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How to Make a Great Income With Blogs and Affiliate Marketing
By Carol Debra Oon
It is possible to make a great income from blogs and affiliate marketing separately,
but also to combine them to do even better. There is no reason why affiliate products
cannot be promoted on your blogs to provide you with a good income. First, let's consider
affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is where you make money by promoting other people's products. The
reason that most newcomers to affiliate marketing fail - 98 percent fail in their first six
months - is that they don't know how to promote a product. The whole ethos of affiliate
marketing is about promotion, and not about selling. There is a world of difference
between the two, and there are some great salespersons that couldn't promote a product if
their life depended on it.
So, what is needed to make a success of affiliate marketing? It shouldn't be difficult:
you have a ready-made product with a professional sales page written for you. You don't
have to deal with the order taking or the collection of payment and subsequent delivery.
You don't even have to worry about dealing with questions or complaints. So what's the problem?
The problem is three-fold. Those that fail do not know:
1. That they need a website to be truly successful
2. That they have to choose the right keywords to get visitors to their website, and
3. That they are not selling the product: they are pre-selling it.
Let's discuss these three failings in detail, and make sure that you don't make the
same mistakes.
1. The Website
It is claimed by many that you don't need a website in affiliate marketing. However, if
you advertise using Google Adwords, the only program liable to get you sufficient clicks
to make a living, you can't send visitors to the merchant's sales page since only one
advert per keyword is allowed by Adsense to send visitors to the same web address. You
need a website!
However, and this is where the blog comes in, you could use your blog to advertise your
affiliate product. The drawback is that your blog would have to be very focused on the
product in order to get a good conversion rate. Let's say you are selling a $47 for which
you get 50 percent affiliate commission. To make $1000 weekly - you need to think in these sums
to make a living from this - you need 42.6 sales. A good CR from a blog is 0.5 percent, which
means you make a sale from every 200 visitors. You therefore need 8,520 visitors weekly to
your blog.
Nevertheless, blogs are good income generators for affiliate products if you have
enough of them (products and blogs).
2. The Keywords
You must choose keywords to advertise your website or your blog that relate to the
product. Unless your website or blog is expertly optimized, these will have to be
long-tail less popular keywords, and for that you need either good software, or know how
to do it free. There is free software that can find keywords for you, such as the Digital
Point Keyword Tool, or Google's Keyword Tool External.
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