have personal experience with the products you are reviewing on your website.
This means you need to include both pros and cons about each product, highlighting the products strengths, but being upfront about any weaknesses in the product.
If you do this, your reviews will appear more genuine, and you'll find it easier to motivate visitors into taking action and closing the sale.
You may get a lot of search engine traffic for specific product names and model numbers. This is where review sites shine.
Instead of trying to rank for a competitive phrase like “cell phones”, you can instead rank for “brand name model number review”.
So, make sure to optimize every review page to include the product title, authors name and other relevant keywords that will help visitors find your page within the search engines.
WP Review Site is a script that will allow you to turn an existing Wordpress blog into a dynamic, powerful review website network, allowing you to easily create niche review sites on as many topics as you wish.
It’s available at WPReviewSite.com
