As I have mentioned before, I am a forum moderator at Coaching With Josh.  That program is set up to help a wide range of people, including beginners.  Today, I got the below question, and I thought many people might be interested in the answer.

Of course, I have changed the names and some of the details to protect the innocent:

For the last couple of days I've been checking out XYZ product on ClickBank and I think it's a great product to promote as an affiliate, due to the fact that commissions are paid through ClickBank and the sales letter is really good.

I've been considering promoting it on specialized forums and on EZA.

I'm a newbie with no previous marketing experience.

The thing that really makes my head spin is keyword research. I don't know what tool I should use and how to tell which keywords are profitable and which ones are not worth it.

Also, my idea is to start generating not only keywords related to “xxx xxxx xxxx”, but also to the “yyy yyyy yyyyy” term.

Since I've never designed a website in my life, I would like to know if starting with a blogger blog is a better option.

So, should I use the wordpress blog or start fresh with a blogger blog?

Now, I should say that entire $2000 courses are built around the above question.  So, it is hard to answer this kind of question in a single blog post.  I am not pretending to give all the answers here.

Additionally, I don't know much about the product that was mentioned.   I did check out the sales letter and  I agree the sales letter looks good.  The problem is that it is hard to judge how they will convert without testing.  I recommend always asking the publisher for conversion stats, and asking them what support they have for tracking your own conversions.

To promote a product like this, you have many options.  I am not a PPC guy.  I like organic traffic.  For organic search traffic, you can put up a site with a URL like http://TheProductURLReview.com using wordpress.

To get organic traffic to that URL, one option is to create pages that rank for keywords that are related to the product that you are trying to sell.  For each keyword that you want to target, you can write a short article talking about the product and linking to it with an affiliate link.

You can see one new site that I have like this here:

http://www.1waylinksreview.com

It's so new that I have not done much with that site, but you get the idea.

You can also take this approach with article marketing or a blogger blog.  But, I always think it is better to have a specific domain that you own.

Fundamentally, it boils down to conversions.  Get visitors to your site, presell them, get them to click through to the sales page, and a certain percentage will convert to sales.

Photo: photo credit: Dina Middin