Creating an Affiliate Marketing Action Plan ~ A MAP

A MAP is what most people are missing in internet and affiliate marketing. It doesn't matter how much information you have, if you can not put it into a concrete and easy to follow system and have a plan to follow it's useless.

I'm really excited about this month. It's really just dawning on me how important it is to have a system and an action plan. We are going to work on four different marketing strategy systems and hopefully provide you with a MAP (marketing action plan) for each.

Mary K mentioned our first system will be

Idea ==> Squidoo Lens ==> Bookmark ==> Article ==> Blog

This is the system I currently use the most and love the most. In fact I am in the process of writing and in depth ebook that will provide the reader with A MAP(affiliate marketing action plan) for this system. So if you enjoy this week's system please stay tuned for the release of my ebook.

Today I'm going to discuss the first two aspects of this system, finding an idea and setting up a Squidoo lens.

Coming up with an idea is a crucial piece of the internet marketing puzzle. It can be as complicated or as easy as you want to make it. There are two schools of thought on idea generation. One side says "do what you love" the other says "choose something that's hot". I think there's great value in doing BOTH. When you are looking for an idea choose something that interests you, but check and make sure people are searching on your keywords and other people are paying for advertising on that keyword as well.

That sounds really complicated but it is NOT. Believe me, this was the part that took me forever to get, and I was really just making it too complicated.

I generally get a lot of my ideas from Amazon. It's a huge marketplace. They've already divided everything into categories, and I'm sure if it's at Amazon, someone is buying it. So go ahead and go to amazon. Click the big orange button on the left and check out all the categories, open up the categories that interest you until you find something fairly concrete you can discuss.

This will be considered your "broad keyword". This will probably NOT get you into the top 2 pages of google because there's too much competition. Let's just go see how much competition there is. Let's say I found a bunch of information on Wedding Planning at amazon. I find planning a wedding pretty interesting so I'm going to choose that as my broad keyword.

Let's go to google now. Go ahead and put your broad keyword in the search box. You are going to take note of a couple things when the search results come back.

• how many sites are returned in your search results
• how many google ads are on the side of the page

If the number of results comes back over 10,000 (and I'm sure it will) you will need to refine your keyword. (this is the process of finding a great long tailed keyword). You are going to take note of the google ads because this will show you if there are people paying money for this keyword. You can bet if there's people paying, there's people buying.

OK ~ so the next step ~ since you have over 10,000 results in your search is to refine your search term or keyword.

Use the Best Keyword Tool (which is free). Put your broad keyword in the search box. When the results come back you want to look through them and pay most attention to the last column of numbers.

You want to find keywords that have under 1000 in that last column. Don't worry about the order of the words, if you can move them around and make an intelligent phrase write it down.

Keep in mind while you are looking for results that you are going to monetize a squidoo lens for this phrase ~ so think about if you can monetize the phrase through amazon (are there books, movies anything for sale on the topic?) Are there other affiliate options you will have for the topic? For example one of the keyword phrases for wedding planning was maui wedding planning. If I was doing a lens on planning a maui wedding I would want to see if there was an affiliate program where I could get paid for referring people to particular flights, hotels, activities etc.

Make sure to think outside of the box ~ there's an affiliate program for just about everything you can think of.

Take the long keyword phrase with less than 1000 in the last column and go back to google. Now you are going to put this phrase in search box in quotes and see what comes up. So for the maui example I put in "plan a maui wedding" It came up with 2,230 results and there are a more than 10 ads on the page. This will be a very good phrase to build a lens around.

That's really all there is to it. It doesn't have to be difficult.

The next step is to build your squidoo lens. We have discussed building Squidoo lenses quite thoroughly during the Squidoo Challenge. You can go back and read the month of January on this blog if you need a refresher on Squidoo.

I do want to make a few points about Squidoo I've learned since we did that experiment.

• Use your keyword phrase in your url. You can break it up with dashes or if it's taken you can add a number at the end (google won't care)
  
• Use your broad keyword AND keyword phrase AND other related keywords in your lens title and introduction module title (it says keep it short, but you can make it long)
• Use your broad keyword and your keyword phrase throughout your lens
• Name your pictures with your keyword phrase (this will help people find your lens through image searches)
• If you use link modules make sure you use your keyword phrase, and other related keywords in your anchor text
• If you use the poll module use keywords as your answers and hotlink them to a product
• Go ahead and bold/italicize your keywords a couple times throughout your lens
  

The more google is able to understand and SEE what your lens is about the more likely it will be to choose your lens to spotlight on page 1. Make sure google knows exactly what your lens is about by using your keywords when you can without making your lens look or sound crazy.

I'd also like to recommend some modules for you to use when creating your squidoo lens. This is the format I use and it serves a few purposes. It allows me to be focused and use my keywords often. It also allows me to break up the text, and add some interesting points or emphasize the important points. It also allows for interactivity within your lens ~ which is what the community of Squidoo is all about right?

Here's my system for quickly creating quality, interesting Squidoo lens.

• Amazon Spotlight
• text/write
• poll module
  
• amazon spotlight
• text/write
• talk bubble or post it note
• amazon spotlight
• text/write
• guestbook

That should get you going ~ remember you want to provide quality information, but if you make your lens too long you will lose readers before the end.

There you have it the first 2 steps in your MAP. I'll be back on Thursday to run through the last steps of this system.

Remember ~ no matter how much information you have it doesn't amount to money unless you DO something with it. Go DO IT!

Jackie Lee :)