Jamdo Marketing Blog

I see a lot of people in forums and blogs asking how to start out in affiliate marketing with $0. Well, I thought I would lay out a plan for what I would do if this were me.

If I was starting over again and I had $0 to invest this is how I would do it.

Goal 1 - Capital

You need money for URLs, hosting and marketing. It ain’t sexy, but the way I would do this is to offer my services as a writer at every webmaster forum I could find. I am a fast writer, so I could probably whip out 3×500 word articles in an hour. On the lower end of the spectrum, that should get you $20-30 per hour. At an absolute total bare minimum slave wage, that would still be $15 per hour. Put in a couple of big days and you should have $500 pretty quickly.

Goal 2 - Find a Product

Choose a product you know has a reasonable affiliate program and that you know something about. I’d probably choose something I knew about and something I could develop very specific keywords about. I’d also want something that paid AT LEAST $7 or $8 per sale/lead - preferably more. For argument’s sake, let’s say DVD Rewriters (probably a bad choice, but it will do for the sake of this post to demonstrate the point)

Goal 3 - Keywords

Next, you need a list of SPECIFIC keywords. The best keywords that are probably affordable in this case would probably be model numbers.

Samsung D537 DVD Rewriter
D5375 DVD
D5375 DVD rewriter

Also some price point keywords

Cheap DVD RW
Discount DVD Rewriter
Discount DVD Re-Writer
Cheap D5375

You should be able to get a good list together. If you are going after model numbers, then a few hundred keywords is easily possible.

Goal 4 - Find Out If It Converts

Next, I would set up a direct linking campaign with PPC and I would use SubIDs to track down to the keyword level so I know which engine and adgroup and keywords were leading to a sale. I would use Yahoo or MSN because their traffic is usually a better converter. Each ad group would have ONE of the keywords above and I would bid on phrase and exact match only. I would turn OFF content match (or at least put content match only in a seperate campaign).

You’re not trying to make an overall profit on this - you’re simply finding out if the product and merchant convert into sales/leads. If you make a profit at this stage, that is a bonus.

Goal 5 - Analysis

If the product is converting with a couple of sales, then I keep going. If it has no converions from my traffic, then I choose another merchant and product and repeat step 4.

If I am lucky, I should have a list of keywords that convert into sales.

Goal 6 - Website

Now, I would build a website around DVD rewriters, concentrating on the keywords that converted. Here the intention is to build a page for each keyword that converted. On EACH page is great content with a good presell for the specific keyword and product. Of course, each page would also have an affiliate deep link to the product on the merchant site.

Goal 7 - PPC

Next I would set up another PPC campaign to my new site from Yahoo, MSN and Adwords. Again, I would track it down to the engine, ad group and keyword level. I would link to the specific page on my site that coresponded with the keyword.

Hopefully my great new site converts even better than step 4 deep linking.

If not, I rewrite my pages with even better content and try again.

Goal 8 - Natural Rankings

If your website is converting ok on these products, then you should start to do some SEO on the site. Start building links etc. Submit it to Yahoo directory. Do some guest blogs with links back to your site. Try to get specific links to your internal pages. All of this will help your rankings in the search engines.

Step 9 - Rinse and Repeat

Note - you will probably only get past step 4 maybe 10% of the time (if you are lucky). If you are like 98% of people you will get discouraged at your second or third failure and give up which is great, because that means less competition for me.

If you get to your 20th failure and you are still trying to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, this is good news. It means you probably have the personality type to succeed in this business.

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As many of us know, Michael Gray of Wolf-Howl.com doesn’t like it when people make sweeping accusations against SEOs. Hell, most of the time I agree with him. For example, Calacanis’ repeated attacks on the SEO industry are pretty lame and ill-informed and Michael’s responses to them were fair enough in my opinion.

Michael’s general message in his defence of the SEO industry is that there are good SEOs and bad SEOs, just as there are good mechanics and bad mechanics.

The “few bad apples” argument.

Fair call.

Presumably Michael would like to be included among the “good SEOs” and most people would regard him that way - certainly his blog is one of the most respected in the industry.

But recently, Michael has gone a little beyond the limits of cool.

Last week, the hapless Christina Warren of Download Squad was unfortunate enough to make some throw-away remark about the SEO industry. Michael Gray got upset about it.

This is the specific sentence that Michael quoted and the part he had a problem with:

There’s lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it’s GOOD for bloggers and doesn’t negatively affect readers/searchers/regular users. This is a lie. Instead of Search Engine Optimization, SEO should really stand for Search Engine Opportunism, because that’s what it really is.

Fair, enough. I would probably have a problem with that if I were a professional SEO too.

He also has a problem with this partial sentence:

we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes

But here is the entire passage in context:

There’s lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it’s GOOD for bloggers and doesn’t negatively affect readers/searchers/regular users. This is a lie. Instead of Search Engine Optimization, SEO should really stand for Search Engine Opportunism, because that’s what it really is. Look, we certainly don’t object to gaining revenue from ads or page-views on a web site, that’s why we are able to do what we do; we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes to insert web sites into search queries that really have nothing to do with the content. Techniques to make sure your relevant content shows up in corresponding searches is one thing — inserting back-door code that is aimed at getting higher page ranks and more page views, regardless if the targets are actually correct, is another.

Taken in context, those three sentences together in their entirety represent a reasonably balanced view of SEO.
Christina is pretty clearly aiming her attack at “bad SEOs” and ones who would attempt to insert irrelevant results into SERPS. (We’ll just ignore the flagrantly out of context second quote that Michael cherry-picks).

That is hardly a revolutionary sentiment by Christina.

Michael reacted to the cherry-picked sentences (60 words out of a 620 word post) by writing a blog post entitled “Christina Warren of Download Squad is a Clueless Idiot” (while quoting only the sentences mentioned here in isolation).

He then asked his readers to link to the post.

Now anyone familiar with even rudimentary SEO will know that writing an article on a well established blog with lots of trust and then getting a few inbound links to a that specific post will mean that the search engines will rank the post highly for the keywords the post was aimed at - especially if the terms are not so competitive.

At the time of writing, Michael’s post is ranking 9 in Google if you search for Christina Warren.

Now I am totally open to correction from Michael here, but this seems like a pretty clear attempt to get this post to rank well for Christina’s name.

As far as I can tell, it is an attempt to damage her online reputation.

Any future employer who looks up Christina in Google will be confronted by the assertion that their potential employee is a “clueless idiot.”

To add cowardice to insult, Michael has closed comments on the specific blog post, meaning Christina (or anyone else) cannot respond to his opinion on Christina at the source.

Michael seems to have decided that Christina deserved to have her name dragged through the Google mud and there isn’t much anyone else can do about it. Not many of us have either the knowledge or the influence to compete with him or rein him in and to top it all off, the victim is even unable to respond directly to the post regarding the accusations.

This might be called character assasination for the digital age.

Now let’s put aside the question of whether Christina deserved this treatment. I don’t think she did, but others might disagree. Whatever. There is a more pressing concern raised with this scenario.

Who exactly, is Michael Grey to assume he has the right to use his mini-celebrity and knowledge as an SEO to damage the reputation of whoever he deems deserves it?

Please Michael, tell us some more about “good SEOs” and “bad SEOs”. For Example, which one are you?

Is it ok for an SEO to rudimentarily take a disliking to someone online and take vengeance by publishing nasty things about them and getting those accusations to rank well in the search engines?

And to people who work in the industry, do you regard this as acceptable behaviour?

If it is fair enough to you as an industry, do you really not see why other non-SEO people might lose respect for your industry?

Now I am sure there have been far worse abuses than this example, but when a high-profile representative of an industry starts heading down the slippery slope of arbitrary online persecutions that have a very real effect on other people’s on and offline lives, isn’t it time for that industry to stand up and say enough is enough?

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