Affiliate Marketing E-Course

Course Content

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Campaign Outline
Lesson 3 - Product And Keyword Selection
Lesson 4 - Building a Squidoo Lens With Relevance
Lesson 5 - Promoting Your Squidoo Lens
Lesson 6 - Article Marketing
Lesson 7 - Cashing In With Cheap Traffic
Lesson 8 - Blogging for Dollars
Lesson 9 - Mailing List Windfall
Q&A Video/mp3 #1
Q&A Video/mp3 #2

Lesson 1 - Introduction

Want to know how I made over $7,000 in my first 60 days affiliate marketing?

Welcome to my e-course on how I made $7,000 in my first 60 days as an affiliate marketer. As you can imagine, I'm pretty excited about the success I've had in my short career affiliate marketing.

Before we get started I'd just like to make a few things clear which might be on your mind. I'd like to make them clear now so you can focus on what I'm writing about in my course, not where the next pitch is going to be, or where the catch is (I don't do that).

  1. I'm not a super affiliate or guru or whatever you want to call it. This is the story of my first 60 days of affiliate marketing with no prior experience. I'm not claiming that what I did was the best way to do it or the only way. It's just what I did, the results I got, and my thoughts on where I plan to go next.
  2. My total expenses for what I did came to about $200. I could have done it for $0, if I already knew what I was doing, and was willing to work a little harder. The cost break down will be given throughout the course where the tool is used, but please be assured, you do NOT need to sign up for anything that costs money in order to start making money. All of the basic tools are free.
  3. The tools I did spend money on, which you'll learn about, served to make the work easier and the rewards faster. They're the educational and productivity tools that I used during my campaign.
  4. So if I didn't write this e-course to pitch products to you then why did I do it? Good question! First, I didn't say that I didn't want you to buy the products mentioned here. Of course I do, I'm a marketer. But it is not the reason I wrote this e-course. I'm going to tell you about the tools I used and what I liked and didn't like about them and you can decide for yourself what you want to do with them. None of the tools mentioned in this guide is mentioned for the purpose of selling them. They're mentioned because I used them and I can't tell my story without telling you about them. Sounds fair enough huh?
  5. So why, again, am I developing this course? Still a good question! I've learned in the past that one of the best ways to really learn something at a deep level is to teach it to someone else. If you've ever been a tutor you'll know what I mean. When you have to teach something it forces you to really think things through and you quickly discover what you know and don't know. By teaching what I do I'm learning my craft faster which, especially in this business, means a lot more money in my pocket simply from being a better affiliate marketer.
  6. Although I've been a programmer for years, my background was not, in my opinion, a large contributing factor to my success. Almost all of what I needed to know I learned either form the Wealthy Affiliate University (WA) or from people I had met through the extensive forums at WA.

How I Got Here

A few months back I was looking for a way to market a web based service I helped develop. After stumbling around the web for a week or two I was lucky enough to land on the Wealthy Affiliate University (WA) website.

With no prior internet marketing experience I really didn't know what I was doing. To be honest, I'm not sure what exactly made me join WA, but I did. This was my first internet marketing adventure and I was pretty excited to say the least. After only a few hours at WA I knew I had made the right decision.

I'm just as excited about all the questions, feedback and encouragement I've been getting from those who've heard my story too. In fact, it was this feedback from members of the WA discussion forums that inspired me to write this e-course explaining what I did. So thank you to all those who have given me feedback.

Want an *Inside Peek*? Check the video that takes you inside and see what all the fuss is about.

Article Marketing or Pay Per Click Marketing?

There are many ways to market products and services online. The two primary methods for affiliate marketing seem to be article marketing and pay per click (PPC) marketing.

My campaign is article based, which is one of the reasons my total expenses were so small. I do use some PPC, but it was cheap and for a different reason than you might think. You can do without, but it may take you a bit longer to achieve your goals.

I chose article marketing to for a couple reasons.

  1. I was still a little skeptical about making money online so I didn't want to invest too much money until I could see money coming in
  2. I knew I needed a landing page that converts traffic into buyers regardless of the method I used. I figured if my landing page couldn't convert traffic coming from an article then I didn't have much hope that it would convert PPC advertising traffic. I decided to use articles until I was sure my page was converting traffic. By the time I got my basic campaign structure going it seemed I didn't need PPC since I owned anywhere from 3-5 of the organic listings on the 1st page of Google for my product!

The Basic Campaign Structure

The basic campaign structure I ended up with looks something like the diagram below. If this stuff is all new to you there's no need to panic. It's really much simpler than it looks.

This structure represents the layout of the web content I created as well as the direction of web traffic flow I'm creating with the structure. If you're planning to follow along and build a campaign around this course then this is the structure you're going to end up with. Or something similar anyway.

 

 

 

A couple things to note about the diagram. As I mentioned earlier, the 2nd tier PPC is optional, but useful for making things happen faster. Squidoo.com and blogger.com are both free. Of course there are many substitutes for blogger.com. I just happened to use it and it's very easy to learn. Lastly, the website will be the last piece put into place.

Basic Itinerary

So given the campaign structure shown above, these are the accounts you're going to need to set up

All of these services are free but do require a little time to register if you don't already have accounts set up with them.

If you're new to squidoo then I suggest you start learning to make squidoo lenses asap. Squidoo is a fantastic source of traffic as well incoming links for your website. Google loves Squidoo!

Blogger is also very simple to use but takes a bit of time to learn if you've never made a blog before. But don't worry about it if this is all new to you, it will come faster than you think if you're willing to put in the effort to learn.

Better than blogger would be a Wordpress site for many reasons for which you can learn about in the lesson on blogging, Lesson 8 - Blogging for Dollars.

If this is beyond what you feel comfortable diving into right off then no worries about using blogger. In fact blogger is the blog I used for my first successful campaign that prompted this course.

What's Next?

I suggest you set the accounts up that I mentioned and give some thought to the campaign structure diagram I've drawn.

In the next lesson I'll be discussing my motivations behind the diagram as well as an overview of the whole campaign so you have an idea of where we're headed.

I'm not going to lie about the effort this campaign took. It was a LOT of work. But much of that was cramming in all the knowledge it took to make this happen. I knew nothing when I started and I literally spent 8-10 hours a day reading and learning and making content.

Having said that, I'm confident that anyone who puts in a serious effort can learn to be a successful affiliate marketer. If you don't have 8 hours a day to commit to it then don't worry about it. The important thing is to get started. A little bit every day makes a big difference after a couple months and with my course I'm sure you can cut that time down even more.

If there's ONE thing I've learned it's that effort compounds in this business like no other business I've ever seen!

cheers,
Todd Ariss