My Free Advertising Model - Overview

I was recently asked for advice on how to go about advertising for free. I feel that this is a very important question that beginners especially have to know. Chances are, when you just get started with affiliate marketing, you're not going to have a lot of extra cash to burn. Like with any business, you want to minimize startup costs, allowing your profit to pay for future expenses.

Since I feel this information could really be helpful to people, I am going to start a series exploring on the process of promoting a product for free. This initial post will just be a brief overview of my free advertising model, but I will continue this series, explaining each step in-depth.

To start, here is my outline:

1. Keyword Research
2. Squidoo
3. Blog
4. Write Articles
   
5. Socialize/Twitter

The first step is extremely essential. Your goal is to come up first page in Google's search results for something that people will search. The less competition you have for the selected keyword, the better your chances of making that happen. I touched briefly on keyword research in a previous article about Properly Identifying a Niche, but I want tackle it better this time. I'm going to show you step-by-step everything you need to do in order to take a good approach to keyword selection, giving you specifics on what to look for.

Once you have the right keyword, steps 2-4 are a matter of generating content to tie to that keyword. How would you like it if out of Google's top 10 results, 4 of them were yours? Well, if you have a Squidoo lens, a blog, an article, and your own website, that's four of your creations right there. You don't have to be a statistical genius to realize that this greatly increases the chances of people visiting one of your links when they search for that string of text.

Each method works a bit differently, so I want to go into them one at a time to analyze how to effectively use them to your advantage. In general, though, your focus should be providing information to people, not selling them something. You can use a landing page for a sales pitch, but when making Squidoo lens and submitting articles especially, you need to avoid coming off like a salesman in order to have your content approved.

A key thing to keep in mind is that it is not enough to just create all of these things. You can make as many lenses, blog posts, and articles as you want, but people won't just automatically see them. It is essential that you get the word out about your creations. This is where socializing comes in. Whether it's going to related lenses and praising them, while mentioning yours... or being a helpful member of a forum community while sporting links in your signature... or promoting through a social network... you need to make sure people know about you and what you made. Spread the word and get links out there for people to see. The more your pages are visited and the more back links you generate, the higher your search engine ranks will be.

I will, of course, cover more details of this in its respective section, but I wanted to give an idea of the basics of all of these.

In the next post, I cover Keyword Research. As the keyword is the foundation of your compaign, this will be an important thing to read and understand.