Advanced Affiliate Marketing

We have already discussed in Lesson #1 about how people shop.  If you haven’t taken the time to do Lesson #1, please go back and do it.

This lesson is about Why people buy from You.

You may not think that you are an expert on anything, but the truth is that you really are.  Even if you have never gone to school, or had any kind of job, you are an expert on everything that you do.

So, if you are a stay at home mom, for instance, you know a lot about child related topics, school related topics, and home related topics to say the least.  That doesn’t even include the training you had on the guitar when you were a kid, or your stint in the Olympics.

What you need to do is establish yourself as an authority in your favored topic.  This does take some time, but the more confidently you write, with personal experience behind your writing, the more convincing you will be.  Your authority will be much better established if you write your lenses in focused groups.  I will not begin to theorize here on which is the best way to link them.  But each lens should lead to another in the series of lenses on that focused topic.  We will call this focused group of lenses an authority cluster for lack of a better term.  You can link them in a link wheel, or in another manner but the most important thing is to write them in a group.  I would say a minimum of 10 lenses per topic is best.

The idea is to get people to trust your word on a specific topic and to look to you as an authority on that topic.  I mean, really, why should I trust you?  I have been burned many times before, and many people online (and offline) are scammers.  You have to earn their trust.

Now, using the example above, you want to sell items that you know something about related to your topic.  Our mom above, knows a lot about guitars, guitar lessons, guitar accessories, and learning to play guitars from her guitar training as a kid.  So she decides to write a focused group of 10 lenses on microniche (teeny tiny niche) topics within the guitar niche.  On each lens, she can focus attention to a reliable company that sells guitar related products.

The tighter the niche, the more successful you will be at selling products.  One lens can be about which guitar strings are the best for beginning guitar lessons, for instance.

Over time, you will build a following of people who are searching desperately for information on your topic, and the more your name comes up, the more they are likely to trust you.  Soon they will just look for your articles on this niche because they already know that you are an expert that they can trust.

For this assignment, which should take two weeks, review your collection of lenses.  Decide if you want to work with the lenses that you already have or you want to start from scratch.  You can also add to a group of lenses that you already have.

Now put together a niche group of a minimum of 10 lenses on the same niche topic.  Each lens can be about a different microniche inside the niche, but they should be closely related.  Use a topic that you have feelings about, because your passion comes across as confidence in your writing.  Your lenses should be well researched for keywords in your topic to help them rank better in SEO.  Your goal is to get people to go from lens to lens, eventually buying something off your lens.

Picture is from Mai Le

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