Glend Article

the workhorse method

Author: glend

Introduction

One problem that affiliates always seem to have is that they want a “fool
proof” way to make money - one that will allow them to quit their job and
make a full-time living from affiliate marketing. Does that sound familiar?
Well, if that sounds like you, I have a question for you: how bad do you want
it? Because, I have exactly what you are looking for, but it involves a bit of
grunt work. So, how bad do you want it?

Hold that thought…

Just imagine for a second… waking up at 11am for a relaxed brunch, and
banking over $100 in near passive income everyday. It sounds great, doesn’t
it? Well, I do it every single day of my life, and I can tell you it is utterly
incredible (I am pretty vindictive and I love to find a breakfast bar near a train
station and sit down at about 9am checking my e-mails while I watch everyone
scurry to work).

Why do I bring all this up? Simple. Because this next method I am about to
tell you involves some work, and it will bore the hell out of you when you do it
- but if you follow my steps you will be making between $40-200 per day in
affiliate commissions when you follow through, typically within 30 days of
reading this sentence.

And, yes, the work is dull and boring - which is why you must always have that
image of me sitting in that breakfast bar, chilling out while I watch people like
the old me go through the corporate ringer.

Now, this method isn’t stylish, and it isn’t clever, but it provides results and
you don’t need any capital whatsoever to set it up - unlike some of my other
techniques. But it will take some “brute force” i.e. work on your end, and that’s
something you should remember. Just picture me, relaxed as hell wearing my
casuals in that breakfast bar, checking how much I made in my sleep and you
will do well.

Summary of the technique

This is a real idiot proof one. In fact, if you hear an affiliate bragging on an
Internet marketing forum about how he is doing this for a living, there is a
good chance he does this method in some shape or form. Basically, we are
going to find a product with an affiliate program, then write several articles
that rank well in Google (with a little link to the product we want to promote),
get some free traffic for our work, and repeat the process – and I do mean
repeat.

If we do this the right way (and it has to be done the right way - read on), and
we repeat it enough times (a good number of times - how bad do you want
financial freedom?), we will generate $40-200 per day in affiliate
commissions with zero capital investment. And we will do it within 30 days of
reading this sentence. Sounds good?

I will explain how it works, and how I do it - the rest is on you.

Find a product to promote

Note: you can use one of the other product selection methods such as “the
opportunist” method, the “copy the best” method, or the “thief in the night”
method here (all to come). I suggest you have a constant portfolio of products
you intend to promote using these methods. Alternatively, you can use the
following “general” selection method below – or you can use some
combination of these methods to build up your “product portfolio” - this is
a term I use to describe a short-list of products you are thinking of promoting,
almost all the super affiliates I have spoken to on my travels have one of these.
You need one too – and you can use the product selection methods outlined in
this guide to build yours. Now, on with the “general selection method”…

The general product selection method

Head over to http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.html and click on any
category, and arrange the products by gravity. Then browse through and draw
up a shortlist of 10-20 products that have a gravity of between 10-70. Above
70 and the product is already being marketed well, and less than 10 and the
product has not proven itself yet (to generalize).

Now, return to your shortlist and have a read through the sales letter of each
product. Does the sales letter look persuasive? The “good” sales letters
generally have a certain style to them - with lots of benefits (”revealed, the five
simple steps to catapult you to financial freedom!” - that kind of thing), lots of
testimonials, and have a very “sales-like” feel to them. If you want to check out
what a standard issue sales letter looks like, please check out the following
sites:

http://www.affiliateprojectx.com *
http://www.adwordsmiracle.com *
http://www.horsebettingracingsystem.com
http://www.gotrythis.com
http://www.adwordsblackbook.com
http://www.butterflymarketing.com
http://www.keywordelite.com

*My two products. Not modest, am I?

Those are only examples, but you should start to see commonalities in the
writing style (benefits, benefits, benefits!), and you should also note that the
presentation is clean in all cases. Never promote a product that is not
presented well. There are plenty of examples I could give (anything on
ClickBank with a gravity of over 50 has quite clearly proven itself with good
copy), but those are ones that I like – and they all demonstrate persuasive
“standard issue” sales copy. Take note.

That’s our due diligence done (we aren’t going to commit too much to refining
the list down at this stage), and we should now have a shortlist of the 10-20
products we want to promote. We will whittle this list down as we move
through the stages so we don’t need to be laser-focused to start.

Do your Keyword research

Remember, when we write our articles, we are going to get the majority of our
traffic from search engines, largely Google. The reason for this is that Google
tends to rank articles on the sites we will be posting on well. You will also get
some residual traffic from Yahoo and MSN, but experience shows that it is
best to focus on Google and get some secondary traffic by chance, rather than
the other way around.

We find keywords that are relevant for our product, write articles based
around those keywords, and get free traffic off the back of Google and the
articles site – if we repeat this process enough times, we will generate
substantial income. This method has allowed many affiliates to quit their jobs
and work from home. Its slow and painful, but a “fool-proof”, zero capital way
to make money as an affiliate. If you hate your boss, have lots of time, and
little capital, this may be the one for you.

When you use this method over and over, you will become a master at
keyword research. Researching keywords several times per day has a habit of
doing that to you. When we choose to promote a product, we are often going
to be at a complete loss as to what the relevant keywords are. Quick question:
what does someone interested in learning how to play golf search for? I am
sure you can come up with a few ideas, but after 5 or so terms you probably
run out of steam.

Now at this point I want to slide into a little sales pitch: if you are really
serious about this method, then I suggest you invest in Keyword Elite - I offer
a series of advanced training videos for anyone who buys the product via my
link – see http://www.killyourjob.com as mentioned earlier. If you can’t
afford to shell out for the program, at least not yet, then read on.

There are a number of ways to collect keywords for our product, and I tend to
take a “scatter gun” approach to draw up keywords and then filter them down
later. Once more, this is not an exhaustive list, and it is not a “clever” set of
steps, but as I say this is a brute force method that works – not a sly
workaround.

1. Check out the affiliate page of the product – see what keywords the
merchant recommends you promote his/her product on. But don’t stop there.

Very often the product vendor will have an affiliate page with relevant
keywords on it - these are intended for Adwords advertisers, but they will
work just as well for our keyword-articles. There are two points to bear in
mind here.

The first is that you should also do a quick search for competitors and look at
their affiliate pages too (very often they will have different keywords that you
can use).

Tip: The second point is that most vendors will provide many vague, semirelated
keywords that don’t convert that well. The rationale here is that the
product vendor will have 1,000 affiliates all promoting his product across
hundreds of keywords. By the time those guys realize that strategy doesn’t
work and give up, a new crop of affiliates fill their place. Great for the product
vendor, not so good for the affiliates.

2. Use Google and Yahoo’s suggestion tool

You can take a broad keyword and enter it into both Google and Yahoo’s
suggestion tool - this will throw up new keywords for you to use (for example
if you throw “Google Adwords” into Google’s suggestion tool, one of the
suggested keywords is “make money with Adwords”). You can head to
http://pixelfast.com/overture for the suggestion tool.

3. Browse resource sites

Take one of the keywords relevant to your product (the more general the
better), and type “[keyword] directory”, “[keyword] Wikipedia” or very simple
[keyword] into Google. If we browse directories related to our keywords, we
will see lots of “niche specific” keywords that we wouldn’t have hit on before.

Wikipedia (the online encyclopaedia) is great because doing a search for the
relevant term will very often bring up a list of other terms (along with an
article with lots of keywords in it, many of which will be links themselves – so
they stand out in the article). Finally, if we just type our keyword into Google
we can peruse related sites and scour them for any keywords that we
otherwise wouldn’t have found - very often we can draw up a shortlist of 50 or
so possible keywords from these three sources in around 20 minutes.

At this point, we should have a list of 30-100 possible keywords for each of our
products. We now need to filter these down to a manageable number - time
for the next stage.

Tip: one keyword you are definitely going to want to target is the title of the
product itself. In fact, writing a review or pre-sell and targeting the keyword of
the title of the product can be very profitable for two reasons. Firstly,
remember that anyone searching for the product is super targeted – incredibly
so. Secondly, it is very often easy to rank well for the keyword of the product
title as merchants have very few genuine back-links (they may have 100
affiliate links pointing in at any one time, but the site may well have a Page
Rank of 0-2, It is not uncommon for a popular ClickBank product to not rank
in the top position for its own term. Many successful affiliates will write their
pre-sell, add it to a site like USFreeAds or Ezine Articles and send Adwords
traffic to that page. That way they get their Adwords clicks and organic traffic,
all on the same page.

Filtering your keywords

All keywords are not created equal. Someone searching for “project x affiliate
guide” is a very qualified prospect, worth twenty times as much to me as
someone searching for, say, “make money” (at least to me and my affiliates).

If you were advertising on Adwords, you would pay possibly five-ten times as
much per click for the former. Of course, here we aren’t using Adwords, and so
we can’t throw up an ad and track conversions (and using guesswork to try
and predict which keywords convert is ill advised). But, we can still use
Adwords to our advantage.

Adwords can be a profit monster in the right hands. Anyone who owns a copy
of my Adwords Miracle guide knows that. But, Adwords can also be a ruthless,
cutthroat business.

Anyone bidding on a keyword that doesn’t convert will generally pull his or
her ad in a matter of days. Over time, only the profitable ads survive. For this
reason, the ads that show up on Adwords for a particular keyword will give
you a clear window into what the people searching for that keyword are after.
If you have ever tried advertising a product as an affiliate on a competitor’s
keyword, you will know how difficult it is to maintain a good ranking.

If we do a search for “Adwords Miracle”, we will see that nine out of ten ads
are promoting Adwords Miracle (and I doubt the guy advertising something
else is profitable). If we type in our keyword and look at the ads being shown,
we can see what the people searching that key term are interested in (some
would say the ads shown are more relevant than the organic terms, since the
advertisers pay a heavy price if they are not relevant).

The point: If there were several products similar to the one we are going to
advertise currently being advertised, then it would be a good idea to target this
keyword with our article. Because, chances are it converts for products like
ours. Simple? Obvious? Yes, and absolutely fundamental to our success.

However, we are not done yet. While Google loves the sites we are going to use
to create our articles, it does not love them more than well-established, hub
sites. To give you a flippant example, we are not going to rank better than
Google for the search term “Google”, no matter how many articles we write.

Likewise, certain terms (such as “poker”, “credit cards”, etc) are going to be
insanely competitive and we have zero chance of even ranking in the top 100
searches for them with our article. We really do need to rank in the top ten for
our term, and so we will need to go a bit lower down the tree to pick our
keyword.

Of course, the problem with going too low is that we need some traffic i.e. we
need people searching for the term that our article will show up under. Too
low and we won’t get the traffic, too high and we won’t be able to compete.
But there are some gems – fairly popular terms that aren’t too hard to rank for
– and we can find them.

The first step we need to take is to head to Overture (Yahoo)’s suggestion tool
over at http://pixelfast.com/overture and enter the term in question. The
figure on the right is the number of times that particular term has been
searched for in the past month.

We are going to want to target a term that has been searched for 300-5000
times per month, so if any of your keywords fall outside that scale, cross them
off the list.

Now that we have the search volume down, we need to ensure that the term is
not too competitive and that we are going to be able to rank on the search
page. Google ranks web pages in a pretty funny way at times (I can’t
summarise exactly how they do it in a book, if I could I would be charging
$2,000 for Project X and people would pay)… but we can gauge roughly how
competitive a term is by looking at the results that are currently in the top ten.
And to get it right most of the time, that’s all we need.

Pay attention to three factors: Alexa rank, PageRank, and the title of the page.
If you are a Firefox user (you should be), you can get a free extension called
SearchStatus (http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus) which will display
PageRank and Alexa rank automatically for every page you visit - a great time
saver.

Just to explain, PageRank is Google’s method of measuring how many links
point to a particular web page. If all the pages in the top ten for our keyword
have PageRanks of between 0-3 then, that is a good sign. If they are all
PageRank 5 and up, that is a bad sign.

Alexa rank is a rough measurement of how popular a website is - and the
lower the number, the more popular the site is (Yahoo.com has an Alexa rank
of #1, it is the most popular site online).

Generally, if the majority of pages in the top 10 for our keyword have Alexa
ranks of less than 100,000, that is a good sign. If there are more than a
handful of sites with Alexa ranks of less than 20,000 then that is a bad sign.
Finally, look at the title of each of the web pages - do the titles include the
keyword in them - if so, there is a good chance that the page has been
“optimised” for that keyword, i.e. the webmaster is deliberately trying to
compete on that keyword, and it will be harder to rank for that term).

Provided our keywords have search volume of between 300-5000, and the
competition isn’t too tough on Google, we have a keyword that we can target.
Now, we can move onto the next stage, which is creating the article itself.

Writing the article itself

If you’re like me, you don’t like hard work, which is why I am going to
recommend that you always write articles similar to ones that have already
been written. Remember, the best capitalists are often the least inventive.
In very simple terms, if you are writing articles on “make money with
Adwords”, search for articles on that subject, draw out what the points you
like and start to write your article. Your article really does not have to be
genius; it just has to be a solid 500-700-word piece. Don’t just put out any
piece of junk, and if in doubt, rely on others articles (copy ideas, but do not
steal words wholesale – taking ideas but not plagiarising wholesale is well
within the law in case you were wondering). But then again, don’t think it
needs to be Shakespeare. It doesn’t.

One important issue with the article itself is keyword density. Keyword
density refers to the number of times a particular word or keyphrase appears
on a web page.

For example, if I write a 500 word article, and mention the keyphrase “make
money with Adwords” five times, then the article has a keyword density of 1%.
I generally aim for a keyword density of between 3-6% - too low and Google
won’t think we are relevant for our keyword; too high and Google will think we
are spamming to get a good search ranking.

You can copy and paste your article to check keyword density) at
http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com/

You will also want to mention the keyword or key phrase once at the start of
the article (in the first paragraph) and once in the final paragraph.

Finally, you will want to add an author resource box to your article - this is the
*most* important part of your entire article (it is where you convince people
to click through to your link, in this case our affiliate link). The resource box
should include three pieces of information: your name, the benefits of the
product you are trying to sell, and a call to action.

Study other articles that show under your keyterm and see how their resource
box links – as I see we don’t get rich by being innovative.

Submitting your article

There are literally thousands of article directories to submit your articles to.
And a beginner would think that the best thing to do is to submit your site to
100 of them. After all, the more sites, the better, right? Not quite. Google will
penalise articles that are the same as others (called duplicate content), so it
won’t endear us to Google. Moreover, many article site owners don’t like you
submitting duplicate content. That said, you can still do it for some extra
traffic, it’s just that Google won’t rank you well for those articles (but it might
provide an extra trickle of content). Also be aware that content posted on
these “hub” sites is often spidered and taken by other smaller article sites.

I suggest you submit your article to one of three sites: Ezine Articles
(http://www.ezinearticles.com), SearchWarp (http://www.searchwarp.com)
and USFreeAds (http://www.usfreeads.com) - I suggest you sign up to all
three and alternate between them - Google seems to love all of them (although
USFreeAds is not an article site, Google loves it and it will work for purposes.
You can submit ads for free, or become a paid member to speed up the
process).

Once you have submitted your article, you should expect to show up on the
first page of the results within a week, and you will generally stay there for
between 3 weeks and 2 months. You will of course need to repeat this process
to make it work - I suggest you write 3 new articles per day, using this method
to make $50-200 per day within the space of 30 days.

If you do or do not decide to use this method (its a lot of work), be aware that
it is a “fool proof” way to make a living from affiliate marketing - and its there
if you want it. You may want to use some of the tracking methods that I cover
in Section 3 (so you know where your sales are coming from), and I suggest
you cloak your links too, once more using the information in Section 3).

Note: with USFreeAds you can link direct with an affiliate link. SearchWarp
and EzineArticles will require you to link to a squeeze page or pre-sell page
(they don’t allow direct affiliate linking). For this reason, I recommend you
use USFreeAds to do the bulk of your damage in the marketplace.

Full disclosure: There is of course a workaround for either site. It is not perfect
but I have used it on occasion. Basically, you upload a cloaked link to its own
domain so when an editor sees a link straight through to a domain, they don’t
notice.

The second workaround is simple: link to a pre-sell or review etc (anything
but a direct affiliate link), wait for your article to be approved, and then
change the review back to a cloaked version of your affiliate link. Either way,
you may incur the wrath of an editor – who may close your account (but
frankly you can always setup as many as you like), or pull your article. I am
simply advising you of the workarounds. And then it’s on you. If you don’t
have steely nerves, simply use USFreeAds for your SEO fix.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 4:04 am and is filed under Affiliate Tips, Work At Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.