Affiliate marketing can short-cut a lot of things especially product creation (it’s done for you by the people running the affiliate programs).

But obviously there are still lots of pieces left in the internet marketing jigsaw and you need to get as many of those as possible put in place sooner rather than later.

So how can you become profitable with affiliate marketing fast?

You’ll need traffic to your website but we’ll come to that a bit later.

Because before you get people visiting your site, you need something to do once they get there.

You can have the nicest looking site in the world. But if it doesn’t have any meaningful content on it, people will click the back button or close the tab they just opened and never return.

That’s why it’s rare to reach a site now with an “under construction” notice. Because essentially that’s a “who cares” notice. People want whatever it is they’re looking for now, not when you get round to constructing your site.

Create content!

I probably sound like a broken record, constantly going on about content.

But it’s what drives traffic.

Written content – because that’s what Google still indexes best.

Long tail written content – because there’s an order of magnitude less competition on the long tail than there is on the short tail.

Long tail means multi-worded phrases. Which will automatically include the short tail end of things, which in turn is one of the reasons there’s so much more competition for the short tail.

Let’s take weight loss as an example.

If Google’s figures are to be believed, there are currently just under 200 million pages with that exact phrase on them.

Your chance of getting on the first page: 10 in 199 million (the actual quoted figure today).

That’s a scarily low figure – to get on the first page of the results is less than the chance of winning the UK national lottery (that’s roughly 1 in 14 million but the first page has 10 “chances”).

Hmm.

Not likely.

Especially since the first page of the results has some big hitters on it.

So you need to drill down.

“weight loss for men over 50” is better. There are currently “only” about 35,000 results.

Add the word “best” in front and you’ve only got 22,000 other sites to beat.

This is getting almost manageable!

That result was quicker to check than it was to type about it.

With the quote marks, I even got an EzineArticles page. It vanished when I removed the quote marks but that tells me the phrase isn’t particularly competitive.

I like keyword phrases that fall into that category.

They can be nicely profitable.

Regardless of whether or not I can find my own site when I search for it.

Because writing naturally about that keyword phrase, I may only mention it in the title and possibly once in the body of the content.

Much like I’ve done for the title of this post.

Because Google knows the title is the phrase I’m targeting and wanting to be ranked for.

And it knows from the words I use that I’m talking about the profitability of that keyword phrase with regard to marketing products as an affiliate.

i don’t have to stuff the page full of that phrase, over and over and over again.

That used to work but not this century.

The nice thing is that the page will be picked up for lots of related terms.

Because no-one is targeting even a related phrase like “how to become profitable fast with your affliate marketing” – except me, now, but that’s a by-product of explaining things.

Maybe by the time you read this page you won’t get this result:

And granted that’s an extreme example.

But there’s a good chance I’ll show in the results for that almost-unsearched for phrase soon enough. Because Google’s algorithm is trained to hunt down the most relevant content.

Which brings me on to traffic

Weight loss will obviously show up in the keyword planner – just over 200,000 searches according to the planner.

But the longer tail phrase doesn’t show at all.

In fact, I need to change the word “men” to “males” for it to show in the suggestions but that’s OK because Google knows the two words are swappable in a lot of contexts.

Which means it will bring them back in the search results – to the extent that the first result with the word “males” actually says “men” in the title. In fact, none of the top 10 results have the word males in the title even though that was the suggested search.

That means that you’ll get related traffic – you’ll get shown in the results for similar words and phrases.

It may not be much traffic.

And you won’t have a clue what the phrases were because Google now keeps them very close to its computers’ chest and all you’ll see in your stats is the really unhelpful “unknown search terms”.

Again, that doesn’t much matter.

Because we’re talking phrases that are at best typed in once in a blue moon.

Amazon thrives on long tail. It sells lots of individual products, each of which would never be stocked in a retail store as they’d gather their own weight in dust before they sold but when you’re not necessarily carrying stock (or if you are, it’s probably stock you’re being paid to hold) then it doesn’t matter. It’s only the cost of a few bytes of disk storage to “stock” the product.

That’s the same with the kind of long tail pages you’ll be creating to start getting profitable in your affiliate marketing fast.

How fast depends on lots of factors.

But the more content you create, the more you’ll tip the odds in your favour.

So a roughly 1,000 word post like this one will trigger all sorts of different search queries.

And a few of those will trigger a click.

Multiply that by tens or hundreds of pieces of content and it starts adding up to being nicely profitable.

If you’d like more help, take a look at my affiliate marketing site here.