5 ways to promote affiliate products and make $5,000 or more a month

I have been promoting affiliate products in the past 2 years and about half of my income or $5,000 a month comes from affiliate marketing. If you are a newbie in affiliate marketing or having trouble making money with affiliate products, here are some tips for you.

1. Content - Content is by far the most important thing in affiliate marketing. You should create unique, quality and fresh content for your site. 60-70% of my traffic comes from search engine and about 85% of that comes from Google. There are few things you need to do for Google to find you.
a) Keyword research - Do some basic keyword research through Google adwords. See what kind of keywords people are searching.
b) Identify buyer keywords - There are people who are looking for information and there are people who are ready to buy. Target the buyers. Some buyer keywords include but not limited to the following
buy
purchase
best
review
model numbers
brand names
cheap
c) Information keyword - There keywords are still important as they drive a lot of traffic to your site and they may ultimately buy something. You can also put adsense on your site to make additional money.
d) On Page SEO - you should do some basic SEO on your site. I was getting good traffic before I learn SEO, but my search engine traffic almost double when I applied SEO to my site. If you are using wordpress, then you can use the All in One SEO plugin.
e) Build back links to your site and deep links.
f) presell the product. People tend to ignore banners in general and they have horrible conversion rate. Therefore, you should write something to presell the affiliate product that you are trying to promote. Another approaching is text links in a problem-solution post. You post a problem, and then insert your affiliate product as a solution to your problem.

2. Forum Marketing
- Participate in forums and be helpful. Help out other people who needed help and post
genuine replies instead of posting affiliate links. You should never post spam in any form as you will get ban quickly. Nobody likes spam and people are more likely to buy from a friend rather than a stranger, so try to become friends with other members. Have a signature that points to your site is all you need. Spend at least 1 hour a day in forums that are related to your niche.

3. Twitter Marketing
When I first started twitter marketing, I was clueless. All I can see is people post useless stuff. I tried to do the same, but failed. I tried again and failed again. The reason was I kept posting affiliate products but nobody came to my site or buy anything from me. Then I realize twitter is the same as forum, I should be more helpful to other twitters. So I did the following

a) I started to answer other people's question and gain followers. You don't need a massive list of followers to make money with twitter, you need real people to follow you and if your message really help them, they will retwit your message to their friends and it goes viral.
b) I have never use any tool to build followers or anything. The only tool I use is socialoomph which is free. I use the tool to send a direct message to my followers when they follow me. The message is of course a link to my presell page.
c) Use the twitter search to find targeted customers. For example, if your niche is weight lost or diet, you can do a search
“diet recommendations -http -www.” - this will search for people who search for diet recommendations and their twit doesn't include a link. The reason is there are a lot of other marketers on twitter who are promoting their products with a link, I want to exclude them from my search. Remember, that is an exact keyword search on twitter, you should try other phrases as well.

3. Promote your product on facebook
Facebook is a little different than twitter because there is no search function to find other people's message posted on the wall. So you need to make a lot of friends.
a) Post messages on other people's fan page and build your friend list.
b) Fans Page - after you have about 500 friends, create a fans page and ask your friends to join.
c) Market your fans page, post helpful stuff that people want or need, and post links to your presell page from time to time.

4. Article Marketing -
- Write articles and submit to ezine and other article directories. I don't use this method very often because of my writing skills. But if you are a good writer, you should use article marketing because the conversion rate is pretty high.


5. Product Selection - Last but not least, product selection is important in affiliate marketing. You may work 12 hours a day, but if you are promoting the wrong product, then you will fail no matter how hard you try.
a) Affiliate Networks - Join affiliate networks like clickbank and commissino junction. Promote only the products with good landing pages. In clickbank, promote only the products with a gravity of at least 10 and minimum commission of $30. In Commission Junction, only promote the products with a Network Earnings of 3/5 or higher.
b) Spy On your competitor - Do a Google search and see what your competitors are promoting. If they are promoting a product heavily and constantly, chances are the product is a good one to promote, so you should try to product it too.

As you can see, I'm not a good writer and English is not my first language, if I can make money promoting, then you can too. On top of all that, hard working and persistence is the key. If you are a guy who gave up easily, then affiliate marketing is not for you.

I hope you learn something from my post. If not, I'm sorry to waste your time. Good Luck!

 

Using Twitter search to find potential customer is really a great idea. I am currently working on the fanpage to generate some free traffic to my online service.

 

Very helpful post. Another great way to promote an affiliate product that most people overlook is Youtube. You can take about 10 minutes a day to make an informative video about what you know on the product you're promoting and leave the link to your affiliate product in the video description. If you've purchased a domain name that leads to your affiliate product then you can even include that on the screen using windows movie maker. I try to make 2 video a week and so far it has been very helpful.

 

Actually I've always thinking about to get into youtube, but my speaking skills is worse than my writing skills, so not sure if it will work out.
However, I will give a shot soon or later anyway, since there is nothing to lose.

 

Don't worry about your speaking skills. When creating the videos, you don't even have to speak on them or even be in them. The video can be a PowerPoint presentation and just add Royalty free music to it. Then use Camtasia to turn the powerpoint slides into a video format. On your YouTube channel, in the content box below the video, you include a URL link to your blog/salespage. Another option is to hire a voiceover artist to do the audio for you. In any case, don't let anything hold you back. YouTube is a great source of traffic.

 

About what time frame did it take yo to get anywhere near that? Any specific affiliate sites you'd recommend above others?

 

Well, I started as a part time internet marketer 3 years ago and wasn't really making any money because I didn't know any other ways on how to make money online other than putting a Google adsense on my site. Anyway, I started with Google adsense and pay per click was pretty good, but I didn't get good traffic. Later, I discovered affiliate marketing and I realized that I was getting good traffic from Google to my site, so I took it seriously. So I would say I officially started promoting affiliate products 2 years ago. I then started many new sites, but didn't have time to really promote them yet. I use clickbank, commission junctions, and a few in house affiliates.

 

Hey Shulink,
Will you please tell step by step guide me how do you promote amazon products on your website or blog.
I'm amazon affiliate member but I don't know how I promote my product!

I need your help ! Really

 

Promoting amazon products is easy. Once you have an account and you are logged in, simply go to the amazon product page of the product you want to promote, then click on "Link to this page" at the top of the browser. From there you should be able to figure it out.

 

Just login to their affiliate association center and search for the products that you want to promote and they will give you an affiliate link for your site. You can also create an Amazon Store on your site. To be honest with you, Amazon is the worst performer for my sites and I eventually took it down. They pay like $4 commission for every $100 sale, I can get that amount with 3-4 clicks with Google Adsense. The best day for me was someone bought like 20 books from my site and the sale amount was like $800, and I got only $35 bucks for that. I'm not saying Amazon won't work, there are a lot people who are making a killing with promoting amazon products. However, I think you need to sell expensive products rather than books and get a lot of traffic to make money with Amazon. Hope you do well

 

thanks for the share but you forget to add youtube its an goldmine if you use it correctly i myself have earned hundreds of dollars by combining power of youtube with my cpa lead website its very useful for the newbies because there is no cost involved and you can try facebook also i have seen very fair results with facebook according to me social media is the best because it is free and its scalable upto extent

 

Yah, youtube is my next target. I didn't do it yet because my english speaking skills is bad, so I focus on things that I'm good at first and try to replicate the things that worked well for me. I know marketers are doing extremely well with youtube promoting affiliate products, so I will definitely try it out myself.

 

Do you know anything about Youtube's partnership program?

 

Very descriptive thread and allowed me to start thinking more about marketing. But, what exactly do you mean by an "affiliate product"?

 

A good post, but just like any other site it will take time, and hard work to reach that goal of $5000 a month.

 

I actually really like this post and your website link. Both are fact filled and helpful. Do you re-invest your profits? Do earnings stay steady or are they still increasing for you?

 

I don't reinvest my profit (maybe in the future), but earnings are still increasing because I'm still working on the traffic and creating new sites.

 

really cool post , thanks for your sharing ,and i think twitter marketting is a better way if you can make full use of it .

 

Good tips - thanks. I think it also helps if you have an exact match domain name. So, if you are promoting say Google Sniper 2 - try and get a domain name with google sniper 2 somewhere in the domain and get a .net, .org or add a random letter on the end like x or something.

 

An "affiliate product" is a product that is developed by a certain person, and that person allows for other marketing individuals to promote or sell the product for a share of its profit. Most commission percentages are established by the developer of the product as to how much each sale will be worth to the affiliate marketer who is advertising the product.