Working on Affiliate Marketing

I am working on my first site that will be purely made for affiliate marketing.  This is a site that I have built after taking everything that I learned from The Black Ink Project.  I am about 6 months behind schedule, but I have the site completely online, with a lot of content in the blog and most of my first campaign on the go.

I have just got my first pass on the campaign online.  I have a lot of tweaking to do after I get my first round of keyword information.  I picked the time that I did to put it online so that I can play with the volume of traffic over the holidays and get some good keyword information.  I am not planning on making much in the lines of cash on this first batch, but with some major tweaking I think that the site will be a winner for me in the New Year.   I have spent approximately $700 on the site design and content to this point, and believe that all that I have left is the marketing and a small volume of blog posts. 

Some of the things that I have learned so far are:

Outsourcing is not the be all end all

As readers of this blog will no I have had some issues with outsourcing.  Some of these issues are my fault and not defining what I was expecting in the communications.  Other times are the freelancers not delivering on schedule.

I actually had one writer tell me that they were not going to be meeting the schedule.  I asked for a discount and they said that I was already getting a deal and to take it or leave it.  I left it.  If you decide to take the contract, and yes it is a contract, then you have a responsibility to follow it.

With writers you get what you pay for, and typically less

I am not a great writer and it shows a lot of the time.  But I am working on it.  SO when I was looking to get content for my affiliate site I decided to outsource as much as I could.  I can tell you this now, you really get what you pay for at best.  I have gone through a few writers on this site alone and I am not completely satisfied with any of them.  There are a few that I have blogging now that I think are the best, but I am still doing some editing to make them blog posts.  This is something that I think will improve.

However like I said above, there are some out there that feel like they are doing you a favour for giving you such a “deal” and expect you to just take what they give you.  If you come across such a writer, dump them.  You are hiring them because either you don’t have the skill or time, and as such shouldn’t have to deal with their BS

Choose Your Niche Well

This is another thing that people tell you to do all of the time, but I never really understood what they meant until now.  The niche that I am developing my affiliate site in seems to be very narrow as it is.  But when I am choosing the content for the site I realize that there is a broad range of customers that will be visiting your site.  So just because the service, type of service or product is very narrow.  The customer that will be visiting your site is broad. 

You might be selling blue widgets, and that would be a very narrow product niche.  However what type of customer are you targeting?  The person that is doing their initial research on blue widgets?  Finding out there is out there for blue widgets?  Or are you looking for the people that have decided on the type of widget they want and you just have to give it to them.  That is really where you want to be.

Then you have the demographic that you have to appeal to.  This could be a lifestyle demographic, geographic, or age and gender demographic.  There is a reason that all “woman” magazines look a certain way, and men’s mags look the way they do, they are targeting a particular demographic.

So why bother?

If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing then get out there.  The Black Ink Project is a great resource for the beginner.  They are not really telling you anything that you can’t find online for free, and the only reason that I actually signed up was that it was free.

That said, there is something to be said for having all of the information that you need to get started in one place and one resource.

Oh yeah, and if anyone tells you that affiliate marketing is easy, they lucked out and will probably be doing something else next year.  There is a lot of work involved in marketing any product, but the beauty is that you can do it in your home office, or on the beach in some tropical paradise (if they have Wi-Fi).  This is the reason that I am doing this, and spending so much time writing, researching, and producing.  I want to be completely self-sufficient and with a nice nest egg in the next 2 years.  I have a multi-pronged approach to this that I will use to succeed and be diverse.