Day Two in the “How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Program Series” involves figuring out your categories and keywords (doing some basic research) and choosing affiliate programs to promote. Makes sense, right? You need to have an idea what you’ll be promoting before you start.

Now, this could get into a huge long post, but I’m giving you my “get it going now and revise later” method, so that you can have a business at the end of the week. You’ll have the opportunity to revise it and make changes forever. Let’s just get you up and running for now.

ok. Keywords. Don’t go run off on me. You now know what your topic is and who your audience is. Now we just want to get a good idea of what they are looking for regarding that topic.

Here’s an easy way to get a snapshot: Free Keyword Tool.

If your website will be about weight loss, then, you’d enter diet, weight loss, lose weight, or any other terms common to that topic. And, you’ll get a list that looks like this…

4797 diet
2431 free diet plans
2261 south beach diet
1965 atkins diet
1883 beach body diet
1750 american heart association 3 day diet
1418 free online diets
1412 diets
1251 diabetic diet
1153 diet pills
1142 cabbage soup diet best recipe
1128 american heart association diet
1086 free online diet plans
1052 cabbage soup diet
1014 raw food diet
982 american heart association diet plan online
977 free diet programs
944 how does the jenny craig diet work
933 grapefruit diet
928 free copy of 3 day diet
926 3 day tuna diet
885 high blood pressure diet
877 dash diet
836 free diet meal plans
822 mediterranean diet
804 diabetes diet
792 what is the cost of the jenny craig diet
744 low-fat diet
648 healthy diet for athletes

That will give you a peek into the market much faster than trying to figure it out by yourself.

First thing, first. Look through the lists of keywords and keyphrases (a keyword = a single word | a key phrase = two or more words together) that you receive from WordTracker and start looking for patterns and/or logical categories from the searches.

What are people looking for and what can you provide them? Now, while “free diet plans” might look good, you’ll want to consider what they’re planning to do once they land on your site. Hmm… grab free information and run? And, how will you make money with that? You can. Just keep in mind whether someone is looking for a term with their wallet sitting next to them on their desk or whether they’re just hunting for free info. We PREFER those who have their wallets out, who are actively hunting for something to buy, right?

In the list above and in clicking around, I see the term “diet plans” quite a bit and “diet review” so you could easily create a section on your blog with diet plan reviews.

Now, how to monetize it.

Before I get into that I’d like to explain some terminology when referring to Affiliate Programs. These are terms that you will run into, so you should understand them.

Pay Per Impression – You get paid for the number of times an advertisement is viewed on your website. These programs are hard to find until you’re established.

Pay Per Click – You get paid every time someone clicks on a certain advertisement. The most popular one of these is Google Adsense. (Free course: www.ShowMomtheAdsense.com )

Pay Per Lead – You are paid every time someone signs up to receive information about a certain product or service. There are pay per lead programs that pay anywhere from 25cents all the way up to $20 or more.

Pay Per Sale – This is the most common type of affiliate program. You get paid a % of each sale that you send to the company. Amazon.com, Clickbank.com, etc. run on this model.

Recurring Affiliate Commission – The holy grail of affiliate programs. These are affiliate programs that pay you month after month after month. Ex: MomWebs.com hosting pays commission for every month that your referral keeps their hosting account. I don’t know about you, but I really dislike moving my hosting so I do that as seldom as I have to. That means that you can continue to be paid for a referral that you made for 5 years or more. (We like these!)

Let’s go back to our example. If you’re creating a diet plan blog, you might add some Google Adsense to see how it does on your blog.

One obvious affiliate program that you’d want to sign up for, would be Amazon.com. You could offer reviews of each diet plan and then offer the “Official Book” for sale at the end. I have every single book ever printed for the South Beach Diet, so I know that people do spend money on them.

Some diet and exercise plans are not available on Amazon, but are on Clickbank.com and you’ll find products to promote in their marketplace.

You may also want to sign up for CJ.com as they oftentimes have programs that are a natural fit for your market. I do well with them. You just need to look around a bit and find the perfect affiliate program.

And, I also offer an Affiliate Network for Moms ← that you might check out.

Some tips when choosing affiliate programs to promote.

Select quality products always. Never ever promote something on your blog that you wouldn’t personally recommend that a friend buy.

Make sure the product is highly targeted to the minds of the people who come to your blog. (You never know which page someone will land on when they come to your site from another site, so always make sure that they get an immediate feel for what you’re offering in less than 5 seconds of being there.) – For instance, don’t offer pet food ads on a blog about scrapbooking. Yes, people who scrapbook may have pets, but that’s not what they are looking for on your blog. Capiche?

Here are some more tips for Choosing a Quality Affiliate Program.

Your assignment for today is to get your blog up and running if you haven’t already, set up a few categories based upon your research at WordTracker, and go find some quality affiliate programs to promote.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about what to write about and some shortcuts.

Post your questions. I’ll be back to give away prizes and share more tips tomorrow!

Warmly,
Nicole Dean