Adult Affiliate Guide

1. Remaining committed to one strategy only

For me, it wasn't a question of who to trust or which strategy to follow, because Mark has always said that building a website is building an asset. My weak point was more about not getting side-tracked by all the promotions and products offered by different people.

In all my eagerness to do affiliate marketing myself, it slipped under my radar just quite how long it takes to start seeing any real results (money I'm talking about!), and I didn't anticipate a long drought of endless hours of effort and commitment with no reward.

It's not that I doubted that the method works. It's just, well, I get a bit fidgety... and prone to distraction. The idea of a quick fix that other products claim to offer began to look all too appealing.

And so I found my commitment wavering, as instead of spending time working on my site I was researching (well, many just arrived in my inbox) alternative options and pondering those.

Luckily for me, others around the office were able to set me back on track with a few sharp words of advice!

2. Choosing a niche

It takes one quick glance at our forum to tell you that this is a big deal for many people. After all, if we get it wrong here, it's going to make it a lot harder to carry out the rest of the work needed...

I started with the intention of choosing a niche that I have some interest in (and preferably, some sound knowledge in). But then when you factor in competition, search volume, buyer intention phrases, and gravity... it's not that straightforward.

Call me boring or stupid, but I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for potential niches that I had both interest and some knowledge in.

And so the research process of choosing a niche, keywords and products to promote that hold some profitable potential had me running around in circles, and spending a lot of time on what at first glance appears to be a minor task.

3. Building a website

Imagine you've got a page on your website that has attracted a whole lot of good links, and is attracting a lot of traffic, but you need to move it to a different place on your website.

What can you do?

Obviously you don't want to delete the page and simply recreate it somewhere else... you'll lose all those great links and all that PageRank as well.

The solution is the 301 redirect. This takes all traffic and links arriving at your old page and redirects them to the new page. Your links are safe, your pagerank is safe, and your visitors get to where they need to be.

To make one, you just need to paste this piece of code into your .htaccess file (if you're using an Apache server, which you probably will be.)

Make sure you've created your new page first!

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

Save this, upload, and your redirect should be in place! Easy as that! This method is the most powerful because you can redirect entire folders/directories, or even entire websites with it.

But if you're not sure how to edit your .htaccess file, you can also paste this piece of code into your old page. Make sure you've deleted all the old content from the page first.

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

When you save the page, you have to save it as a .php page. You also need to be sure that there's no .html version of the same page in the same place, because the browsers will display the .html version instead of this one. Once you've got all that, upload it, and the redirect should start working immediately! This method is only good for redirecting one page. (If you need to redirect multiple pages you must insert it into every page you want to redirect.)
Other types of redirects

#1: Find out which sites are linking to your competitors' websites.

Sites that are linking to your competitors are probably going to be interested in linking to you as well, (provided your site is as good as your competitors' sites, of course!).

Use Traffic Travis's Backlink Checker tool on the top-ranked sites for your keywords. See who is linking to them, and then contact these sites to see if they're interested in recommending your site to their readers too. Perhaps the links come from directories, in which case you can submit your site as well. Perhaps the link isn't free, and you have to sell out a little cash to get your site linked to. In any case, you know that these links are helping your competitors get the top ranked spots in the search engines, so chances are good that the links will help you too.

#2: Build or provide top-quality content

One of the best and most effective ways of getting links from another website is to create some unique, high-quality content. Not only will you attract links naturally from other sites, it also makes it a lot easier to ask for a link if you can provide some sort of benefit for the other site's visitors.

You might also try offering to write a unique article for the other website in return for a credit or a link. That way you're offering them something valuable, and you get a valuable backlink. This kind of link is good because you'll probably be one of just a few links on the page.

#3: Social Media Link Building

There are a lot of different social media sites on the internet these days. These sites are great for both click-thru traffic and helping your search engine rankings. Some of my favourites are:

* Squidoo.com
* Hubpages.com
* Twitter.com
* Digg.com
* Del.icio.us
* Wikipedia (very good if you can get links from here)
* 43things.com

There are many, many more of these sites out there. They don't all work in the same way, but they can all help.

The following blog post is a guest post by internet marketing expert Matt Carter.

Hey everybody, in this post I am going to reveal what I have learned to be one of the biggest success killers of any new online business. You may well have done this, or are doing it right now, so I encourage you to read this post carefully.

There is an old saying that goes something like this: "A Jake of all trades but a master of none".

Most of you will know what that means, but for those of you who may not, it refers to someone who tries a lot of different things and reaches a level of mediocracy at them all, but never really becomes an expert at any of them.

The reason for this is because their efforts are divided, so the time needed to master one skill is never allocated to it, due to competing demands.

So what's this got to do with your online business? Actually the saying couldn't be more true for a lot of people online. I am referrring to people who hop from one opportunity to the next, almost as often as the wind changes.

What I encourage people to do when they are building an online business, is to pick one main avenue of making money, and dedicate yourself to that, and fight the urge to jump onto the next new thing that comes out.

For some people, like it was for me, it will be to focus on getting good at search engine optimization, to such a level that you know what keywords you can get to the top of Google with, actually get them there and turn that free traffic into cash!

I'm not against purchasing new tools and products to help you become a master in this 'trade' you choose, as there are plenty of great software tools, products, coaches etc...that are vital to help you get there.

What I am saying, is if you choose to dedicate yourself to SEO, then resist the urge to start getting caught up in PPC Marketing, Video Marketing, Offline Media, etc...and focus your time and money only on things that will help you master SEO.

So far we have focused on paid advertising (pay-per-click) and search engine optimization as ways of getting visitors to your site, but these certainly aren't the only ways to get traffic. In this lesson we show you how to get traffic to your website using alternative methods.

In fact, successful affiliates usually make a point of diversifying their traffic sources. Relying too heavily on any one source of traffic leaves your business vulnerable to the whims of the search engines, or to dramatic shifts in PPC costs. If you've got all your eggs in one basket when it comes to getting traffic to your site, you could find yourself in trouble when the situation turns sour. So here are some ways to mix things up a bit:
Links from other sites

Getting links to your site is a hugely important part of being a successful affiliate. Not only do they deliver a little bit of traffic to your site independently of the search engines, they also help your search engine rankings.

Even though linking is a huge part of search engine optimization, try not to think about links purely in terms of the SEO benefit they'll deliver. You may be able to get links from sites that are low-PR, or that use no-follow tags to block the flow of pagerank, but which deliver a lot of high-quality traffic to your site. Always remember that the point of SEO is to get visitors to your site, and that any link that delivers traffic to your site is achieving that goal, regardless of whether it helps you move up the search engines.

Posting on forums and blogs

Forums and blogs can be excellent places to promote your website, provided the promotion remains subtle and as part of other useful content that you've added to the conversation.

If you simply bombard a random forum with your URLs you'll be banned. Similarly, if you post pointless comments as badly disguised self-promotion, your posts will be deleted.