For those of you just joining us, you’ll want to review the past few weeks worth of posts about Affiliate Marketing - this post expands upon the framework we’ve already laid out…

At this point in the process, you should have one or two niches identified that are definately profitable. With little effort, you’ve been able to make a little money and learn a whole heck of a lot about the niche. It’s time to dip your big toe into the pool and see if the water is warm enough to swim in.

Once you know that a niche is hungry and profitable, it’s time to start playing hardball. You are going to build a “portal” around your niche. You will be shifting your focus off of monetization and onto list building. With your own opt-in mailing list for this niche, you have the power to make money on demand - the larger your list, the more money you can make.

You’ve already done the market research by selling a product in this niche. You already know it’s profitable (heck, if you made money by simply buying some traffic and throwing it at an affiliate product, imagine how much you’ll make if you actually put some effort into it

What you have learned over the past few weeks is something that I like to call the Marc Quarles Market Research By Doing Method (look, I’m left-brained… if you want a jazzier name, too bad!) So don’t sit around and worry about investing a little time or money into it… we already know it’s got potential, right?

You’re going to build a simple, 5-page website with 100% unique content centered on your niche. Nothing big, nothing fancy. In fact, if you’re a smart person, you’ll get a free copy of Charles Heflin’s “The Plan” PDF which will give you an excellent structure to use when building these portals (Charles’ PDF is geared towards Adsense website building, but the plan works exceptionally well for niche websites regardless of how you’re going to monetize it.)

If you follow the plan, you’ll be writing 5 articles that will become the nucleus of your niche website. However, since our emphasis at this point is to build our list, you’ll be adding an opt-in box to both the top of each page, and the bottom of each page.

Don’t even think about adding Adsense or some other monetization system to this new site. Just build your 5-page site according to “The Plan”, add your opt-ins to the top and bottom of each page, and post a link or two to get the search engines attention to it.

While you’re waiting on Google, Yahoo, and MSN to visit your site and index your pages, you’ll be doing a number of things ahead of time so that when your 5 pages are indexed in the Big Three, you’ll be able to take the next step immediately.

(On a side note - how long does it take to get indexed in the top 3? One of the people competing in my Search Engine Indexing competition got a brand new 25 page website indexed in Google in 35 hours… and they’re not “supplemental results”, either!)

Item #1 - if you are an adequate writer, write 10 more 500-750 word articles for this niche and set them aside for later use. If you’re not an adequate writer, hire a ghostwriter to write them for you.

Item #2 - build inbound links to your new site. There are around 400 SEO-friendly directories that will accept your website submissions. You can also use software such as SEO Elite to help automate the process of finding link partners.

Now, sit back, relax, and investigate some other Clickbank products to restart the process with. Cast your net over a wider area (more niches, more Clickbank products), and you’re likely to find some additional hidden gems with which to repeat the process…

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