I have approached affiliate marketing from many different angles. It can be as easy as placing a few Adword ads on Google or as complex as creating a hundred or more of your own mini-websites that drive traffic to the merchants you are promoting. No matter which marketing technique appeals to you most, you will have to use several different techniques to drive a long term, sustainable, affiliate marketing business.
You have to promote your client sites to get traffic. There is an art to generating traffic. So where do you begin?
Let’s take a look at one of the vehicles you can use to drive traffic for your clients, placing Adword ads. Some clients do not mind if you do not have your own website. They are looking for traffic any way they can get it. It still needs to be quality traffic mind you! Some of these possible clients are gold mines waiting to be found. I recently found one myself.
Not always as easy as 1-2-3…but sometimes it can be!
I was flipping through a magazine and stumbled across a product that I have been aware of for years. I wondered what kind of affiliate activity this merchant had. But before we go there…
My curiosity got the best of me so I pulled out some of my handy keyword research tools and looked up some keywords for this product. Sure enough, there was a plethora of keywords with no activity. No competition. Nada! I began researching the little competition I could find. I learned that no one was using Adwords, or any PPC vehicles for that matter, to drive traffic to the clients’ site.
Before going any further (and possibly wasting any more of my time), I looked up their affiliate marketing program, the qualifications and the payout. Everything looked fine and the commission rate was okay given the opportunity I saw here. I immediately began breaking my keywords into groups and creating ads broken out for each of these groups. I put my campaign together and began watching the traffic flow. I was driving traffic for pennies a click.
I registered for the affiliate program. They asked for my site url. Instead of a url related to their product I used one of my business url’s. I also explained the success that I had with my Adwords tests. I was approved within a week and began driving sales for this company and making some money for myself in the process.
Initial results are in and I should be making over $150 – $200 per month in profit from this client. Not a fortune but this program requires only an hour of my time each month!