Transcript continued from the Episode 052 Show notes

Profitable or Passionate Affiliate Marketing

Last week we had a really good discussion where we worked through some listener feedback of passion or profit. I get a couple of kinds of feedback whenever we have this kind of passion discussion. ‘

One of them is, “Hey, Mark. I don’t know what my passion is.

I happen to know an expert in this topic – Dan Miller. For those of you who have heard about Dan, he’s over at the 48 Days Podcast at 48Days.com. He has a really great passion work based community at 48Days.net as well. You’ve heard Dan do a bumper intro for the show before. I’m going to see if I can get Dan to come on the show and answer the question, “What do I do if I want to work on my passion but I don’t quite know what that is?” We’ll try to tackle that topic in a future episode very soon.

I’m sending an email requesting an interview with Dan today. Dan is usually very accommodating with podcast interviews, so I suspect that it won’t be an issue for him. I’ll let you know how that goes and we’ll tackle that in the future.

If you are working in your passion and you want to the world’s foremost authority on some topic, as we mentioned before, for my money the absolute best way to do that is with Jeremy and Jason over at the Internet Business Mastery Academy. You can find that at LateNightIM.com/IBMA. I was a charter member there, it has shaped and influenced a lot of the work that I’ve done on this podcast and at LateNightIM.com, and the vision that I have for my future.

If that’s the kind of thing that you want to build, those are definitely the guys that I recommend. Of course, I’ll help you with that too, because I think that is the most fulfilling kind of business that you really can possibly create. If you get that right and you line up your passion with your purpose and the things that make you go, you can absolute crush it in the way that Gary Vaynerchuck means in his book Crush It.

I definitely recommend that, but I also recognize that it is necessary a lot of times to take more reasonable steps – or maybe that doesn’t appeal to you at all and you’re already working in a job that you want to keep but you’re looking for additional income to pay for your car or whatever. In that case, my recommendation, particularly if you’re getting started, is to find a product that you can promote that will pay you a commission whenever you promote it successfully with websites. We call that affiliate marketing.

In the past we’ve talked about what it takes to be an affiliate marketer. Basically you have to get your head right with what affiliate marketing really ought to be. I can talk to you about that, but it has to do with adding value to the people who are trying to make purchases, creating something of value that justifies the commission that you’re getting, and then identifying a product or service that you want to promote and creating a website property that adds value in that conversation, helps with the selection process, provides something that’s valuable either before or after the sale, and so forth. As you attract traffic to that website property people will invariably click through to the product on your affiliate link and you will be paid a commission for that.

There are other things you can do to grow that business by adding email lists, bonuses, and other kinds of things that you can do, other offers, related offers, related websites, and so forth.

These four topics of finding a niche, building a website, adding offers and getting traffic to those offers, and then growing your business out from there, those form the four pillars of discussion that you can find over at LateNightIM.com.

If you haven’t visited the website yet, it has been reconstructed so that the front page of the website, the homepage, is five pillar articles that discuss affiliate marketing in this way. There’s an overview article and then the four topics that I just mentioned. If you haven’t checked that out, I encourage you to do that.

I’m continuing to build that out. My goal for that set of content is to make that the most authoritative, highest value resource for affiliate marketing on the internet, either free or paid. That’s the long term goal for that. It will be a long time getting there, but there is already some great information there for you to get started on and ask questions. You can comment on every article and I try to answer every one of those.

Finding Your Niche Interests

Once you’ve decided that’s the route that you want to go on, the first thing you have to do is pick something of interest to you. There are lots of ways that you can go about this and I think, for me, there are two primary ways that you can think about this and approach it.

One is you can take the attitude that you want to work in an area that you’re interested in. This is a broad kind of area. Usually for affiliate marketing we tend to think in terms of keyword phrases. The reason we do that is because keyword phrases are what people will be typing in the search engine and for this kind of affiliate marketing that’s how they’re going to find the website that you’re going to eventually build.

So if you’re interested in a particular area, what is that area? This is without regard to any particular product. One of my favorite examples that my buddy Cliff uses is that he has a friend who has a podcast about wooden boats. Are you interested in wooden boats?

Are you interested in electronics? If so, what sort of electronics? Are you interested in stereo equipment or home automation, or the iPhone craze, or specifically not the iPhone and the Android as a replacement for the iPhone?

What is your area of interest? What do people come and ask you about? Whenever you’re around people and they say, “Hey, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this problem I’m having with my _____.” What is that thing that people already recognize you as an expert in? What do people ask you about?

Is it cars? Do you know a lot about cars? I have a buddy who is the guy that I ask about car wax. He is into show cars and he happens to know a ton about all the different kinds of car wax that are on the market and what’s good for what kind of paint and all this kind of stuff. If you’re going to take care of your car or have your car in a show, he can tell you what kind of car wax to use. Now, that’s a very specific example, but you get the idea.

Another way to think about this is if you run into an old friend and you guys go into Starbucks for coffee, what is it that you will end up talking about? Are you interested in politics? Are you interested in the economy? Is it your children that you talk about? Is it photography? Is it some aspect of your day job? Are you a project manager, but you’re really fascinated with the process that project management professionals go through when managing projects?

Are you a geek about being organized around the house? Are you a getting things done enthusiast? Do you believe in simplified life? Are a frugal liver? Do you love vegan food? Are you on the Paleo diet? These are the kinds of things that I’m talking about.

You can make a list of those. If you’re not sure what the list is, you can walk around the bookstore and pay attention to where your interest goes. Go to the magazine rack. What magazines do you tend to pick up? Flip through those and write down ideas.

Ask your friends this question. Make up whatever story you want. One time I said, “I’m participating in a survey,” it was true, I was conducting my own survey, and I asked them some questions. “When you think of my areas of interest, what do you think of? When you think of things that I’m good at, what do you think of? List three or four responses.” I mailed that out to 30 or 40 of my closest friends and I got all kinds of crazy answers back that I hadn’t anticipated. So, survey your friends. They may think you’re goofy, but that’s okay. Most of you are a little bit goofy in one way or another. I’m really goofy. So if you can be just slightly less goofy than me, at least you won’t be the goofiest person around.

Survey your friends. Go into bookstores. Browse Amazon.com. When you go to your Amazon Wishlist what kind of things are you wishing for? When you look in your browser bookmarks what kinds of websites are bookmarked?

Think through all of that. Even if you don’t think you’re the “expert” in those areas, that’s not really what we’re looking for here. We’re looking for your area of interest. Make a very long list of those things.

That’s sort of the keyword area approach, and we’ve talked about that a lot in the past. That’s still what I recommend. For this stage of this process what I recommend that you do is make the longest possible list that you can. In some future episode, maybe next week even, we’ll talk about exactly what to do with that list.

Basically you’re going to want to see what keyword phrases related to those topic areas are being used in Google. And you’re going to want to try and understand of those keyword phrases if you were to build a website that was focused on one of them, like best computer stereo speakers.

Maybe you’re an aficionado of the computer stereo speakers. I personally have the clear Harman Kardon towers that they sell in the Apple store to go with my iMac. Maybe you love those and you feel strongly that there are only three or four computer speakers that are really worth having out there. Maybe you’re a gamer and there’s some kind of surround sound configuration you really know about.

Eventually what we’ll talk about is how to go and figure out what people are searching for related to that and how to capitalize on that opportunity. But, for now, I recommend that you make your list. I think you have some good ideas about how to make that list.

Long Tail Product Focused Keywords

Now, there’s another approach that you can take to this. As Dave alluded to in the last episode when we were dealing with the feedback, the word that he used was “mercenary,” but the word that I’ll use is “product focused.” This is what turns out to be the approach in Forever Affiliate.

Whatever your interests happen to be, the world is full of products. In fact, economies of the world revolve around this idea that we have to buy and sell products. That’s how the economies of the world work. As a result of that, in general, there are hundreds of millions or billions of products out there. I’d say there’s billions. There are more products than you could possibly imagine.

These products, for marketing reasons, have very specific names and they usually have very specific model numbers. The reason that’s interesting from a search engine optimization standpoint is we refer to those specific things that people search for as long tail keywords. We’ve talked about this before a little bit as well.

If you search for shoes that’s a very broad keyword. I haven’t checked it, but if you search for shoes you’ll probably get Zappos.com. Then if you search for suede shoes that’s going to have fewer searchers. Obviously most searchers that are searching for shoes are not searching for suede shoes, so there are going to be fewer searchers searching for suede shoes than the general topic of shoes. There will be even fewer people searching for blue suede shoes. Blue suede shoes is a longer tail keyword than shoes.

The reason we call it a tail, in case you’re wondering, comes from this idea that there is a distribution of traffic and that if you plot the most prevalent keyword on the left hand side of a plot where the X axis is how far out on the tail you are and the Y axis is the amount of traffic, you get this kind of ski slope coming down and it goes way off to the right. That stuff that’s way off to the right is very long tail keywords, it’s very specific terms that have relatively little traffic compared to the big mountain term like shoes.

Blue suede shoes is a longer tail than shoes. And even longer tail would be “where to buy blue suede shoes.” An even longer tail than that would be “where to buy blue suede shoes in Dallas.” That’s getting to be way out there. But it might be that you might find that there are tens, or hundreds, or thousands of people searching for these long tail keywords.

The thing about long tail keywords is that there are so many of them that often times you are able to identify long tail keywords that have relatively little competition for the top spots in Google.

The other great thing about long tail keywords is the intent of the searcher can be quite well understood. If someone is going to the trouble of typing “where can I buy blue suede shoes in Dallas,” that’s a pretty clear indication that the person’s intent is to get in the car and go buy some blue suede shoes in Dallas.

If you can find where is the best price for XYZ product online, if that’s a keyword, then you have a pretty good idea that the person has their credit card in their hand waiting to go buy this product online. The magic of long tail keywords is that they tend, in many cases, to have less competition and they also tend to have a better understood intent.

By the same token, if you find “where can I download Die Hard 3 for free,” you know that person doesn’t really have a commercial intent to buy the Die Hard 3 DVD, they have a commercial intent to steal the Die Hard 3 DVD. So there’s all kinds of information that you can get out of these long tail keywords regarding targeting.

The thing about product keywords is that they are the longest of the tail. If I’m looking for a 47” Sony XYZ127 model number television, that’s a pretty specific thing. If I have a website that reviews that television and talks about the best place to buy it online to get the best price, I have a pretty good chance of selling that TV to somebody who types in “Sony XYZ127 TV review,” because that guy is looking for that specific product.

In the Forever Affiliate course, one of the approaches that Andrew talks about a lot and one of the things that Dave was talking about in the question from last week, is there is such a focus on products, isn’t that a little mercenary?

Well, it can be if you go into it with the idea that you are going to try and identify the highest converting, highest paying product without regard to anything, without regard to whether or not you believe the product works, without regard to whether or not you’ve ever tried the product, without regard to what the online reviews are, without regard to whether or not it’s an ethical product, without regard to whether or not the product is aligned with your moral standards.

For example, maybe it’s an adult product and maybe you’re from a Christian household or a Muslim household where adult products wouldn’t be appropriate. If you choose to promote those products anyway, which is something I think we’ll get into in a future episode, then yes it’s a mercenary thing.

The Hybrid Approach to Affiliate Marketing

But what if you take this approach – what if you take the approach of identifying products that you know, like, and trust, that you believe in, that you think are good for people, that you would recommend to your friends? What if you pick those products to promote?

What about the times when your friends come up to you, “Which computer should I buy?” Do you spend 30 minutes telling them what the right computer is? I know I do. Or do you spend 30 minutes when someone asks you what kind of podcasting equipment to buy? I have a strong opinion about that. I’m very attached to my podcasting gear. If you’re one of those people who has products in your life that you love and that you respect and that you could speak volumes on, you are the perfect candidate for affiliate marketing of products.

One of the things that you can do now that you have your great list of all the areas that you’re interested in and now that you’ve started to recognize that there are products out there that you can care about, you can go make the same kind of list that you made for the areas that you’re interested in and you can make a list of products.

There are lots of great ways to go do this. If you have a credit card, go back through your last six months of credit card statements and look at all the stuff that you’ve bought. If you’re like me, going through all the stuff you’ve bought in the last six months is going to make you sick because you’re going to realize you spent way too much money buying stuff you didn’t need. Maybe that’s a topic for another podcast as well.

But you can go through and look, “I went to Best Buy, what did I buy? I bought this DVD. I bought this television. I bought these cables. I bought this dishwasher.” You just keep going through these, “Oh yeah, that dishwasher was absolutely fantastic. We got the Bosch dishwasher with the controls in the top of the door that disappear when you close the door. It’s fantastic, my dishes have never been so clean.”

You start to identify this list of products that you know, like, trust, and in some cases love and would recommend to your friends. Then all of the sudden you have this massive list of things. Go back to your Amazon account and see what you’ve ordered. Go back and look through your emails to see what you have electronic receipts for. Look at what the rest of your family is ordering, what products they love, know, like, and trust.

Then we’ll need to do some work to decide whether or not those are good products to promote. But the first thing to do is to get this idea of what kind of stuff you’re interested in, what kind of products do you like that you can promote, and then go find the products that you didn’t even know about. There’s all kinds of stuff out there. You can browse Amazon, you can browse OfferVault, which is something that Andrew has been on the show and talked about before, and see all the things that are on offer out there on the internet. It’s amazing. You can buy absolutely anything you want.

I think after a couple days of browsing Amazon.com, Target.com, Sears.com, Overstock.com, and all these other big box retail places, Clickbank.com is another great place to find products that are interesting to promote. Maybe you learned to sing and you took some online courses. There are all kinds of things out there that you can learn to promote. Spend some days making a list.

What we’ll do in the coming weeks is talk a little bit about how to analyze that list, how to pick something. Now you have 500 good ideas, I don’t recommend that you go build 500 websites. We need to pick a couple – one would preferable to get started.

Once we’ve identified this niche of a product or a keyword, or in the best possible case a keyword area like “computer sound gear” that matches up to a product where you care about both of them and you have an area where you have a few products that you can promote, you’re a little bit knowledgeable about it, you care enough about it to write reviews and create content that will actually help people who don’t know a flipping thing about it who just stumbled onto your website and need to make a good purchase.

If you can get into a position where you can help those people to keep them from buying junk and steer them towards the good stuff, and make a commission in the process, you are the best kind of affiliate marketer that there is. You’ve added value to the transaction and you deserve to be paid for that – and they will pay you for that. If you do it in an intelligent way, in a way that allows you to get traffic, you can make money doing that.

That’s actually the kind of thing that I recommend. It’s this hybrid process where you take something that you care about, not your life’s calling quite yet – some of you will do that and I admire you and I want you to do that, but for those that aren’t quite ready to go tackle your life’s calling, find some products or some areas that you care about. We’ll talk about how to create content and promote products in those areas and add value to those transactions and collect commissions for that work.

Wrapping Things Up

That’s what I have for you this week. I hope that is helpful. I hope that further clears up this kind of approach to affiliate marketing. Perhaps next week or in the coming weeks we’ll spend some time trying to understand how we down-select from this big list of ideas of things that people are typing in Google. We’ll look at the Google Keyword Tool, talk some more about that. We’ll talk about competition in these niches and decide how to go focus on something specific. And then once we have something specific, we’ll decide what to do.

Again, if you’re interested in this kind of process the best product that I know of on the market right now for directly targeting and converting these kinds of affiliate offers is the Forever Affiliate course from Andrew. I have the private mastermind group up and running on Facebook now; you can find that at LateNightIM.com/fagroup. Of course, because of the nature of that it’s only for people who have purchased the product, which you can do at LateNightIM.com/fa.

I hope that helps and I hope you have a fantastic week. Once again, I want to encourage you to go ahead and get something meaningful done on your business this week. If you do, come to the show notes at LateNightIM.com/052 and tell me about it. You don’t have to be all that specific, just let me know that you got some good stuff done and that you’re proud of yourself, because I’m proud of you too. Good luck to you this week.

Thank you for listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast…

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