I don’t read a ton of affiliate marketing blogs, because I feel like most of them are written by affiliates how haven’t made a dime in the industry. However, there are a couple really saavy fellows out there that do know what they are talking about, and it helps to get the creative ideas going by reading. So here’s who I like and why:
ShoeMoney.com - Gotta love the Shoe, if for nothing else than entertainment value. He definitely knows what he is doing, but I’m not sure that he’s the most helpful for the newbie. A lot of the guest authors write about affiliate techniques that are fairly advanced (like the recent one about how to write an informational product). Don’t get me wrong, I love the information it’s just hard to put into practice sometimes.
UberAffiliate.com - He doesn’t write that often but if you want to learn about affiliate marketing then I would highly suggest going back through his article archives, there is some really good information. In addition he has compiled one of the VERY BEST affiliate resources on the website in his Affiliate Marketing Guide.
AffBuzz.com - This is a nice compilation of RSS feeds on the top Affiliate Marketing Blogs out there. If nothing else, sometimes I’ll go here to see if anybody has written something interesting. Affbuzz is a good way to have your bases covered if you don’t want to go to all of the individual affiliate blogs.
I’ve been using KeywordSpy for about 3 years now and all in all it’s a pretty handy tool. Keywordspy is not necessarily a groundbreaking tool (there are a ton of keyword suggestion tools out there), so much as a hammer in a toolbox. You need Keywordspy because it’s where you should start all your PPC campaigns. By using their keyword or URL keyword tool you’ll have a nice list of 1000′s of keywords to start your PPC campaign with. As an affiliate why toil over hours and hours of keyword brainstorming when what you really need to do is get a campaign up and running.
I won’t go into the whole itty bitty details of why you should use KeywordSpy, but instead I’ll just tell you how I use it. Lets say the affiliate campaign that I want to run is for shoe retailer, all I have to do is go to KeywordSpy and enter in the URL “Zappos.com”. Hit enter and up pops about 100,000 keywords that they are bidding on, keywords they rank for organically, their top competitors, and the approximate click volume that those keywords get. I emphasize “approximate” because it is definitely a floating, not to be wholly depended upon, estimate. Continuing on, I download the list, put in another URL like “shoes.com” and repeat the process. In about 10 minutes I have a working list of 100,000+ keywords and I’m ready to start trimming the fat, and really narrowing down the keywords I want to use. If you’ve been following my advice at all, that means getting rid of any super-low volume keywords.
There are a ton of other keyword tools out there, but KeywordSpy has been around for just about the longest, so until someone comes out with something truly game-changing KeywordSpy will definitely be in my toolbox. Like I said, not going to make you 1000′s of dollars overnight, but will save you 100′s of hours in which you can use to make 1000′s of dollars.
