My 7 Step Process for Affiliate Marketing Promotions – Part One

If you read one of my last posts you will see where I have recently signed up as an affiliate for Rogue Fitness and Dragon Door. In this post I am going to show you the exact 7 steps that I will be using to promote these 2 companies. I have worked on this strategy for the past year promoting another affiliate program.

In the past year I have written 92 articles to promote this affiliate program and have spread these articles out over 5 different websites. This has allowed me to actually have multiple websites ranking on the first page of Google for over a half dozen different keywords. When I was able to secure position #1 and #2 for a single keyword, I saw my earnings increase significantly. As of Friday March 29th I am averaging earning $87 a day. Here is exactly what I did to get to this level.

Step 1 Find an Affiliate Program

There are many different places you can go to find an affiliate programs. There are several websites that oversee the affiliate program for many different companies and you can easily access all of them in a single location. Some of the mega affiliate websites are Google Affiliate Network, Share A Sale, Pepper Jam, Commission Junction, Link Share, Avant Link and Clickbank. In addition many bigger name companies have their own affiliate program that they administer in house. Some of the bigger name companies with their own affiliate program include Amazon and WalMart.

There are many people that will tell you to do extensive keyword research and look for products with so meany searches per month and less than so many results in a google search. I have nothing against using some set of criteria points to determine whether or not to promote a product. I picked my current affiliate program because my cousin was promoting it and was making several thousand dollars a month doing it. Nothing scientific there.

Though I do recommend that you promote products that you have some knowledge about them. For example I would find it very hard to promote used car parts since I have no clue what is what under the hood of my car. Now I am an active athlete and actually ran in a 5k road race this morning so I feel comfortable promoting products for athletes and especially those doing Crossfit exercising. That is how I chose to sign up with Rogue Fitness.

Some people may find the fitness niche as being too competitive and they might be right. If you are looking for an evergreen product then check out Safe Rides 4 Kids. I will talk more about this product in the conclusion of part 2 of this article and how I ended up signing up for their affiliate program. This is a revolutionary new product in the baby market. To join the affiliate program you will need to email Stephanie directly so make sure you tell her that you got lead from Jennifer at ratracegrad.com. NOTE: I get nothing for recommending this product – I just think it is a great product.

Pick one affiliate program and sign up for it. This will be your primary program that you will promote. I also recommend that you sign up for one to two more complimentary affiliate programs at the same time. This will allow you to promote their complimentary products in the product review articles that you write for your primary program.

Step 2 Create a Website

If you want to go the free route when promoting your affiliate program, I highly encourage you to do this. Of course, you can also purchase a domain name and create your own website. There are many Web 2.0 websites where you can create a free account and be promoting a product in under a few minutes. There were 6 websites that I used to promote my current affiliate program that included both free and paid and they included:

• Website (PAID)
• Blog (I installed a separate WordPress directory on my website for my blog)
• Squidoo (FREE)
• Weebly.com (FREE)
• WordPress.com (FREE)
• Blogger (FREE)

Step 3 Write Articles

If you are going to promote any affiliate program then you will need to write product review articles. You can either write these yourself or hire someone else to do them for you. My product review articles are just a tad over 500 words each. Some people recommend that you write 1,000 word articles. That is fine if you want to write longer product review articles.

If you missed my previous article Internet Marketing on Steroids then I recommend that you take the time to read it. I showed you how I find a core group of writers on Elance that I use to write my product review articles. My best writer charges $6 for a 500 word article.

My strategy is that I start off initially with 15 articles. These articles will be a combination of product review articles, general information articles, beneficial articles and Free Stuff for your readers. For the initial 15 articles I will have the following articles written:

• 8 Product Review Articles
• 3 General Information Articles
• 2 Beneficial Articles
• 2 Free Stuff Articles

Here are some topics that I would write about in each of these categories for Rogue Fitness:

Product Review Articles

• Top 10 Equipment needed for a crossfit garage gym
• 5 Items you should always have on hand in your home gym
• Best Olympic barbell for the money
• Best Weightlifting Shoes
• Best Olympic barbell brands
• Ways to Secure Barbell Weights
• Kettlebells vs Barbells – which should you have in your home gym
• Should you purchase a rower or an exercise bike?

General Information Articles

• A Beginner’s Guide to Barbells and Weight Plates
• Difference between standard and Olympics weight plates and bars.
• Bumper Plates vs Rubber Plates

Beneficial Articles on using Recommended Products

• 5 most challenging Crossfit workouts
• How to improve your chin-ups/squats/pushups/deadweight lifts/snatches

Free Stuff for your Readers

• Spreadsheet for scheduling your weightlifting workouts
• 6 week bodyweight workouts for Upper Body/Lower Body/Weightlifting/Aerobic

My writer would charge me $90 to write all of these articles. If you want to save on the cost then write the articles yourself. I would recommend that you find videos that you can use to embed in your product review articles. Check out my post How to Reach 30% More Potential Customers Using Video for a step-by-step guide to creating your own product review videos. Luckily Rogue Fitness has an abundance of very professional videos that I can use in promoting their products.

Step 4 Publish Articles

I publish a new article on my website every 3 days. That means my websites get 10 new articles each and every month. Now above I said I used 6 different websites. If you do the math that is 60 new articles each and every month. That can be quite expensive if you are hiring writers to write the articles for you. Well that is not really the case. I recommend that you slightly modify your original 8 product review articles so that you cover the same products on each of your websites. If you hire a writer then ask them to write the article in spin syntax. This allows you to use a free spinner program to generate 5 more versions of each article to put on each website.

The general information articles can be spun like your product review articles. Or you could just come up with different general information articles. If you come up with different general information articles then you will eventually want all of your websites to have all of the general information articles. You can do the same with the beneficial articles. There is no reason to change your Free Stuff articles and they can be published word for word on all of your websites except Squidoo which requires unique content.

Note: this blog post is continued in Part Two which you can read here.