Train Your Audience: Top 9 Ideas for Conditioning Your Readers

If you want to have a successful website then you absolutely need to develop a method to get return readers - be it directly to your website, through your RSS feed or even as subscribers to your newsletter.  While it is possible to have a successful site without a large regular readership, it is very difficult.  Trust me, I learned this the hard way back when I used to run the Treadmill Sensei website, which existed based on a near complete turnaround of readership every few weeks.  And it was painful to have to deal with.  So, if you’re in to a niche which doesn’t have a lot of return customers (fitness, automotive and insurance being some of the primary industries matching that description), then you might want to reconsider how you do things a bit.

Now, if you want to get that return readership, one of the easiest ways to achieve it is by conditioning your audience and by creating expectations in them.  “What the hell does that mean?” you might be asking yourself.  Well, it means you have to train your audience by developing a deliberate and predictable schedule for your website or blog. 

Think about it this way:  my week revolves around a few scheduled events - Tuesday I go to Best Buy because New Movies are released, Wednesday a trip to the comic book store is in order for New Comic day and Fridays are all about a trip to the local AMC because new movies are out (ok, some come out on Thursday night, but work with me here).  Because the retail industry has conditioned me to expect these events every week I have fallen right in with their schedule.

You can (and should) do the same precise thing with your readership.  Newspapers and magazines have been using this practice forever as something called an “editorial calendar.”  As the traditional media has discovered, the use of an editorial calendar for your content will help you develop repeat visitors to your website as they become trained to expect relevant and regular content from it.

One warning, once you have your readership trained to expect certain articles on certain days of the week (and even at certain times if you go that far), missing out on one of your own deadlines may have a disasterous effect on your readership.  If they show up for your weekly Wednesday political article and it isn’t up, I can assure you there will be hell to pay. 

Let’s go over how to create an editorial calendar for your own website.

Plan for Success

There are two ways you can plan your calendar:  you can do use the weekly method and only worry about the week as a unit and plan your articles;  or you can use the yearly method in addition to the weekly one, and build a yearly reoccuring calendar for your site.  Both methods work great. 

The weekly method is easy:  plan different topics related to your niche for each day of the week.  That’s it.  I have such a schedule for my Nifty Nerd website and stick to it religiously every week. 

The yearly editorial plan takes a bit more work.  What you do is look at the upcoming year and lay out every major holiday or event which are relevant to the niche of your website.  Plan to publish an article a few days before each of them.  In addition to the regular seasonal content, you can also develop your own “special event” days to go with them.  Do you run a yearly contest or give out industry-style awards or release a guide to your niche?  These things can be excellent, and your audiences anticipation will build up over the course of the months before the events.  I used to publish a “best buy” set of awards for my Sensei site and had a huge amount of buzz in the month or two before the awards came out…to the point of being able to actually affect the industry itself as my readers waited for the awards to purchase new equipment.

Developing an editorial calendar for your website can be one of the most important factors in building and keeping your readership.  Here is a list of 10 examples you can use to help build your calendar.

Top 9 Ideas for Conditioning Your Readers

1. Regular Columns: Columns on different topics or even by different authors are a fantastic way to add new content to your site, as well as to give your readers something specific to look forward to every week. 

2. Interviews: Pick a day of the week to post an interview of someone in your niche.  Not only will your readers look forward to it, but it is an excellent way to build a bit of buzz for your website.  Interviewing an expert in your niche can bring some media and industry attention to your website you might not otherwise have received. 

3. Podcasts/Video Posts: Creating weekly Podcasts or Video Podcasts is huge in the internet right now.  Video in particular is one of the top ways to get your message across and has one of the best conversion percentages around.  Podcasts and video are both very easy to share and can achieve a viral status if you are lucky.  Picking a specific day to publish a new video can have your readership returning regularly in droves.

4. Weekly (or monthly) Wrap-Ups: This is one of the no-brainer ideas for a website.  Since you’re doing all of this great content every day, some of it can get lost or go unnoticed from time to time.  Give your readership a run down of what went on in the past week for both your niche and your website.  Give previous articles a quick synopsis and a link for ease of use.  Also give out links to articles or websites which were significant to your niche in the past week.  Publishing your weekly wrap-up to your email subscribers is essential as well.

5. Reviews: These are a great way to add content to your website, attract new readers and even give you the ability to make a little extra cash from affiliate sales.  Readers online are always looking for new gadgets, movies or stuff, so make sure to give them a day of the week to stop by your site to see what is new.

6. Contests: Contests and free giveaways are a huge way to attract new readers as well as keep old readers coming back.  Pick a product or service related to your niche and do a random drawing to get your readers to participate.  You could choose from new subscribers to your newsletter, or from any reader who submits and email.  The options are almost endless and all of them will help to keep your readership involved and engaged with your website.

7. Deals of the Week: Everyone loves to save money.  Publishing a new “deal of the week” related to your website’s niche will have them coming back every week to see how they can save their hard earned cash.

8. Reader Polls:  Nothing gets your audience involved more than asking them for their opinion.  Everyone has an opinion and everyone loves to share those opinions online.  Make sure to put up a new poll everyweek to give your audience a vested interest in what is going on with your website or blog.

9. Reader Mail: Just like the reader poll, answering your reader email once a week online will not only get readers coming back, but it will also encourage them to write in to you.  This involves your readers even more in your site and has the added benefit of a lot of user generated content.

Those were just a few ideas and there are tons of more examples you could use.  The most important thing is that you use them to condition your audience.  By following a recurring your schedule and maintaining it long-term you will give your audience something to look forward to and come back to your website for. 

-Mat Nastos
http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com

New Affiliate Tips: “Raymond Reed, you are my Nemesis!”

The title of this post is a line that comes from the low-budget film I wrote and directed a few years ago, “Bite Me, Fanboy,” and it illustrates today’s post perfectly.

Foes are important, and developing an enemy for your website, blog or business is crucial to its success.

As someone who is a comic book fan, I love the idea of superheroes fighting supervillains — good fighting evil — right fighting wrong.  It is often said that a hero is only as good as his villain, and that is as true in affiliate marketing as in comic books or James Bond flicks.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Mat, what the hell are you spouting off about this time?” 

But sit back and think about it.  Having an “enemy” will help to further develop your brand and focus of your site.  It will aid you in defining the goals of your website.  When you’re building your blog or affiliate site and writing your posts, you need to define what you are fighting for and who/what you are fighting against.  And, you need to make sure you readership knows what those things are.  This is a major motivating factor for both you and your audience.

One of the main things having an “enemy” or foil for your website does is to gives your readers something to rally behind you against.  It can be a great community building tactic, add a level of depth to your posts and a higher degree of connection with your audience.  Whenever you post a new article or blog entry mentioning whoever or whatever your nemesis is, you’ll find your readership is more like to respond to you in emails or with comments on those posts. 

For one of my review blogs, the site’s enemies were manufacturers producing low quality equipment and other, less reputable reviewers.  And I’d mention one or both of these groups a few times a week to continually build a momentum for the site.  Luckily, the industry I was in had a large number of low end manufacturers and an even bigger number of customers who had been burned by them in the past.  The connection I was able to make with those burned customers was huge and helped to build an incredible connection with them.  We shared an enemy and my site was their champion, fighting the good fight against them.  Howard Stern had the FCC as he arch nemesis and his fans ate up that epic battle.

Another great thing about having a villain for your website is that it allows you to tell the continuing story of your battle against that villain.  This may sound over-the-top upon first reading it, but think about it.  If your blog is about weight loss, then your enemy is fat and your battle against it.  If your blog is about parenthood then your enemies are many - lack of sleep with a new born, dirty diapers, keeping your kids safe - and if you build the story well enough, then people will keep coming back to see how your “fight” against the enemy is going.

And, funny enough, you never really have to “win” against your enemy.  As long as the battle rages on your readers will follow it.  If you do eventually conquer your villain and send them off to where ever villains go, then make sure to get yourself a new one and start the fight all over again.  Your audience will thank you for it.

My one warning for you, my loyal reader, is to be careful if you choose a specific company, person or group as your website’s enemy.  There are legal risks to keep in mind, so make sure to protect yourself.  No one wants a lawsuit, even if you are in the right.

Until next time, fight on!

-Mat Nastos
http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com

Getting Started as a Blogger, Part III: Becoming a Niche Expert

One of the most important things for a new affiliate blogger is to become recognized as an expert in their niche.  This video gives some great tips on how to do it.

Mat Nastos
http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com

Getting Started as a Blogger, Part II: What to write about and encouraging your readers to respond

Now that you have Wordpress set up on your server and you are ready to get cracking on your brand new affiliate blog, you’re ready to start writing.  But if you don’t plan what you’re going to write in advance and how to do it, you’ll find yourself ranking rather poorly in search engine results for your niche.  Here’s how to avoid making some of the biggest mistakes most bloggers make.

Once you get started, make sure to keep your blogs theme and niche in mind.  Don’t stray too far off-topic, especially when you start.  If you do, then you are messing with how Google sees your site and what readers are expecting to see on it.  Once you’ve been around for a while it is ok to toss in an off-topic post every now and then, but that is a big no-no to start.

Before you start telling anyone about your site, make sure to have the first 10-15 posts written.  There is nothing worse than going to a site and not finding very much content — even if the content that is there is good, the lack of meat can keep readers from coming back.

When you are writing, make sure to write a series of posts or articles on one subject.  Not only does this help keep you on topic, but it gives readers something to come back for.  If they’ve read and enjoyed the first couple parts of an article series, you can bet they’ll be coming back for the rest of the series.  Repeat visitors and readers who subscribe to your blog are very important.

Speaking of readers who subscribe, make sure it is easy for readers to subscribe to your RSS feed — give ‘em a big button which is clearly marked and always encourage your readers to subscribe in your posts themselves.  Also, encourage readers to leave comments on your blog.  Reader comments are great user-generated content and add a huge amount of value to your site.  Besides, the sort of back and forth dialogue with your readers is one of the best parts of blogging.

Which leads us to:  always respond to comments on your blog.  This lets your readers know you listen to and care about them.  As much interaction and connectivity as you can provide will lead to more readers as well as build loyalty from your current readers.  I feel like one repeat or long term reader is worth 5 or 10 one time readers. 

That’s it from this end for today.  I’ll be back tomorrow with a new video and a new affiliate marketing article for your viewing pleasure.

-Mat Nastos
http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com

Getting Started as a Blogger, Part I: Setting up your blog

Starting out as a blogger can be a confusing task for those who are new to affiliate marketing. The first thing you need to do is to pick your blogging platform…and there are a lot to choose from.

The two most popular, and the two I am most familiar with, are Blogger and Wordpress. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Blogger is owned by Google and is probably the easiest way for someone new to Blogging to get going. All you need to do is sign up for a free account, pick your layout and start writing. The system is ultra easy to use and, if you choose the Blogger-hosted option for publishing (where you blog appears as http://YourBlogNameHere.Blogspot.com), you can be posting in 2 minutes.

With the simplicity of Blogger comes a number of concessions you must make. First off, customizing your blog isn’t that easy without some knowledge of HTML coding, and you really need to know a bit about CSS to do things effectively. In other words, it is easy to get started but not quite as easy to make your own. If you know how to code or work with an outsourced HTML programmer then your sites can be as customized as you want to make them. I ran my most successful blog, wwww.TreadmillSensei.com, using Blogger and it pulled in a very nice income.

On the other side of the coin is my favorite blog platform for affiliate marketing, Wordpress. Wordpress is one of the most powerful content management systems (CMS) available for free on the internet. By downloading plugins for the system, you can do almost anything with it - run shopping carts, polls, newsletters, have ads, publish from your phone, you name it and someone has built a plugin that does it. There are thousands and thousands of plugin options. And changing your Blog’s template is as easy as downloading a theme you like and hitting “activate.” The Wordpress backend makes things simple to change, update or redesign. Plus, if you know HTML, CSS and/or PHP programming, the system is infinitely changeable.

The minor downside to Wordpress is that you have to install the software on your server for it to work. It only takes a few minutes but you will need to set up a mySQL database for it as well. Now, a lot of hosting providers will have automatic installations of Wordpress available which makes setting up a new blog as easier as working with Blogger.

I use Wordpress for 10+ blogs at this point and I am in love with its modular nature and ease of use. It is definitely worth checking out.

In the video I mention some of my favorite plugins: Share This, Buy Me a Beer, FeedSmith for FeedBurner, Google XML Sitemaps, Newsletter Opt-In for Sendblaster, Akismet (absolutely essential for fighting SPAM comments), the Revver plug-in and All-In-One-SEO.

For someone just getting started in blogging and not sure what to do yet, check out the Prosense theme which automates most of your Google AdSense advertising blocks. It places the AdSense ad units in a number of places and all you have to do is input your AdSense ID to start making money with it. Prosense is a great theme on its own and a fantastic theme with a little customization.

That’s it from this end for today. Check out the video and post a comment if you have any questions. I’ll be answer reader comments and emails in my upcoming video posts. Take care!

-Mat Nastos
http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com

New Affiliate Help: How to Monetize Your Online Video with Revver

As anyone who has frequented one of my sites is probably aware, I have become an absolute nut for video lately. I’m using it on almost all of my sites and have seen a huge pop in traffic because of it. Video can be one of the best tools for an affiliate marketer to get a message out to their audience…and with the advent of easy-to-shoot, easy-to-edit, easy-to-publish video cameras like The Flip (check out my review of this great, easy-to-use camera), the technological barrier to putting video up on a website is almost completely gone and no longer is video content only found on the highest end websites.

Now, when I first started looking in to producing video for the internet and for my affiliate websites, my first thought was to post them on YouTube. Everything is on YouTube and I figured my stuff should be too. And, to tell the truth, you really should make sure to have as much of your video content on there as possible because if you brand your videos properly, and make sure to include a clickable link in your video description, you can see a very nice traffic flow from YouTube. Depending on the video, it could be a monster traffic spike and YouTube is one of the starting points for most of the viral video on the internet.

Of course, if you’re like most video producers, you haven’t been able to break in as one of YouTube’s partners in order to monetize your video (it takes a huge amount of popularity on YouTube to get picked up as a partner right now). So what can you do to make a little bit of cash off of your posted videos? Well, there is a great solution in the form of Revver.com.

I began noticing websites running videos on Revver about a year ago and was intrigued. Revver is one of the many new mini-YouTube video directories that have popped up in the past couple of years. Where Revver is different from their competition is in their ad revenue sharing model. When you post a video to Revver, their system puts in a series of contextual ads as a layer on the bottom of your video. The ads are very unabtrusive and don’t affect its viewing at all. Revver shares the ad revenue with a videos creators — who also get a portion of any revenue generated by their videos on other people’s sites. It is a great system.

As with any affiliate system, you aren’t going to make huge amounts of money to start. With Revver, just like Google AdSense, it really is a traffic game: the more traffic you get, the more video views you’ll receive and the more ads will be shown and clicked on. Luckily, just producing videos can help you build traffic and the more videos you producing, the more potential for traffic you have.

So if you are interested in running video on your website, go out and pick up a Flip Camera and sign up for Revver.com. You’ll be an Internet Spielberg in no-time!

-Mat Nastos
http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com

Yuwie won’t believe what I did!

Well, last night my buddy, Marc, convinced me to sigh up with a social networking website called “Yuwie.” Marc has been poking around for a way to make money online for some time and, as a MySpace person, was hooked when he discovered Yuwie. The best way to describe Yuwie is “MySpace meets Pyramid Scheme.” Yes, I know most Yuwie users would argue with that description but this is my blog and I can voice my opinion.

It works like this: Yuwie is a MySpace clone who pays you a percentage of the advertising fees they receive. That percentage is based on the number of page views you generate in their system and the number of people you get to sign up for their program. Sounds like a pyramid scheme to me…especially when you watch their introduction video and see the picture of the referral structure — it’s a pyramid in their video!

That being said, I think Yuwie has a huge potential for the savvy internet or affiliate marketer. You see, Yuwie users are quite a bit more active than those on MySpace. These people are surfing Yuwie like crazy, constantly viewing your blogs, pictures and profile. What this means for someone like myself is that Yuwie is a potentially great way to drive traffic to my other websites. Forget the .40 cents you get for every thousand page views, Yuwie looks to be a great source for traffic - especially for those in the “make money online” business. The Yuwie members are crazy for making money online and driving that traffic to your non-Yuwie websites can be a fantastic source of targeted readers.

The main nitpick I have with their site is the proliferation of what I like to call “Booby Models.” If you’re on MySpace then you already know what I’m talking about. The profiles featuring really hot, half-naked girls who may or may not actually be real but who send you notes asking to be their friends. Of course, they want you to email them at a non-Yuwie account so they can try to sell you something…generally porn or dating services. While I don’t mind pictures of attractive ladies showing up in my Yuwie inbox, most of those accounts seem to be BOT driven…meaning, computer software of some sort is generating messages and comments for the account holder. Why that is bad, or at least annoying, is you wind up with a lot of SPAM messages in your mailbox. The first thing I’d recommend is turning off the email notifications in your Yuwie control panel. Otherwise, you’ll wind up with new messages every couple of minutes.

Anyway, I definitely recommend checking Yuwie out if you’re interested in a new social networking way to drive some traffic to your websites or blogs, or if you’re a MySpace addict looking to make some loose change for your obsession. I’ll be playing around with their system to see what the best ways to drive traffic are and will be reporting back on there here at NewAffiliateHelp.com. Check back to see what I find out!

-Mat Nastos
http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com

New Affiliate Help: I have a new toy — the Incredible Flip Camera!

One of the coolest new toys I’ve picked up recently is the Flip Camera Ultra, which I bought over Amazon.com.  This mini, incredibly easy-to-use camera is on of the best new tools I’ve added to my repertoire as an affiliate marketer.  Video is one of the most powerful resources for a new affiliate marketer to use and the Flip Camera Ultra makes video production available to even the least technically-savvy affiliates.  The Flip makes shooting and posting video to your website as easy as point, shoot and plug-in. 

 Check it out at Amazon, where you can pick one up for under $145 with free shipping and no tax.

 -Mat Nastos
http://www.newaffiliatehelp.com

7 Steps for how to get started in Affiliate Marketing

Yo, yo, yo!

Back when I was first looking in to the wonders of affiliate marketing, I had absolutely no clue where to look or even how to get started. For as much information as there is out on the internet about affiliate marketing there really isn’t a lot of solid information on what someone needs to do to begin. In an attempt to help out my two nephews who are looking to follow in my footsteps and become Ultra-Mega Affiliates (they feel the term “super affiliate” is much too small for them), I thought I’d sit down and write about how to get going — at least for those of you interested in building content or blog based affiliate websites. There are tons of other options (PPC, Coupon sites, landing pages and so on), but I’m going to focus on what I know best and where my experience is strongest. We’ll get in to the other types of affiliates on another day.

Step 1: Find your Niche

The first thing you have to do to get started is decide on what niche you want to get involved in or what questions you want to answer. For some people this is an easy step and for others it is more difficult. The best advice is to build a website around something you love or something you’re interested in. The reason for this is because it’ll be a topic you have a lot of information already running around in your head about and it will be a topic you’ll be more likely to follow through with. That second part is one of the biggest keys to affiliate marketing — the follow through (which I talked about in my article on the Secrets of Affiliate Marketing).

Some suggestions might be: a parenting website or site on how to deal with a new baby might be great for a mother with 3 children of her own; a single mother writing on the trials and tribulations she faces and how she overcomes them could be a fantastic niche; someone with a passion for hunting or fishing could easily build a site around that; video games are popular these days…there are countless subjects to choose from. Find out where your passion is and start there.

For me, I started with fitness (treadmills and ellipticals specifically) because I had a lot of knowledge in that area and had a parter who was a repair tech in the fitness industry. From there I moved on to hunting, pop culture, filmmaking and, now, affiliate marketing. You can use your hobbies as a starting point.

Step 2: Research Your Niche — Is there money in it?

Once you’ve nailed your niche down and are ready to get started, what you’ll want to do is to start researching your competition and your money making oppportunities. Find the big players in the niche (if there are any) and see what they are doing. Find out where they are referring their links. Get signed up for some of the keyword research tools out there — Adwords has an excellent keyword and traffic tool for beginners.

I know what you’re asking yourself right now — “what the hell does Mat mean by ‘keyword research’?” What you’re doing is looking for the terms regular people are most searching for in regards to your niche as well as how much traffic there is for those terms. You may find your niche really doesn’t have that much traffic or you may find out you’ve got some great keywords that will bring in thousands of people a day. The only way to know is to sign up for the keyword tools and start researching. Just log-in to the tool of your choice and start putting in the keywords you use when you’re searching for information on your niche. You’re an average person and you know as much as anyone about what people are looking for in your niche.

Step 3: Pick your Domain Name

Now that you’ve picked your niche and done some research it is time to build your website. What? You know absolutely nothing about building a website? That’s ok, this is the 21st century and everything is easy. First off, figure out what your URL or domain name is going to be…you know, those words between www and .com. The best URLs will include the most important keywords in your niche. You’ll know what most of those keywords are from the research phase. This can be a bit tedious because there are so many web domains registered that a lot of what you come up with will be taken. Use that as a challenge to be more creative with your domain name. One of the best domain registrars and web hosts out there, as well as one of the cheapest, is www.GoDaddy.com . You’ve seen their commercials with the hot babes on television — they are the big boys and have everything you need. If you become more advanced you’ll be able to move to a different host down the road…although a lot of people stay with www.GoDaddy.com because of how much they offer, their great prices and how easy their system is to use.

Oh, and while we’re talking about domains, you really don’t need to worry about .net or .org or any of the other domain extensions right now. Your website is completely unknown right now and no one will be looking to take advantage of the traffic or brand name you’ve built yet. Maybe a year down the road you’ll want to consider buying the other extensions when you have some income from your site, but right now you’re poor and don’t have to worry.

Step 4: Build your Website Already!

If you’re building a blog or content site, the best things in the world are content management systems (CMS) and blog software — they are basically the same thing. What these programs do is provide everything you need to start up a webpage without having to know how to program HTML. They also give you a bunch of tools to automate the more tedious tasts of running a website, such as posting and updating your website, building a site map and letting Google and the other search engines know you’re there.

For bloggers, the two top options are Wordpress and Blogger (which is owned by Google). Wordpress is more powerful and has way more add-ons, but it can be a little more difficult to get started. www.GoDaddy.com does offer a free installation option as part of their service which brings down the difficulty to almost nil. Blogger, on the other hand, is part of Google and is very simple to get started on. You can have a blog up and running on Blogger.com in a couple of minutes. Of course, it is a lot more difficult to customer your blog, especially if you don’t know how to code HTML, PHP or CSS.

What you want to use is completely up to you and you can import posts and articles from one system to the other fairly easily if you decide to change.

Step 5: Join Affiliate Networks

The fifth step is to head out and start joining affiliate programs and affiliate networks.

Before we go any further, let me explain the difference between those two terms. An affiliate program is a relationship with a specific retailer or advertiser (you are called a “publisher” or “affiliate” and the companies who own the programs are called “advertisers). If you sign up for Amazon Associates then you are in the Amazon Affiliate Program. Thousands of companies have affiliate programs. On the other side is the affiliate network, which is run by a third party and consists of multiple affiliate programs under it. When you join an affiliate network such as Commission Junction or Share-A-Sale you gain access to an almost endless number of affiliate programs to join and support.

There are a lot of options in where to go, but the networks to join first are Commission Junction (the largest affiliate netword), Share-A-Sale (a network with an excellent reputation) and the Amazon Associates program (one of the most profitable programs around). There are a bunch of other affiliate networks and programs, but these are the big boys and the best place to start. As you gain more knowledge and refine your website and niche you will find other affiliate networks and programs to join.

Step 6: Start Writing!

Now comes the fun part: start writing your content. For a blogger or content website owner, this is the most familiar part of the process and, unfortunately, the part which takes the longest. You’ll need to post at least once per day (once per weekday is fine) for the next year. You’ll start to see some traffic within a couple of months, but for your blog to get properly ripe it can take 6 months or more. It will all depend on your skill for writing articles and posts with SEO in mind. I’ll go over techniques for SEO writing in another article. You’ll also want to make sure you include your affiliate links in your articles. You’ll be able to get the links from your affiliate networks and programs, and inserting the code is as simple as cutting and pasting.

You’ll also want to make sure to sign up for Google Sitemaps in order to let Google know your page is out there. MSN and Yahoo both have similar programs as well. In future posts I’ll tell you how to start building your traffic from the ground up. It is a lot of fun to do and is very much an interesting game to play.

Step 7: Get going!

The last two things to do are to subscribe to the free Revenue magazine, the industry’s only real magazine and a great source of information, and you’ll want to join the forums at Abestweb.com. Abestweb is the absolute best place for a newbie to learn how to do things and what is going on in the industry. Get over there and sign up now…you’ll thank me for it later.

That’s it for the lesson today, grasshopper. I’ll back back with more New Affiliate Help for you later. Take care.

-Mat N.
http://www.newaffiliatehelp.com

The Secret to No Budget Affiliate Marketing

Yo, Yo, Yo!

As an affiliate marketing person, I am constantly being asked about what I do and how I do it. To most people the phrase “affiliate marketing” doesn’t mean anything at all. However, when I tell them I make money on the internet their ears tend to perk up a bit. Especially when I describe what I do. The funny thing is most of them automatically assume they can’t do what I do (and, what I assume is what you, my readers, are interested in doing). Even funnier is just how wrong they are.

Affiliate marketing isn’t rocket-science, in spite of what most affiliate markets will tell you. Almost anyone can do it and it doesn’t take an sort of advanced degree, or any degree at all really, to do it. Alright, you caught me. I did just write “almost anyone can do it” instead of “everyone” can do it. The reason for the “almost anyone” is one of the things most affiliate “gurus” don’t talk about and it is one of the most important things in all of affiliate marketing. Do you want to know what the big secret is?

Patience and Follow-through.

Ok, you got me again, that’s technically two things but they go together. The important fact that a lot of people fail to mention is: most affiliate marketing takes a lot of time to build and get started. It is an easy thing to do but without patience you’ll never get anywhere. It generally takes 3-6 months to build traffic for a website, such as a blog or other content website, and you usually won’t see very much in the way of sales for your first year. Yes, yes, PPC (pay-per-click) programs can show an almost instant return, but even they can take a bit of time to get going unless you have an unlimited source of money to throw away in trial-and-error. Besides, I’m writing this for those of you who are just going starting in affiliate marketing and are trying to do it for very little to no budget.

The cool thing is that no budget affiliate marketing can be done very successfully (my own array of websites bring in more than $10,000 per month in affiliate commission right now). However, you have to have the follow through to get passed those first 3-6 months of what I like to call “affiliate labor pains.” You’ll need to sit at your computer and write a new post for every day of the week, all without being able to see any sort of pay off.

Let me tell you a little story about the beginning of the Treadmill Sensei website as a bit of a case study.

Back in 2006 I was working for an online retailer. The owner, who I’ll call “Jack,” would go on and on about how his company was in a state of limbo with no grown or expansion going on for most of the 8-10 years he’d been in business. His company was (and still is for the most part) completely tied to its natural listings in Google. Not an intelligent thing, but also not the point of this article. No matter what he did he just could not figure out why some of his competitors were growing and expanding their internet sales while he shrunk.

At the same time Jack had a young guy working as his internet grunt - posting product on ebay, doing data entry and the like. This grunt, whom we’ll call “Jimmy,” would ramble on and on about blogs. He read blogs all the time and would talk about how great they were. Unfortunately, while Jimmy would continually start up blogs, he would give up on them a few weeks later when they didn’t earn him any of those “big internet bucks” he felt he should be getting. Over the course of a few months Jimmy probably started and abandonned 10-15 different blogs. Needless to say, Jimmy was more than a little frustrated by the whole thing.

Seeing what Jimmy was going through, and having done a bit of research on the whole affiliate “thing,” I decided to give it a go myself. Partnering up with a local repair tech who loved to talk about treadmills and ellipticals, I decided to launch a new website called the “Treadmill Sensei.”

Of course, I had absolutely no clue as to what I was doing or how to do it. So I sat down and I started to write.

And write.

And write.

I researched and wrote about treadmills and elliptical trainers every week day. Much to the chagrin of my new wife who was completely baffled by what I was doing. Heck, I didn’t even know enough about what I was doing to explain it properly to her. I would write early in the morning or late at night for 1-2 hours a day.

Every day.

I have to admit that I nearly gave up a number of times because even though I knew there was something to this “affiliate thing,” my website just wasn’t getting any traffic or making an commissions. Luckily, I was too stubborn to give up — something reinforced when Jack informed me that I was wasting my time and blogging was a waste of time.

After about three months of pain and frustration the site received its first commission. I’ll always remember it — a remanufactured Precor EFX 546 elliptical through Commission Junction for about a $400 commission amount. Even more surprising was a second commission a couple of days later for another Precor elliptical (this time, the Precor 544).

This was how I learned about the Google “Sandbox” for new websites — Google keeps new web sites from appearing in higher ranked positions in users searches. And finally, I had a name for the frustration I had experienced. Once the site moved out of the sandbox, my traffic began to increase. As did our commissionable sales. In hindsight, those three months or so of pain were probably the time of most learning for me. I learned about SEO (search engine optimization), and how to write articles with SEO in mind. I also learned the value of regular posting. And, most importantly, I learned the value of patience and follow through.

Most new affiliate marketers and bloggers do not allow themselves the kind of patience needed to follow-through on their sites. This is the reason so many new blogs and websites wind up languishing on the side of the information super-highway of the Internet. They jump in and just as quickly jump back out when a return isn’t immediate. However, if you can work through the pain of those first 3-6 months while your web site begins to mature and grown then there is all likelihood you’ll see a wonderful payoff down the road. Within a year, my site was pulling in $2000/month in commissions and now, almost 2 years later, it has exploded beyond anything we thought it would be. I know old Jack is kicking himself now. Which makes it all worthwhile.

The sad part of the story is that Jimmy is still out there, writing and giving up on new blogs all the time, still never having learned the wonderful lesson of follow-through.

Until next time,

-Mat Nastos
http://www.newaffiliatehelp.com