Now I'd do it a little differently these days, since I've found more tools.
The blueprint for this is just a few steps:
- Do your research and discover a long-tail niche that is underserved. Find the keywords with high KEI and low R/S ratios with a product that is in demand.
- Out of that homework, research for the data you need to write a half-dozen good articles. If you already have PLR on this, that's even better - but they'll still need to be re-written so it sounds like you and not a translated version.
- Get a CMS to set up a mini-website just with that original content. Link this up properly to your affiliate site and have scattered internal linking so that the viewer is invited (along with search engines) to check out the other pages on that site. This can be a subdomain or subdirectory on a hosted site (not a free web host, as these can disappear.) Make sure you plug-in analytics to this before you leave it.
- Now spin those articles into several versions and post them to the main article directories which actually do send traffic. Set up your system for this so you can repeat this process.
- Set up Hub pages, Squidoo, and half-a-dozen or more high-SERP sites with variations of those articles and linking back to your main site again.
- Also from that homework above, get out and contact the relevant blogs which have conversations going about this subject area. Make sure you can leave your website address at each one - and leave deep-linked pages, not necessarily the front page.
Now, you can pretty this up by putting all your content into video's and post these, then embed them into your pages at #3. Then come back and link them into your remote hubs at #5. Some article sites will also accept video's. And you can go find other video's on YouTube and others to leave your video as a response - where it's appropriate.
Just make sure your posted videos always links back to your main site.
Your squidoo and hub pages can also have videos, which makes them more interesting - and gives you traffic to your video pages as well.
A follow-up would also be to then take that site and make it into an ebook (pdf is best) to give away on your site for an opt-in gift, and then also post that on the various doc-storage sites as a paid download.
Affiliate marketing is actually rather easy. And you just keep repeating the above for each niche you find, testing and tweaking to improve the results according to what your analytics say.
The only secret in this is how long it takes someone to find out about how to do it. But right now, it's a piece of cake - other than in how long it takes to do all of the above thoroughly and get your actual results.