Affiliate Marketing 102: 100% Free Money for Affiliates

IMPORTANT: This is NOT a prelaunch for a product or anything. I am not selling my secrets for any price. So rest assured that I am not going to ask you to buy anything from me at any point. This method utilizes only free resources.

Throughout my websites I stress on one fact that makes a difference between making money and building a business on the Internet: Don’t settle for “free” stuff. Free web hosting, free traffic, and free autoresponders in particular are the biggest “No No”s for me.

With that out of the way, I know that it’s not an option for every one on the planet to pay for hosting and autoresponders or buy advertising. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s the lack of the method of payment as for most of those who live in African countries.

So, here is a simple plan for making money on the Internet building simple free blogs and monetizing them with affiliate links and contextual advertising while driving free traffic to these blogs.

First of all here are the outlines of the plan:

1. Finding a niche, so easy and simple that any kid in the third grade can do it.

2. Choosing the keywords to build the blog around.

3. Building the blog in a way that Google loves (so that we get the free Google traffic).

4. Building a list of the subscribers with a free autoresponder.

5. Driving tons of free traffic to your free blog.

6. Monetizing the blog with affiliate links and contextual advertising blocks.

Now that’s not going to be a killing technique that you’ve never heard about (probably) before, or something that will get you rich over the weekend. It’s a proven method to make some money using free tools available to everyone on the Internet, but this income could, and will, vary greatly from person to person and from time to time. There is also a risk that these free tools might change their rules in a way that makes it impossible for this method to work anymore. It is highly recommended that if you have the means to at least buy a domain name and host it on your own hosting (see the top right corner of this page for a good deal on hosting), please go ahead and do it.

With that disclaimer out of the way, we can start explaining the plan in details:

1 & 2. Finding Niches and Keywords:

Finding the niche, or the subject for your blog material, is where you’ll need to spend most of your time and energy before you start building your money making blog, because based on your results there will be a difference between making some good money and money little to no money at all.

It’s not that hard, and anyone can do it. Here are the steps:

  • Watch infomercials and take note of the products they are selling (don’t buy anything :-), you’re working now).
  • Make a list of the PROBLEMS that they solve, e.g. weight loss, back pain, osteoporosis, hearing troubles … etc. Then shortlist these problems to what you have some knowledge about or have passion for (building muscles for example).
  • Go to clickbank’s market place and find products that solve these or related problems. These products and their gravity indexes are indicators of the size of the market. The more products you find and the higher the gravity indexes the more competitive the market is. There is no rule for it. I had success selling products with less than 1 gravity index and failed miserably with products with gravity index above 300.

IMPORTANT: STAY AWAY FROM WEIGHT LOSS, YOU-KNOW-WHAT-ENLARGEMENT, WORK FROM HOME, OR ANY THING YOU SEE INĀ  YOUR EMAIL SPAM BOX.

Anything that your email provider filters out as a spam is also considered spam by most of the free blog service providers and the content sharing websites you’ll be using if you stick to this method.

  • Go to Google keyword tool and find a keyword related to your market that is not too specific and not too broad, and get’s like 2000-4000 local searches in the US. The too specific keyword will probably trigger spam bots, and the too broad ones will be too competitive for a free blog to rank in search engines for it.
  • Check the competition for this keyword by searching it on Google in quotes (like this: “keyword”) and see how many websites will show for it. This is the simplest way to do it. Also take note of the sponsored ads. No ads is not a good sign.

It’s not going to be a piece of cake. You’ll probably need to keep searching for keywords related to your niche of choice for a while until you find the suitable keyword.

That should keep you busy for a while. This is your homework. Find a niche and related keywords until the next post comes out.