Affiliate Case Study

This is a super-quick Case Study for an Affiliate Promotion.

I am going to tell you why I did it, how I did it, how I chose the product and the merchant, how long it took me to set it up, and every other detail about this simple process.

By Affiliate Promotion I simply mean that I will sign up for an affiliate program, promote a product, and earn commission (cha-ching! that means money!) on the product sales.

Let me preface this Case Study by saying that I am a lazy Affiliate Marketer. Or at least, in this case you'll see an extreme example of that ~grin~. Lazy means easy, and easy is good, right? Read on as I share the details of this quick affiliate strategy...

Why the Lazy/Easy Way?

Because I'm busy. Because I dont have a lot of free time to spare on new projects. Because I'd rather be working on my primary websites.

But mainly because... it works.

Time and again I have invested 30 minutes to 3 hours on a simple promotion, and earned commission on that promotion for several years. I call them "streams of passive income", each one generating $50-$600/month consistently and requiring little to no maintenance.

Obviously you can invest a lot of time, and expect a great return, in affiliate campaigns. And to be clear, I do have large affiliate sites that require more development and maintenance time. But the purpose of this Case Study is to share my lazy affiliate strategy.

note: sometimes these lazy little campaigns will turn into larger projects. They are great market testers!

Selecting a Product or Niche

Regular readers may remember my little "cat in the hat" promotion a few years ago, where I made money online when the movie came out during that Christmas season. The idea for that Affiliate Promotion came to me while I was shopping, and saw a kiosk in the store promoting Cat In The Hat merchandise.

The way that I choose products to promote hasnt changed much over the years. I might see a commercial, hear about something from a friend, purchase the product myself - just about everything I run across has the potential to be my next "victim" (lol).

My most recent product of choice is the Digital Picture Frame. I saw this product while browsing through a camera store with a friend over the weekend, and fell in love with it. I decided to research it online when I got back to my desk, and made a quick note to myself and stuck that in my purse.

You'd have to know me... I'm "out of sight, out of mind" 🙄 . At any rate - product selection is that simple. I might come up with the niche first, or the product, but basically it begins with an idea that was sparked by something I saw or ran across online even.

I simply thought, "This looks like a cool product. I'm going to check that out online."

Finding an Affiliate Program for the Product

The first thing I do is look at affiliate programs for the product. I want to make sure there are decent programs before I put any time or effort into researching the niche. Here's what I look for in an affiliate program:

• good product selection - I want my buyers to have options
• good commission structure and decent payout
• internal linking, so I can link directly to specific products
• nice landing pages, easy to use, that will convert well

Anything else is a bonus. These are the things that matter most to me when I am choosing between affiliate programs to promote a specific product or product type.

I walk through the buying process through each affiliate program - or the affiliate link, to be specific - and determine what would suit my potential visitors most. Which means, what would convert best, and have the highest profit potential.

Where do I start looking for Affiliate Programs? Usually the larger networks that I am involved with. For this product, I began at CJ.com (Commission Junction) because I know that they carry other electronics. I could always use my Amazon.com account, but higher payouts can usually be found with other merchants.

Why CJ? Simple. For small "lazy" campaigns, I dont want to worry about multiple small checks and payout minimums. If I have 10-20 merchants in one network, I can manage everything from that one account. I also receive one commission check, which is a lump sum of earnings from all of those campaigns. It just makes sense.

I logged into CJ.com, clicked the "get links" button at the top of the page, and did a search for "digital picture frames". Several merchants came up in that search, and I walked through each one as I described above. The commission ranged from 2%-10%, and some merchants carried one model while others carried several.

I was able to find a merchant that offered a good product selection, internal linking options, an easy ordering process... and 10% commission. Ten percent is great on physical products - particularly electronics.

I was sold on working with that merchant. At this point I am all of 7 minutes into the process, tops. Its time to research the market and see whether it is worth my time to try a "quick & easy lazy promo"...

Researching the Niche or Product

I am a quick 7 minutes into this process. I'm not going to waste more than 10 before I know whether to keep going, or ditch the idea and get back to work. My next stop is Overture's free tool for a quick assessment on the number of searches for this product.

Overture will give you a quick glance at the number of searches done in a month for any given keyword phrase, and an idea of how deep that market runs - or how many similar/related phrases are used.

I tried a couple of variations: digital photo frames and digital picture frames. One had over 12,000 searches, the other more than 17,000. That's at least 400/day, so I decide its worth it to continue the research.

That "quick glance" might have taken 90 seconds, by the way. Nothing fancy here.

Knowing that Overture will lump plural and singular versions of words together, my next stop is the WordTracker (free trial version). I check both phrases at WordTracker, and make note that there are 800+ searches/day for each phrase, in the singular version. (note: Overture & WordTracker results will always vary from each other - they pull their data from different sources)

I'm not creating an entire "Affiliate Site" here, or doing a major promotional campaign, so I'm keeping the research simple. My next step is to see how competitive these two phrases are in the search results, and then pick one to optimize my web page.

I havent created that page yet, mind you - I want to make sure I feel confident I can compete in the top ten search results before I invest any time in setting up a web page or any other promotional element.

I went to Google. Typed in each of the keyword phrases. I looked over the top 10 results. I noted any "authority sites" that would be hard to compete with - such as wikipedia, amazon.com, etc.

I then looked at individual web pages, noted basic "on the page optimization factors". Did they use that phrase in their page title? Did they use that phrase within the content? And next I looked at the number of inbound links to each of those pages (using Yahoo! Site Explorer or "the link command).

After this quick look, I had a general idea what it would take to rank in the top 10 for these two keyword phrases... and picked the one that looked easiest 😀 .

If you want my in-depth methods, see Market Research and Keyword Analysis. Warning though, they are GOOD but will take you much longer than the time I spent putting this entire promotion together (laugh).

Promoting the Affiliate Program

Having picked a Primary Keyword Phrase, I was ready to put together a web page and optimize it. A PMK is simply the keyword phrase you most want your page to rank well for in the major search engines.

I just made a simple template and then uploaded that page to a domain I already have (this one, actually). I logged into my affiliate network, CJ.com, and got the linking code along with pictures and descriptions, for each of the products in that line.

I did edit the formatting of those descriptions, took some pieces out and re-worded others. I also added a descriptive paragraph at the top of the page. I spent about half an hour putting this page together.

I used the Primary Keyword Phrase in the Title Bar, within the content, and in both outgoing and incoming links. I then blogged about this product - specifically how it could be used as a marketing or promotional tool, since that is the topic of my blog - and linked to the page. I used related technorati tags in that post as well.

Next I wrote a short article (around 700 words) and submitted it to 6 popular article directories.

All of that was done yesterday (Monday) after seeing the product while shop browsing on Sunday afternoon. This morning (8am on Tuesday) I see that Google has already indexed the blog post that I published on Monday, though they havent yet indexed the new page that is specifically about the products. Yahoo and MSN havent indexed any of the new pages yet (related to this promotion), though they have noticed the links to those pages... so its just a matter of time.

I'll keep you posted on results 😉

Best,

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