Affiliate Marketing

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time over the last few months building new micro-niche sites aimed directly at promoting other people’s products (as an affiliate) and receiving a commission from sales, plus a few Adsense sites. I really want to diversify my online income a little more, so I figure that putting a bit more effort into affiliate marketing probably wouldn’t hurt!

After about a month of writing articles & SEOing sites at last I’m starting to see a few sales trickle through from Clickbank. 2 to be exact – 1 last Friday, and another yesterday.

This may not seem like much reward for the amount of work I’ve been putting in – 3 new sites, almost 30 articles for each site plus numerous articles spun, submitted to article directories, SEO work etc. etc. But it’s all about building a solid foundation – it shouldn’t be too much longer and all I should have to do is a small amount of linking and adding fresh content to the sites each week and they will still make a good, steady income (I’m aiming for about $200 a week from each site).

One thing I have noticed this time, is I’m having to do a lot more work now to get the affiliate commissions, than I did 3 years ago when I had a play around being an affiliate for Clickbank products.

One of the products I’m promoting now, is the same one I promoted 3 years ago. Back then, I wrote 18 articles, submitted them to EzineArticles and a couple of other article directories and ended up with 12 sales. At an average of $20 a sale that worked out to about $240.

This time, I’ve written 15 articles on that topic, and only had 2 sales!

When you look at it like that, it might seem like it’s not worth the effort. I can write and submit 2 articles an hour, so a few years back, I was averaging about $26 an hour for the affiliate promotions, while at the moment I’m on just over $2 an hour !

In the long run though, those articles will keep on ‘selling’ for me in the coming weeks & months…so while initially they don’t seem to be doing much, down the track they will be well worth writing.

I’m doing things a little different this time – I’m spending a lot more time SEOing the articles I’ve submitted to improve their search engine rankings too. Last time, I just did a little SEO (not much at all) on the main website, which just isn’t enough in some of the ultra competitive niches.

If you can get an article of yours on an authority site like EzineArticles, it will usually be much easier to rank that article than it will your website.

Think about it for a minute, if you can do a bit of back linking to your article, maybe even so it gets a reasonable Google page rank (though not necessary), Google will see your article as more important…

…& where is your ‘more important’ article linking to? Yep, your website, helping to make your website even ‘more important’ in the eyes of Google.

And remember, this isn’t just an affiliate marketing tactic, you can apply this when you’re building new links to any site .