Before we go into how to (ethically) spy on your competition, you first need to know why would you need these Sherlock Holmes skills in the first place. Why do you need to spy on your competition?
Well, to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to rank well for your keywords for one. Spying on your competition allows you to see why your competitors rank better for certain keywords than you. Why they have a higher PR than you. Why they get more traffic than you. Why they do overall better than you – and how to fix that.
Now that you know why would you want to use the spying techniques, let’s see what all will you achieve by doing this.
You will be able to…
- find the ‘top dogs’ in your niche and what they website URL is
- find your top x keywords that you aren’t using but you should be!
- finding where these top dogs are getting their backlinks and getting some of that for yourself!
- grab some of those top positions as well!
Question is, do we have tools good enough to offer us all of these so we can beat the competition? The answer is: yes, we have! And the good news is, although some have to be purchased, others are for free and you can do all your analysis with the main 3 tools I’m going to describe you here:
The easiest tool of all, of course, is Google.com (or your language equivalent of it). All you need is type in your keywords with ‘exact match’ (in “text”) and you will get on the first page the main competitors for those keywords.
So getting that was quite easy right?
Now on to the next step, finding the top keywords they are using. One of the best – and free – ways to do it is by using the Google Keyword Tool . The only difference is that instead of keywords, you will select here ‘website content’ and then grab the first link from your Google search result and enter the URL there. Now you will see the main keywords that competitor is using. Write them down, and then go on to the next. Rinse and repeat.
Next step is finding the backlinks to their site. Good news is, this tool is also free: the Yahoo Site Explorer. Go to the site, enter your competitor URL and press Explore URL. You will not only see how many pages they are indexed but also who is linking to them! Pretty powerful stuff if you ask me.
Technically all you need to get started are really these 3 free tools. Most of the times this is what I am using.
If I want to make a heaver market research though, I will grab one of the paid tools that really pays for itself 100 times over: SpyFu.com . This website has some free features as well, which I use a lot, but sometimes they are not enough and you might have to resort to buy it in full to unlock its full power.
One of the aspects of affiliate marketing that you will learn early on is keyword research. It sounds quite daunting, but all it takes is a bit of common sense, logic and time on your hands to ‘research’.
What you need to focus on are ‘long tail keywords’, these are the easiest to rank for not only as a newbie in affiliate marketing, but as an internet marketeer in general.
So what are long tail keywords? These are phrases containing at least 3 words that are typed in the search engines (Google for example) for people to find information on.
For example if you’re looking to promote a product on dating, you could write down things like ‘getting my ex back’, ‘how to get my ex back’, ‘ways to get my ex back’. There are lots of people who are searching for ways to win back their ex-es and thankfully Clickbank has enough products that you can promote for years.
Or if you’re looking at the diet niche, long tail keywords might be ‘the green tea diet’, ‘ways to lose weight fast’, ‘get rid of fat’, etc. Diet, fasting, fat and dating are NOT long tail keywords. These are whole markets and you’d really need gloves of iron to even try competing with these general terms.
One of the best sources of finding great long tail keywords is Micro Niche Finder. I can’t recommend this product enough, it’s really a superb piece of craftsmanship. With this software you can make your whole market research and much more. You can buy it directly here from the author.
To become a really successful and wealthy affiliate, you really need to focus on 5 main steps. There are some steps in between as well, but by doing these 5, the others come automatically with.
- Pick and research your niche – first you need to find a niche that you know something about, or you like it for one reason or another – or you can related to it somehow. Then go ahead and research it. Go to Amazon.com and check out the most popular books in the niche. Usually Amazon has a Table of Contents that is freely viewable. Check that out, see the topics, find some interesting tags and keywords. Write them down. The go ahead to the various free keyword research tools (Google’s tool being one of them and find some nice longtail keywords that you can use. Of course there are whole books written only about keyword research and there are specific software that will help you tremendously with it, like MicroNicheFinder that I totally use in my daily research, but I won’t go into details about research just yet, that is for another article.
- Find some great converting affiliate programs that you can advertise – some people like to start with finding a Clickbank product and then building the niche around it. I prefer it the other way around. I want to know that I have a hungry market eager to buy the products and then I’ll research for something that I know I can happily product because I know the market is already there.
- Create your website and build your content around it – first get yourself a domain name that is relevant to your niche, so that Google can see it as such. Then decide whether you want to create blogs around the niche, or landing pages that will have buttons where people will click to go to your selected product that you promote, or maybe you’ll do a sales page yourself or a squeeze page. The possibilities are endless here. But make sure that you don’t just point your domain to the seller’s website with your affiliate link embedded in it. People have grown accustomed to seeing these pages and they will be fast to clicking the back button when they see that you don’t offer anything of substance but a trick to lure them to buy the product.
- Get targeted traffic to your site – I have discussed getting targeted traffic to your site here, so I will not repeat myself. Make sure you go and read this article.
- Finally now is the time to monitor and tweak – see how all is converting, what traffic you are getting, and tweak if necessary.
- A last step, which is not really part of this process, yet, it is integral to your becoming a great affiliate is: do it all over again in another niche
What is SEO anyway? Most newbies have hears about SEO, but are afraid to ask.
Search engine optimization is the art bringing your site to rank well in search engines (particularly Google) so that when people are searching for the keywords your site is optimized for, they will find it in the SERPS (search engine result pages). Yes, it takes months, if not years, for a site to rank well for the keywords you are trying to optimize your site, so don’t get discouraged if next month you’re still not on page 1. You really need to be patient. Let’s covers some important SEO tips for you.
Make your proper Keyword Research
You need to choose a range of long tail (variations of a main word) and other related keywords, so that when somebody is searching for them, you will be found. Nobody really searches for ‘acne’, but they definitely search for ‘acne natural treatments’. Some topics have a range of keywords that relate to them so you really need to cover them all, including choosing synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning), plurals and other words that people may use to find your site. The more the merrier, I say!
Tracking and Statistics
How can you improve something something if you don’t know what you need to improve. So sign up with Google Analytics and get used to using it on a regular basis. You can also use Awstats in your hosting Cpanel to track where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they are finding your site with and where they are leaving from. I’m using Awstats quite a lot actually.
Emphasize some keywords
You can emphasize certain keywords in your articles and blog posts by making them bold and italics, and also making them headers with the H1, H2 etc tags. This will tell the search engines that these are important words and should be counted as such.
Of course, there are much more than these 3, but these SEO tips should get you started on the right track to SEO your success.
There are quite a lot of affiliate marketing ebooks available and it tends to become overwhelming to the new internet marketer as to which are the best to be purchased.
As a matter of fact, there are some good books, but there’s also a lot of fluff among them. So here I will cover the best ones for you.
One Week Marketing by PotPieGirl
Ok I’m a bit biased here. This is the book that started it all for me in affiliate marketing. If it weren’t for this book, and the easy way it is all laid out so even the newbiest of the newbies can understand, I might have never started in affiliate marketing.
But decide for yourself.
This is another book that I can honestly recommend. Topics Include Blogging, Market Research, Affiliate Programs, Web Design, Problem Avoidance And So Much More! Just by reading this book you’ll get the most of what you need to get started in affiliate marketing.
AffiloramaAffilorama is something else entirely. It’s not an ebook, but consists of over 70 hours of video, including lessons, tips and interviews with leading names in the affiliate and online marketing industry. It also has a comprehensive forum which is moderated by real affiliate experts who can answer your questions and give you advice.
I am trying to pick a favorite out of the 3 ebooks I’ve mentioned here but truth be told, I highly recommend all of tem. If you are a beginner or intermediate affiliate marketer you should really read all three, as each brings you another aspect of affiliate marketing that will place you on a higher level from where you were before.
After reading all these recommended e-books then its time to put your learned methods into action!
As I mentioned in my previous article, article marketing is one of the most powerful ways to get targeted traffic to your site, which means getting revenue from your affiliate marketing.
Articles allow you to put your “footprints” literally all over the internet. It is a great form of promotion and it is considered one of the best internet marketing tactics.
Once are through with your market research, you now should have more than a general understanding of what you will be writing about, so that you will gain the interest of those within your niche.
Once you submitt an article to a directory such as Ezinearticles.com, it allows people to pick it (complete with your name and website link) and use it on their website. For them is great because they don’t need to think of unique articls to write on their sites and blogs, and for you it means more backlinks to your site and hopefully more visitors once people follow your resource box to your website.
Truth is almost all online marketing strategies involve writing unique articles to generate traffic. You might also heard of viral marketing. This consists of distributing articles to websites within your niche. So what you can do is once you wrote a few unique and well crafted articles, contact some webmasters in your niche and ask them if they’d consider posting some of your articles on their site in return for a backlink to you rsite. Most webmasters will be happy to use your articles as it means they are getting free content for their site.
If you ask anyone, the best article directory to submit to is by far Ezinearticles.com. It really has grown to become the biggest and most used directory and if you think of using article only sporadically and don’t feel like submitting to zillions of article directories, use Ezine to submit to at least, as it will be well worth your time and effort.
When it comes to actually writing articles, it is really not as tough as you may think. And once you have written a few of them you will get the hang of it and will be able to produce your next articles in no time. Of course, if you’re not an article writing type of person, you can always outsource the articles to someone at Elance or Rentacoder, or some other webmaster forum. For a relatively small amount of money you will find some great native English that will craft your articles fast.
To have a successful website, you need targeted traffic, which means traffic that really WANTS to be there. The folks visiting your site need to be interested in what you are selling or promoting.
Internet marketing involves a number of different ways of generating traffic to your site through website promotion techniques and here are 3 of the most important ones.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing involves gathering a list of leads and emailing them on a regular basis. What you need to do is place an optin form on your website (using Aweber or Getresponse, these two being the mostly used autoresponders around) and people can sign up through there. You will then need to send out informative emails on a regular basis and occasionally send out an offer containing your affiliate link. This is how you will build a long term customer base and sell to them. It will also bring the leads to your site as you can link to your site from your email newsletter. - Article Marketing - or bum marketing
Article marketing means you will be writing articles evolving around your niche topic which you will then submit to various article directories such as ezinearticles.com and isnare.com. As these directories are visited by thousands of web publishers, they are able to use your articles on their sites whilst keeping your website link at the end of the article. Bum marketing has really proved to be a very reliable and important way to generate traffic and backlinks to your website. - Online Advertising
You might opt to advertise in ezines or on other websites. This is a great way to get traffic to your site specially when you are advertising on popular websites. Of course, those sites should be somewhat related to your niche so people actually click on the ads and come to your site. It will cost you a monthly fee to place a banner or text link on a popular website and that is not cheap, but in most cases it is really worthwhile doing so.
When just start out in internet marketing, and you ask anyone what is the best way for a newbie to get going, you’ll usually get the answer ‘affiliate marketing, of course, join one of the affiliate programs on Clickbank’.
It’s true,affiliate marketing has really become a perfectly accepted and feasible business model for internet marketers and you can make a great living only by doing it. For example, most of the affiliate marketing programs are completely free to join and you will even have free access to a whole range of promotion tools to get you going in the business. So yes, it’s true you can make money with affiliate marketing for free if you choose to do so. No wonder everybody is recommending it wholeheartedly.
But…as with any business, there are certain pitfalls that you need to know about, so you can avoid them, in order to be really successful. If you choose to ignore these mistakes, you might find yourself working to no end to make only pennies from your affiliate marketing – and that will NOT make you free of your so dreaded 9-5 job that you want to get away from.
Mistake #1: Choosing The Wrong Affiliate Program
Before you run off to promote an affiliate program that you get attached to, you need to know why you want to select that program. The cute header and nice words, or your personal affinity to the niche subject won’t do here. You need a hungry crowd, meaning a targeted market that is in desperately searching for something.
Let’s say you researched a bit and found that acne sufferers are finding it really hard to get rid of their acne, but they want to do so using natural treatments.
Now you will go to Clickbank, for example, and find the right product to promote. You will search in this case an ebook on using natural treatments for acne, which does not harm to the skin, doesn’t need for the patient to spend thousands on pills and expensive creams, and is successful in a relatively short period.
Mistake #2: Going after Too Many Affiliate Programs
If you’re like me when I first started out, you will join several affiliate programs, as each sounds better and better in terms of payouts, etc. You will think that by joining more programs, you will make more money. Wrong. You will soon find yourself overwhelmed and will tend to give up affiliate marketing so much faster. When starting out go after only a few products all evolving around the same niche, so you can stay focused until you get those ones making sales. Once you’re comfortable using those, you can always expand, and dump those that proved to be non-money makers.
Mistake #3: Not Familiarizing Yourself With The Product
To properly promote a product or service it really helps to know as much about it as possible. As a matter of fact, it’ is recommended that you buy it and experience yourself if you really want to be able to talk about it well. Some programs allow you to buy their product using your own affiliate ID at Clickbank when it’s simply for learning, reviewing and promoting it. But it’s always best to first check with the product company, to make sure they approve. There may come a time when someone asks you a question about it and you have no answers. Knowing everything there is to know about the product will allow you to write a really good and unique review, which will separate you from the crowd who never bothered with this third step, and always copies boring reviews from others.
