Affiliate Blueprint DAY TWO Day 11: Open an Email Autoresponder Account In order to build that list, you need the tool to do it. An email autoresponder system like Aweber or GetResponse will house the names and email addresses of your subscribers and send out messages to their inbox on a schedule you devise. Day 12: Decide Whether You Want a Focus on Follow Up or Broadcast Emails There are two ways your messages can go out. With broadcast emails, the messages are sent one time, to whomever happens to be on your list at that moment. With follow up emails, you schedule them to go out to all new subscribers, whether they sign up now or a year from now, so they have to be evergreen. Day 13: Go Through the Technical Form Steps to Gain Subscribers Each email autoresponder system has a specific way of creating the form that will go on your blog and accept submissions of subscriber contact info. Follow their instructions and grab the code so you can install the form onto your blog. Make sure you test it yourself! Day 14: Make a List of the Pressing Problems for Your Niche Earlier, you did some research about your audience’s most pressing pain points. The pain they feel is an emotion that stems from a problem. They’re too separate things. For example, someone who is dealing with obesity has many problems. Those include craving sugar or carbs, being sedentary, overeating and more. Their pain points are what stems from those problems – such as the shame they feel not being able to fit in a seat on an airplane, or not feeling as if they want to date until they lose weight. You’ll be using these pain points and problem areas to not only slant your blog posts, but also to seek out products that you can review as a potential solution to their issues. This might include something like a course for sugar detoxes or at home gym equipment for people who make excuses about not being able to make time for the gym. Day 15: Pair Each Problem with as Many Viable Product Solutions as You Can Find When you have your list ready, you need to spend a day listing all of the products that could potentially be used in a review for solutions to a specific problem. For example, let’s use stress as our niche topic example. With stress, one of the problems is not having time to engage in stress relief activities (like a long, hot bath or going to get a massage). You’d want to list products – digital and tangible if you can find them – that your readers could do anytime, anywhere. For example, you might find digital courses about guided visualization, meditation, or deep breathing. Tangible products might include some sort of aromatherapy gadget, a stress relief ball, or other item they could use in a pinch. Day 16: Create or Buy and Publish Niche Content to Your Blog If you create the content yourself, you’ll want to take those problems and pair them with the solution and write a blog post about it. You can do it several different ways, such as writing a post called Deep Breathing for Stress Relief in a Chaotic Schedule. Or, you could do something like, 10 Ways to Relieve Stress in the Office When You Can’t Break Away. You’ll want to explain the problem or pain point, then introduce and expand on the solution. Keep in mind there are many pre-written product reviews or articles you can buy as private label rights material where you can let the content represent you as your own, and insert your affiliate links into them. Right now, you just want relevant niche articles posted to your blog. They don’t have to be product reviews because you’re just looking to brand your site as a helpful resource for consumers. Day 17: Submit Applications for Approval to Affiliate Programs When it’s time to put the content to use, you’ll need to be able to add your links. Many vendors don’t like to give approval to new affiliates or sites with very little content. So publish the posts and then submit your application so that when they visit your blog, they see valuable content they can give their approval to. Day 18: Plan Your Review Slants There are many different slants. We already discussed a couple of them. The top 10 list is always of interest to consumers. But so is the one problem/one solution slant, where you talk about one item in depth. You can also pit two items against one another, like a this versus that pros and cons list between the two to see which one comes out on top. You can also do a case study of a product if you want to let them see it unfold. Unboxing product reviews are very popular on both YouTube and Tik Tok. People like to see your reaction and the item being put to use from the minute you grab it off the porch after delivery. Day 19: Create a Layout for Your Product Reviews A template or layout can help you speed through the content creation process over time. You may want to create something where, for example, on your top 10 list reviews, you write two introductory paragraphs about the pain point or problem, followed by a subheading for each product and a one paragraph review summarizing each item before linking out to it. Having a template like this is helpful if you ever want to outsource the content reviews to a freelance ghostwriter and it helps maintain a uniform look for your site content that your audience will become accustomed to. Day 20: Outsource or Write Your First Review Your first review will set the tone for your entire site. You should already have niche content published to it, so now you’ll take the layout or template you devised and begin crafting a profit-pulling review that highlights one or more products you hope to earn a commission on.