By David Olsen
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Copyright, Legal Notice and Disclaimer:
This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable
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are not allowed to give or sell this Guide to anyone else. If you received this publication from
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mail at support at forensicaffiliate.com and notify us of the situation.
Please note that much of this publication is based on personal experience and anecdotal
evidence. Although the author and publisher have made every reasonable attempt to achieve
complete accuracy of the content in this Guide, they assume no responsibility for errors or
omissions. Also, you should use this information as you see fit, and at your own risk. Your
particular situation may not be exactly suited to the examples illustrated here; in fact, it s likely
that they won t be the same, and you should adjust your use of the information and
recommendations accordingly.
Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the
property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied
endorsement if we use one of these terms.
Finally, use your head. Nothing in this Guide is intended to replace common sense, legal, medical
or other professional advice, and is meant to inform and entertain the reader. So have fun with
the 10 Quick Steps, and get your stuff done.
Copyright © 2014 David Olsen. All rights reserved worldwide.
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Thank you for purchasing The Forensic Affiliate.
In this course we are first going to use some basic Niche selection techniques to
learn where people are spending money online. Once we've found where the
money is, we're going to perform our forensic analysis to focus in on what our
audience is really looking for and what gaps currently exist in the marketplace.
It's in these gaps that we can find the truly profitable pockets that we can stake
our claim in.
But First...
The niche you decide to promote is the foundation of your Affiliate marketing
business. No other single factor has the ability to make or break you like niche
selection does. You can recover from most any other mistake you make, poorly
written content, poor web design even bad keyword selection can all be fixed
pretty quickly, but if the niche you choose to promote doesn't have any active
buyers---you're pretty much dead in the water. In this module we are going to
explore several different niches to find out where the "buyers" are.
Niches and Sub Niches
Niche selection has been written about over and over again for many years (long
before the Internet was around). The process is in one sense pretty simple - find
where people are spending money and figure out a way to get yourself or your
product in front of them. We call this finding a sub niche. Here's a quick example
of a Niche and a couple of sub-niches:
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Fitness is a niche. We can also say that Fitness is a "mega niche" because there
are many Fitness related sub-niches that are very profitable (and many are
already very crowded with other marketers).
"Weight Loss" and "Body Building" are two sub-niches of Fitness. Both can be
very profitable, however there are several very important differences between the
two. First, the people who are spending money in the "weight loss" niche and the
ones who are spending money in the "body building" niche are probably very
different. If you're 100 pounds overweight, you're probably not worrying about
increasing the weight you can bench press (or at least you probably shouldn't be)
further, if you're an avid body builder you probably aren't going plunk down $47
for an ebook on how to eat cake and cookies all day and still lose weight.
Figuring out what the customers in your niche are looking for is how you will be
able to create compelling content and promote appropriate products using the
proper sales pitches.
Another important difference between these two sub-niches is the demographics.
Body Builders are probably mostly male, probably 18 to 30 and probably single
(this is just off the top of my head, further research would be necessary to
confirm this). Customers who fall in the Weight Loss niche are probably mostly
women and probably a little older, maybe 30 to 40 and probably are (or were)
married. Knowing the makeup of your audience is crucial - these two groups
(Men 18 - 30 and Women 30 - 40) are going to have very different "hot button"
issues. They simply aren't going to care about the same things.
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Cross-Over Niches
Now that being said - finding cross-overs in these two groups can be both
profitable and often have much less competition. So what kind of crossovers can
we find here? Well here are our two groups:
* Body Building: Men - 18 to 30 - single
* Weight Loss: Women - 30 to 40 - Married or Divorced
* The demographics above are just my assumptions and have not been verified.
Later on we'll see how to better predict the demographics of the niche.
So for our body building group my guess is there are a fair number of men in
their mid to late 20's who had been body builders in the past but may have put on
a few pounds. So this sub-niche might be:
Weight loss for Former bodybuilders: Men, 25 - 30, Single - who want to lose
weight and get their body building physiques back.
Another cross over group could be, women who are recently divorced and are
ready to get back into the dating world but want to tone up first.
Tone Up for that next-first date: Divorced women 30 - 40 - who are trying not just
to lose weight but get more toned.
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SIDEBAR
Here's an interesting fact: both of these groups are essentially looking for the
same thing. In the most basic sense both groups just want to look and feel
better about themselves. The ultimate goal of both of these groups is probably
to attract a mate.
Sub Niches
A Sub niche is different from a cross-over niche in that a sub niche is simply a
smaller group of people taken from a much larger niche. One example from the
Fitness world might be:
Fitness -> Weight Loss -> Lose excess weight in your hips and butt
As you can see from the above, a sub niche tends to be more specific then the
parent or mega niches.
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SIDEBAR
An interesting thing to note is that our job as affiliates actually gets easier as
we get more specific. You see, when someone is "Googling' something very
specific like "How to lose excess weight in my hips" they are much further
along in the buying cycle then someone who is just Googling "How To Lose
Weight". Also, the more specific searches are easier to rank for in Google.
This is especially true of people who are searching for specific product
numbers in say an Electronics niche.
If you're looking for a specific model number you are ready to buy - you've
already done your research and know that you want the "Sony X439" (or
whatever), so now you're probably just looking for a place to buy it. That's very
nice for the affiliate!
So how do you find niches and sub-niches?
My favorite place to look for new niches is the Amazon Best Seller lists :
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers/zgbs
Here we can see the best sellers in a each Amazon category. In the left sidebar
you can see all of the Amazon categories, for the purposes of this course we are
going to focus specifically on the "Books" section.
http://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-books-
Amazon/zgbs/books/ref=zg_bs_nav_0
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So why do we care what the top selling products on Amazon are? Because,
Amazon is one of the largest retailers on the planet and they sell pretty much
everything. Any product that makes it to the top 100 is selling huge numbers (that
means there is money in that niche). Also, Amazon does a great job of
categorizing their products. We could say that each of these main categories is a
Mega Niche and the sub categories are Sub Niches.
Anyway, here we can see the top 100 best selling books (they are listed 20 per
page) at any given time. Looking at the current list, I'm seeing 5 books in the top
20 that are related to weight loss (Yeah, it's a pretty big niche!).
So since we know there are a lot of people buying weight loss books (there's
money in that niche), we'll focus on the weight loss niche for the remainder of this
course.
Getting Practical
Ok, so now we're ready to start researching different niches.
Since we are going to focus on the weight loss niche, I'm going to navigate my
way directly to the top selling weight loss books section of Amazon. So, from the
main "Top Sellers" page I'll look to the categories in the sidebar and navigate to:
Health, Fitness & Dieting -> Diets & Weigh Loss
Looking quickly at the first page I see two books specifically related to the Paleo
diet:
Paleo for Beginners
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and
Practical Paleo
That tells me that the Paleo diet is probably a pretty big sub-niche - so lets dig
further.
Enter Clickbank
What is Clickbank? Clickbank is one of the largest online repositories of
Information Products, they help information product creators find affiliates to sell
their products and enable the entire purchase, download process. Since
Clickbank is so large, they are another excellent place to do niche research.
However, for our purposes we are simply going to see if they currently have any
Paleo diet related products. Let's head over to the Clickbank marketplace:
https://accounts.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
Now let's enter "Paleo Diet" in the "Find Products" search box.
Right off the bat we can see there there are quite a few products related to the
Paleo Diet, I would say there are at least 20 products that have the word "Paleo"
in their title. Our next step is to get an idea about how well these products are
selling. To do that we will look at the "Gravity" metric that Clickbank shows us.
What is Gravity? Gravity is a proprietary calculation that Clickbank performs that
looks specifically at how many affiliate sales have been generated for a particular
product in the last six weeks. Higher is better (I like to look for products with
Gravity that is 25 or more). A higher number means more affiliate sales (the
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product is "hot"). Keep in mind though that very high numbers could mean that
there are a lot of affiliates promoting the product already (more competitors).
Anyway, we will now sort our products by Gravity. We do this by selecting
"Gravity" from the "Sort Results By" selector. I also set the Gravity filter on the left
of the screen to only show products with a minimum Gravity number of 25 (See
image).
This returns five products. The top product "Paleo Recipe Book" currently has a
Gravity of 146.73. This product is definitely selling right now! Looking down the
list we see that the other products have much lower Gravity numbers, but are still
above my 25 threshold.
The bottom line here, there are affiliate products we can promote to our niche.
Let The Forensics Begin!
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The Crime Scene - Where our Niche hangs out?
My next step it so go to good old Google and find some Paleo diet related
Forums. To do this I'll simply type "Paleo Diet Forums" (without the quotes) in
the Google Search box. We can see from the screen shot that four of the top five
results are domain names that contain the word "Paleo" in them, one of the four
is a domain called "Myfitnessplan.com" we will ignore this forum for now.
So, let's copy down the URL's of the four Paleo specific websites. They Are:
http://cavemanforum.com/ (NOTE: The Paleo Diet is sometimes called the
Caveman diet)
http://paleohacks.com
http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/
http://www.amazingpaleo.com/paleo-diet-forum/
Since these sites are all forums, they require users to be registered before they
can post. I will go ahead and register for each of the four sites at this time, as
well.
Now, that I'm registered, let's see what we can learn about these sites.
Let's go to each site and taken a closer look. Looking at the four sites I quickly
notice that most of the posts on "amazingpaleo.com" seem spammy. For that
reason, amazingpaleo.com is not a good site for us to look at so I'm removing it
from my list.
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Next lets look at the three remaining sites to try to see how big they are. Most
forum sites display some user statistics at the bottom of the home page. Let's
look there:
Looking at cavemanforum.com I can see they are doing doing this. Here are
there stats:
At the time of this writing there were: 25,001 registered users, over 65,000 posts.
That tells me this site is reasonably large.
Similar numbers are at rawpaleodietforum.com
27,397 users and over 114,000 posts
paleohacks.com doesn't seem to list their stats but you can see just from
eyeballing their existing posts that most posts seem to get over 150 views so I
would say this is a decent sized site as well.
Enter Quantcast!
Our next task is to try to find some demographic information about this niche. For
this we will use a website called Quantcast.com. Quantcast provides lots of
valuable demographic information about a websites visitors. The downside to
Quantcast is that to get to the really good information, a website owner has to
first register their site with Quantcast. If the websites we are researching haven't
done this, we won't get the really good information. However, there are some
ways around this as we'll see in the next paragraph.
Ok, so the Quantcast homepage has a search box in the middle of the page, you
simply input the url of the site you want to analyze. As I mentioned earlier,
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websites have to register with Quantcast to have their stats tracked and
displayed. Unfortunately, none of the three sites we are looking at have done
that. Not to worry though, a quick search of Google for "Paleo Diet" did yield
some other Paleo related sites that are in QuantCast.
Note: it's crucial here that we make sure the website is specifically about our
niche. There are many more paleo related pages that are on more general
websites or on Free blog sites. If we look at the quantcast data on these sites we
won't be getting a true picture of our niche.
That said here are a few Paleo specific sites that are in Quantcast:
paleoweightlosscoach.com
nomnompaleo.com
paleomunch.com
paleo-recipes.com
Let's look at the demographics
The first thing I did was to plug all four sites into Quantcast.com, what jumps out
is that nomnompaleo.com is by far the largest site with over 44,000 unique visits
per day. The three remaining sites only get about 300 visitors per day
(combined). Looking at the demographic makeup however, we see that all sites
are very similar. Each site gets between 70% and 80% female traffic with the
majority being between 25 and 44 years old.
Here's A Video To Help Clarify QuantCast:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUW0eGi-FdM
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So after compiling our numbers at Quantcast.com we can assume that our
audience will be made up of the following:
78% female
49% will be between the ages of 25-44
58% will NOT have children
60% will have household incomes above $50k
71% will have college
84% will be Caucasian
The next section I want to look at is the "Audience Also Likes" section. This part
of Quantcast tells us how likely the visitors to our target website are to visit
websites in other specific categories. This is a great way to further learn about
our visitors mindset. We can use this information to get to know our visitors better
and to find ideas for content that we will be providing.
Here's A Video On Quantcast.com "Also Likes":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIcPPFhVqn4
There are several categories that are common to all four of our target websites.
They are...
bridal
commerce - food
diet & fitness
fragrances/cosmetics
home & gardening
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home decor & design
home/family
parenting
travel news & info
Let's look at this in more detail. We already know from Quantcast that our
audience is going to be about 80% female between the ages of 25 and 44. We
now know that besides visiting Paleo related websites they also frequent Bridal
sites. So what does that tell us? Obviously these women have (or hope to have)
a wedding in their future.
Next, we can see from our list above that our audience also is likely to visit sites
related to:
Diet & Exercise
Fragrances/Cosmetics
3 of the four audiences also frequent sites in the "Fashion/Cosmetics" category
This tells me that our audience is concerned about their appearance. Again, if
they are planning a wedding then this makes perfect sense - every bride wants to
look their absolute best on their wedding day.
I think we now have enough information to move on to the next phase.
What's Missing In The Niche?
Here's the real power of the Forensic Affiliate...
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The truth is, most niches are already pretty crowed with affiliate marketers.
Affiliate marketing has been around for nearly 20 years and countless people
have thrown their hat in the ring to reap the "easy money" that's available online.
Most of these "marketers" will quit long before they ever make a sale, they simply
pick a niche where they think there is money being made (like weight loss), build
a website, throw up a few affiliate banners and wait. Most will never even spend
the few hours it will take to perform the Forensic Investigation I'm about to show
you. They'll simply forget about their websites after a few weeks or months, then
spend their time complaining that affiliate marketing is a scam and it's impossible
to make any money with it...
But I know you're smarter then that!
You know that the only way for the new guy to make it in a crowded marketplace
is to brush away the surface and take a closer look at what is really going on in
the niche. In this next section we are going to take a close look at our niche. We
are going to find out what they really want and what problems are keeping them
awake at night. We are looking for the "Starving Crowd" that is ready to buy the
solution to their problems. This the forensic part of our job.
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SIDEBAR
Here's a quick story about the Legendary copywriter, the late Gary Halbert:
Gary was teaching a copy writing class and he asked his students, If each of
us was about to open a hamburger stand and we were having a contest to see
who could sell the most burgers, what one advantage would you choose to
have over everyone else. The students came up with various answers, some
said premium quality beef, some wanted a better location, someone else said
buns with Sesame seeds on them.
Finally, the students asked what advantage the instructor Gary Halbert would
want. Halbert simply said. I'd want a Starving Crowd!
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A great way of finding who is "starving" in your niche is to use a clever Google
hack called the "Site" command. Here's how it works.
Earlier, we found several Paleo related forums - they are:
http://cavemanforum.com/
http://paleohacks.com/
http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/
Now, these three forums are pretty popular and have thousands of visitors
posting content to them every month. Often times they post about issues they are
having or what is bothering them. Sure, you can painstakingly look through the
forums, reading post after post and after a while you'll probably find some great
nuggets of information to use. However, I'm going to show you a cool "Ninja"
technique you can use to hone right in on the problems your niche is facing. For
this we'll use the Google Site command, here's how:
Go to Google.com and in the search box type the following:
site://cavemanforum.com "frustrated"
This will return a list of forum threads in the cavemanforumn.com site that contain
the word "Frustrated".
Think about this for a moment. We are looking at a popular website that services
the niche we are targeting. Using the Google Site command we can now browse
through this niche and find out what is "frustrating" our potential visitors enough
that they are posting about it. Your only job here is to read through these posts
and look for (and take note of) the "hot button" topics that are really bothering
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people. You can find these by looking for repeated topics and topics with lots of
responses.
SIDEBAR
In my research in the Paleo diet world I found that a common problem people
are having is convincing their family and friends to support their diet choice.
The paleo diet requires you to cut out most carbs and to avoid dairy and wheat
products (among other things) and many people report that they feel pressure
to eat "normally" by their families. Most of the posts related to this issue have
replies that offer good advice for dealing with it.
Uses for this intelligence:
1. This issue could absolutely be the basis for a post or several posts.
Simply summarize the responses (don't plagiarize, write it in your own
words) and create a blog post.
2. You could further turn this information into a free report that you give
away to your audience in exchange for their email address (list building)
3. If the issue seems to be big enough and your intelligence turns up
enough content, you could even consider using this as the "point of
view" (POV) of your entire website.
So plug in the websites you are researching and spend several hours reading the
different threads to find common problems that your niche is dealing (the
responses will often provide you with the solutions or at least good suggestions).
Make sure to take good notes and save the URL's of the pages you are looking
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(NOTE: Later on we'll take a look at some cool FREE tools that can help us to
organize and automate this process).
This research should provide the basis for content on your site. Besides just
"Frustrated" there are other great phrases to try:
" "rant"
" "goal"
" "obstacles"
" "i wish"
" "problems"
" "help"
Don't skimp on this. Spend several hours going through all of these, this should
give you a very clear picture of what your ideal customer will be like and what
issues you can and should be creating your site around.
Here's a video on using the Site Command:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts2MNw1wGgI
Once you finished going through the list above, go back to your notes and
compile a list of the issues that you uncovered Now, go back to the site
command and plug these new phrases in and repeat the process. This should
yield a pretty in depth analysis of what the hot buttens of your niche are.
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SIDEBAR
Example: a lot of people in the Paleo diet niche complained that their "family"
and "friends" don't support their Paleo Diet plan. After discovering this in my
initial research, I went back to the Google Site Command and plugged in these
two new keywords ("family" and "Friends") and uncovered even more
intelligence.
But Wait There's More...
The next bit of research I want you to do is to go back to the Amazon Books
section and type in your niche (in my case it's "Paleo Diet") in the search box,
make sure you are only looking at Books here (select the "Books" category).
Next sort the books by the number of "Customer Reviews" on each (You want to
see the books with the most customer reviews up top). Then, for each book, look
at the title and official description - note the books title, what specifically the book
is about (what it promises etc..). Now go to the Customer Reviews section and
click on the 3 star reviews and start reading.
Why look at the 3 star reviews? The 1 and 5 star reviews are often biased. Three
star reviews usually seem to be more honest. I occasionally will look at 2 and 4
star reviews but 3 seems to be the sweet spot.
While reading the reviews pay special attention to the things that the reviewer
doesn't like - this is where you can find more "holes" in your market. Filling these
"holes" is how you'll develop your following.
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 Here's A Video On Using Amazon Reviews:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF7j5DtARzY
SIDEBAR
Forensics takes time!
Make sure to spend an adequate amount of time doing your forensic research,
this is where you'll find out what your niche needs and how you can "break in"
to that market. I would recommend spending six to eight hours spread over a
several days. You also need to be taking notes and keeping track of any
important links that may be useful. The research you do here will be the basis
for your website and your content. Make sure to note anything that seems
important. Things to look for:
1. Any recurring issues that appear in the forums. Do the Book Review discuss
these issues as well?
2. What is missing from the niche? What does the "I wish" site command tell
you? What to do the book reviews say is needed.
3. What are people really annoyed about the "Rant" and "Frustrated" searches
will help you here.
4. While I recommend that you give adequate time to your forensic work, don't
fall victim to "Paralysis by Analysis". You do have to finish your research and
get on with building your site at some point.
Putting It All Together!
Now we need to review all of our forensic and demographic intelligence and start
making some decisions about our target market and how we will approach them.
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Create Your Avatar
An Avatar is a representation of your typical visitor. When we are marketing to
someone, the more we know about our potential customer (prospect) the better
we can do. We can see examples of this everyday at our local car dealer. Sales
people, especially ones who sell high ticket items like automobiles, learn how to
"size up" everyone they talk to. They look for subtle clues in their appearance,
their physical characters etc. They want to learn these things so that they can
tailer their sales pitch to them. We are about to do the same thing using the
information from Quantcast, and from our Forensic research.
So we know that our visitor is most likely going to be a white female, 25 - 44 who
is probably single (maybe engaged) and is concerned with their appearance. So
the first thing we want to do is to give our Avatar a name (in our case a female
name). Whenever I create an avatar, I always make it a point to use a name that
is definately either Male or Female, I wouldn't use an ambiguous name like Chris
or Pat because I don't want any hint of confusion as to who I am talking to. For
this exercise I'll use "Tina". Here's what we know about Tina:
Meet Tina:
Tina is 28 years old, she is engaged and planning her wedding which is a little
over a year away. Tina has No children (although she would like to have them
someday) and currently lives with her parents, she did NOT finish college but has
a decent job. Tina has always felt that she needs to lose some weight or at least
tone up, she has tried lots of different "fad" diets and has now found Paleo.
Tina is determined to be in the best shape of her life for her wedding day.
What's On Tina's Mind?
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Planning a wedding is a huge and stressful process for both the bride and the
groom. Wedding planning goes on for months, often times well over a year. Tina
our "paleo dieter" is right in the middle of this process. She still lives with her
parents so beyond just planning her wedding she is probably also concerned
about finding a place to live. Bottom line - She's stressed!
We also know from our Forensic research that her Paleo lifestyle may be causing
her additional stress as she may be feeling pressured by her parents (and
possibly her fiancée) to "eat normally".
Tina would probably like to find a website that will help her deal with all of these
issues. This is also helpful to us as affiliates because it gives us the opportunity
to promote products outside of just the Paleo niche. There are plenty of products
in the Wedding Planning, Health and Beauty and Exercise Niches.
Our Website's Point Of View
Now we need to consider how we are going to "crack" the niche. Knowing that
"Tina" is probably pretty stressed out, our website's Point Of View (POV) should
focus on that. For this niche a Paleo related website specifically geared to the
"Bride to be" may be a good choice. Some Ideas:
Website Title: Paleo Bride (paleobride.com)
POV: Dealing With The Stresses Of The Modern World While Still Eating Like A
"Caveman".
What kinds of content would Tina be interested in seeing on our website? Here
are some targeted content ideas based on our research:
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"Getting in shape for your Wedding in only 10 minutes a day"
"Should Your Wedding Menu Include non-Paleo Options?"
"What To Do When You're Being Pressured To Eat Normally"
"Is Paleo Dieting Safe If Your Pregnant"
"Can My Baby Eat Paleo?"
"What if "He" isn't on board with your Paleo Lifestyle"
"Tips for buying and preparing Paleo Meals on a budget"
"Five Fast Paleo Meal Ideas"
SIDEBAR
If you choose any health/fitness related niche, it's crucial that you always
advise your readers to check with their Doctor before starting any new diet or
exercise plan. This should be posted clearly on your site on your "About" page
and on any posts/pages that discuss specific health or diet issues or make any
recommendations. It's probably a good idea to put it in the footer of your site
as well. The last thing we want as affiliates is to cause any harm to anyone. So
make sure these warnings are clearly posted on your site.
Videos
Videos are a great source of content for your website. Most of the videos you find
on Youtube.com and the other sharing sites can be embedded on your website,
simply use the embedding code supplied by the site and paste it into your post. I
always recommend that you not just randomly embed videos on your site but
instead, watch the videos and make note of your thoughts. Then when you post
the video on your site, add your notes as a "review" or rebuttal of the video. This
gives your readers the ability to watch the video (and we all know video is huge)
plus by adding your notes you are making the content unique to your site.
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List Building
List building is one of the crucial tricks to creating a sustainable online business.
By List building we are talking about collecting the email addresses of your
visitors for the purpose of marketing to them in the future. Spam laws are very
serious so your visitors must always voluntarily optin to your list, it's also
recommended that you have them "confirm" their optin (to do this, you send them
an email immediately after their initial optin that contains a hyperlink. The visitor
must click on this link before they are added to your list). I always recommend
using a third party service for list management. The two biggest services are:
Aweber.com
and
GetResponse.com
Both are excellent and have a huge number of features. The drawback is these
two services are NOT free.
If you wish to go the Free route, then the recommended service is:
Mailchimp.com
Mailchimp.com is free for up to 1,000 list members. The drawback with the free
version is that you don't have a lot of the really nice features of the pay services.
Anyway, all three services will help you manage your list and ensure you
are compliant with the existing spam laws.
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Getting People To OptIn.
Most people aren't going to just give you their email address so simply putting an
optin form on your site is not going to be very effective. The standard way to
obtain optins is to offer a free gift (usually a report or ebook) in exchange for the
email address.
In my Forensic research for the Paleo Diet niche I found that a recurring issue
many people where having is dealing with family and friends who
don't necessarily support their lifestyle choice. The posts had a lot of responses
that offered suggestions for dealing with this issue. We could use the information
in these posts to create a free report as a giveaway. Simply go back to the
specific posts and re-read everything. As you're doing this copy the different
responses into your favorite word processing software and organize it into a
report. I would then title it something like: "7 ways to deal with Anti-Paleo Family
Members" or "Dealing Paleo UnFriendly Relatives".
On your optin form, announce that you are giving this special report away for
free. You can do a quick summary of the contents (bullet points work well here).
SIDEBAR
If you want to get fancy, you can go to fiverr.com and have an ebook cover
created. You would then include the new ebook image on your optin form.
Seeing the actual ebook cover creates a higher perceived value in your
visitors mind: The Result - more optins!
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Now, Show Me The Money!
So, we have a website in mind. We have some content ideas, we have a list
building plan in place. Now we need to find products to promote and find a way to
promote them. Many newbie affiliate marketer's think that simply placing banner
ads on their site is an easy and effective way to start making affiliate sales. While
many affiliate product authors do offer pre-made banner ads for their affiliates,
banners alone won't do much in the way of getting your visitors to buy. The fact is
the average click through rate for a banner ad is less then 1%. That means that it
will take over 100 views of your banner to get a single click to the product sales
page.
SIDEBAR
Banner ads do have a place though. I like to select two or three products to
promote on my websites, I will then place banner ads in my sidebar for those
products. While I don't expect to get any click throughs from these banners,
having them there can raise awareness about the product. It can kind of plant
a seed in the visitors mind about that product. Then, later on when they read
my review of the product or see the product linked to in my content, they
already have some familiarity with it. Further, having obvious advertising in the
sidebar of my website also creates a "separation" (in the visitor's mind)
between my editorial content and the products I'm promoting.
So how do we actually promote affiliate products?
I rely mainly on two different methods to promote affiliate products on my
websites. The first is creating product reviews of the products I am promote. The
second method is much more subtle, I like to reference products in my editorial
content and link to them. Here are the two methods in detail.
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Product Reviews
Creating a product review for the products we want to promote can be extremely
effective if it's done correctly. In a well written product review you need to include
both pros and cons of the product (I like to call this a Warts and All Review).
Including negative information about our products may seem like a bad idea
(aren't we trying to get people to buy the product afterall?) but by showing both
sides of the product we are adding to our own credibility. When we write our
product reviews we are not trying to "Sell" the product we are trying to warm the
visitor up to the product (We call this Preselling). The idea is to give our visitors
enough information about the product so they can make an informed opinion
about whether it's for them or not.
There are a number of great resources for creating reviews, here's one resource
from affilorama, that will give you enough good information to get started:
http://www.affilorama.com/content-creation/writing-product-reviews
This is 13 minute video and an accompanying article offers some excellent
advice on creating your own product reviews.
Subtle Link Placement
Another great technique for promoting affiliate products is refer to the product in
editorial articles on your site. This technique involves writing a general post, say
a how-to that's related to the affiliate product. Then from within the post simply
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make reference to the product and link to it, in a "matter-of-fact" way. As an
example here's how I may link to a recipe book in our Paleo diet website:
Post Title: "Five Fast Paleo Meal Ideas"
The main article will be made of recipes, so this would be a great way to promote
a recipe book. In the article itself, I may say something like:
Here's a recipe I originally found in my favorite Paleo Recipe Book. It tastes great
and it's quick to make.
(In the above example the phrase "My Favorite Paleo Recipe Book" would be
hyperlinked to the sales page.
Another example, say we are writing a post titled: "Getting in shape for your
Wedding in only 10 minutes a day".
In this article we could focus on both the Food aspect (Paleo Diet) and Exercise
for weight loss. When discussing exercise, I may say something like:
It's crucial that you combine both diet and fat burning exercises when you are
trying to lose weight quickly.
The phrase "fat burning exercises" would link to an appropriate exercise related
affiliate product.
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SIDEBAR
What is our goal as affiliates?
The answer to this question is key to your success as an affiliate. Our goal is
NOT to sell the product (The sales page is supposed to do that). Our goal as
affiliates is to "PreSell" the product. By preselling I mean we need to:
" Introduce the product to our visitor
" Discuss the benefits of the product
" Discuss the pros and cons of the product
" Help the reader decide if the product is for them or not.
When we do the above correctly we are warming the visitor up to the product
and giving them the information they need to decide if the product is right for
them or not.
So our goal as affiliates is to get our visitors to voluntarily click through to the
product sales page!
Tools to Organize and Automate the process
Diigo.com
We know that forensic work means gathering lots of clues from lots of different
places. To help me manage all of this I use a (free) web tool called Diigo.com.
What is Diigo? Diigo is kind of a bookmarking service on steroids. With Diigo we
can highlight text on web pages, tag our pages (for easy search and retrieval),
we can even add sticky notes to pages. With Diigo, all of our research
is accessible from one place, they even have a mobile app so you can use it
during your free time (like waiting at a Dr's office) to perform your forensic work.
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 Here's A Video On Using Diigo.com:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgmW5YcbvBM
Google Alerts
Google Alerts (GA) are another great way to automate your web search. With
GA, you can tell Google to let you know anytime a new piece of content, related
to a specific key phrase is discovered on the web. Alerts can be sent to your
inbox via email or can be sent to a customized RSS feed (See the next section to
learn how to use that Feed). Find GA Here: http://www.google.com/alerts
Here's A Video On Using Google Alerts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaz3AKyFxig
IFTTT.com
IFTTT.com is a very cool new website that I've been using for several months
now. IFTTT provides you with an easy to use, menu-driven interface that can
interact with dozens of popular websites (Sites like Facebook, GMAIL, Intagram
etc). To use IFTTT, you simply go to the website (http://www.ifttt.com) and
create an account. It's free and you can use it for some very useful tasks
Here's A Video On Using Ifttt.com:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFhuUFDRArg
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What's Next...
So now you've done your Forensic research, you're created your Avatar,
formulated a plan and you're ready to create your website. Now What? Well, the
odds are you won't get rich from the very first site you create but you should be
able to start collecting email addresses and will probably make a few affiliate
sales. How this site performs and how much data you uncovered during your
forensic research will dictate how you should proceed. If there are a lot of
"problems" in your niche, maybe you should create additional websites to
address these issues. If not, if you feel you've exhausted all of the potential in the
niche, then go back and start over with a new niche and new forensic research.
Meanwhile, your existing website(s) will still be operating on auto-pilot gaining
you new leads and hopefully more sales.
Remember, each site you create, will be on the web for as long as you own the
domain name. This means you can move on to other niches and other sites. The
idea is to Wash, Rinse, repeat...
Good luck and Happy Clue Gathering!
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