Affiliate Marketing Domination

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How To Start Affiliate Marketing – Getting Backlinks From Blog Commenting

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

To start making money with affiliate marketing, you should be using funnels to build your opt-in lists and affiliate marketing blogs to increase your chances of attracting as many targeted prospects as possible. And to maximize your affiliate marketing leads, you need to use every possible form of search engine optimization (SEO) on both your blogs and your squeeze pages that lead into your affiliate funnels.

These days, quality backlinks from related sites are a big part of off-page SEO, and they can go a long way towards improving your affiliate marketing results by helping your affiliate blogs and squeeze pages rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). As the search engines see it, if related blogs in your same niche feel you’re worth linking to then there must be some good content on your site, content the engines should be showing on their SERPs.

Commenting on other people’s blogs can be a powerful source of quality backlinks if you know what to watch for. The first step is to find the top 20 or 30 blogs in your niche. That’s not hard to do – just enter your main keyword or keyword phrase followed by ‘blog’ in your favorite search engine. Check through the results and find blogs that fit your site’s topic and seem to be updated regularly.

Next, look for posts that already have comments and use ‘View > Page Source’ from the top menus to see the coding for the page. Scroll through til you find the comments, and look for the link to a commenter’s site. By default, WordPress blogs add a piece of code to these links that says: rel=’external nofollow’. This tells the search engines it’s an external link and not to have their spider follow that link. Why WP would be that unfriendly to commenters is beyond me, and obviously to a number of others as well since there are dozens of plugins available to get rid of that ‘nofollow’ attribute.

So from your list of the top blogs in your niche, immediately disregard any blog still using the ‘nofollow’ tag – just cross them right off your list entirely. Smart affiliates don’t waste their time with partial results – you want both the potential traffic clicking on your link AND the search engine boost, so only bother with those blogs that offer you both.

Now that you have a list of blogs that target your niche and use one of the do-follow plugins, start visiting them and leaving comments regularly. Understand that your goal is both to get traffic from that blog’s audience and to get another backlink. As such, you have to leave intelligent, relevant comments. Good blogs have comment moderation, meaning your comment won’t show until it’s been approved, and fluff or spam won’t be approved so don’t waste your time and the time of the blog owner.

The more often you comment on a blog the greater your exposure to their readership, and the greater the chances of them clicking through to check out your blogs and squeeze pages. Don’t use links in your comments – blogging software will link your username to your URL automatically. Pay particular attention to blogs whose comments also link to your latest blog post and/or your Twitter account, as these are bonus values for you.

If the site shows it’s using the CommentLuv plugin, you’ll see a link to each commenter’s last blog post under their comment, using their post’s title as the anchor text. When you isolate the blogs using this plugin, be sure to use your keywords in your blog post before heading over to leave your comments – this ensures your keywords will be part of the anchor text linking back to your own blog, another SEO benefit from your blog commenting activities.

One thing to keep in mind – most blogs, this one included, delete all comments that have links in them and those where the commenter uses a keyword or keyword phrase in place of their name. Always use your real name in the commenter’s field, and do not include links within your comment itself.

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Super-affiliate coach, mentor and speaker Doug Champigny has created numerous online resources to help affiliate marketers, including his Simple ClickBank Profits Blog where you can download a free affiliate marketing report to help you further. Or to really get going with your affiliate marketing, have Doug coach you directly through his Affiliate Marketing Coaching Program. Be sure to watch for Doug Champigny speaking live at marketing conferences around North America and be in the audience when he speaks at events in your area – you’ll learn a lot about all aspects of affiliate marketing from his presentations!

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Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, squeeze pages, start affiliate marketing, blog commenting, search engines, marketing

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

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

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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Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing blogs, start affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing, marketing blogs, marketing

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Affiliate Marketing 101: Are You Building An Affiliate Marketing Business Or A Job?

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Affiliate marketing is possibly the most common way for people to start making money online, and an affiliate marketing business might help your earn more money than you ever have before – but for the majority of affiliates they find too late that they haven’t built a business, they’ve just created another job for themselves.

You may be wondering how that’s possible – after all, isn’t affiliate marketing a self-directed occupation with no one over you? Yes, in most cases that true. But let’s take a look at the differences between a job and a business, shall we?

If you have a job right now, you get paid for your efforts – it may be an hourly wage, it may be a salary or you may be on some sort of draw against commissions. And if you’re on salary or draw, chances are you can miss a few days and still get paid, as long as it doesn’t happen too often, right?

But what happens if you take a month off a couple of times a year – or say one month in three? Or if your company doesn’t provide insurance, and you’re taken ill and miss three or four months? Either way, the income stops. Maybe not immediately, but very soon. Even doctors, lawyers and judges find their income dries up quickly if they’re not practicing.

Compare that to a successful business owner like Bill Gates, Donald Trump or Warren Buffet. If they take a month or two off, does their company fail? No. Does their income stop? No. If they take one month off every quarter, do they go broke? Does their company go under? Of course not.

Affiliate marketing mirrors both scenarios depending on your style of operation. For most affiliate marketing newbies, the lure of quick affiliate commissions has them firing out every type of missive they can to make affiliate sales right now, with no concern for the future. Yes, they make sales, and yes over time they may make great sales. But what happens if they stop for a few weeks, or start taking every 3rd month off? With no active promotion, their affiliate marketing commissions slow and eventually dry up completely until they start promoting again.

And if they should take ill and can’t tend to their daily affiliate marketing tasks, what then? Same result – the tap is turned off on their affiliate earnings. Sounds a lot like our description of a job, doesn’t it?

Now take the affiliate marketing professional, known in the industry as super-affiliates. Yes, they send out regularly, often daily, as in our first example. But then they spend the rest of their day building long-term resources and putting them on autopilot. Here’s what that looks like:

- choose a niche with a number of profitable affiliate marketing programs;

- write a short report with impressive content on any aspect of interest to that target market;

- Build an opt-in page, known as a squeeze page, where prospects can download your free report in exchange for joining your e-zine list;

- Put the link to the report and a few affiliate offers on a download page to send them to after they confirm their e-mail address;

- write a series of informative e-mails and place them in an autoresponder to go out to those signups on a regular basis. Be sure to have your various affiliate links wound into the copy and have a few solo ads in the mix;

- Once that whole system is in place, use external sites to drive traffic to the squeeze page. Use affiliate marketing strategies that will continue to work long-term like article marketing, podcasting, video marketing, social bookmarking, etc.

- When that entire affiliate marketing funnel is in place, start in on the next one!

As you can see, these affiliate funnels are self-sustaining; traffic comes in from the various outside sources, prospects sign up for the download and then receive your ongoing e-mails giving them more information and plenty of opportunities to follow your affiliate links to purchase products your make a commission on. It’s all hands-free from that point on, other than to review it from time to time to ensure the products and information are still relevant.

But if your income comes from a number of these funnels, taking a few weeks off here and there, or a month every quarter – even taking a 3-month holiday – will have little impact on your income. Now you have an affiliate marketing business and affiliate marketing is not just another job you created for yourself!

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Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program at http://www.PowerStart2010.com and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program at http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

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Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing business, affiliate marketing commissions, affiliate marketing funnel, marketing

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