June 23rd, 2010 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

Whenever you mention affiliate marketing the first thought that springs to mind is people buying up traffic to push it at the latest sham get rich, health or beauty product. If that’s the first thought then the second is likely to be placing product links within a naturally ranked page and hoping for a percentage on any sales. A lot of money has been made online using both these methods but as you’ll no doubt learn, they either require a lot of time and expertise or a lot of money. There is another way, local affiliate marketing. I started playing with this 6 months ago and this is my experience to date.

Way back when I started working for myself I had this dream of building websites for local small businesses to help them rank and get lots of traffic. It never really worked out too well, companies either didn’t see the value in the net, didn’t want to pay for it or they thought I was too cheap! Even so I did manage to help a few companies make decent money from the internet, I still do so today but it’s much more of a side hobby :) A couple of businesses are only still going because of the work I did in giving them a platform for web enquiries. After 6 months or so I was sick to death of the excuses so I altered my own business plan and started building and ranking sites for myself and selling advertising/affiliate offers. As of today I’ve done pretty well out of it.

Anyhoo, back to the point. The beginning of this year I bumped into an old friend who owns a local financial services company. We got talking and it turns out that he was spending serious amounts of money with Adwords ($50,000 a month) and getting no real ROI on it. I knew I had a website that was in the same rough (very rough) market and with some adjustments I could rank for various phrases that would attract potential clients for him. 10 minutes later and a deal was done, I would gather leads for him and take a commission of any that went on to use his services. The joy in all this for me was that:-

1. None of the hassles of dealing with a client
2. Total control over the lead gathering website
3. I know they offer a quality service
4. Their clients tend to do repeat business
5. I get to help a local business and the local economy (what I always wanted to do in the first place)

I knew they were competing with several other local companies as well as a few more based in different parts of the world but I was 100% confident in being able to provide a better ROI than Adwords (The fact there was no risk to them helped). Having total control over the website I am trying to rank is a big boon for me and 2 months later I had the 3 rankings I really wanted. I was using a really simple enquiry form to gather the least amount of information I’d need to forward the enquiry on (name, email, telephone, how they’d like to be contacted, anything else they’d like to tell me). Once I had my site setup correctly to convert I dabbled a bit with Adwords, they were even happy to pay for the Adwords spend because by now they were seeing serious results from my enquiries. Some investigation did reveal that it was always the natural traffic that converted best though, the real key to my local affiliate marketing was getting the natural rankings. I know there are lots of people like me out there who can do that bit for fun, even if you’re not so hot with your SEO skills remember this – it is much easier to rank for industry specific long tails that have a local element as well.

Six months after that initial conversation and they are very much a local business on the up. Personally I’m very happy to share in their success. If all carries on as it is by Christmas this year the relationship will be generating enough income for me to sell all my other websites and retire from any active involvement online. I’m not saying that I will but it’s always an option.

As you learn more and more about making money online you tend to forget just how much more than the average business you do know. There are very likely businesses in your area that provide a top notch service that would love to make more of an impact online but don’t even know where to get started. What my initial attempts at running a web design business taught me was that most businesses are very risk averse so you need to offer something risk free. Commission is a great way of doing this, I’ve never met a business owner yet that didn’t understand that 10% of something is better than 15% of nothing.

How I’ve Adapted My Local Affiliate Marketing Approach

All the above is great but the only reason I got such a quick return for the business was because I already had a site that was in the same ball park as what they were doing. I’ve learnt from this and have gone on to build several other websites relating to markets where other local businesses could benefit. It’s an ongoing process for me and once the traffic builds up I then approach the business to let them know that I’ve got XXX traffic, how would they feel about doing a deal to get access to those potential customers. It also helps if you have an enquiry form in place so you can show them some example exquiries. No risk for them. I’ve not had many turn me down :)

I see this as a win win situation for all involved. I get to have the satisfaction of ranking pages plus the extra income from a business I know nothing about whilst the company gets access to a lot of potential new clients. The local economy gets a boost in the process. If it’s money that motivates you then I have no doubts that there is a mint to be made in helping out your high quality local businesses.

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Paul B