Adult Affiliate Guide

As an affiliate doing a bit of market research, competition is usually your friend. It means that there's money to be made in a market.

However, when it comes to search engine optimizing your site, it's a slightly different story. You need to be able to take a look at the competition that's out there and decide how good your chances are of ranking well for that keyword.

Many affiliates simply try entering their keyword into Google and seeing how many results they get. When they see this number reach the many millions they get discouraged. How can you beat millions of other sites to those top spaces?

Well, it may come as good news to you that this figure doesn't actually represent an awful lot. There are a bunch of other things you can do to see how tough it'll be to rank for a particular keyword.
How many results?

This is the trick that most affiliates try, and when the 12,000,000 results for X-keyword hits them like a punch to the stomach, they ditch that keyword and look for easier pickings. My advice is to take this figure with a grain of salt. It's an estimated figure, and not all those 12,000,000 listings actually appear in the search results.

Furthermore, most of these sites won't have done any search engine optimization, so it's pretty easy to beat them.

Use this figure more as an indicator of whether there's any activity in the market. If it's super-low (say, under a million) it might indicate a lack of interest in that particular word. Try whacking it into your keyword search volume tool to see how many people are searching on it and see if it confirms this theory.
Allintitle

The next two steps try to identify how well search engine optimized the competition is. Is it a fluke that they're ranking well? Or have they designed their sites this way?

The backlinks you want are from high quality, relevant sites with a PageRank that is preferably higher than your site.

Start by searching for sites relating to your niche. You are looking for relevant and quality Web sites, so you need to find sites that have a Google page rank of more than your own site and that are relevant in some way to your industry and your Web site visitor. Using search engines, enter a variety of phrases then, review the sites you see listed.

Tip: Combining your search phrases with 'add link', 'add listing' or 'add URL' will find Web sites offering to publish links to other sites. Some may be free, some may require a reciprocal link and some may require you to pay for a listing. If you are only looking for free listings, try adding 'free' to your search (e.g. 'add free link').

A while back there was this video introducing a new "system". They totally trashed affiliate marketing as a loser way to market online. Then they made this very bold claim of earning a fast 20k in 20 days or something like that. What they really did was invested 10k to earn 2k. I don't have 10k to lose in order to earn 2k so I'm pretty sure that program was a complete failure to most people who tried it.

THIS is in fact my greatest pet-peeve about making money online. These clever videos that suck you in and then treat you like their personal ATM which by the way, they talk about all the time.

Another guy years ago earned $250.000 on his preview video on how he would teach you to earn thousands on his AdSense system. Everyone was all excited over what? The fact that he earned and was bragging about how fast he was making money on .... AdSense??? NO, it was all bragging about making money selling the program. No one paid any attention to this clever and in my opinion deceptive marketing scheme.

Wouldn't you like to say NO to being their personal ATM machine? I do. I have and I hope I can help some of you do it too.

Now then... here's what I want to say and I hope it helps anyone struggling as I have done for many many years.

FOCUS - I had a serious problem with this regarding my online marketing business. I would buy this and that program, subscribed to this service and that services. I have earned a few thousand dollars from an ebook I wrote and I've earned several thousands of dollars selling training programs for programs like wordpress. The problem for never getting any further was because I was a tiny guppy in a shark pond. These sharks knew how to scare me and distract me. They had more money than me, they knew how to market, I didn't, and they knew how to keep me from following through with my little success I had started by eating up my money and never telling me about outsourcing. I only just learned about Outsourcing last year.

I am going to share with you some of the best affiliate marketing advice that I have learned, and in fact one particular keyword research tip, that once employed, single handedly kick started my affiliate success.

What confused me, early on in my affiliate career, was why I was not making sales when I had a great looking website up. I also had some fantastic Google rankings so the traffic was ok, and I'd made sure that all my pages were monetized properly, by having images ad and plenty of obvious affiliate links to click, yet hardly any sales!

This was quite a disappointment for me, I thought affiliate marketing was going to be easy and I could kick back and watch the money roll in, however that's when I realized the flaw in my plan.

What I soon realized is that when someone has decided to do some shopping online, they often start by going to Google and doing some initial research. Very few people just dive straight in and buy the first product they come across, I wish it were that easy!

Let's say a person has decided it's time for a new T.V. and they know they want it delivered to their door, so purchasing online is perfect for them. Well, first they might go to Google and type in "Best T.V.'s" and browse a handful of websites to get an idea of the types of T.V.'s and their prices.

Next they might refine their search down further and go back to Google and start to type in "Plasma T.V.'s" as they have now narrowed down their choices to some kind of plasma. Once they have browsed through another bunch of sites that discuss Plasma's, they should have a better idea of the kind of plasma they want.

Again and again, the biggest question newbie's ask is "how do I decide which products to promote?"

Now when you're first starting out, this decision can be a little daunting - everyone wants to be that overnight success, and if you make a mistake in choosing the right niche, you're worried that you won't be able to recover.

Well for starters - quit worrying so much!

If you get your first niche wrong, you learn what you can from it and you move on! Even the best internet marketers get into niches from time to time that don't work out - the difference is they don't let it discourage them, they simply learn from their mistakes and move on.

That being said, it is of course preferable that you do succeed, even just moderately, in your first niche. The rush of confidence that you get from your first few sales can really give you the kick you need to keep going. So what single technique is the most effective at helping you choose what to promote?

Sell what you know.

Everyone has interests - things they like to do, things they like to read about. We're not talking about being a veritable expert here, but if you actively seek out new and interesting information about a topic, or have a good grounding in the basic concepts of something, then I suggest that this is the best place to start your internet marketing empire!

But why should you focus on what you know? Surely you should go for whatever niche is most profitable? Not necessarily. Sure, there might be a lot of money in those niches, but are you going to get far enough to find out? When you're first starting it out, focusing on your existing interests and hobbies can definitely be the best place to go. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. Being bored out of your skull isn't fun.