Personally, I would say that traffic and links come hand-in-hand. I don’t care about dofollow or nofollow and I don’t care about Google Page Rank of the sites I am going to use to build links and traffic.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Model

The Internet is moving towards a social era. This means that you will need to do more than hard selling to get your visitors to flash their credit cards. But on traffic building and link building for affiliate sites, the social media and Web 2.0 movement actually open up a wide opportunity for affiliates.

Thus, when you are applying social media marketing principles (interacting, solving problems and be yourself) into your traffic building and link building efforts, you will not only be able to get more traffic and rank higher in the search engines, you will be able to brand yourself and your site as well.

Proper Anchor Text Link Usage

If you are taking notes, you should jot down a big capitalized ANCHOR TEXT LINK and circle it up. The fundamentals on how to rank for a specific keyword really boils down to the anchor text that you use for the links pointing back to the page that you want to rank higher on the search engines.

For those who are new, anchor text is the text you use for a hyperlink. For example, the anchor text for this "affiliate marketing" link pointing towards http://www.affboom.com will be affiliate marketing.

You should know by now that what are the keywords that you should rank for from the keyword research and marketing viability research guide that I have provided. Now, when linking back to your affiliate sites, use the keywords as your anchor text after building a search engine optimized page following the search engine optimization for affiliate sites guide that I have provided.

6 Major Sources of Traffic and Links

Below are some sources or methods that I use for traffic building and link building. Yes, they are ranked in order according to the effectiveness and the results that they have brought me personally.

Article Marketing

If you don’t have an account at EzineArticles yet, you should get one immediately. Also, you should sign up for an account for almost all the directories listed on Article Marketer (do note that a large % of directories listed are junk sites, join those that have a similar format/script to Article Dashboard).

Get yourself a new email address and figure out a pen name. Why? If you are going to tap multiple niches as an affiliate, people will not believe that you can be the best in everything. If you want to be real in certain niches like me for affiliate marketing, some article directories allow you to use multiple names under one account.

Another tip here is to use the same password for all the article directories registration but they must be different from the password that you use for other activities. Why? As you move on, you may want to outsource your article submissions to other people and this will help to make their work easier.

The basic idea will be to write articles and submit them to all these article directories consistently. So how about the duplicate content thingy that has been around for quite some time?

Personally, thanks to a tip by Jaime from Affiliate Xtreme, I believe that duplicate content DOES NOT have much effect on your traffic building and link building campaigns.

However, if you are skeptical, you can always use JetSpinner, which is an FREE online tool to spin your articles. The articles will not be rubbishy because you are the one inserting the variables of your articles. JetSpinner will  be spinning one article into many articles that are partially unique.

Content Submissions

For content submissions, I use Squidoo and Hubpages. Content submission is a little different to article marketing as contents include articles, images and videos. Do not throw your articles away after using them for your article marketing efforts as you can use them for content submissions as well.

You should do content submissions because these sites have high search engine authority and they tend to rank well on major search engines. Apart from this, you can also earn some side income as Squidoo and Hubpages allow you to place Google AdSense, eBay Partners Network ad panels, Kontera ads and more on your pages.

Forum Marketing

First thing first, forum marketing is not forum spamming. Go register for an account at some of the active forums in your niches. Hold back from posting anything apart from introducing yourself. Be humble and don’t sound like you are the best expert around when writing your introductory post.

Use something catchy in your forum signature. It can be something like “want more forex trading tips from me? Check out…” or “Connect with me to get more forex tips at…”.

Try providing solutions and helping people out. People will take notice of you and check out your affiliate sites that you put up in your forum signature if you are seen by others as an expert and if they want more content from you.

If the forums have sections where people share their stuffs (photos or blogs), try to complement or post your constructive criticism so that these people will later support your statements in the forums.

Directory Submissions

If you asked me, directory submissions are mostly for link building rather than traffic building. There are tones of directories out there which include both paid and free ones.

Two of the popular premium or paid directories will be dmoz.org and Yahoo Directory. However, getting listed on these directories will either take you a lot of time or a lot of money. To semi-automate your whole directory submission process, you should get Directory Submitter which costs ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Submit your site to the free directories only if you are just starting out. I find that paid ones does not have any significant benefits compared to those that are free.

Social Bookmarking and Social Content Voting

When people like the contents on your affiliate sites, they can vote or submit them to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or social content voting sites like Digg. There are two approaches that you can take to build traffic and links for your affiliate sites using social bookmarking.

The first method to leverage these social media properties is to submit as many content of yours to these sites. You can use tools like Social Marker to automate the submission process. This method will get you little traffic and the primary aim of using this method is to build tones of links. You might be labeled as a spammer or had your accounts terminated if you do this excessively.

Other than that, you can take the social approach as well. This process will take some time because you must participate in the community of these social sites. Apart from your own contents, you must also vote and submit quality contents of others.

Build friends and relationships by voting or bookmarking the items that people share with you. Results will take some time to show but once you are an authority on these sites, consistent links and traffic shouldn’t be a problem.

Video Marketing

People try to get themselves away from video marketing, mostly due to the fact that they are shy to show themselves or to present their voice for the “scrutiny” of the Internet community.

You can create videos that are related to your niche. Videos can be created to show the steps of a process, explain pertinent facts regarding your niche and notify your community about the recent happenings that are related to your niche.

Then, save your time by uploading your videos across a few popular video sites using Traffic Geyser or Tube Mogul.

If you are using a pen name for a niche or you are not ready to reveal yourself on the Internet, you can always do a screencast using softwares like Camtasia or CamStudio. Include Power Point presentations in these videos and your own voice or hire a professional voice talent to cover the points.

Social Networking

From my experience, this is perhaps the hardest way to build links and traffic. Using sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook to market your affiliate sites for FREE, the niche that you are in should be the one that you are passionate about.

It takes time to interact with people and most of the time, people dislike the presence of marketers on these platforms. Form a bond with fellow hobbyists, provide value to what they are discussing and recommend your contents occasionally. Golden rule to remember here is not to spam.

Your Own System for Traffic Building and Link Building

You might have learned tones of methods to build traffic and links for your affiliate sites from various resources out there. Some may be effective for you but not showing results for others.

Thus, you should constantly try out new methods and at the same time, develop a system for your own affiliate marketing venture. A system for traffic building and link building will smooth out the outsourcing that you might plan to incorporate into your venture later on as well.

If you think that the above contents provided value for your affiliate marketing strategies, kindly subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed for more affiliate marketing tips that offer value with no fluffs and no fillers using the form below.

In No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest, we went through site building tools for affiliate sites and types of site that you can build for your affiliate marketing venture. Now that you had your affiliate sites and draft contents up, I am going to teach you about search engine optimization for affiliate sites.

In this learning affiliate marketing article, you are going to learn almost all the search engine optimization nuggets that you MUST apply to your affiliate sites and all pages contained within. With these nuggets in place, you will be successful with your no cost affiliate marketing in the long run.

Why Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites?

My guess on the reason why you chose the no cost affiliate marketing route is because you want to spend as little money as you can and search engine optimization is actually free of charge. It takes up your time and efforts but you will pay nothing for it unless you choose to outsource.

Another great thing about creating a search engine optimized affiliate site is that search engines bring targeted traffic and visitors that are more likely to convert into sales or leads. They also bring a snowball effect. The longer you are doing this, the more traffic that you will gain from the search engines in the future.

Prior Work for Search Engine Optimization

Many affiliates optimize their sites for search engines but are not earning the commissions that they are supposed to earn. Why?

Before you start optimizing your sites using the tips below, be sure that you have done your keyword research and market viability research properly. Without them, even if you are trying to rank or ranked highly for a keyword that you want, you might not be earning any commissions.

So, are you ready?

On Page Search Engine Optimization

Many people have done this mistake of not doing proper on page search engine optimization before moving onto link building. Search engines need certain elements to appear on your pages so that they can determine which keyword that your page should be indexed for.

Title Tag

Keywords between the title tags, <title></title> in your HTML, is the most important element for on page search engine optimization. You need to keep it short but at the same time include your core keywords. For the home page of your affiliate site, I would suggest you to use a broader set of keywords compared to deeper pages of your site.

Heading Tags

Heading tags, or commonly known as H tags are <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and etc. seen in your HTML source. Initially, these are being used to structure a site and style different headings. Search engines use the keywords contained in these tags as a measure for relevancy, thus, you should have some of your keywords within the H tags.

Keyword Density

The frequency of keyword usage is not that important compared to the “old days”, however, it still carries certain weight. Do keep the keyword density of your pages around 3-8%. You must at least include three instances of your keywords. Yes, don’t write for search engines but you can have the three instances easily by writing for people.

Avoid Mass Internal Linking

If you are blogging or plan to build a huge content site or authority site, internal linking is useful for search engine optimization purposes. Even so, you should not place internal links frequently and have link posts (weekly summaries used by avid bloggers).

Reason? You want people to click links that you can earn commissions from, not links that drive people round and round and eventually leave your site. My rule of thumb on this? One or no internal link at all is enough for a page.

Avoid Merchant Provided Contents

A lot of affiliate networks like ShareASale and eBay Partner Network provide affiliates with data feeds, which basically allow affiliates to post details of a wide variety of products on their affiliate sites. Some other affiliates also took the easy route of copying and pasting information that are found on a merchant’s page.

You need to avoid using them and scripts like BANS to pull these feeds out because search engines see these contents as non-value adding and some argued that the contents might be seen as duplicated as well.

NoFollow and Redirect Affiliate Links

For most of the time, search engines are against commercial sites, especially affiliate sites, even in their pay per click business models. There is no solid proof on this but the saying tells that you should nofollow all your affiliate links and redirect them using the PHP redirect method.

Off Page Search Engine Optimization

When you are all done with on page search engine optimization, it is time for you to start with off page optimization which revolves around building links.

Build LINKS

Off page optimization is all about link building. We will have a whole issue of digest on link building for affiliate sites but for now, keep this in mind, you need inbound or incoming links to rank for your keywords.

The perfect approach will be to get as many links as possible from sites with high Page Rank values that are relevant to your niche. However, getting links from relevant sites with high Page Rank values is hard. Thus, you should not let any opportunity of building links from any relevant sites slip through your clutches.

Targeted Keywords as Anchor Text

Apart from getting as many links as possible, you must make sure that most links are pointing to your site using the keywords that you are targeting. For example, if I want to climb up the search engines index for the keyword “affiliate marketing” for Aff Boom, I would use a link like affiliate marketing rather than AffBoom or http://www.AffBoom.com.

You must do a little mixing here as well so that your anchor text usage seems natural to search engines. Using AffBoom as an example, I also use anchor text like “affiliate marketing tips” and “learning affiliate marketing” sparingly apart from just “affiliate marketing”.

Where to Get Links?

In a nutshell, you can get links from almost everywhere on the Internet. Write and submit your articles to various article directories, utilize free blogging platforms like Blogger to link back to your affiliate sites, request for a link exchange with relevant sites and perform social bookmarking and directory submissions all help towards off page search engine optimization.

I will guide you guys through various effective link building methods for affiliate sites in my upcoming No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest issue. So, be sure to subscribed to Aff Boom RSS Feed for the latest update.

Number of Keywords to Target on a Single Page

Now you know how to optimize your affiliate site pages for search engines but the question that you are likely to have will be the above.

Well, I would say it depends on how many work that you are willing to do. Personally, I target two keywords using a single page. These keywords can have a slight variation such as between “make money online” and “earn money online”.

Using two keywords that carry the same meaning helps dilute my keyword density, avoiding the red flag from search engine robots. As for link building, I alternate the anchor texts on a ratio basis (6:4), (7:3) or even (9:1) to optimize for one of the keywords before moving on to another.

The best thing to do will be to create one page for one keyword. This will require a lot of work but it will definitely be worthwhile. Remember the old saying that is self explanatory? Do not keep all your eggs in one basket. Also, having as many pages as possible on your affiliate sites will help bring in more search engine traffic in the long run.

Subscribe for Link Building and Traffic Building for Affiliate Sites

Now you know how to optimize your affiliate sites for search engines and you also know that link building is crucial to the rankings of your sites on the search engines. So, where to get links?

You need traffic for your affiliate sites in order to send them to your merchants. So, where can you get those traffic? In my upcoming issues of the No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest, I will focus on traffic building and link building methods that WORK, with no fancy methods, fluffs and fillers.

What are you waiting for? If you don’t want to miss all the tips, subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed now using the form below immediately.

There are lots of content types for an affiliate site but all of them will have the common goal of helping your to earn affiliate commissions. Following will be the top content types that affiliates can use to drive traffic to the merchants via affiliate links.

I will explain to you the benefits of using each type of the contents and how you can churn out these contents effectively for affiliate marketing purposes.

Reviews

Reviews aim to educate readers about the pros and cons of a particular product or services. To build trust using reviews, you must avoid being bias. Be sure to include the positives and negatives from your experience using a product.

Did I just mentioned “write based on your experience”? What if you have no experience using a product?

Well, request for a review copy or a sample from the merchant. If this is not possible, hop over to shopping sites like Amazon and Epinions. I am sure that there will be some pretty decent genuine customer reviews which you can rewrite as your review content.

If you are promoting digital products on Clickbank, do not write your reviews based on the sales page, especially the testimonials because they are hyped up to boost sales. The best approach will be to ask for a review copy.

Sales Copy

As you might have guessed it, long form sales copy is a piece of content that you use to directly promote a product or services. You need to hype up the tone of your writing and tell your visitors why they should swipe their credit cards for what you are promoting.

The 5 must have points that I will include in such a sales copy are:

• Immediate pressing problem of visitors
• Description of what you are selling to them
• What is in it for your visitors?
• Questions that your visitors might have about what you are promoting
• Call to action - How to purchase or get what you are promoting

Such contents will convert when you clearly outline the benefits that a visitor rather than coldly listing the features of a product. Also, sales copy on an affiliate site is more of a presell, not an actual sales page. From my experience, it must be kept short and sweet to get visitors over to the actual sales page.

Comparisons

Photo by mckaysavage

Comparisons between products and services is another form of soft selling. When you set up a comparison page, you basically let your visitors choose instead of you trying to push them through a funnel.

List out the pros and cons with a brief descriptions. 5 to 10 points will be enough for each item. One way to boost click through rates on a comparison page is to use images. You can use screenshots of the merchant’s page, ratings (stars or ticks) and a call to action button (Buy Now, Download Now, Click Here).

You can get one set of ratings images from me just for reading this article.

As for call to action buttons, it is available for downloads at Different Type of Sites for No Cost Affiliate Marketing.

Niche Information

Niche information are contents that you can see on authority sites or blogs. Such contents add value to an affiliate site. Most affiliate sites have an articles section trying to disguise the fact that they are affiliate sites.

How to provide value with information on your affiliate sites and at the same time, lead your visitors to click on your affiliate links? Add relevant affiliate links! A couple of the frequent methods that I use are (using diabetes niche):

• Examples Method: You can always get diabetes test strips from places like <Diabetes Store affiliate link>, <eBay affiliate link> and <Amazon affiliate link>.
• Point of Contents: Let’s say I am writing a blog post on diabetes prevention and control. One of the methods will be to get a diabetes diet. Example, Diabetes diet is crucial for diabetes prevention. <eDiets affiliate link> provide great diet programs that help many diabetics reduce their sufferings from the disease.

News Content and Buzz

I usually get my news contents from press releases to update my affiliate sites. Most of the time, the subject of the news will either be related to a company or a product. If it is a product, I will run a search on Amazon or eBay to see if I can actually link to the product using my Amazon and eBay affiliate links in my news content.

Photo by Sister72

If it is a company, I will check out whether the company itself has an affiliate program. Visitors will find them clicking on these links just to find out more about the products or companies that you are buzzing them about. Thus, another soft selling technique for you.

RSS Feeds from Merchants

A lot of merchants (those from ShareASale) provide data feeds for their affiliates nowadays. Affiliates will use these data to present products information pulled out from their merchants’ database. This is an easy way to show your visitors a page full of products if you have scripts like Build A Niche Store. Visitors are likely to convert as such pages have the shopping layout that puts them into a shopping mood.

However, there is one red alert for you. Such technologies is not welcomed by search engines especially Google. They see such pages as doorway pages that serve as a bridge to your merchants and there are also speculations that they will ban you on the base of duplicate content as data feeds are used by merchants and other affiliates as well.

Niche Mash Up

I set up niche mash up affiliate sites to test certain offers, products or services. It is basically a general site which allows me to add all the abovementioned contents from different niches. I will then drive traffic to them using article marketing.

Such sites work incredibly well for CPA offers from affiliate networks like Market Leverage and Hydra because you can test out various offers on the network and it will not be odd for visitors to your site. I will move deeper into this and yes, this method is worth a whole blog post on it because it DOES WORK!

Conclusion on Types of Content for Affiliate Sites

I put this up so that newbie affiliates will now know what to add to their affiliate sites other than just the type of content that they are currently using.

I am not perfect and I know there are probably other types of content out there that have high conversion rates but the above is what I use and has worked out for me.

Any questions? Any great stuffs to share with readers of AffBoom? Add your comments below and I will gladly respond to it.

Also, I will be giving away Top 20 Tips on Article Marketing for Affiliates in a two part series from next week onwards and yes, they are part of No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest as well.

If you are interested, subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed using the form below. I don’t update this blog like Techcrunch or LifeHacker so you will not be receiving tonnes of updates everyday.

Learning about different type of sites to build helps placing your affiliate site as an authority in a niche, which is a crucial part of learning affiliate marketing.

Before I get started, let me have a small disclaimer here. I don’t have experience building all the type of sites I listed below. However, I have seen people using it and with this, I will be covering them using my sense with some of my experience in the world of affiliate marketing.

Site Types for No Cost Affiliate Marketing

Building sites for affiliate marketing has evolved over the years and with the advancement in coding and scripting, affiliates are now able to use advance and user friendly scripts to build their sites without much of a fuss.

HTML Static Site

HTML static sites will be the foundation of stone age Internet. Affiliates with ample HTML knowledge are still using them to build simple 5 page affiliate sites. However, you should not be using plain HTML for your affiliate sites any more due to the following reasons:

• No content management system - With most search engines discarding their trust on thin affiliate sites, you would want to have a full fledge CMS to add and edit your contents as and when you need to.
• Complicated design customizations - User friendliness in design customization is extremely crucial as affiliate promotion page tweaks must be done frequently for maximum click through rates.
• Time waster - OK, this is the killer why you shouldn’t be using HTML static sites for your affiliate sites. Updating and customizing them simply needs a lot of time. Time is gold for successful affiliates and you would hate to waste hours tweaking HTML codes and not making any money.

Blogs

Using blogs to set up affiliate sites is recommended by me. Adding content is no longer a fuss and customizations of design can be carried out easily.

Wordpress is a powerful blogging software that I use as it also provides some great plugins such as the All In One SEO Pack and Automatic Wordpress Upgrade to help saving the time that we as affiliates spend on technical stuffs.

Apart from the plugins, there are some great FREE themes that I have used for great conversions. One of them that you should be trying out is the Vegenance, which is a single column template with large and clear type font.

Store Front

If you have always dreamed of having a store but don’t have your own products to sell, you can now do this with merchant products. An affiliate store front lists out merchant products using data feeds provided by the merchant.

Scripts such as Build A Niche Store for eBay Partner Network affiliates and Clickitz for Clickbank affiliates provide the facility for affiliates to only focus on link building and marketing their store rather than just focusing on content creation.

However, with the recent outrage of Google on the use of the Build A Niche Store Script prompted me to move away from these scripts. I have been trying to get Build A Niche Store back into Google for some time now.

If you are willing to take the risk and will add great contents apart from the store pages to your site, you should not face any big problems with Google.

Incentivized Sites

Such scripts have been a hit since the boom of incentivized offers on various CPA networks like Market Leverage, Hydra and NeverBlueAds a while ago.

The scripts will work in such a way that you reward people with prizes or cash by filling out incentivized CPA offers for you. I have seen a drop in incentivized offers on networks recently and definitely not recommend you to get your hands on such scripts.

Contents for No Cost Affiliate Marketing Up Next

Now you know that blogs seem to be the best script to install on a domain for no cost affiliate marketing but what are the contents that you should add to it? What are the contents that will actually make you affiliate marketing commissions?

Well, I will publish all the contents that have made me money in the past. Stay tune if you want to know what types of contents to add to your affiliate sites by subscribing to Aff Boom RSS Feed by using the e-mail subscription box below.

As for no cost affiliate marketing which the whole model revolves around search engine optimization and acquiring search engine traffic, having a site is a must.

I do understand that most people are doubtful and curious, even after the keyword research and market viability research that they have gone through, that they might fail badly and lose a lot of money. Yes, hosting and domain names can be very expensive for some who are just starting out in learning affiliate marketing.

In this article, I will provide some of the free site builders and page builders that will allow you to build your own virtual real estate without the need to pay. Also, I will be putting up a few valuable tips on what to have and what to avoid when building your site for no cost affiliate marketing.

Free Tools for No Cost Site Building

To save up your time and effort, please avoid using free web hosts for your affiliate marketing venture. There is no point going through the fuss of setting up a database, the FTP and having tonnes of ads splashed all over your sites, only to find out that you are banned from the host because of 20 unique visits a day.

Let me list out 5 site building platforms that you can use to market the products and services that you are promoting as an affiliate.

• Blogger (RECOMMENDED)
• Squidoo
• Synthasite
• Blinkweb

All the above sites have an easy to understand control panel and you should be able to get your first affiliate marketing promotion page up in no time.

Site Building with Free Tools Must Remember Tips

Although the above tools allow you to try and experiment as much as you want, you have to imprint this in your head: YOU NEED A .COM AND A HOST! Thus, make your money and leave these tools out for building primary affiliate sites later on.

The following tips will be able to shrink down the number of experiments you need and provide you with a higher chance for success.

Restrict On-Site Navigation

Forget about things like stickiness and bounce rate. Those are not your major concerns when it comes to building affiliate sites using free tools. All you want your visitors to do is to click on your banners and affiliate links and hopefully, they will convert.

There is no point sending them all over your free hosted site without telling them you are trying to sell something. You are not staying with Blogger or Squidoo forever. Once you have made enough money for a host and a domain name, these tools are going to be supplementary.

Readable Content

Just like selling something using your mouth, your writing needs to be clear and precise. No, not your writing skills, but the way you present your writing. Most of the default templates will have appropriate spacing and readable fonts.

Do not turn your affiliate site into a color palette. Refrain from using too many colors on your site as they hinder proper reading.

Proper Usage of Banners

Most affiliate networks like Pepperjam Network and CPA networks like Market Leverage offers some great creatives (banners) for your usage when promoting their offers. These banners can be nice looking and they are best if they come with short benefits description and a call to action.

However, you must not overuse them (one will be enough) and please avoid those spammy red black white blinking designs. Banners that explain themselves usually have high click through rates and you should place them high up in your blog post.

Call to Action Buttons

Instead of writing click here, learn more, download here, buy now, you can always add some vibrancies to your affiliate promotion copies by using glossy call to action buttons. Click the image below for preview of examples of what I mean.

Looks astonishingly nice, don’t they? Don’t be sad, you don’t have to buy them because Aff Boom is giving away all the 170 private label rights graphics above FREE OF CHARGE just because you read this post!

**The PSD files are inside as well so you can edit them if you have some knowledge with Photoshop.**

Only Relevant Contents

My experience tells me that people tend to be more skeptical when visiting a generic Blogger blog or a Squidoo page. They would want to look at your profile (Squidoo) or your other blog posts (Blogger).

Thus, please make sure that apart from promotional copies, other relevant contents are available to build the trust needed for you to promote something easier.

No Mashup

As I move along, I will be talking about one type of affiliate site which is cost efficient for affiliate marketers. These sites are called niche mashup sites or offer sites. I will not go deep into the details but with free site building tools, you must not build such sites.

Apart from losing the trust building process that I have mentioned earlier, affiliate links will become too hard for you to track. Focus on one niche, list down all the affiliate links you have so that you can change whenever there is an offer expiry.

Affiliate Marketing Success with Free Site Building Tools

There are a lot of people using the free site builders above to build their affiliate sites. Some even have their whole affiliate marketing model based on the above tools. However, we aim to move on once we make enough money to get a host and a domain name.

Sites and blogs hosted for free makes you look cheap. People will trust marketers that uses a .com domain more. You will also have better control over things like affiliate links, content ownership and web design if you have a proper web host.

All the Best in No Cost Affiliate Marketing

Next week, we will be moving into different sites to build for affiliate marketing. Once you have the money, what type of sites you should build? How you should be building them and how will they fare? All these will be revealed in next week’s issue of No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest.

P.S: Got your goodies above? Well, I always give away goodies from time to time within my post. In order not to miss them, subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed today.

P.P.S: If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to use the Contact page to get in touch with me.

This week, we are going to look at market viability. Basically, you can be targeting any keywords that have high volume of searches and low amount of competition. Will this make you a lot of money if you conquer position no. 1 on Google for the keywords?

It depends. It all depends on market viability of the keyword that you are targeting. Are they the buying keywords that we as an affiliate marketer is looking for?

Want to know my blueprint for market viability research? Click on the Read More link…

If a visitor arrived at your blog or site via a buying keyword, the chances are high that he or she will be converted into a sale or a lead. Visitors searching for buying keywords on search engines are ready to pay for something. When you show them the “something” that they want, they will pay you the money willingly, without much persuasion!

You can have a lot of keywords to target in your quest to no cost affiliate marketing but not every keyword will convert into sales and leads easily. With this being said, the following will be some crucial tips on how to pick buying keywords out of the keyword list that you already have.

Buying Keywords

Buying keywords are keywords that you type into the Google search bar when you are looking for something to buy. Some words that are normally added if someone if looking for something to buy:

• buy <keyword>
• <keyword> review
• cheap <keyword>
• <keyword> store
• <keyword> discount
• Model number for a product such as Canon Powershot A50, Acer Aspire 5570 and so on

All the above are buying keywords and of course, they work differently for different niches. For example, people don’t search for model numbers of notepads and pens and neither do people search for stores when they are looking for digital downloads.

The generic buying keywords above might be very competitive. While doing your keyword research, use some common sense when looking at your filtered keywords to try and figure out whether they are buying keywords or not.

After you have your site or blog set up, monitor the search traffic in your stats. Jot down the keywords that are being used to arrive at your site. Some of them might be buying keywords as well.

Don’t Go for FREE

If you are promoting products that requires some form of payment, do not target any keywords that comes with FREE, WAREZ, SHARE or TORRENT. People using these search phrases will not take out their credit cards easily and trying to make them pay is almost impossible.

However, if you are a member of a CPA network like Market Leverage, Hydra or NeverBlueAds, you can always promote freebies by targeting these keywords if they have little competition.

Buying Places

There are a lot of trading places on the Internet. People go to these sites with credit cards already in front of their computer. What you can do for your market viability research is to use the search stats of these sites.

The logic is this, if there are people searching for “cheap Nintendo Wii games” on eBay and Amazon, there must be someone searching for it on Google.

Also, you must know that searches on these sites will not necessary mean sales. Let us look at the following sites individually so we can determine what sells and what doesn’t.

Clickbank - The popularity of products (gravity) that you see from the screenshot below determines whether a product sells well.

Amazon - Use Amazon if you are planning to promote information products. Amazon sells physical products such as sportswear and lingerie but they are known for selling books online.

eBay - eBay is my far my best site for market viability research. eBay Pulse helps you to determine keywords that are highly searched and their Completed Listings section actually tells you what sells and what doesn’t.

Affiliate programs - If a niche is has tonnes of money to be made, there will be a lot of affiliate programs. Sign up for affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Pepperjam Network. Determine whether money can be made by looking at the number of affiliate programs for a niche and the earnings per click for them.

Forums with Marketplace - This may waste you a lot of time as searching for forums with an active marketplace is hard. People go to forums for discussions and to satisfy their ego rather than to buy stuffs. However, if a forum have a trading reputation system in place, it is very likely that their marketplace is active.

Info Seekers

If you are interested in promoting information products such as online courses, reports and membership sites, the resources selling physical products above might not help you much.

You must proceed to some large information sites and look at what information people are searching for. For this purpose, I have a few sites for you to do your own research.

Ezinearticles - Arguably the largest hub for information and the key here is to compare the date of an article is published and the number of views that the article has already received. If an article is published two days ago but has already received 200 views, it shows that the information in the article is highly sought after.

Hubpages - Hubpages has a Hub Request section which shows what kind of hubs people are looking for but not available yet. Although your hub might not be accepted by them, you know there is a need for such information and thus, you can target the market.

Yahoo Answers - People who wanted to find solutions for their problems go to Yahoo Answers and other answer sites. From such sites, you will be able to find problems that people face and hopefully, you are able to solve them with the products that you are promoting.

Test Your Market

Niches differ from each other and some buying keywords may work on one niche but not the other. For example, college students will search for study tips and test taking skills but only a handful of them will actually spend money on these materials.

To determine whether a keyword is for you to work on, you will need to test them out using some free platforms before proceeding to purchase your domain and start your own site.

Remember, cost must be kept as low as possible in no cost affiliate marketing. Test your keywords on the following platforms.

• Blogger
• Squidoo
• Hubpages

There are a lot more tools out there where you can create your sites or pages but I recommend these three because they tend to get higher search engine rankings.

Create one blog, one Squidoo lens or one Hubpages hub for each and every keyword that you come across. At least promote one product on them.

If you have found a great niche with strong buying keywords and your free sites are ranking high enough in the search engines for the keyword that you are targeting, you should be making enough money to get yourself a web host and domain.

Filter Your Keywords Immediately

You should be able to have a huge list of keywords after learning the basics of keyword research. However, keywords that will really make you money are buying keywords and you should be targeting them in your no cost affiliate marketing campaign.

Start testing your market before you start spending money and time to work on the niche.

If you have anything to add to the market viability research tips above, kindly leave your comments below. I would be glad to answer any questions from you guys as well.

Subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed for more no cost affiliate marketing tips that are coming soon. On the next issue, we are going to talk about setting up sites for no cost affiliate marketing purposes.

Affiliate marketers have been building BANS sites across hundreds and if not, thousands of domains. Apparently, Google did not like this practice and starts to deindex .INFO domains that are using these scripts.

Affiliate marketers using the scripts then speculate that Google bans such scripts on .INFO domains as .INFO are supposed to be informational and value adding, not trying to make money off visitors. Well, they are proven wrong when Google starts to deindex .COM domains using BANS as well.

As an eBay Partner Network affiliate, I use BANS for a few sites as well. 90% of my BANS sites were deindexed by Google. Those that are safe is because they are acting as a supplementary store for my content sites.

Plans to Recover from BANS and Google Deindexing

I can see a trend is what Google likes and dislikes. They have even changed their webmaster guidelines by adding the following:

Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Thin affiliate sites do thrive with Google but since a lot of affiliates are using BANS to create their money making sites, it is just about them a flag is raised within Google.

The widespread of deindexing suggests that Google somehow manage to spot traits within the BANS script. Most people are trying to remove the traits but it would be hard for a coding phobic like me. Google want contents so I will present them with contents.

Live Case Study to Recover from Google BANS Deindexing

First of all, let me show you guys the characteristics of my BANS sites that got deindexed.

• 100% BANS on domain (no blog, no extra content pages).
• More than 50% have a PR (PR0 to PR3), suggesting that Google loves my link building activities.
• Store pages are manually created.
• Getting traffic from Yahoo and other article directories even though they are deindexed.
• Keyword stuffed
• Privacy Policy and Terms of Use page is up

Actions to Take to Get BANS Sites Back Into Google Index

The things that I am going to do are the following. Do keep in mind that my actions are based on the saying, “Content is King” and “Google loves content”.

Contents for Store Pages

I have thought of this simple way of creating contents on store pages. Well, I would write a 400 words unique shopping tips for each store page. For example, I would write a “remote control car shopping tips” under a “remote control car” eBay listing.

Cut Down Number of Listed Items on Store Pages

I am currently displaying 30 items on every store pages. Apart from adding shopping tips, I will reduce the number of displayed items to either 18 or 21. Why? Because I am using the three items a row display style.

No eBay Listings for Homepage

I am going to introduce what my BANS affiliate site is about and why customers should buy from me instead of other stores.

Wordpress Blog

I am sure you have seen some shopping blogs out there. I will update the blog from time to time with product recommendations and release of new products in my niche. Where am I going to get descriptions and affiliate links for a particular product? Well, Amazon.

Content Pages

I am going to add some content pages with 400 articles that are relevant to my niche. This is just to make sure that my contents are more than doorway pages (store pages).

Your Thoughts on Getting BANS Back Into Google?

To be honest, I am not an expert with all these deindex and reindex stuffs. I do understand that affiliate sites do rank high in search engines and the key to get high search engine rankings is via link building.

However, as I have mentioned earlier, Google might be manually reviewing every BANS because to them, BANS sites rarely have valuable contents. Thus, Google took the drastic approach of deindexing all BANS. They want content to show up if you are building affiliate sites using BANS so I will give them what they want.

What do you think? Do you think my steps above will work? Are there some other ways that you think can get your BANS site back into Google index?

Subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed for more updates on affiliate marketing with eBay Partner Network.

You can always make money with a niche that is already competitive and profitable, which most niches already are. However, it is going to take you years to rank highly on search engines.

What are we trying to look for are niches that can make us money, where people will buy stuffs but not competitive yet.

Today, we are going to look into basic keyword research and for next week, I will be diving into how you can decide whether a market is viable or profitable enough for you to dive into.

There are a lot of keyword tools that you may or may not heard of. Anyway, I am going to list them down:

Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool

Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool

Google

SEO Book Complete Keyword Research Tool (best web-based tool - RECOMMENDED)

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Buzz (FREE and Downloadable Software - RECOMMENDED!)

Using Keyword Research Tools | Board Overview

One of things these tools automates are the ability to suggest keywords that you type into the search bar. You can go deeper and deeper to get more suggested keywords from these tools (shown in image below). Also, you have to adapt yourself to a few tools as all of them have their own advantages and shortfalls.

Most of these keyword tools show DAILY searches according to various search engine data. However, you have to keep in mind that the figures shown to you are normally estimates which the actual figures can be a few times higher.

Moving away from the number of searches that a keyword receives, you will have the number of competition for a particular keyword. Well, we will look at how to assess the competitiveness in the upcoming section but for now, let’s just keep it as you should be eyeing for a keyword with little competition.

Keywords to Target for No Cost Affiliate Marketing

This section will be the core for keyword research. We are going to look at two main elements, which will be the demand and competition. As a beginner, you might want to start out with keywords that are not highly saturated. After you became an expert in this, you can always start dominating keywords that are more competitive.

Keyword Searches and Keyword Demand | Keyword Research

Since Internet marketing is booming, most keywords that are highly searched are competitive. However, there is always a chance for a keyword to escape the eyes of all marketers.

Keyword Search Amount Tip: When you are looking through the keyword list provided by the keyword tools above, there might be some keywords that are not being targeted by marketers out there. One of the obvious ones are localized keywords.

Keywords like “texas gardening”, “debt consolidation florida” and “credit card manchester” (for example) will have little competition because marketers are not willing to dig deep to create information that are so specific. Also, there might be different regulations for different geographical locations.

Even though the information that you can provide should be specialized as well, you can sell the exact same items to people who are searching using localized keywords. For example, you can sell all sorts of organic pesticides or chemicals to people searching for “garden pests uk” and “garden pests houston”.

Keyword Competition in Keyword Research

For competition analysis, we only look at the numbers showing under Google. Why? They are the search engine with the most users on the Internet and their search results are highly relevant compared to Yahoo and MSN.

When doing keyword competition analysis, I would recommend you to use quotes, which is instead of searching fat loss, you should search using “fat loss”. In the Keyword Buzz software, you can actually automate the process of showing the amount of competition when a quoted keyword phrase is used.

For starters, anything below 500,000 results can be dominated easily. You should not aim to dominate anything with millions of competition because as a starter, it is important for you to see fast results because it will equip you with the necessary motivation.

If you are able to come up with a list of keyword phrases that have less than 500,000 results, you need to drill further. You need to check the authority of the sites that are ranking on the first page. This is crucial because some search terms may have little competition but the sites or pages ranking on the first page have high authority and it will be hard for you to compete against them.

To achieve this purpose, you have to pull out Yahoo Site Explorer. Proceed to the search results page on Yahoo. Paste the URL of sites ranking for top three for your keywords. Now, click on the inlink tabs. For the choose inlinks dropdown menu, choose except from this domain.

Confused? Let me show you an example. Let say I would want to dominate “rose gardening”, which is a term that is highly searched. The screenshot below is what should be done after you have pulled Yahoo Site Explorer out.

Why use the number of inlinks as a measure you might ask. Well, Google sees links to a site as a vote. Thus, the more the inlinks that a site has, the more authority and priority will be given to the site when it comes to keyword rankings. There are a few other factors that determines keyword rankings but all these will be covered in the Search Engine Optimization Chapter.

If a site or URL has over 1000 inlinks, it may not be the site that you want to compete with for the top position. Yes, you can achieve it by building links over the period or settle for a lower position for the keyword but for short term, you will not be able to surpass the site.

What’s Next After Keyword Research?

What is the point of keyword research? Well, to help you pick a market that is suitable for you to make money online from affiliate marketing. If you are already in a niche, it will be useful when determining which keyword to target for when creating affiliate landing page. Also, no cost affiliate marketing involves article writing and keyword research will also let you know which keyword that you want your articles to revolve on to get the maximum exposure.

Keyword research is definitely vital for every affiliate marketers, especially those who will be dependent on organic search engine traffic.

On the next chapter of No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest, we will be covering how to assess market viability of a niche. It is a whole different thing compared to keyword research. A keyword with high volume of searches does not necessary mean that you are able to make money off the keyword or niche.

Subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed if you don’t want to miss out any chapters of the No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest series which will be extremely informational for new and intermediate affiliate marketers.

Most people jumped onto the affiliate marketing bandwagon after learning about affiliate marketing through blogs, information products and claims by people earning a fortune from it.

Affiliate marketing or becoming an affiliate marketer is not just about joining affiliate programs. Hard work and persistence must be there as well. Rather than being vague, why don’t we jump straight into what are the Top Things to Consider Before Learning Affiliate Marketing.

Not Get Rich Quick Scheme

Every element of promotion will either take up your time, money or both of them. Affiliate marketing involves tonnes of optimization for ad copy, presell copy and landing page design. One might not even see any results one month after time and money have been devoted. Trust me, the frustration is not easy to bear.

Information Overload

Even if you have decided to make money online via affiliate marketing, you will get a brain freeze due to information overload. You have 100 ways for traffic generation, 100 ways to build links and 1000 methods to promote your merchant products or services. It will become worse when everybody is claiming their method works.

Constant Need for Knowledge

Promotion methods that make millions back then may become a blackhat method today. The medium you use for your promotions might change their rules all the time and one good example will be Google AdWords. You need to keep yourself abreast with the latest affiliate marketing news and information.

They will help you in discovering new opportunities instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. Also, learning the latest tricks will give you an edge over your competitors. I am sure you want to know every affiliate’s best performing promotion tactics, right?

Subject to Merchant Changes

There are still merchants out there who doesn’t care about their affiliates even though you are working like a mad dog generating income for them. They can come up with terms changes and some might be nonsense but you must abide to it without complaints. Going against them will only get yourself robbed of your income source.

Ethics and Authority

If you have the thoughts that affiliates have merchants to cover their asses, you are WRONG! With the Internet focusing more on user interaction, affiliate marketers need to put their names out there when promoting something in order to add credibility to the promotions that they are running.

Recent developments and news in the world of affiliate marketing also shows that ethics is being taken much seriously. It has evolved into a business model itself rather than a past time activity to make money online.

Network or Not to Network

Affiliate marketing, just like any other fields of Internet marketing, requires you to work alone to get started. For most of the time, you would want to avoid sharing information with regards to what niches are you in and what merchants you are promoting because you don’t want unnecessary competition.

For introverts, this is neither a good news for you. You do need to network with other people in order to gain new joint venture opportunities, better payouts and insights in the form of knowledge. This is the reason why there are a lot of forums for affiliates and Affiliate Summit for affiliate marketers.

Should You Be Learning Affiliate Marketing?

I am listing a few alternatives to make money online so that you can make a better decision:

• Info products creation and marketing
• eBay physical goods trading or dropshipping
• Site flipping
• Blogging
• Google AdSense - Yes, people still earn a lot from it

I won’t force you into affiliate marketing so that you can subscribe or read Aff Boom because I don’t want people to waste their time trying out things that they have no idea of.

If you are interested in knowing more about affiliate marketing, you are more than welcomed to subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed to get the latest affiliate marketing tips. Do take note that the first issue of Aff Boom No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest, which is on niche research will be up by next Monday.

For me, I follow a model that requires little capital but huge amount of effort to get started. Why my model works and what are the advantages that I have seen so far:

• Building virtual assets that generates continuous income
• Sites gain authority when it is thicker
• Trust Building
• Snowball effect on efforts
• Little risks
• Learning No Cost Affiliate Marketing

My no cost affiliate marketing model will allow you to start learning affiliate marketing without the fear of losing a lot of money.

As a reward for early birds that visit Aff Boom right from the start, I would like to reward you with my entire no cost affiliate marketing model in the form of weekly digest.

The weekly no cost affiliate marketing digest will include the following parts that will be released every Monday! The digest is extremely useful for new and aspiring affiliate marketers and those who failed time after time when it comes to make money online. The digest will go for free, no opt in and no sign up is needed.

Let me reveal to you my planned posting schedule so that you have time to hop over and learn certain parts of my no cost affiliate marketing model.

• No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest Week #1 Niche Research
• No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest Week #2 Site Building
• No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest Week #3 Content Generation
• No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest Week #4 Link Building
• No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest Week #5 Traffic Building
• No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest Week #6 Capitalization or Disposal

If the one of the digests become a long blog post, it may be split into two weeks. Also, I expect myself to add in a lot of mini nuggets (I love over-delivering) here and there that would eventually form a blog post. Thus, the whole affiliate marketing digest series may be extended as well.

I am really trying to offer value here for those who are not yet making any money from affiliate marketing. If you are an affiliate marketer or you have a friend who is an affiliate marketer, refer them here.

Avoid missing out on any of the no cost affiliate marketing digest, subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed today!