Something I’ve been testing with success for the past year or so has been to offer a serial soap opera on some of my affiliate websites. And it’s something you may be able to do as well.

What’s a Serial Soap Opera?

Actually, maybe the term “soap opera” isn’t the right one. Instead, create a fictional story that directly relates to your niche and release it weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

For instance, if your niche is medical, you might consider creating a story along the lines of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. Mind you, don’t copy Grey’s Anatomy, but create a story with a unique plot and characters set in a hospital or other medical care facility.

Even if you’re not a writer, you can hire a ghost writer. It’s also a great way to help brand your website (i.e. ‘A My Website Name’ story).

How to Implement it On Your Affiliate Site

Write your short stories, which shouldn’t be more than 15,000 words apiece, and offer the first one for free. You can even use it as incentive to sign up to your affiliate marketing website’s newsletter.

Whether or not subsequent editions are free is up to you—once you hook the subscriber with the first edition, you can then charge 99c for future editions—or you can use it as a way to keep a reader subscribed to your newsletter. Of course, you’ll have opportunities to market more products to your subscribers while they’re waiting for more installments of your story.

Another option is to compile the serial into a full-length book and offer that up for sale directly from the website or through Amazon, Smashwords, B&N, and other avenues.

While this technique may not work in every niche out there, it can work in a great many of them. (Selling tents and camping supplies? How about ‘Campfire Stories’? Patio supplies? ‘Backyard Shenanigans’.) You could always create the first story and put it up as a test on your site. If it works, write more.

Rosalind’s book is about getting your affiliate marketing foundation set, while the WordPress Affiliate Guide is a flexible blueprint specifically for leveraging WordPress for affiliate marketing based on years or testing and tweaking. In fact, the WP Affiliate Guide is built on the principles outlined in Rosalind’s guide.

But let me not stray to far from the topic of this post, reviewing the Super Affiliate Handbook so you can decide whether it’s a worthwhile guide to help you build an affiliate business.

When I purchased my copy of Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook, I was wary of its promises, but over the years, I’ve come to realize just how invaluable a tool it is. The fact that it’s been around (and updated) since 2003 is a testament to its value.

When I first read the book, I was a bit put off by its focus on Pay Per Click advertising methods, which was confusing and because I didn’t have the kind of money necessary to make a go of it. As a beginner, I found myself floundering to understand it more than once, almost submerging me in information overload. That’s something to prepare yourself for if you’re brand new to affiliate marketing.

However, when you do get past all of that, the Super Affiliate Handbook is something worthy of being printed out and referenced often. There is a goldmine of information contained within its covers, and although it may not come complete with action-steps in a step-by-step sort of way, with a bit of trial and error you’ll get it sorted in no time flat.

The book is just over 200 pages long. That’s intimidating to put it mildly, but luckily there isn’t too much filler. Yep, that’s 200 page of straight dish to work with and it’s available instantly in PDF format.

It starts off by explaining what you’ll need to get your affiliate marketing business started (some things being obvious, such as access to a computer that can get on the internet), then it explains what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and the types of commission structures.

Since I was a newbie when I first purchased the guide, I remember going over it with a fine-toothed comb multiple times to make sense of it and then set out to build my first affiliate websites. At the time I knew HTML and CSS and had begun working with a new software called WordPress, but at the time, I never thought about using WordPress for the affiliate website process. WordPress was only powering my personal blog–it wasn’t even widely distributed or adopted then, so it was very inflexible.

That said, my first affiliate website was built using standard HTML and CSS. (It was huge by the time I actually switched it over to WordPress and it took a whole lot of overhauling to make it happen, but I’m much happier with it and its management now.) And I earned back my investment five times over in the first month by using her methods. I did a short happy dance because I realized, this affiliate marketing thing actually works.

Over the years, the Super Affiliate Handbook has undergone various updates and with the most recent, it now includes a marketing section which goes well beyond Pay Per Click advertising.

One thing I truly respect about Rosalind’s guide is that she teaches you how to build a business, not how to build a website that will be obsolete in a few days.

The writing style is smooth and entertaining, sometimes outright funny, which makes reading the book and following the prescribed methods seem less like a chore. She even shares with you one of her completed affiliate sites as an example and explains how she came to put it together and how she keeps it up, what type of affiliate promotions she uses, and even how much she earns from it.

The handbook explains:

• How to find a niche (pg. 25)
• How to evaluate market demand (pg. 32)
• 6 keys for choosing the right domain name (pg. 42)
• How to build content and increase your conversion rates (pg. 66)
• How to write product endorsements (pg. 77)
• How to make money from your website (pg. 93)
• How to market your new affiliate website (pg. 132)
• How to become a super affiliate (pg. 171)

This guide is certainly one of those rare finds in the internet marketing realm, and it’s certainly one everyone who wants to work from home should download and read immediately, taking plenty of notes.

Download the Super Affiliate Handbook and get cracking!

The general answer is, “There are article topics all around you, if you care to look for them.” Granted, that’s only helpful to people who want to churn the answer around in their mind for hours on hours. So let me save you a bit of time and just give you three quick ways of finding article topics to help better your affiliate website.

Niche Forums: The first option is to search through various forums within your niche. They’re usually rife with people asking questions or seeking advice about one thing or another.

Amazon’s Askville and Yahoo! Answers: Services such as Amazon’s Askville and Yahoo! Answers make it incredibly easy to find blog topics by simply checking out the questions people are asking and writing a short article answering the question and providing other resources.

Email Groups: Depending on your niche, there may just be an email group which you can join to interact with others who share a similar interest. One thing that email groups are good for is getting the creative juices flowing. You can even mine the archives for previous questions and their subsequent interactions which can then be transformed into articles or blog topics.

These are but a few ways to find inspiration for writing articles which will add value to your affiliate website, and with a little ingenuity, I’m sure you could come up with a few more.

Knowing that I sell things online, via affiliate marketing, she asked me for some advice. The advice I shared with her applies to all facets of sale whether online or off.

The first thing I asked her was her goal. How many of the products did she intend to sell? Once we had a (reasonable) goal mapped out, I then told her she needed to pay attention to the people around her. When she’d found their specific need, offer to fill it.

Needless to say, she gave me the most quizzical look ever. But if you think about it, that’s all selling really is: Identifying a person’s needs or problem and then providing the solution.

If she wanted to sell her products, she needed to find the people who would most benefit from it rather than bombarding everyone in her path. It’s the same thing with online traffic; one should seek out targeted traffic (people interested in what’s being offered) rather than generic traffic (people who are just passing through).

It’s a question of where to find that traffic. In her case, she needed to think about what complemented the product she was offering. Find those businesses and seek out partnerships.

The same applies to online marketing. Find the websites and other services which complement what you have to offer and seek out relationships. Consider creating alliances for mutual benefit.

To give an example, if you’re selling fish bowls, you might want to track down the seller of fishes. He’ll send you business after he sells and fish and you can send people interested in purchasing fish his way.

Change the way you think about the other websites online–see them as partners rather than competitors–and you’ll change the way you earn money.