A Theme-Based Website, Part 3- Choosing Affiliate Programs

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In parts 1 & 2 , I determined that developing a theme-basedsite is a great way to generate income.
It's going to be aWINing situation for the search engines, my visitors, mymerchants and ME. I've chos...
In parts 1 & 2 , I determined that developing a theme-basedsite is a great way to generate income. It's going to be aWINing situation for the search engines, my visitors, mymerchants and ME.
I've chosen a theme that I know (or canfind out about) and love. I've found lots of keywords thatare related to my theme and have lots of ideas for goodcontent to offer my visitors.
Now I need to find merchantswho sell products, programs or services that areappropriate for my site and will fit with my content.Once again, I'm going to look at my list of keywords. Since people are going to use these words to search and I've used them to write my "keyword focused" content for each page of my site...
it only makes sense that the products and services I want to represent should also be related to these keywords. That will help me to seamlessly recommend the product within my content and really use my content to presell.
There are several ways to find merchants. Technique 1: I'll do a search on my keywords at severalof the engines - Google, AltaVista, Overture, or any ofthe others.
Then I'll have a quick look at the first ten or twenty listings. If I use SiteBuildIt!, the Manager willautomatically show me ten related sites for each keyword.(You can take the quick tour of SBI! at...http://quicktour.sitesell.com/assist3.html ) Wherever youget the listings, some will be merchants, whileother are content sites.
(Of course some are alwaysirrelevant. Lots of room for my theme-based site!) I'm going to take a look at the merchants' sitesand see if they have something I'd like to offer myvisitors and if they have an affiliate program.
If so,great. They go on my "keep in mind" merchant list for thatkeyword.
Next I can explore the content sites. Maybe I'llfind ideas for content, but I'm mainly here to see if THEY link to any merchants.
If so, I can click through and see what I find. Can you see the beauty of this? I'm going tohave content ideas and possible merchants all organized bykeyword.
That's going to make things pretty easy when I goto build my "keyword focused" pages, no?Technique 2: I'll do a search for each of my keywords,plus the word "affiliate", like this... +Italian wine+affiliate.
Or I can try this... affiliate wine.
Whatwill come up are either merchants with affiliate programsor content sites that are affiliates. Again, for themerchants, I'll see if I like their product and affiliateprogram.
For the content sights, I'll check their links. Technique 3: Now I'm going to check the directories.
There are a lot of affiliate program directories out there. I'll check with a few of the best, likeAssociatePrograms.com, Refer-It.com, CashPile.com andAssociate-It.com.
The directories list programs bycategory, so I'll go right to the catagories that fit mysite theme and see if there is any program I like. They often have reviews as well, which I'll check.Technique 4: One more thing I could do is to joinaffiliate networks.
These networks provide merchants withaffiliates and vice-versa. It's a good place to getexposure to a wide variety of merchants.
I'm sure to findsome I haven't run across already, so I'll check to see ifany programs are featured that will work for me. I canjoin Commission Junction, BeFree, LinkShare, and/orClickTrade.
That took a bit of work, but now I'm ready to narrow downmy choices and weed out merchants with less than greatproducts, or poor affiliate programs. I'm going to bepretty particular.
The products I choose to represent willreflect on me. And the quality of the affiliate programwill be reflected in my commission checks.
I want myvisitors to be happy and come back to my site. And I wantfair compensation for delivering such valuable, presold customers to my merchants' sites.In part 4 of this series, I'll explain how best to build a theme-based site.
Questions?mailto:[email protected] Article Tags: Affiliate Programs, Content Sites, I'll Check Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .