Building Your Affiliate Funnel

While a lot of affiliate marketers can operate without setting up a website, the benefits of doing so will become immediately apparent. First, having your own website establishes your credibility on the subject, and further lends authority to the product you are promoting.

While you can strictly use AdWords and other contextual advertising methods, having your own website is a way to add other income streams, organize and consolidate your affiliate product offerings and add other types of advertising and monetization schemes to your site.

Setting up a website is not that difficult nor is it very expensive any more. If you decide to go with your own website, there are a few things you should know in order to get started.

Get your own domain name. A domain name is a unique name that identifies your website. It transforms an IP address (100.99.103.44) to something memorable – www.yourdomain.com.

Having your own domain name adds to the authority of what you’re writing, should be easy to remember and gives you a platform from which to write. Registering a domain name nowadays costs only about $8 to $10. Some of the best registrars include:

 Godaddy.com

 Namecheap.com

  Internic.com

Next, you will want to get webhosting. This is also very inexpensive. A full featured webhosting plan will cost you only about $5.00 to $10.00 per month.

 Godaddy.com

 Hostgator.com

 Dreamhost.com

Get an easy to use website platform. You don’t need to be an HTML or Dreamweaver expert to set up a really nice site.

The platform of choice these days is WordPress, which is very simple to setup by using Fantastico and Cpanel, and there are tons of very nice themes out there for you to use. Two other easy to use content systems are Drupal and Joomla.

All three of these will build out a full site for you that has an admin interface that is easy to learn and use. Through the use of one of these platforms, you can accomplish a number of essential things to the success of your affiliate sales:

Affiliate link cloaking: It would be nice to think that everybody is honest. However, this is not the case. As a result, you need to cloak your affiliate link so that when a person clicks through your link and buys the product, the commission goes to you.

Especially with an affiliate network like Clickbank, it is very important to cloak your original link with an ironclad decoy link that keeps the commission protected.

It will take a link that looks like a mish-mash of letters and dots and like this: http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net and turn it into something like this: 

http://yourdomain.com/product.html. It makes it both easier to read and keeps your affiliate information secret and intact.

Pre-selling: This affords you the opportunity to write or have written articles that are keyword optimized (which means that they are designed to rank highly in the search engines for specific words), traffic magnets that affords visitors the opportunity to learn more about a specific product and get more exposure that leads to eventual conversion. Pre-selling is an art that happens over time.

Ad Tracking & Analytics: While Google AdWords offers excellent ad tracking features, having a person visit your website further refines the analytics you can look at.

As a visitor explores your entire website, you are gaining valuable information about what pages they visited how long they stayed on specific pages, what links they clicked and the like. All of this information can help you refine what is on your website.

For instance, say a person arrives at your home page, goes to a page on a specific product and then goes through a link on that page to another page on your site and stays there for a long time.

If this happens over and over, you have just gained valuable information about what has caught people’s interest. In that way, you can offer more of the same that is on the second page so that people are likely to return and be re-exposed to you, your products and your site.

Blogging About Specific Topics Related To Your Affiliate Product: With a website built on the WordPress platform, you can set up certain programs called plug-ins that automatically optimize your website.

What this means is that Google and the other search engine spiders will love to stop by your site and add pages to their search index.

As you get more pages into the search engines, you will rank higher. What this means is that you will have more and more visibility and in turn more traffic will visit your site over time.

Learning about keyword research and search engine optimization or SEO is one of the things that every affiliate should learn.

The more you know, the better your site will become, and the better your site, the more sales you will make.

Choosing Good Keywords

Okay, so now that you've chosen your niche, it's time to do some good 'ole keyword research and accompanying competition analysis!

Gasp! What do these crazy terms mean, you ask?

Well, it's really quite simple. Keyword analysis means taking a look at the actual keywords and keyword phrases related to your niche that people are typing into Google on a regular basis.

Your goal will be to pick one good keyword phrase, as well as several secondary keyword phrases (the more the better). Our intent here is to rank high in Google for these keyword phrases, and that will be the primary means of driving traffic to our blog.

Competition analysis means checking to see how many websites are going to be in direct competition with your blog as you try to rank for those keyword phrases.

We'll start with keyword analysis. There are many ways you can do this. You can buy programs that will perform keyword research for you, but we won't bother with that here. For now we're going to concentrate on one tool, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool:

By imputting our keywords into this tool, we can see on average how many searches they get per month. Scroll down a little further, and you can find related keywords-- “Additional Keywords to Consider”.

Staying with same example of -  “bamboo fly fishing rods” check how much research is done on that keyword.  For example if you find 2400 searches per month. That's not bad. Generally, for your main keyword phrase, you'd like to have at least one or two thousand searches per month. If you can get more than that, it's even better.

Now let's go to Google and conduct some competition analysis for this keyword. Type your keyword phrase in quotes like this: “bamboo fly fishing rods”.

Notice how many search results pop up. Generally, anything under 30,000 is pretty good, and anything under 10,000 is great! So this keyword “bamboo fly fishing rods” has potential.

Now I like to conduct a couple more searches for good measure. Example - Search for allintitle: “bamboo fly fishing rods” . This will give you every website that has its title optimized for “bamboo fly fishing rods”

Next, imput in anchor:"bamboo fly fishing rods" and you'll see how many websites have “bamboo fly fishing rods” in its anchor text (link text). 

These results make up your REAL competition: the people who are actively trying to rank for this keyword by using on-page SEO and using the keyword in the title and in anchor text.

Now, to dig up a little bit more information on these sites, I like to use an add-on for Firefox called “SEO For Firefox”. Once installed, a little icon appears in the extreme lower right corner of your browser. Click on it and you'll be able to see more data about the websites you go to.

The site will give  description, highlighted in blue, you can see tons of information about the site. These are all factors that come into play when determining the site's rank. For Example -  This site might ranks #1 for the keyword “bamboo fly fishing rods”.

What you will want to do is try to determine WHY it ranks #1, and what you would have to do with your blog to try to compete with this site, as well as with all the other websites on page 1 of the Google search results.

I'm not going to go too in depth with competition analysis, because it's a wide topic that could comprise several eBooks on its own. If you need more info, do a quick Google search. There's tons of information that can be found all over the internet for free.

Once you've picked your main keyword phrase, go back to the Google Keyword Tool and select a whole bunch of secondary keyword phrases-- anywhere from 5 to 20. These don't have to have thousands of searches per month.

These secondary keyword phrases are meant to be the “low hanging fruit”-- they don't get tons of searches, but they also have very little competition, so they should be easy to rank for.