Hi,
There are many ways to promote an affiliate link. The thing is you have to ask yourself, where am I going to get the most targeted traffic from my time and or money invested?
First of all, you need your own website. Not a company replicated one, but your own. This way you can write quality content related to your affiliates product and presell your visitors before you even show them the link.
Just as an example. Say you are an affiliate for Rogaine, or some kind of hair growth product.
You would be best off building a website named something like, Stop-Hair-Loss.com as an example.
On your website you would need to write numerous artilces on individual pages focusing on particular keywords that people with hair loss would be searching for online.
These could be something like:
How to stop hair loss
thinning hair
hair loss on back of head
men's hair loss
women's hair loss
best shampoos for hair loss
stop hair loss
reverse hair loss
etc
etc
Of course your home page's keyword would be hair loss
Those keywords, or more correctly long tail keywords would be the focus of your tier two pages off of the main page. You would need to weave that phrase, ex.(how to stop hair loss) through the page a couple of times or so to rank well with the search engines.
Remember, a keyword focused page with a long tail keyword phrase as its focus is much easier to rank well with the search engines than a main keyword, like hair loss. Which you will probably never rank first page for.
It's just too competitive. But that doesn't mean you can't have a small piece of a very large pie either. You can rank well for long tail keywords, and get traffic for long tails you can't even think of just by writing good content about your subject. And I mean lots of it on separate pages.
Now for your keywords. My webhost has a brainstorming tool second to none for this but since yours probably won't you'll have to settle for Google's keyword tool, or wordtracker.
Type in hair. Scan down the results looking for hair loss related keywords. Open a note pad and copy and paste some main ones in. Hair loss, thinning hair etc.
Now, start over. Type in hair loss. You'll get things like how to stop hair loss. What causes hair loss. Hair loss home rememdy, etc. Write the good ones down you think you can write a page specifically about.
Also look at the demand, (how many people search that phrase) and more importantly the competition. (google tells you how many people advertise for that keyword by a bar graph.)
Writing articles and submitting to directories is good too, but you can't self promote in your article. You have to put links in your author bio section. When you do this make sure it's original content and not copied from your website, otherwise google will penalize you for duplication. Be sure to link to your website and your affiliate link to help your link popularity with the SEs.
When building your website be sure to go to googles webmaster page and submit your site manually. You really want to submit a sitemap to get indexed quickly and regularly when you add more pages. My webhost provides one for me free, but most don't, so be careful choosing a webhost.
And of course as you can see at the bottom, you can advertise on my website and put your link on the ad.
Just make sure you put some decent content on your ad so the SEs send you plenty of traffic.
Man, I should just have written this as an article and sent you there. Just kind of got started and the next thing I knew I had written a few hundred words. See, if you know a little about a subject, it's not hard at all to write some content about it.
Remember, no matter what level of experience you are at. Good content will always appeal to some.
There are always people who don't have your level of experience on any subject.
This post has been edited by Zacman: Jan 24 2009, 02:26 PM
