Start Affiliate Marketing - Choosing Topics To Blog About On Your Affiliate Marketing Blogs

August 12th, 2010 |

Start Affiliate Marketing – Choosing Topics To Blog About On Your Affiliate Marketing Blogs

Affiliate marketing blogs are amongst the most powerful tools in your affiliate toolbox, but it’s important to be sure you’re achieving the greatest possible benefit from the efforts you put in authoring these or any blogs. So to start with, you need to always keep in mind the main reasons for using a blog as one of your affiliate marketing strategies.

The foremost reason, of course, is to drive sales by attracting and forwarding targeted prospects to the merchants’ sites via your affiliate links. But in with that are other purposes that help you achieve that goal at the same time. For example, arriving at a blog that’s full of helpful information gives the visitor the impression that the author is an expert in their topic, and thereby someone whose suggestions are liable to be helpful. And since search engines index pages, not sites, each additional post to your blog is one more potential signpost to lead targeted prospects to your blog in the first place.

So how do you determine which blog topics to write about – which topics will help you stand out as an expert in your field, bring in more targeted readers, and help build your affiliate marketing commissions to higher and higher levels as time goes on? You need to find the answers to people’s most common questions in your niche and write posts that either answer those questions or lead them to products and services that answer those questions – via your affiliate links, of course!

But before you can write those helpful answers, you need to know what the questions are. There are any number of ways to find them, from simple steps like visiting Yahoo Answers and niche-specific forums to more advanced techniques like searching for your niche keywords in Twitter streams. And don’t limit your research to online sources – in any profitable niche or sub-niche there are also books and magazines on the topic, so browse through a few of the most popular publications to see what topics they’re using to attract a targeted audience.

And, of course, your initial keyword research when you first decided this was a popular niche will provide plenty of topics as well – after all, each popular keyword represents thousands of searches a month, and those prospects are searching for information. Look at your initial list of keywords and pick the ten best to target first. Start by writing 5 different headlines that use & target that particular keyword, then write a post for each headline and post it to your affiliate marketing blogs.

It may take you a bit of practice to be able to come up with 5 different ways to approach each keyword, but it’s well worthwhile since you already know those phrases are being searched for regularly and every post you write is one more potential search engine results page listing that can bring people into your funnel. Plus, that targeted visitor will find the post they landed on and 4 more on the same topic of interest to them, and then other posts on related topics as well.

You’ve answered their questions or at least shed light on the issue for them and they now recognize you as an expert in your niche. So your credibility is already established when they read a product review post or a pre-sell page you’ve written, either of which can now lead them to the merchants’ sites through your affiliate links.

There will always be more questions people have, more keywords showing up in your research, and more ways to approach each keyword or keyword phrase you’re targeting on your affiliate marketing blogs. Combine this powerful list of topics with your ever-increasing ability to come up with creative ways to incorporate those terms and ideas into new blog posts, and your affiliate marketing blogs can keep on growing year after year successfully!

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Affiliate marketing mentor Doug Champigny is a featured speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America, and the author of several e-books, websites and blogs. For more advice on building your affiliate marketing business, continue reading at his Affiliate Marketing Domination Blog for basic information, or his Captain Affiliate affiliate marketing training blog for more advanced tips and techniques.

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