Susan Carter Affiliates Is Now Official

Susan Carter Affiliates is now official as a website. This is really exciting because I have an additional opportunity to generate revenue by promoting my skills as an internet marketer. I've been enjoying writing articles on HubPages for several months now, and am earning good money with my Google Adsense. However, I wanted to pursue affiliate marketing so that I could earn higher revenue from commissions. My research into this field revealed that the most important aspect of choosing which product or service to market is to find out whether it is being purchased online - on a consistent basis. Picking the latest “hot” item is no guarantee that you will be able to market it successfully. There are several steps that must be followed in order to verify that your efforts will not be wasted during your advertising campaigns. Learning these steps involves understanding the myriad of tools available on the internet. Many of them are free, and the others are at a minimal cost. Your learning curve all depends on how much time you are willing to spend understanding the whole picture of affiliate marketing.

Along my journey to learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, I found that people will buy just about anything online. And I do mean anything. My internet partner has a friend who makes all her purchases online. She even bought a couch from a website, and when it arrived she just paid the delivery men a little extra and they brought it into her house. The secret to being successful at affiliate marketing is to find products or services that are being purchased on a regular basis. The next step, which is absolutely critical to the success of any advertising campaign, is to find the best keyword phrases that are perfectly descriptive of the item you are going to market. If your keyword phrase is not effective, all the marketing in the world will not bring you traffic.

My favorite free tool is called the Wonder Wheel, which you can find by typing in a keyword phrase in the Google search bar. Once your results show, click on the “More” option on the left side of the screen. When this opens up more options, click on “More Search Tools”. Scroll down to “Standard View” and click on Wonder Wheel. When this opens up you just click on the various spokes of the wheel and you are provided multiple related keywords or keyword phrases that will help you in your research.

Another free tool on the internet is the Google keyword site https://www.adwords.google.com. You can use this to find out what keywords have the highest competition (which you want to avoid), and you can find out the keywords on a competitor’s site by using the “website” option. If your competitor is successful with their site (they are on page 1 of Google), then you want to model your website or blog after theirs by using the same keywords that brought them to the top of Google.

My next favorite tool is Micro Niche Finder.  This is a paid product that I currently advertise on my flagship site SusanCarterBooks and I am an affiliate for this vendor.  This is an amazing software program that allows you to search for keyword phrases, plus it gives you domain information (is the .com, .org, or .net. available?), commercial intent (are people buying the products they found with this keyword phrase?), and the strength of competition (how many other marketers are using this exact keyword phrase?).  It also stores your individual keyword searches so that you do not lose any of the information you previously researched.  You can also export the information from Micro Niche Finder so you can save it and sort it in Excel.

Once you have decided what product you are going to market, and what keyword phrases you are going to use when creating your marketing campaigns, you then need to choose how to promote it.  I highly recommend that you set up a blog (Blogger or WordPress) for that one product and drive traffic to it by publishing multiple press releases, articles and classified ads all with a hyperlink leading back to your blog.  I don’t recommend having multiple products on one blog.  Your goal is to refine – or niche – your traffic so that when they type in the keyword phrase you have named your blog, they are more likely to buy the product if the only thing on the site is exactly what they are looking to buy. 

Use pictures or videos of the exact product or service so that your blog is visually appealing.  If your customer already knows what they want to buy, and your blog gives them the opportunity to purchase it, then do not write a lengthy post.  You don’t want them to get lost or bored with reading a long article about the product they already want.  Give them two or three short, to the point paragraphs explaining the specifications of the item, then present them with a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button we are all familiar with on websites.  If they are coming to your site to buy, then let them buy.  Your goal is to give them an immediate opportunity to buy so that they don’t leave your site to trying shopping on someone else’s website.  You want to get a sale on their first visit so make your goal to have an attractive blog that gives them exactly want they expected to find. 

Here are my two favorite product sites where I find most of my items to promote:  ClickBank.com and CommissionJunction.com. These sites are well known and respected for affiliate marketing. On ClickBank you are more likely to find digital information products, whereas on Commission Junction you will find physical products or services as well as brand name vendors such as Best Buy, Sears, Kmart, Sony, RCA, etc.

I have enjoyed sharing my excitement that Susan Carter Affiliates is now official and I hope that I have provided you with some good tips to help you in your journey to become a successful affiliate marketer.