Simple Strategy For Making Affiliate Commissions

Posted at August 29, 2009

I thought we’d start this blog off with a case study. Here’s the plan.

1) I’ll share the overall strategy with you.

2) I’ll walk you through an actual example

3) I’ll come back to this case study regularly to share my results.

The Strategy

This is a pretty simple way to start making affiliate commissions. (Disclaimer – I can’t promise you that you will make any money with this. I’m just sharing what’s been working for me).  You are not going to rake in thousands of dollars doing this once, but it’s a little something we can do on a regular basis that will put a few dollars each week into our pockets.

Step 1 – Go To Clickbank and find an ebook to promote.

Go to www.Clickbank.com , sign up for an account if you don’t have one yet and then look through the marketplace to find an ebook to promote.

Step 2 – Register a domain and set it up to redirect to your clickbank hoplink.

Step 3 – Write a few articles and submit them to article directories and social networking sites like hubpages, squidoo etc.

Step 4 – Continue to write a few articles each month and submitting them.

The Cast Study

Now let’s put this strategy to the test. After all – strategy is all well and good but it does not put any money in our pockets.

I suggest you pick a product on clickbank that you can easily write quite a few articles about. Especially the first time around, pick a topic that you are already pretty familiar with. Most of my websites revolve around cooking and recipes, that’s why I looked in the “Home and Family” category and then the “Cooking and Recipes” subcategory on clickbank.  Here’s what I found:

Clickbank Market Place

When you pull up these searches, please make sure you are sorting by “Popularity”. This will show you what ebooks are selling best.

The next step is to do a little bit of keyword research to make sure we can write some articles on topics that people are actually looking for. Go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com and type in a few related keywords.

For our case study, I decided to go with the #1 result in the search above “Save Money – As Seen On Tv – Official Secret Restaurant Recipes”

Once you get to this step, go ahead and buy the product and review it. You want to make sure it’s a decent product and actually having read and used it, you’ll be able to write about it a lot more convincingly.

I also did a little keyword research using the free keyword tool mentioned above. I did a quick search for “copycat recipes” and “restaurant recipes” to make sure these were things people are actively searching for. Both searches came up with plenty of keywords and had several hundred searches per day in the search results, which works for me. You don’t need thousands of searches per day to make this work, but you do want to make sure you have plenty of keywords to work with and they have at least 20-30 searches per day.

Now it’s time to register a domain. I like to use GoDaddy for this because they make redirecting the domain to your clickbank affiliate link very easy. If you are using Godaddy.com to register your domain, use coupon code “hash7″ during the checkout process. It’ll take your price for the domain down to $7.49 per year.

I just registered COOKRESTAURANTRECIPES.COM for our little case study here.

After you register your domain, log into your Domain Manager with Godaddy, click on the domain you just registered and then click the forward button. A new window will pop that will look similar to the one below. On there you will see  a link that says “Advanced Options”. Click on it and this is what you’ll see.

Forwarding A Domain with Godaddy

Go back to the Clickbank Market Place and click on “Create Hoplink” for the product you chose to promote (I hope you’re following along :) ) The link will look something like this affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net

Paste this link in the first spot (be sure not to include the http:// since it’s already there).

Then click on Forwarding With Mask. This will come in handy when we start to write articles for article directories and submit them later on. We’ll go into this in a little more detail later on, but basically we’ll write an article and then use our domain in the resource box at the end. When you set this forwarding up with mask, the person that clicks on the link will not know they are being redirected because the link in the address bar stay the same.

Go ahead and try it out … go to www.cookrestaurantrecipes.com

Enter a title, description and a few keywords related to your domain. Don’t spend a huge amount of time on this, just get them in there and move on.

Step three will be to write and submit a few articles that will reference the domain in the resource box. I’ll go into more detail about this tomorrow. My favorite article directory by far is Ezinearticles.com but unfortunately they do no longer allow you to promote affiliate products in your resource box, but there are plenty of other sites to get traffic from and we’ll also talk about how we can use a slightly modified version of this strategy to work with that particular article directory. For now make sure you pick your product and set up a forwarded domain.

Warmly,

Susanne Myers

P.S. Be sure to follow along and come back tomorrow to keep putting this strategy to work.

P.P.S. So far I’ve spent about 30 minutes and $7.49 on this (not counting the time it took me to write this post).

You may also like to read:

  1. Simple Strategy For Affiliate Commissions Part Two
  2. Building Hub Pages For Affiliate Commissions
  3. Wordpress Redirect Plugin – Makes Pretty Affiliate Links Simple
  4. Why Register A Domain Name To Promote An Affiliate Product?
  5. Clickbank and Article Writing For Commissions – CopyCat Recipe Casestudy Update

Affiliate Marketing

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