A savvy marketer will place a review page onto an older domain and with only marginal marketing efforts his or her parasite page will rank for the chosen keywords very quickly. Although parasite hosting frustrates a lot of companies who try very hard to market their sites, it's a quick way for the little guy trying to make a buck with online marketing.
Parasite hosting takes advantage of the semi-new term "domain trust". Essentially, the older your domain, the more Google likes it, and the higher it will rank for practically any term. I have a few domains that were originally registered in 1997 and 1998, and I can honestly say "trust rank" is very real. I can place a single page on those domains and with just a handful of back links, they will begin ranking for the keywords I choose.
The easiest way to promote any product as an affiliate marketer without spending money on advertising is to use parasite hosting. Although there are countless sites to use for your parasite hosting, the most popular right now is Squidoo.
At the time of this writing, according to Yahoo site explorer, Squidoo has 270,000 back links and over 4,000,000 indexed pages (and we all know there are significantly more back links than what search engines reveal).
So, can you imagine making a new website and trying to compete with a parasite page on a domain that already has 270,000 back links pointing towards it? It would be very tough to do, but it certainly isn't impossible, and that doesn't mean you can't rank in the top ten results. It just means that you have your work cut out for you.
If you want to try parasite hosting, I would suggest you create at least five lenses at Squidoo about the product you want to promote. Your next step would be to establish back links pointing to these lenses with the proper anchor text for the keywords of your choice. I would recommend at least a dozen social bookmarks and perhaps three or four articles distributed to a few dozen article directories.
The only downfall with parasite hosting is you do not own the domain. If the website ever shuts down, you will lose your hard work, but that's the risk you take when working with this type of marketing. I believe the risk is definitely worth the reward, especially when you don't have to work so hard at marketing when compared to building a brand new website.
Before you head over to Squidoo and start creating lenses, you should do some research and find a solid product to promote. The easiest way to get started promoting products is to sign up at ClickBank and create a user account. After you've signed up, take a look through their available products in the marketplace.
Remember, the best products to promote will be in one of three categories: health, relationships, or finance. Although you can make money in other niches, these three are the power markets that will always have an ever-increasing customer base. Any marketing work that you perform in these categories will never be lost because these niches will remain strong as long as the human race exists!
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Most successful products average a 1% conversion rate. That is, for every 100 visitors to a website, only 1 is going to make a purchase. That is a very low rate.
Based on a 1% conversion rate, if you are buying traffic, your clicks need to be costing you substantially less than the commission you will earn on an actual sale. If every click is costing you $1 and your commission is only $95 per successful transaction, then it's a losing scenario and you need to tweak the campaign in order to squeeze out more profits (or drop the campaign altogether).
If you are getting free traffic, then a 1% conversion rate is fine. But increasing the amount of traffic via free methods will be a long haul and you must take into consideration your time when building free traffic streams.
Because of the above listed factors, I don't like selling products online. My preferred method of marketing online is lead generation. And that doesn't mean it should become your preferred method, it's just that I am better at CPA than I am with any other type of marketing. It suits my style of marketing.
There are two primary types of lead generation campaigns: incentive and non-incentive. While both types have their pros and cons, I prefer incentive-approved campaigns.
You cannot offer a reward for non-incentive campaigns. You cannot say to a website visitor, "enter your information here and I'll give you a free book!" If you "incentivize" a non-incentive offer, you will probably get your affiliate account terminated. Non-incentive traffic generally results in higher quality leads. Because of this, the payouts are typically higher for all non-incentive campaigns.
On the flip side, incentive-approved campaigns can be used to squeeze a customer or otherwise force them to take an action in order to have a specific reward. Do you have a great book on fly fishing that you would like to give away for free? Great! Add a description about your book and then tell your visitor, "Enter your information here and you will get a copy of my book for free!" When the visitor submits their information, you can have a link that allows them to instantly download your fly fishing ebook.
To make an incentive campaign work smoothly, it is a good idea to install what is called a "post back script". When your network generates a successful lead from one of your affiliate links, they can "post back" to your website that the lead was successful. And with a properly installed script, your website essentially knows that the person completed the offer and will then allow them to download the ebook.
Offering a free book in exchange for a consumer's information can be very profitable. I typically average a 30% conversion rate for my free ebooks, and I get anywhere from $1 to $2 per lead. If you do the math, giving away a free book can be more profitable than trying to sell a product.
Like any method for making money online, you need a lot of traffic to make substantial profits with the free book strategy. But if you have invested significant time into learning how to market, then you probably already know many ways to acquire traffic.