Blogging - A Key Affiliate Marketing Strategy

For many people, the first step in the Affiliate Marketing world is a difficult one. You're lost and you don't know exactly what to do. Perhaps you've found a product to promote... one that you think will make you a good amount of money if only you get the sales. The problem is, you don't know how to go about promoting it.

A lot of people run to pay-per-click campaigns such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Big mistake. These are no places for novices to be. They will get expensive, wasting a lot of money for you without properly turning a product.

Before you ever venture into any type of paid advertising, you have to make sure that your clicks will convert into sales. This way, those clicks you pay for will actually be paying for themselves. How do you make sure your clicks convert? By first utilizing any free advertising technique you can. Not only will all sales be pure profit, but you get to test your site and various versions of ad copy to see which attracts sales the most.

Now I can go on for a long time about testing your site and all the various free advertising sources to gather your test subjects... but for the purpose of this post, I'm going to stick to discussing blogging.

Blogs, like the very one you are reading, can be a very effective way to get people to your website. No matter what type of product you are selling or what methods you are using to try to sell it, having a blog attached to your website is critical. Search engines love lots of fresh and relevant content, so if you keep a constantly updated blog with lots of nice articles, you'll easily boost your search engine rank.

Good blogs have lots of fresh, quality content. Google's bot is pretty smart, so you can't just throw any crap you copied from somewhere and expect it to work well. Original content works best. The more Google sees the same exact article, the less it ranks that article. Make your blog posts creative and informative.

If anything else, a good blog can at least get the word out about whatever you are trying to advertise. It's another source on the internet that someone might come across, and upon reading it, may discover what you wish to sell. Don't rule it out. However, to really make blogging work, you need to be serious and dedicated. Typically, the people who are most successful aim for 5 new posts a day. I know that can be a lot, but try the best you can. It might not be a bad idea to hire some blog writers for you if you can afford it.

Also, don't forget to check out my recently renovated website about making money online for more tips on how to get started with the affiliate marketing process.