Can You Really Make Significant Money Using Affiliate Marketing?
It’s harder to get into the industry today, and it depends on what “significant money” is to you. However, the answer to the question- Yes–but it isn’t as easy as it first can seem.
It is very easy to think that you can just build a website, throw up some affiliate products and watch the money roll in.
You don’t need a $47 eBook, there are no shortcuts. It’s a lot of hard work, learning, adjusting to the changing landscape, and lots of time. I just partnered with 2 other affiliates and launched a site in March, and will be marketing heavily for 9 months to be ready for this year’s holiday shopping season.
If you don’t have a year to invest in building your site, with quality content, and aren’t willing to learn the right way to do things (no shortcuts!), don’t bother. Affiliate marketing IS hard work and it is even harder now that the competition has grown.
Affiliate publishers that actually make significant money are mostly of these types:
* Major Coupon sites, like retailmenot, and savings.com
* Major Bonus sites like Upromise and Ebates
* Major Branded Loyalty Shopping networks: like Cartera and DBG
* Virtual Currency networks that give users game points in exchange for completing advertiser offers: like TrialPay and TapJoy
* Major Product Comparison sites: like TopTenReviews
* Affiliates with coupon sites that bid on merchant Trademark+ keywords such as “Gap.com Coupon Code”.
* Affiliates that cheat and bid on merchants trademark terms in google search, pretending to be them. (We use BrandVerity to combat this)
* Niche content sites that have high SEO ranking on particular product related keywords.
A good way to get started would be to take a product category you are naturally interested in. Use a tool like Keyword spy to make sure there is sufficient search traffic for it. Make a website comparing and reviewing the offerings, with affiliate links prominently placed.
Ask the merchants for unique exclusive codes that you can promote to encourage your traffic to click through your affiliate links. And use a tool like LinkDex to guide your SEO efforts. Good SEO requires regularly writing original content, and getting other sites to link to it. Again, this is all real work. But if you like writing, and making websites, it might come naturally to you.
