A New Affiliate Marketers Journey

Many countries are experiencing gray growth at rates not seen before in history.  As science prolongs life, countries are experiencing greater numbers of retiree’s and assisted living candidates making this segment of the population one of the most cashed up and needy markets available today.

The downside for these individuals, as life continues to be extended, is living with various medical and life style requirements.  For example incontinence is more widespread with more people entering this age band.  More aging people have varicosis and require compression stockings and vascular socks than ever before.

Mobility is also becoming a much larger marketplace with more people requiring the assistance of wheelchairs, walking sticks and wheeled walkers.  For the bathroom there is an increasing market for bed pans, bath boards and bath and shower grab rails.

Bed Rails are also becoming more popular as are tap turners, dressing sticks and bottom wipers - just a few of the every day living assistance products that our aging nation rely on daily to lead a more normal and independant life.

One web site - Australia Best Buys has realised the pressing need to bring these products to an online platform where the elderly and those who who also need this range can access them at realistic prices while ordering online through secure process’s and saving money at the same time - For many, this also alleviates the embarrasment of ordering certain items over the counter.

Youtoo can also join this fast growing market by becoming a prosumer advocate and earning money at the same time.

I have been away for a while working on several new projects, ence I have neglected this particular Blog - My apologies if you have been following me.  However that said, I have certainly gained a huge amount of important information that most internet marketers will find very useful.  Best of all, I have moved from PPC and over to search engine rankings.

I realised that while PPC was bringing me in sales, if it got turned off for any reason (it was and still is until I can reclaim my credit card) that I would be back to square one - no real traffic at all.  Because I was getting good results from PPC, and leading a busy life, I began to neglect creating worth while backlinks to ensure my sites were getting targeted traffic.

I have now rectified this and in upcoming posts, I will be walking readers through how to get good free back links and other methods I have discovered and tested in the last few months.  As a teaser, I can tell you that I got to the front page of google for a number of terms across a number of different niche sites, so it would well be worth you subscribing, or bookmarking this page.

While I don’ have an auto responder (as yet), if you would like me to personally let you know when updates are ready, then please send me an email at markmcelhinney@bigpond.com with the subject line “Update me” and I will personally shoot you a one line email when I have written another post that would be worthy of your time.  By the way, all of the info will be at no charge though in a couple of months I would like to put this all into a pdf and sell  it - yet another project on the waiting list.

OK, back to about blogs and their worth.  Apart from this sadly neglected blog, I had not ventured into the blogging field until recently and have been amazed at the sheer natural traffic that they have drawn.  Firstly, why did I suddenly turn to blogs?

I realised that blogs are becoming more important in the eyes of Google, and as I had set up a brand new site, I figured that attaching a blog may assist in linking and traffic.  The new project was entering into the realms of drop shipping - basically advertising some one elses products, recieving payment on a sale, then ordering the product and paying for it through the supplier who then has the product delivered directly to the customer - in short no product holding and I pocket the difference between the retail price and the drop shippers whole sale price.

The new project was to set up a fully integrated website with merchent gate way to sell popular brand watches to the USA market - The brands I market are Luminox Watches , Stryker watches , Truglo watches , and more - all contained in my site built around mens watches.

(yes I know, shameless link building)

I decided to set up a word press blog on the site.  It took me a while to work out how, and what the best template and add ons were - I now have this down to a bit of an art, having set these up on 3 sites in total - to view the blog, go to Mens Watches Blog.

The blog structure I have set up allows Adsense revenue as well as having a SEO back end, meaning you get out there to more eyes quicker.  The other benefit is that once you have posted a blog, you can shoot it through to a free blog ping service as well as using a very nifty free acount to automatically send the post through to a number of leading social network and bookmarking sites, ensuring back links as well as traffic from readers of these services.

Now then - How effective are these blogs? The blog above has been there for a couple of weeks gathering traffic, so I will show you stats of the other two that I basically began posting to this week - go to blogging results to see the huge impact that this method had on my free traffic results.

In future updates I will explain the exact method and free systems that I used to do this virtually over night - as always, any questions please email me at markmcelhinney@bigpond.com

Wow, how easy is it to get off track once you begin working on the Net?  I’m afraid I tend to do that, however in my defence, I also like to know what is going on out there - what are the new marketing trends and so on.  My day to day work has also taken a lot of time away from my personal projects such as the new website that I last wrote about, www.life-aids.com  The good news is that when I first put this site up in an Xsite Pro Template form, it had an Alexa ranking of 21, 162, 279.  Today, just on a month later, it is ranked 10,696,995 - Basically halved in this time with no activity from myself.

The only links to the site are from my initial blog a month ago here and one or two from a blog I created for this site - http://life-aids.blogspot.com/.  This new Blog only has two articles to date as again I have not had the time to enter more.

I have found myself of late, removing myself from those email marketers that really have little or nothing to offer as these were time traps - Interesting offers of new Internet leveraging products etc, but of no real value.  You may wish to do the same to allow you to concentrate more on core activities, and leave your self only on those who offer solid advice.

I have learnt several things over the past month which I am putting into place, so I will update my next post with some of this relevant learning.

Email bankruptcy applies to those business professionals that become overwhelmed with the number of genuine business emails that they are receiving.  Not having the skills to actively manage their online communications, professionals are turning to the easy way out - delete their email account and start again.

What impact would this have on your day to day business if you wiped out all of your email contents and information?  The Washington Post has featured articles on this as has major newspapers from other countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia.

Email traffic has grown rapidly in the past few years, and now accounts for more than 60% of business communications.  As this number grows, what plans do you have to unlearn your self taught communications habits and relearn best practice methods that will allow you to effectively manage your In Box, while giving you back more time per day to spend on your core business activities.  One article that encapsulates the essence of this growing issue is posted here, and gives you the rationale behind why organisations are struggling with this human resource issue.

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There are a huge number of positives to being an affiliate marketer.  I have listed the top three below.

1. You do not need to hold any stock
2. You do not have to deliver / ship the product to the client
3. You do not have to negotiate product pricing with suppliers

So what do you have to do? 

Find a reputable company to work with that has worth while products to promote.  By worth while, I mean products that people value.  In the Internet marketing world there is a huge number of “Internet Marketers” that will promote valueless goods (normally get rich quick Internet marketing books) with insane promises and catches.  The company also has to have a viable method of turning visitors to their offers into clients, preferably repeat clients.  To do this they have to have an easy process for the prospect to follow and make a purchase.  Many companies have still not worked this out and instead rely on huge volumes of affiliates sending massive traffic through - some of it will stick. 

I believe that there are a number of very good niche market down-loadable products available.  Ebooks like Halloween in the 1920’s and Finger wave Hairstyles, good quality entertainment and information.  Also I have generally focused on physical products such as mobility aids and power inverters.  There are large markets for just about any product that people currently us in their day to day life.

Your role as an affiliate marketer is to promote the particular product ranges that you are promoting either in the real or virtual sense.  I focus purely on the Internet as it is still a very small market place (compared to what it will be in 5 years time).

Promoting other companies goods and services for commission payments requires two basic components.  You need to have a good offer and you need to send traffic to this offer.  If you are new then Googles Adwords program is a good starting place, however you are then paying for your traffic in the hope that some one who has clicked on your link will actually buy.

The best method is to have your own website to push traffic to and use the site to pre-sell the product so that when they do click on your affiliate link to go through to the sales site, they already know a lot about the product and are much more likely to purchase.  This is your opportunity to build trust.  I realised very early in the piece that I had no control over what happened after a prospect clicked on one of my Google ads.  50 click troughs and no sales?  What could be wrong? You have no information to base any decision on.

I don’t have a site you say, or a site that you can work affiliate sales through.  In this day and age registering a website name and finding a low cost web host is very easy.  Don’t know how to make a website?  Again there is a lot of free software that will help you build one quite easily.  Remember, you don’t need a site full of bling - It just has to offer the right information to the prospect with a few relevant graphics and your affiliate links through to the sales site.

The huge benefit that you gain is that your prospects are in your environment for a period of time.  Using your web hosts administration area you can gain a lot of statistical information relating to the type of traffic you are receiving, and what they are doing on your site.  It will advise top entry and exit pages, break down of visitors by day, hour, country, search engine, top search terms and more.

With this information you are then in much more control of managing your affiliate business rather than just blindly using Adwords to refer to a site out of your control.  Now that you have a site, you can look at other ways of generating traffic to your site - no cost methods that will not only forward through visitors, but will also raise your ranking in search engine terms.  If you build a site about trains for example then type trains (or what ever key term your site uses) into Google.  Don’t be upset when you see that your site in not in the first couple of million or so - I have just typed Trains into Google which returned 70,500,000 matches.  What ever space you are in you are going to have to compete for traffic.  To check where your site stands, go to www.alexa.com.  

LegAids, my first site currently has an Alexa ranking of  5,959,531. Amazing, this was at 7,857,623 a month ago.

So how is LegAids getting a better ranking?  Through the creation of back links.  Back links are sites that link to your site, ensuring that spiders crawl your site more frequently.  As the spiders are coming, you need to ensure that you have a lot of very relevant content on your site to interest them.

When you begin building a back link program there are a variety of methods at your disposable.  As I don’t believe in buying links from companies, or using black hat spamming methods, I need to create quality links on the Internet.  For example, the link to LegAids above will create a back link from this blog through to my site slightly improving the rank.  I also write articles for Ezine Articles which gives me a more relevant back link as Ezine Articles is a much larger, older, more traffic-ed site with a huge amount of unique content than my little blog.

Squidoo.comis also another fantastic way to create a page that points to your site with relevant content - again Squidoo links have a high relevance (The links are in my profile).  As I am also a professional in other business areas I have a page on LinkedIn which allows me to list my sites along with my professional resume.  Squidoo and Ezine Articles  also are related to Twitter.

So by using the above sites, I have created around 30 very relevant back links to LegAids, which is a good start while each link gives me the opportunity to give my viewers relevant information about a particular subject.  As well, these linking opportunities allow me to link my Squidoo pages to Twitter and vice versa as well as linking to my articles on Ezine Articles - so I have created many more links than just to my mobility site.  I have had some of my published articles picked up and placed on complete strangers blogs with my author byline which includes the LegAids link.  Some of my previous blogs have also been picked up and used the same way.  All of this means growing relevance for my portfolio of sites and information content repositories.

It will take time to build these links, but the more relevant and foccused you are, then the better the outcome.  I have also posted relevant information on Blogs but that is another subject.

Please note that when I set out to write this I didn’t actually intend to include the number of links here, but if the article interests you, clicking on the links will show you exactly what I mean in terms of content and relevance.  Until next time…..