Step 01 - Set A Goal

Let's start with a modest goal. Say we aim to earn a total of $300 (US) a month in affiliate commissions and AdSense revenue. Imagine what we could do with that money. A holiday? A better lifestyle?

I've kept the amount low, because it's important that we believe we can do this. Achieve small successes first, see the money in our hands or in our bank account, and then increase our goals.

Perhaps we have much larger goals. That's OK. Whatever our goals, I strongly recommend that we serve our apprenticeship by taking these 18 steps. They'll give us solid knowledge and experience on which to build our affiliate business.

Step 02 - Find Your Niche

Read Ken Evoy's free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits us and our interests.

Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times.

Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. We're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.

We'll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It's much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.

Choose a topic that is easy to write about.

Even if we've already chosen a niche, we must to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make us change your mind.

We can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck – and a bit of keyword research – we may be able to do both.

Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until we've taken the next two steps...

Step 03 - Choose Profitable Niche

Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones we've chosen. Because we're planning to use AdSense, we want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdWords.

We're going to build a site the search engines love, so we also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. We don't realy on guesswork.

We must do this BEFORE we start building our web site. That's critically important.

Here's a useful free tool to using for quick, rough keyword research: pixelfast.com/overture/

Type in a phrase, for example, "hiking boots", click "Go", follow the instructions, and we can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) network of web sites.

We can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.

Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.

Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. You can do that by playing around with Google's free Keyword Tool.

For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as "recipe" and click on "Get More Keywords". Pretend you're willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows - 100. (It won't work properly if you ignore this.) Over on the right side of the page, make sure that "Cost and position estimates" is selected.

The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases. Try entering a different word, say "debt" or "hosting", click on "Re-calculate" and watch how the CPC changes.

You don't HAVE to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.

If you use Site Build It you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought of without it.

Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you'll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.

Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.

For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

Publishers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you're planning to create and look at their AdSense ads. You can also use AdSense's preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.

Step 04 - Research Affiliate Merchants

Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match our topic.

We want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. We can search the AssociatePrograms.com affiliate directory for ideas.

Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.

If we're lucky, we'll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions – the sort reviewed in this directory..

We'll earn repeat commissions when "our" customers make more purchases.

Step 05 - Build A Useful, Interesting Website On Our Niche.

Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.
Show our personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. We need to connect with our visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like.

There's no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a web site. For that, we'll need a good instruction manual.

We can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies.

We'll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual written specifically for affiliates.

Here are the two best options:

• • For keen do-it-your-selfers, I recommend Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook.
    
    Rosalind is a real been-there-done-that super affiliate.
    
    Her instruction manual shows you how she builds very successful sites using web authoring software.
    
    It starts right at the beginning, discussing topics such as myths about doing business online, mistakes to avoid, how to choose the best topic, how to choose the right domain name, etc.
    
    The book, updated in May 2006, takes you step-by-step through the whole process.
    
    One particularly useful feature is her explanation of how she achieves high conversion rates (visitor-to-sales ratios), achieving conversion rates of 4% or 6% while most affiliates are happy with 1%.
    
    Another of the strengths of the book is her descriptions of a wide variety of ways to get traffic to your site. This is important - too many affiliates rely on just one or two traffic-generating methods. The more traffic-gemerating methods you have, the safer your business is.
    
    Rosaland is genuinely successful, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now she's also a very successful author, with sales of more $1 million from her book, which is excellent value.
    
    When you learn from her, you're learning from a winner.
    
    Learn more about Rosalind's Super Affiliate Handbook here.
    
    
  • For affiliates who want to simplify things as much as possible and automate the tedious techie stuff, I recommend Ken Evoy's Site Build It (SBI).
    
    SBI is a site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools, all in one place.
    
    Once you have SBI, you don't have to go scurrying all over the Net adding more tools and software. You have almost all you need in one package, so you can concentrate on the fun part – creating useful, interesting content.
    
    (Once you have SBI, the only addition you need to buy occasionally is a cheap, one-day subscription to Wordtracker. It's useful to double check the SBI brainstorming results against Wordtracker results.)
    
    SBI comes with a newly updated, truly comprehensive instruction manual, a step-by-step Action Guide.
    
    SBI is the tool I give my assistants.
    
    Ken Evoy's instruction manual is doing my work for me. First it taught Rupert and now it's teaching Ros how to build a high quality, successful, revenue-generating site.
    
    You could build a site without SBI, but using it saves you time and effort by simplifying the process.
    
    SBI teaches you how to optimize your web pages so they'll be found in search engines. After building a page, you click the "Analyze It" button and it tells you what you need to do to improve it.
    
    The SBI technique really works. Two of the SBI sites that Rupert built are included in the case studies on the SBI site.
    
    See the proof in the SBI case studies
    

Step 06 - Add Affiliate Links

As we write the articles for our site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as we write the articles. Speak to that visitor.

Our task as an affiliate is to help our visitor decide what to buy.

One successful technique is to gradually lead our visitor towards a purchase. Start by outlining a problem, discuss a good solution that has worked for us, and end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, "Find out more here."

Our task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that's the merchant's job) but to presell, to warm up our visitors. We want our visitors in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when they arrive at the merchant's site.

For superb advice on preselling, I strongly recommend we join Ken Evoy's 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. It's free to join.

Ken is an absolute whiz at preselling and he's renowned for working extremely hard to help his affiliates succeed. He has a superb program. It's been No.1 in my Top 10 for several years.

Step 07 - Place Adsense Ads On Our Site

Here's an excellent free AdSense tutorial.

If you have a good, popular site, it's remarkably easy to make good money with AdSense.
Do It so we will be happy....

Step 08 - Get Links

First, link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to us.

This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular.

Now we see why I said build a useful, interesting web site. If we do that, people are more likely to link to our site.

Here's an article describing how to get reciprocal links.

Step 09 - Anchor Text

You'll also need to understand the importance of anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site.

To search engines, anchor text is very important.

We can find how anchor text can boots our search engine rankings in this link.

http://www.associateprograms.com/articles/17/1/Anchor-text-explained/

Step 10 - List Our Site In Mojor Directory And Niche Directory In Our Industry

We probably already know about Yahoo! (good but expensive), DMOZ (often takes months to get into) and Zeal (tricky to get into; for non-commercial sites).

Here are some more directories (some charge a fee):
Gimpsy
Skaffe
Joeant
GoGuides
Business.com
SevenSeek
ThisIsYourYear
Looksmart (probably too expensive)
BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind


Guides to web directories
David Mahler has a Guide to Web Directories. It's a good list of recommended web directories.

Here's another list: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php


How to find niche directories:

• Go to http://www.associateprograms.com/searchit (It's a very handy free research tool.)
• Scroll to the Search Category, "Specialty Hubs and Directories"
• Choose one of the 4 options in STEP 2
• Read the "Click Here for Information..." help before proceeding
• Complete STEPS 3 and 4, and then click on Search It!
• Read the tutorial. It tells us what to do with the search results
• Get our search result. We should be able to find relevant, themed hub sites and directories which will list our site. Some charge a fee, some are free.

Step 11 - Write Article

Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them (more challenging). This step isn't absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if we do it. Now we understand why it was so important that we chose a topic that was easy to write about.
If like the topic we will not bored to write about it.

Step 12 - Add More Pages And Get More Links

Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (we do research at Wordtracker for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to our site. Remember..... google or the others search engine love the fat and rich site, don't let our site skinny.... :D

Make friends with other web site owners, and more people will link to you...

step 13 - Be Patient

Be patient.......!!!!
If our new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and we'll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.

We're likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. We're likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk.

Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If we're persistent and get the details right, the process I'm describing works beautifully.

Learn something new every day. Do something to improve our business every day. If we do that, success is inevitable.

Step 14 - Expect To See Sign Off Success

Eventually, because of all the links to our site on other sites, Google, Yahoo! and MSN will find our site and start sending us traffic.

Perhaps around the three-month or four-month stage we'll be receiving 100 visitors a day. Visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to us and asking us to link to them.

Keep at it. We're just getting warmed up.

Step 15 - The Payoff......

About six months down the road, after little expense but quite a lot of hard work and research, we hit our magical $300 a month mark, from affiliate sales and from AdSense ads on our site.

Depending on the niche we've chosen and the skills we've learned, we might earn considerably more than $300.

Perhaps after 12 months, you'll be earning $500 to $1,000 a month from our site.

The checks keep coming in, month after month, even when we take a little vacation. We start telling friends how easy affiliate marketing is, and are puzzled when they're not convinced.

Of course, it's not really easy. It just seems easy after we've done the hard work.

...or the NON-payoff

If we've merely scanned the instruction manual and jumped right in without doing any research and built a "Make Money on the Internet" site, we'll probably earn very little. A search on Google for "make money" displays more than 4 million pages. If one of those is us, we have a LOT of competition.

If we did this and it isn't working for us, go back to step 1 and start again.

Step 16 - Tweak Our Site

To boost our conversion rate (our visitor-to-sales ratio), try little experiments, one thing at a time.

Try changing the heading on a page, the words, the colors, the placement of our links. With each change wait until about 1,000 visitors have seen the change, and monitor our affiliate commissions to see if they rise or fall.

We do this because we understand that if 1% of our visitors are buying and tiny changes boost our success rate to 2%, we'll DOUBLE our commissions.

Step 17 - The Future

When we reach our goal of $300 a month, we wonder whether we should expand our site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an autoresponder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell ... and turn it into a portal. We dream big. Perhaps we even start dreaming of having our own affiliates promoting your reports for us...

Or perhaps we just research another little overlooked niche and start on our next simple little, low-maintenance money-generating site.

The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that's all we earn, we've done something "wrong". We haven't chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, We haven't built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, We haven't learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or We haven't attracted enough good quality links to our site.

That's the wonderful thing about this business. Weou can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don't make TOO many mistakes :D

Step 18 - Take The First Step

That's the one that matters most.

I suggest we go back and read through this affiliate program tutorial again, and again, and again............ and again. Until we sure that we already take right steps.

Picture ourself owning a successful Internet business. Picture ourself opening letters and finding checks in them.

Imagine enjoying ourself spending the money, perhaps even giving up our day job so that wecan concentrate on our own business.

Now take the first step.