Exact Steps You Should Take To Have Affiliates For Your Blog

Posted on 18. Mar, 2010 by Ashwin in Blog promotion

Affiliate marketing is not just a profitable business anyone looking to work from home can do. Now, most of us don’t even give it a thought (due to our mindsets, if nothing else) about the other side of affiliate marketing– to be a merchant. So, if you were blogging like so many other bloggers, how could you possibly run an affiliate marketing program? You don’t really have a product or service to market, do you?

Actually, you do. All you have to do is to think about it a bit more creatively than just setting up blogs and promoting traffic in the hopes that you will strike gold.

Ideas On How To Find Your Niche and How to Create Products

Bookstores: Just walk into any book store and you are likely to find books categorized and put up on display in a systematic manner. All you have to do is to look at any of these categories — the narrower the topic is, the better — and pick one to write about for at least another year. Pick some books up to help you get started on the “great content” drive. Perhaps, one of those little books could be used as “research already done” for you to develop a small free report for your site.

Amazon Racks: If you think you don’t have the time to actually walk into a book store, you could perhaps just visit amazon.com and start your niche research from there. Surf through almost all pages and dedicate time to pick out the categories or topics that seem to have some sort of commercial value. Usually, Amazon wouldn’t bother having a category there that isn’t making money for it. This method should be even quicker for you since it’s all online. Purchase tapes, DVDs, books or anything else you might find on your niche to start with.

Magazines: Need yet another source for niche research? Visit magazines.com. This should make for a great additional niche research resource for you. If there is a magazine on any topic whatsoever ( even if you don’t find the topic of your niche attractive), it is a niche which has considerable interest. Browse through the categories and drill down and across to find the topic/niche you are most comfortable with.

Creating Your Own Product

If you are blogging on a topic, it is worth writing a free report on and then make an ebook out of it. Since we are talking about “Being the merchant” here, you are now approaching this from the other side. There are just two ways of developing your product:

Write yourself: If you have good writing and research skills, it makes sense for you to spend some time each day — no matter what you do and then develop the product yourself. It will take some time and patience but it is surely worth it since you will save huge amounts of money you could probably spend on generating traffic or other aspects related to your business.

Outsource to a professional ghostwriter: If writing is an effort for you or if you just don’t have the time to do it, it makes sense to have a professional ghost writer do it for you. In a strict business point of view, it makes perfect sense to do so. A professional ghost writer is usually the best choice for projects they would have written plenty of ebooks. They usually have a systematic approach to writing ebooks and some of them even present them very well.

Establish an Affiliate program

First and foremost, I am a blogger and then an entrepreneur. When I saw it all from the “merchant” point of view, I could immediately place my finger on the potential of an affiliate program. Imagine thousands of people trying to sell your products and services. I immediately set my website up.My portfolio website Fetchprofits now holds my portfolio and also an affiliate program. How did I do that?

Use Plimus: This was my first port of call even though I did hear about the other three affiliate management programs. I liked Plimus because It was incredibly easy to set up my affiliate program. Within a couple of days of my affiliate program going live, I had someone sign up as an affiliate. That was incredible. My sales force is now growing — one affiliate at a time.
e-junkie: I heard about e-junkie much before I heard about plimus. I wasn’t sure if I could sell services through it but I didn’t bother trying. On the other hand, I know a lot of my online entrepreneurs who started out with e-junkie and are doing quite well.
Clickbank: I don’t think I need to tell you anything about clickbank.com at all? Just in case anyone reading this now didn’t know, it is a leading online marketplace for all things digital – mostly ebooks and software. Yet again, I didn’t if I could sell packaged services and also it takes money to get started. I gave it a skip. If you have software or an information product to sell, clickbank is still an amazing choice.

Promote Your Affiliate Program

Promote through your blog: Naturally, this should be your first stop. Put up a sticky post on your blog like I did about my affiliate program. Talk about it endlessly. Link back to it. Don’t just say “Check out my new affiliate program”. Try to put out the numbers there for potential affiliates to think about when they decide to join you.
Join abestweb: I know I did talk about Abestweb a long time ago; it is still the best place to go and talk about affiliate marketing. Not to mention, you also get to learn a lot and stumble across new affiliate programs as they come. Most importantly,think about loads of traffic from here alone. If you have a good affiliate program and a good commission, you will have affiliates for you in no time. However, they are änal-retentive” about their rules on the forum. Tread with care.

Do you have your affiliate program up and running yet? Why can’t bloggers also provide blogging services to so many others who can’t blog but do want to make money?

Share and Enjoy: