How to make money online (The Plan)

Making money with affiliate marketing online

Make money with Amazon & affiliate marketing

Making money online can be accomplished with some determination, but it is NOT always easy. Break out a notepad and let's take a few notes.

Some online skills are necessary unless you plan to buy the services needed to create and market websites to sell products and services. We offer more good information on affiliate marketing programs here. We discuss it from the marijuana perspective, but the information there is invaluable.

How to make money online

I know some people attempt to make money simply by getting their affiliate links from a merchant and then constantly posting those links to their social media sites in hopes of someone clicking on their link and making a purchase.

Many people find that kind of "marketing" annoying as these posts add very little to any conversation and pose only to get you to click (on their post), sometimes not knowing you are simply being redirected to their merchant and now their cookie is attached to you if you ever do go buy from them. In some ways I find that much less effective, constantly posting to social media platforms while hoping for a click. Anytime you are trying to "fool" someone does NOT help you in getting them to buy.

So take NOTE: Writing original content is KEY to not only getting organic search traffic, but also in obtaining the interest & trust of people to read and click on your recommended links.

Remember, we are trying to get someone to buy from you or your link, so we do NOT wish to irritate them. On the contrary, I want to create an image of a trusting, warm and friendly website... Hopefully one that they will also tell their friends about - Right?


Getting Started with Your

Affiliate Marketing Plan


You WILL have to invest both your time and some money in getting your new business started.

Sign up at Amazon.com for their affiliate program. Congratulations! If you did this or have an Amazon Affiliate Account already, you are on your way! This part is FREE & easy.

Leverage the power of selling Amazon products

For the sake of this "plan", we will be using Amazon as our example, but this same process would apply for almost any affiliate program you join to sell another company's products. This website (weedsthatplease.com) is made up of many different merchants. We write original content for specific keyword categories and work to organically RANK on the first page of Google and other search engines which will give us very qualified trafffic (buyers) to our pages. This is called SEO or search engine optimization, this is another area where it pays to have a little knowledge about website marketing.

There are many, many ways to get traffic to your websites, but this is the most reliable and sends very qualified and targeted visitors to your pages that want to buy what you reviewed or recommended. It helps a great deal if you know something about the categories you select. That helps you write excellent content on those topics. Of course you can also hire people to write the content for your pages as well.

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Choosing affiliate products that make money

Decide on a category. Maybe you already know the products you would like to sell, review or recommend to all those that visit your webpages. If not, you can pick from these areas if you need help getting started...


* Electronics * Appliances * Automotive *

* Fitness * Beauty * Fashion *

* Home Decor * Kitchen * Bathroom *

* Health * Fitness * Parenting *

* Technology * Hobbies * Outdoor *

We want to select an item or product category based on your knowledge or one based on a popular niche. Some of your success is based on these selections.

Buy a domain name (i.e. www.trulyfabulousreviews.com) or something similar. Stick with an actual .com name for best results. You can check for availability of domain names and buy those from HostGator - You will also need to HOST your domain (website), HostGator offers excellent hosting plans as well.

You want your domain name to reflect what you are trying to sell. If you are attempting to sell a variety of different items on one website, then you need a name that reflects that plan (like the example I gave above). Otherwise you can buy domains based solely on the specific group of products you are targeting like www.highperformancepartsreview.com - Can you see the difference? You can be very general or you can be very defined in your domain name choice. There are advantages to both approaches.

You are going to be offering the products of your choice which you will now create a dedicated 15 to 40 page website revolving around numerous product categories you will choose from Amazon. Why 15 pages instead of 40? This will most likely depend upon the depth of the product line you selected. It is NOT difficult to exceed a 40 page website depending upon how broad the category is that you selected. Try to avoid what would be considered "saturated" markets, like sunIndoores... Too many competitors, too little money for the effort.


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Cannabis & marijuana weed movies

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Affiliate Marketing Plan Drill-Down

Create a website, have one built for you, or get a FREE website template you can populate with your original content. Just do a search for free website templates and take your pick. There are so many to choose from, some much easier to work with than others. Make sure they are "mobile-friendly" design templates. Alternately, you can quickly learn and use the most popular web platform available which is WordPress.

Do NOT worry that you are not the biggest website or the only website in this space, we will take from the best websites and leave the rest. You are attempting to be a smaller version of the best websites you can find on your topics (products). If you like the look and feel of another popular website, use it. As an example you can click on the banner ad above which is a single page dedicated to marijuana themed movies. It is not the biggest or the most popular, but it does sell marijuana DVDs from Amazon none the less. A percentage of our website visitors are interested in these items.

Now that we know our category let's make an example that illustrates how we put it all together with the products within our chosen category.

Professional headphones

EXAMPLE: We want to sell electronics, specifically for this website example, we want to sell headphones (a popular item right now). If we simply jump into Amazon we find that this is a fair category with many, many products we can sell. How do we know? We went to Amazon and did a search for headphones and we learned a lot already... Let's look.

When you searched for headphones take a look on the left when you get the results. You see they provided us with the full categories for this product plan.

First of all, we have "over ear" headphones, we also have "earbuds" and then "on-ear" headphones too. We look further down and see they offer "wireless", "microphone", "noise cancelling", and more. I did not see gaming or video gamer headphones (a great category!). Now I can create an entire website on ALL these product categories or simply just the "Sony" offerings. This helps me decide what my specific webpages will be focussing on.

If we wanted to offer or review all of these headphones and brands, we easily have a 50 page website dedicated to ALL the types of headphones offered. Or again, we can focus just on gaming headphones or headsets, wired and wireless. Once you are an affiliate you can login and do a product (link) search and Amazon will show you each product as well as your affiliate link for those products. Now you use a photo of the product and your affiliate link plus some great original content you provided and BOOM there is product page number one for your new "Best headphones reviewed" website.

So now we go to Google and search for "best wireless gaming headsets" (or whatever) and we get the top 10 websites for these products (generally speaking). Now things get a bit more exciting as we try and pick apart why they are on top and what we can do to compete with them on a smaller scale. If we type that same search into SEMrush, it tells us the volumes of searches for those terms - How valuable is that? Now we can tell if there are enough searches to warrant building these webpages.

SEMrush Software is a tool many professionals use to discover keyword buy phrases for the products we are focusing on. We can put in the top websites we discovered and SEMrush will tell us their primary keywords and so much more competitive data we can use as we create and build our dedicated product webpages!

This product allows us (in many ways) to effectively spy on the competitors who are already succeeding organically in the search results. Once we have their keyword phrases, titles & descriptions, it helps us build our own successful pages for the same products or categories. Sure, you can get some of this data in other ways, but they are not as effective and they are much more time consuming which we know equals money.

Now go and replicate what you just did with your next product category website. It will take time (4 to 6 weeks or more) for the search engines to digest your website and pages. While you are waiting, you have already started on your next category or product idea. You come back in 6 weeks to see what has sold, in the meantime you have created 3 more websites - And so your success continues to grow in many topics, products and categories. Can you see this working for you now?

And don't forget to give your Amazon affiliate link to every one of your friends & family to use when they shop, it all adds up! I truly hope this information helped you understand how you can make affiliate money online working with companies like Amazon. Peace & Good luck!

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