This marks the first post in a long series of posts . I will be creating a new affiliate marketing website with the sole intention of providing quality, conclusive and relevant reviews in a niche of my choice. I will then be marketing particular products from Amazon.com on that site.

Can it be done?

Oh, yes it can! I am what you would call an absolute beginner. However, over the course of this year and next year, I will be implementing various skills and strategies that I have acquired from online communities on Facebook and reading great post on Internet.

I am also very lucky to have a successful affiliate marketer as a close friend. He will be guiding me through the various challenges I encounter.

#1: WHAT I WILL NEED.

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• Find a Niche or a Sub-Niche that has a lot of interest and buyer intent but at the same time does not have very high competition so we can rank easily.
  I have already identified this niche. I have chosen the Better Sleep Niche Sleep Niche. I will also be covering other sub-niches within the better sleep niche.

• Keyword Research .
  This is the most important part of Affiliate Marketing. You need to identify Keywords that have low competition and high monthly search volume. Another important factor to also consider, that most people ignore, is making sure that when you put the keyword into Google there are no related and no featured snippets. This usually take up "position zero" of the first page of Google and therefore, you can lose a lot of traffic even if you rank number one.
  

  
  

Featured Snippets

• Keyword Research Tools .
  If you are on a budget like I am, you can take advantage of free keyword research tools such as #Google Keyword Planner, #Moz and #KWFinder which also offers a free plan. However, for best results I will be using the paid plan on #Ahrefs.com and #Majestic.com.

• Website/ Wordpress Theme.
  One of the easiest ways to build a website is using Wordpress. You can build a website easily using drag and drop features from plugins. You can also use the same plugins to expand the functionality of the website.

• Domain Name & Domain Hosting.
  A (.com) domain name normally goes for $10 a year. It can be cheaper than that too if the hosting company is running a promotion or if you use a coupon. You will also need to purchase a hosting package. You can get the cheapest package that may go for around $10 - $15. Some of the hosting companies I would recommend are #Hostgator, #Bluehost and #GoDaddy.

#2: MY GOALS

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1. Post at least 1 product review every single week targeting high search volume keywords.
2. Post informative articles targeting keywords and for internal link building.
3. Promote articles on social media - Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google +.
4. Extensive link building campaign to the main domain page and also to articles on the website.
5. Spy on competitors to see what they are doing and if I can implement the same strategies into my website.

#3: LINK BUILDING

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This is by far the most important aspect of affiliate marketing. You may have the best quality content but all those efforts may not be rewarded if nobody sees it. Google takes a lot into consideration when ranking sites on the SERP's.

One of those is the amount of domains linking back to your content. Not only the number of links but also the quality, the relevance and also the trustworthiness of those domains. Google takes this to mean that other respected domains or websites find your content to be great. Therefore, if other high ranking websites like your content then it must be very helpful.

The more of these links to you main domain and posts, the better.

There are several ways to get links but not all of them are good or effective. I will focus on the main two.

• White Hat - This involves a lot of hard work. It involves building links the "legal way". You can request people in your own niche to link back to your content. Guest posting. Answering questions on Quora and dropping a link your own content. Promoting your content on social media and hoping that people link back to it. This is effective but takes a long time and a lot, and I do mean a lot of hard work especially for a beginner.
• Black Hat - This is the common method used by most affiliate marketers. However, Google frowns upon this and if discovered you are likely to have you money site penalized and de-indexed. Trust me you do not want that.

CONCLUSION

In Affiliate Marketing #2 I will being going more in depth into Keyword Research. What are long-tailed keywords? What is Keyword Difficulty? What do you need to rank for a certain Keyword?

All of this and more in this new Affiliate Marketing Series. Take the journey with me as I work towards 5- Figures a month. If I can do it, so can you.

Thank you for your time reading this.

Your awesome.

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Will you #Follow, #Upvote and #Resteem and reward a minnow. :))

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