How To Market Products Without Creating Content?

16 Apr 15 5:12 am

Hey Matthew,

AffiloBlueprint is very focused on creating content-heavy websites, because it's mostly an SEO-oriented course.

SEO can be a good way to start off as an affiliate because there's less chance of burning through a whole heap of money on paid traffic (since you're going after free search engine traffic), but you're right -- it does involve creating a lot of content. It can also be quite slow, since it can take a while to feel the benefits of SEO.

The way I look at things, you have two options:

1) You can invest time/money up front in creating content for your site, and then attract free traffic from the search engines indefinitely. This is slower to get started, but once it's up and running the ongoing costs are minimal. This is the AffiloBlueprint method, and it's what I do myself because I'm a tightwad :)

2) You can skip all the initial content creation and just build a very basic website with the goal of collecting people's email addresses. I describe a model like this in this thread here. You would then spend money on getting traffic to this site through paid advertisements. You'll likely need to keep on paying for traffic if you want to keep growing your list.

(This option does need some emails to go in a newsletter sequence, which I guess technically means "creating content", but the thing with these is that they don't need to be unique like search engine content, so you could conceivably use some PLR, or get a ready-made newsletter sequence like AffiloJetpack gives you.)

Or you can do a hybrid...

3) Create a simple squeeze site like in 2) and use it to start making some money, and then use that money to develop content so that you can (in time) replace that paid traffic with free traffic. This is what I would recommend for someone new to affiliate marketing who hasn't made any money yet, and who can afford to spend maybe $1000 to get up and running and making money. The goal here is to see results FAST so that you know it works, so that you don't go and give up.

We don't really have any lessons in Free Affilorama or AffiloBlueprint for creating this kind of site, because it's a bit spendy and scary for brand new folks. This is more AffiloJetpack territory. I'm actually working on the lessons for this in AffiloJetpack right now :)

Did you check into AffiloJetpack before you bought AffiloBlueprint? It's got a big scary price tag (remember I'm a tightwad), but it works out at less than two bucks per email for the newsletter sequence.

17 Apr 15 1:28 am

It sounds like you're talking about "content curation", like all those sites that will compile a big list of the "best digital product shopping carts" or somesuch.

The thing with content curation is that you still need to provide your own value. Eg, you might list a bunch of good shopping cart options, but you also provide your own opinions on those, or discuss the different technologies that each one uses, or talk about who they're most suitable for. Just linking to a bunch of stuff does not constitute "quality content" in the eyes of the search engines. That's what they call "thin" content. So you're unlikely to get any decent rankings, and that's the whole point of creating content in the first place.

There aren't very many ways around it: If you want to go after free search engine traffic, you need to create SOMETHING that provides unique and significant value to people. And you need to do that either by creating that content yourself, or hiring someone to do it for you. Note that "content" doesn't need to be "written articles". It could be images, videos, some sort of app or tool.

But if you don't want to create anything new and valuable, then you're better off biting the bullet and just paying for your traffic, and focusing on building a strong "funnel" that makes sales.

And so far the best "funnel" model we've encountered is the one where you collect people's email addresses and build a relationship with them through email. Not only does this let you make sales through the autoresponder sequence (drip fed emails), but it also means that you can mail your list when there are big promotions or launches happening, and this is how the big guys make the big money.

Also, I feel if I got with the JetPak, i will be missing out on much of the learning process

Believe me, you'll still be learning a LOT if you go the AffiloJetpack route. The only thing you won't be learning is how to create a hundred emails on a topic you might not know anything about :)

03 Jul 15 7:10 pm

I personally create all my own content since I fell I know my subjects very well but rather than spending a lot of time typing my articles I got dragon speech recognition software and after I got everything set and read into the speaker what the program wants so it can understand my speech patterns I just talk and it types.

At first it was a little goofy as I was so used to thinking and typing but in the beginning I would stop and think what I wanted to say but now I just say what I want since I am used to doing it this way and my articles are done in no time. As I said it took me a little while to get used to it since I couldn't type nearly as fast as I could think or talk but now it just flows. One of the best things I bought.