The one thing you need to know about affiliate marketing done this way is that it’s not actually the product per se, or the website itself that makes you money, it’s the way you optimise your site for the search engines (‘SEO’) that ultimately creates those profits for you.
In a nutshell you need to know how to optimise your website to make those search engines ‘like’ your website.
Your main task is to ensure your site ranks high – preferably in the top spot – on all major search engines when someone keys words into those search engines to locate products like those you are recommending.
How to optimise your website: a case study
So say, for instance, you’re promoting yurts. Yurts are typically used by Turkish and Mongolian nomadic tribes but they’re growing ever more popular as simple, low cost homes for families living in warmer countries such as Greece and Italy.
This makes yurts a very interesting product for Britons retiring abroad, as well as a potentially very profitable product for you to promote on commission.
As to why we’re discussing yurts, well a regular customer has just told me he lives in a yurt, in Greece, and for the life of me I didn’t dare tell him I’d never heard the word ‘yurt’ before. So I researched yurts and not only did I prevent myself looking ill-informed in my customer’s eyes, but along the way I also discovered an almost certain high profit business opportunity with, as yet, very little competition.
I discovered, for instance, that on Google UK some 245,000 searches are made monthly for ‘yurt’, with 12,100 made for ‘yurt holidays’, 4,400 for ‘yurt hire’, 1,500 for ‘yurts Devon’, and numerous other combinations alongside. That’s lots of traffic, and it’s traffic you can easily capture for yourself and begin sending over to your ten-minute affiliate promotions.
Here’s an interesting fact for you: on eBay.co.uk less than one hundred listings exist for yurts, usually aimed at camping enthusiasts, with just two or three eBay sellers actually supplying them. They sell, on average, three or four times a month and make several hundred to a thousand pounds profit per sale.
For starters check out eBayers ‘Mongolian-yurts-direct’ and ‘grayalpaca’: two of just four or five eBayers I found with yurts listed today.
Look at the kind of products they’re selling on eBay, in what numbers, at what prices, using whatever listing and selling techniques. Then use the best of those techniques to become number six on the list of big time eBay yurt sellers today.
Alongside yurts in their own right you’ll find books about living in yurts and designs for making yurts are equally popular on eBay and Amazon, again, products with high potential profit and few people supplying them.
Back to our one page eventual earner: this page can be on its own website, or part of a bigger website.
Now you need to ensure your web presence is search engine optimised to help you grab a first place listing on Google and other major search engines, thereby guaranteeing you’ll get some of those 245,000 people currently searching for ‘yurts’ online.
You get your traffic by search engine optimising your ten minute promotional page by writing a few hundred words of quality information about yurts and maximising the number of times ‘yurts’ appears on your website along with some or all of those other high frequency search words and phrases – without overdoing it and being accused by Google of keyword spamming! Then you add affiliate links and AdSense units for yurts!
When you’re done you start playing around with your writing, looking for more ways to convince search engines like Google that your information about yurts is highly focussed, very informative, and just perfect for them to recommend to their yurt searching customers.