OK – so you decided you want to become an online super affiliate.
Congratulations!
The “deadbeat lifestyle” is second to none:
Nothing beats being able to wake up at 2pm in the afternoon…
And logging in to your affiliate network accounts to be greeted by to see hundreds of dollars in commissions before your “work day” has even started.
Now the reality is you can make this a “1 hour” per day career…
But it does take some initial leg work to get things up and running.
Hi – I’m Dan Brock “The Deadbeat Super Affiliate”…
And after driving over 7 figures in affiliate sales while working in my favorite robe and floppy tube socks,..
I decided it was finally time to start “Deadbeat University” and teach all the nitty-gritty affiliate tactics that I’ve learned.
Let’s jump right in and discuss some of the key steps at starting.
Here Are The First Steps You Need to Take To Become a Successful Lazy Super Affiliate.
First, You Must Master the Mental Game.
I’m going to talk a lot about this in the future… but in a nutshell, you have to get your mind right in many ways.
What I mean by that, is affiliate marketing/internet marketing is a bi-polar business:
Some days you can earn nothing, and the next day earn thousands in affiliate commissions.
Also, when you’re just starting out, you can go months before you start seeing progress.
In fact, you will probably mess up your first couple affiliate sites.
There’s a learning curve…
And you need to continually cultivate what I call an “Optimistic, Goal Oriented Mindset”.
This is what will keep driving you in the face of failure… and will also help you overcome the many hurdles along the way.
I don’t want to go too much into it in this post because I plan to create a lot of content in the near future to address this concept.
Once your mental game is tight, you have to start building things!
Step 1 – Find a Market, and “Niche It Down” Based on Keywords.
The first step is finding a market where people actually buy stuff!
But don’t think you can jump right in to a hot, highly competitive market and start pulling in the affiliate sales, it’s probably won’t happen.
That is why it’s important (when starting out), to find a low to medium competition market…
Or at the very least, “niche a competitive market down” to a small subset of a highly targeted audience.
A perfect example of this is the “guitar” market.
If you were to make a site around the “guitar” keyword, you’ll likely have thousands of vendor and entertainment sites to compete with.
If you “niche it down” a little bit and instead target a sub-set of the guitar niche – say for example – “acoustic guitars”… you’re odds of competition go up quite a bit.
That’s still a bit broad, so you can drill it down even further by going after an even more specific audience like “left handed acoustic guitars”!
You can find out crucial niche data by using keyword tools like Google Adwords Keyword tool.
Step 2 – Find Some Affiliate Products to Promote
If you’re going after a physical product oriented niche – which is something I usually recommend – Amazon.com affiliate program is a great “go to”.
It offers attractive commission payout rates between 4-10%. That may not seem like a lot initially, but you can expect a conversion rate of around 10%. Not only that, but you also get paid commissions on any products that the website visitor you refer buys during the 24 hour cookie time period.
Step 3 – Register a Domain Name & Create a Website
This is relatively easy to do, even if you have no idea what you are doing.
Aim to register a .com if you can, but you can sometimes settle with a .net or .org if you are aiming to create a small affiliate niche site.
If you are trying to create something massive – AKA an “Authority Site”, I ALWAYS recommend you try and get the .com.
Going with the “left handed acoustic guitar” niche example, I would try and register something like “lefthandedacousticguitars.com”, or “lefthandedguitars.com”. If I am satisfied with creating a smaller niche site and the .com isn’t available, I would go with something like “lefthandedguitars.net” instead.
Setting up a website is easy once you have your domain name.
All you need is a web hosting plan (I recommend HostGator), and a fresh WordPress installation.
I ALWAYS build my affiliate sites on WordPress because it offers the best “point & click” capabilities.
Step 4 – Add Content To Your Site.
Typically I will use the data from a Keyword research tool like the Google Adwords Keyword tool to determine 3-5 articles I can write about a topic.
Going with our theoretical example of “Left Handed Acoustic Guitars”, some probable keywords worth writing content on include:
- buy left handed acoustic guitars.
- best left handed acoustic guitars
- acoustic guitars for left handed people
- left handed acoustic guitar reviews
Just a disclaimer, I didn’t run these keywords through the keyword tool yet to determine if they are being searched for or not, but I’m going to bet some of them are.
Anyway, I would create an article addressing each keyword above, and publish it to my site.
Once your content is up, you then focus on driving traffic to it.
Step 5 – Drive Website Traffic
This is one of those things that scares people away.
When you hear the words “traffic generation”, you imagine some guy slaving away in front of his computer days on end pecking away at his keyboard just hoping for some traffic.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In fact, if I had to sit in front of my computer any more than 1 hour per day doing this… I wouldn’t be doing it.
I’d be out robbing banks or something.
(Just kidding)
But really – traffic generation can truly be a “Set and Forget” type thing. Once you create your “traffic asset”, it can driving traffic for many years to come with little, if any input on your part.
I’ll be talking a lot about traffic generation in the near future.
Once all these steps are complete, you now have an autopilot niche affiliate site ready to earn commissions for years to come.
Like I said – it does take some initial practice…
You probably will create a couple duds in the process – but that’s OK.
It’s just like learning a martial art.
EVERYONE sucks at first.
The people who are able to overcome their ego and stick with it get better.
Those that can’t give up.
In the affiliate marketing space, that means a lot of money left over for the rest of us who have the resilience to stick it through!
Images sourced from
1)www.amazon.com
2)www.adwords.keyword.google.com