Your content has many more uses than just building links from article and authority websites.
If you plan your articles before you write them, over time you can create the content for an email course, ebook or other products that can be given away to build an email list.
In fact, I know of people who have turned their blog posts into physical books that they now sell or give away at events or business conferences.
Building a list will give you an asset that you can nurture, educate and market to for years to come. There are many schools of thought on what the lifetime value of a single subscriber is but depending on your market, it can be several hundred dollars per name.
It’s a business building step that’s well worth investing your time in. Hungry markets will continue buy your affiliate promotions over and over to satisfy their needs if you give them a good reason to trust you.
How to build your first book
I think the easiest way to demonstrate this process is to look back over the past weeks’ articles. They have included the following titles:
- Better Traffic From Better Keywords
- An SEO-Rich Article Writing Formula
- Leveraging Your Articles to Create Authority Links
Combined with today’s content, we have a set of 4 articles that take you through the process of keyword research, writing articles, link building, building your first product and developing an email list. If you have website, you will probably have 10 or more articles that you can use which will make this process even easier.
Without a great deal of effort, I can review each existing article, rewrite some sections so that they flow together, and introduce more screenshots and images so that fairly quickly I have a 10-20 page book. It would contain everything a reader needs to know about creating content for an affiliate website and making it SEO friendly.
Reviewing my text also gives me the chance to add some more details where I feel the need to expand and even write extra articles to include. I suggest you do this because you don’t want to just give away the exact content that’s already on your site. Make it more specific and add extra research to support your point of view.
Once I have my content adjusted, all I need is some catchy section titles and a name for my new product.
Maybe something like:
How to write content that search engines love and people can’t resist
Sounds pretty catchy for the first thing off the top of my head. Might even download a copy myself!
That was painless wasn’t it? If you want, you don’t need to build a book, you can just set up those rewritten articles as an email course delivered to subscribers using an autoresponder. It’s funny but I don’t hear them talked about as much these days yet a structured email marketing campaign still remains an extremely effective tool. If you wanted to, you could use social media like Facebook or Twitter instead of an autoresponder.
Building your list
If you’re going to build a list, you’re going to need software to manage it. Aweber offers a fantastic range of online tools to help you with every step of the process. Better still, they have a great range of pro templates you can use to make your emails and newsletters look even more professional. Their system allows you to deliver your ebook or a download link as soon as a subscriber opts in.
One other aspect of the Aweber system that appeals to me is their form creator. I’ve always found it difficult to get good looking forms added to my site but Aweber can supply you with the code. All you need to do is copy and paste.
With so many sites containing a sidebar, it’s easy to insert it at the top so it gets the most attention. Make sure you include a product image and some sales copy to catch your reader’s attention.
Another tool that is extremely effective for collecting email addresses is Popup Domination. If you use WordPress, there is a plugin. Otherwise, there is a small amount of code to be added to your website to make it work. Popup Domination will take your Aweber code and automatically insert the fields into the popup form for you.
You can read more about it at their site or if you want to see it in action, you can see it here – Learn WordPress.
What to do with your subscribers
Because your affiliate site is most probably targeted at a specific niche, you can focus your regular newsletters on it and introduce other topics that support or relate to it. For example, if you were writing about the health benefits of chocolate frogs, you might also write about other types of chocolate.
Expressing the positive effects of antioxidant dark chocolate would give you the opportunity to promote a link to a site that pays you an affiliate commission on your sales of it.
The key thing to remember is to keep focused on the niche you are working in. One list of people won’t cover all of your affiliate sites even if they’re in the same market. Sometimes it’s much more effective to write short focused newsletters for each list because you appeal to the reader’s specific interests. Just because someone signs up for more information on chocolate frogs, it doesn’t mean they’re interested in making more money by selling real estate…
Where to begin
To begin this process, I think you need to go back to the start. Have a look at the content you have already written or started writing. If you can, jot down a plan of what you want to achieve e.g. 10 articles in 10 weeks that you can turn into a booklet. Write the article titles based upon your keyword research and then get writing.
Once you’ve completed that, come back to this article and get yourself set up with Aweber and Popup Domination so that you capture every name you can from your website traffic. Then you can start writing your first newsletter to build your credibility and increase your affiliate income.
