Your Affiliate Marketing Plan
In today’s Marketing Monday, I am going to cover what to include in your affiliate marketing plan. With affiliate marketing as in any endeavor, you won’t get very far without having a good, solid business and marketing plan.
The first step you should take before signing up for any affiliate program or start shopping for products to promote, should be to sit down and map it out. When you do so, this is what to include in your affiliate marketing plan:
Define Your Goal
This is the most important part of your affiliate marketing plan, to have clearly stated goals. It’s not enough to just say that you want to make money with affiliate marketing, choose a dollar amount and a calendar day that you want to start making money.
You need to actually write down your goals and place it where you will see it daily to keep it fresh in your mind.
Once you have that big goal, then create the smaller sub-goals (or steps) that are going to get you there. Commit to yourself that you will take daily action on each of these sub-goals and keep track of your progress.
Have a Well-Chosen, Very Specific Niche Market
It’s not smart trying to be all things to all people, all it will end up doing is wear you out and keep you frustrated. It is better to focus on a more specialized niche within a bigger niche.
Not only will you find that there is less competition, but that it’s easier and quicker to establish yourself as an authority.
Also people in sub-niches are more likely to be more involved with that niche, and they’re likely to buy products. This will make it easier for you to make commission sales.
Imagine your target market as being a specific person. What are they like? What do they want? Where do they hang out? Then write out a detailed description of that person.
The next important part when choosing your niche is selecting the right keywords. Use your keyword tool of choice to identify the main keywords, category keywords and long-tail phrases that you will be targeting as part of your affiliate marketing plan.
Those keywords will help guide your website design, your content creation and your link-building.
Strategies for Getting to Know Your Market
There are many ways available for you to get to know your market. Your strategy should include a combination of SEVERAL different methods such as niche blogging, social media, and forums.
The main point here is not to overdo it. Pick several methods to use and stick with it until you perfect it before adding on
Having knowledge about your market will be a big factor in determining your success. Before you get started, find out where those in your market likes to hang out and be there to listen to what they’re saying.
Tactics for Driving Traffic
It’s unwise to try every single traffic method that you know or have heard of at once. Instead, it is better if you choose a few proven methods first and then work them into your weekly and daily routine until you get them working well for you.
For example, you might decide to use a strategy where you submit 3 articles a week to article directories, write 2 blog posts a week to your site, spend 30 to 60 minutes a day posting comments on niche forums, Facebook groups, etc.
It’s important that you continuously monitor your traffic results for each method you use and drop any that aren’t producing those results. When you discover a new traffic strategy that you would like to try, then add it into your schedule.
Stay Organized
Before starting, make sure that you have a method for staying organized, especially with your accounting and time. This is crucial since it is so easy to quickly get out of sorts.
You can find accounting software and time management software that will help you do this. Create a system for organizing your files and set aside some time each week to keep it cleaned up. By doing this, it will prevent you from being overwhelmed later on.
What to do with it all?
I know it sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It takes some time to create a good affiliate marketing plan, but it is well worth the effort to have one in place and will end up saving you lots of time later down the road.
However you will find when you’re goal-oriented, organized, and knowledgeable about your niche market, it will make it so much easier to make money online as an affiliate.
As always, I invite you to leave a comment, observation or question below since I like to hear from you. 🙂
