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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