30-Day Affiliate Blueprint for Success
When you first start out as an affiliate marketer, your biggest worry is that you won’t know what steps to take, when. You wish you had a blueprint that guided you along the way.
You have to know more than just how to review something. You need to know all of the behind-the-scenes tasks that go into creating a successful affiliate marketing business. Starting an affiliate career doesn’t always take a month.
In fact, you could spend an entire day or two getting all of these tasks done and be on your way to securing profits sooner. But it’s best not to overwhelm yourself in the beginning, so spreading the tasks out into a 30-day planner will ensure you devote ample time to each one so that you’re not rushing the process and making mistakes.
Day 1: Passion, Profits and Persuasion
It’s always a good idea to spend a little time brainstorming some niche possibilities rather than just choosing one based on what others are doing. You want a topic that you feel passionate about, or have some experience with.
Knowing you’ll have to be blogging about the topic day in, day out for years means it has to resonate with you enough to get your audience excited about your recommendations.
Your attitude and the insight you share is what will help persuade your readers to take action and purchase a product through your link. You need to evaluate the profit potential of the market, too by looking up what the industry is poised to earn in the coming years.
For example, if you go to Google and type in anti-aging industry growth, you’ll see how this industry grew from 122 billion in 2013 to over 191 billion by 2019. Look for niches that are trending upward to see whether or not you’ll have a lucrative niche topic.
Day 2: Does the Market Look Ripe for Success?
Once you’ve seen the industry growth stats, dig a bit further and see what the buzz is for the niche. You want one that is frequently talked about, since most (probably all) of your own promotions will be done through online communications.
Look for trends occurring in your niche, and see what the news is about the topic. Is it an evergreen one or something time-based that will eventually disappear or dwindle? You can look on magazine covers, news sites, in forums and elsewhere to see if the niche is getting ample coverage.
Day 3: Check the Availability of Affiliate Opportunities
For both digital and tangible products, you want to check and see what all is available for you to promote within your niche. Keep in mind that many niches will have both (such as survival, anti-aging, and stress).
Other niches, like relationships and marketing, will be primarily digital in nature, while others (like toys) will be strictly tangible. Look on sites like Amazon, Share-a-Sale, and Commission Junction for tangible products and ClickBank, Warrior Plus, and JVZoo for digital ones
Day 4: Pick a SERP-Viable URL
You want your site to have every available opportunity to rise in the ranks of the search engine results pages (SERPs). To give it a fighting chance, start with a keyword-relevant domain name that helps search bots and humans easily identify what the site is about.
Use a keyword tool to brainstorm some words and phrases and then go through a domain registrar to secure one that’s available. Make sure you get one that’s broad enough to cover everything you want to blog about.
For example, if you know you’ll want to blog about many different diets, then don’t get a keto domain that restricts you to that topic. Make sure you dot com domain for your affiliate site.
Day 5: Invest in a Small Blog Hosting Account
You don’t need much in the way of hosting to run a simple affiliate blog. If you call a hosting company, they’ll try to get you to upgrade your order with all kinds of things you don’t need.
Stick to a simple one-site plan. You can expand that in the future if you need to, but for now, it’s not a necessity. You want to keep costs low and also make sure you’re going to stick with the business before you spend more.
There are many different hosting companies. You can choose a household name one like Hostgator, or go with a smaller company that has excellent service, like JET Host PRO.
Day 6: Go Through the WordPress Installation Steps
Once you have your hosting plan and domain, you’ll be able to log into your cPanel and quickly initiate a WordPress installation. This creates a blog on your domain, which is where you’ll house your product reviews as an affiliate.
The install should only take a couple of minutes. It only requires you to input a few details, such as the name you want to use as the administrator, the email you want to use, and so on.
Day 7: Design a Profit-Pulling Affiliate Blog
When the install is complete, you’ll have the bones of a working blog that you can then customize to your liking. You’ll want to first pick a design (or theme) for your site. There are both free and paid ones and many of them are niche-specific, like themes for a cooking niche blog, themes for a blog about parenting, and so on.
Go through the technical set up of your blog by diving into the settings on your dashboard and choosing how you want your blog to operate. Here, you’ll set up pages such as your contact form or affiliate declaration page.
You’ll choose how people can comment, and upload or activate any plugins that you want to use to help with your search engine optimization, affiliate product earnings, and other things.
Day 8: Ensure Adequate Navigation for Your Prospective Buyers
One thing you want to focus on for your day 8 tasks is ensuring proper navigation for both search bots and human visitors, too. Navigation helps people find the content they want and this is done using keywords called tags and by categorizing the content on your site.
Day 9: Find Your Audience’s Most Pressing Pain Point
Before you start blogging, you’ll need to dig in and see what’s haunting your readers. What problems are nagging at them relentlessly? You can find these pressing pain points by visiting forums.
Here, people will discuss their struggles and you can make a list of topics that will help you with your affiliate earnings. You can also check out the comments on competitor blogs or YouTube videos to see what they’re saying.
Another thing that will help is by looking to see what the bestsellers are in your niche. Look for bestselling books on the niche as well as tangible products and digital courses. When you know what’s selling, you’ve pinpointed the blog topics that will convert best for you.
Day 10: Pick a Media Format and Create Your Opt in Offer
What do you feel most comfortable with – text, audio or video? Usually, video and text are the two most popular formats for a lead magnet that will help you build a list of customers who listen to your recommendations and buy products through your affiliate links.
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
Day 21: Publish Your Post to Your Blog
You’ll want to publish your post by carefully checking to make sure it appears the way you want it to. Bold your subheadings, use underlined hyperlinks and make sure there’s enough white space so that your readers don’t feel bogged down in paragraphs that are too lengthy.
When you publish the first review, make sure you use appropriate and relevant tags for the post and put it in a category that helps visitors to your site find it at a later date. For example, if you’re writing about a toy that teaches kids how to tell time, you might categorize that under learning toys or educational toys.
Day 22: Socialize Your Product Reviews Online
After your first (and subsequent) reviews are live, you want to socialize them by sharing the links to them online wherever it makes sense. You want to share them where your audience resides, whether it’s Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or elsewhere.
Day 23: Add the Review to Your Email Autoresponder
After your review is live, you’ll also want to add it to your email autoresponder – whether you’re using a broadcast or follow up email. The key is to send your subscribers to the review so they can absorb the information and guidance, and hopefully follow your recommendations and convert into a sale.
Day 24: Create a Video Review of the Text Version
Most product reviews by affiliates are text-based, mixed with images. But you also want to create a video review of the product whenever possible. YouTube is the second largest search engine online, so this can generate quite a bit of traffic for you.
Day 25: Upload a Graphic to Represent Your Review on Image Social Sites
If you don’t already use it, you may want to utilize a tool like Canva to create graphics that can represent your review on social media sites and apps like Pinterest and Instagram as well as to create image-based thumbnails for your video reviews. You can put an image of the product with wording that goes along with it so it stands out among your competitors.
Day 26: Start a Simple Podcast to Drive Traffic to Your Reviews
Don’t underestimate the power of the podcast. You can create free podcasts on sites like Anchor.fm – and they don’t have to be live shows with a call-in audience, either. You can create episodes that discuss problems your target audience is having where you not only motivate them, but also share insight into products that may help.
Day 27: Secure Review Copies to Create In-Depth Reviews
If you’re working with a niche that has ample digital products, you may want to begin the process of networking with vendors so that you can get your hands on review copies (sometimes before a launch) that will allow you to cover more ground with your review.
If you are reviewing tangible products, you might want to invest some money into buying items you can afford so that you can review them with a hands-on approach. Whenever you earn money on the sale of products you recommend, set aside a bit to reinvest in product purchases for future reviews.
Day 28: Brainstorm Bonus Measures You Can Take to Increase Earnings
Bonuses can set you apart from competing affiliates. If there’s a digital product launch and you have a nice guide or eBook to offer as a bonus when they buy through your link, they may choose you over someone else who merely told them to go buy the product.
Day 29: Create a List of Future Reviews to Be Created
Most affiliates do some record-keeping so that they know what products they’ve reviewed and for what problems, so that they don’t duplicate them later. You can categorize it by the problem, the brand, the price point – or any other important measures you want to sort it by.
Day 30: Assign a Publication Date and Writing Schedule
Savvy affiliate also whip up a publishing schedule by spending a day or so mapping out what they want to cover. This way, you can start each day knowing what content you’ll be creating without having to sit and brainstorm.
Don’t overestimate what you can do. It will only cause you stress and frustration if you make demands of yourself that you know you can’t handle, such as trying to write 5 product reviews per day, seven days a week.
Being a successful affiliate marketer does take a bit of time to allow your brand to become recognizable and the trust to build with your target audience. Be patient and consistent with your action steps and soon, you’ll be scaling your profits easily.