Affiliate marketing can be a time consuming process. Don’t think that you are going to build a website tonight and sign up for affiliate programs and then start making money the next day. If those are the hopes that you have, and if those are the stories you are hearing from people, then you have been mislead. Affiliate marketing is not easy, especially at the beginning. It takes a lot of content, great content at that, in order to build the traffic to your site. Creating traffic can be the most difficult part for you, and this is where you may start to feel discouraged. Don’t give up.
If you are just starting out, don’t set expectations of reaching 1,000 visitors a month, because chances are it’s not going to happen. For the first month, you may only be getting a few views a day, but that doesn’t mean you should stop creating content. If your content is good, you will begin to gain more and more visitors. Great content spreads easily. Once this is all done, then it becomes a lot easier, as long as you can continue to create great content.
Now your website will be able to start working 24 hours a day. What I mean by this is that, your website and content is up on the web all day, so you never know what time people will be reading what you have created. If your banners and ads are relevant to what you are talking about, then you will begin to start seeing some clicks on your ads and also seeing some conversions.
No matter what, don’t give up. If you have been blogging for 2 years and you only have 10 readers and not a single click on any of your links, then that’s a different story. Set your goals small first and reach them frequently so you keep up your confidence.
Best of luck in creating that great content and making money online.
It has been over a month since I last uploaded a post and a lot has changed since then. As of July 12, I started full time as an SEO specialist for BGT Partners based in Miami, FL. I decided to take about a month off of the blog in order to get myself back into the flow of working in a 9-5 office environment. Now that I am back into the groove of things I have decided to start blogging again. There have been so many updates in SEO tools, and WordPress updates and the Affiliate Summit going on right now, that there is just way too much to talk about.
Today’s post is short and just a heads up to keep a look out in your reader again for this blog for tips and tools to make your SEO and WordPress lives easier.
I hear all the time from new bloggers that they are not getting the amount of traffic that they want and they don’t know what they can do to increase the traffic. Number one is create better content. Creating better content is going to make you a better blogger. Below are 4 tips on becoming that better blogger that you want to become.
Write, then Write Some More
Write, write, write, write, write, and as soon as you finish writing that last thing, write again. The only way to become a better writer is to continue to do it. You don’t need to be logged into your WordPress dashboard or Blogger account to start writing. Open up a notepad or TextEdit if you’re on a Mac, and start typing away. You can even use that ancient thing called pen and paper to write out blog posts at times when you are not at a computer.
Take Notes
Every time that I leave my house I carry around a a small notebook, about 4″x3″ or so, in my pocket. It fits just like a wallet into my back pocket. I am horrible at remembering blog ideas, because they randomly pop into my head at different times. Keep a notepad handy for situations like this. You can also use your iPhone or BlackBerry, whatever you have to keep notes and then look at them later on when you are ready to write a post.
Read Outside Your Industry
One way to becoming a better writer / blogger is by reading more. Don’t just read about things in your industry. I manage several blogs, with this one and my diabetes blog the two main ones. I work as an SEO and WordPress design guy, but I read a lot about things outside of these two industries. The more I read, the more ideas I come up with to blog about because I attempt to relate these things to my industries.
Answer Questions
This idea I heard at a keynote by Chris Brogan. He uses e-mails that he receives and makes blog posts out of them. You can do this as well. If there are questions that you are frequently asked, why not use those as a chance to inform everybody at once the answer?
Begin learning good habits and create a schedule as well if you can. You will become a better blogger before you know it.
When most people think of WordPress, they simply just think about a blogging software. WordPress is a lot more than that. WordPress offers several free shopping cart plugins to use on your site. The one that I personally recommend is the WP e-Commerce Plugin.
The setup for this plugin is quick and easy. Simply install and activate the shopping cart plugin from your Dashboard while logged into WordPress. From there, it is all self-explanatory. This plugin allows you to easily upload a mass product list, or create individual products with shipping attributes, tax attributes and photos of the products. The plugin is free, but does offer extended features for a small fee, $40 for a single blogger and $195 for unlimited usage for a business.
One of the key features of upgrading to the premium package is a larger amount of payment processors and gateways. Authorize.net and Bluepay to mention two of them. The free option uses Google Checkout and Paypal shopping cart.
If you don’t have the in-house ability or the resources to hire somebody to build a custom php shopping cart for you, then this is the best way to go. You will be able to easily manage your inventory and sales reports from within this plugin. One of my favorite features of this shopping cart is the ability to use categories and sub-categories. Using categories will help your customers shop through your site. You are also able to create a breadcrumb navigation for your products and categories for easy use for customers.
Don’t be afraid to jump into managing your own shopping cart. WordPress makes it very easy.
Happy shopping cart building to ya!
In this week’s edition of Affiliate Marketing Monday, we are going to focus on the design of your site and the importance of it. As discussed in the past, it is all about content, content, content. Not just for the search engines, but also for your readers. However, once your readers are on the site, is it easy for them? Are they directed to a call to action? Here are a few design questions to ask yourself to make sure that you are getting the most out of your design.
Is my font easy to read?
You would think that this would be an easy answer, but sometimes it’s not. You may need to experiment with different colors or background colors and find what works best for your site. Send a link to your blog or website to family members and ask them if they can read it easily. I tend to show things to my older brother because he always will find something wrong with it, but it just makes things better that way. If people can’t read your font, then what’s the point of having a website?
Do you have too many images / flash?
Sure, those flash banners you have on the side look cool, but are they distracting as well? I am not telling you not to have any flash banners because I think that they are fine to have, in fact, I have them on the side of my site as well. However, static banners will do just fine as well. If your website starts to become a photo gallery of banners, then you are going to make it more and more difficult for your readers. Keep it simple, keep it useful.
Is there a clear call to action?
This is not just about affiliate marketing, this is every marketing piece that you have ever created or provided to people. Once you drive all these people to your site, what do you want them to do? One thing that you may want to do is capture their e-mail addresses. If that is the case, then make sure that your e-mail sign-up is very clear on every page. Some of the banners that you may have up on your site were most likely not created by you, but some graphic designer for the merchant company. If their banners do not have a clear call to action, then you can ask them to create one that does, or it may be time to look for a new merchant to promote.
These are just 3 quick, simple questions to ask yourself to make your site easier for viewers. Like I always say, this is simple stuff. Simple is much more effective then difficult and flashy websites.
What easy design tips do you have?
Search Engine Optimization can be very difficult to understand and seem overwhelming. In reality, it can also be pretty damn simple. At the end of the day SEO comes down to four main things, content, links, content, links. Below are a few tips for both of these.
Content
Let’s be real, if you’re wondering why you only have 5 blog visits a day, it’s probably because your content sucks. It’s a harsh reality, but it’s the truth. Of course, if you have only been blogging for a month or two, then don’t expect to have 1,000 hits a day. You have all heard the phrase that “content is king”. No matter how people try to dispute that, it is true. It is not a popularity contest, if your content sucks, you are not going to become popular. Let’s get into a few strategies for writing better content.
- Keyword Research – You must know what keywords you want to rank for and bring in traffic for. If you sell lamps online, do you want to rank for swimming pools? No, didn’t think so. You can use free tools such as Google Analytics to track what keywords people are finding your website from. Google also offers a free keyword research tool that will help you find relevant keywords.
- Keyword Placement – Do not write for the search engines. Search engines can not read, they just scan. You can write 1,000 blog posts and have them all ranked on the first page in Google, but if nobody is reading them because they can’t understand a single thing you are saying, what is the point? Take several of your keywords and be sure to place them in the first paragraph, but write your readers, not just to rank. This is very important in making sure that your content doesn’t suck.
Like the title states, this is Simple SEO, so there are a lot more details that you can get into to help with your content, but these are the basics and if you follow these two tips you will increase the quality of your content right away. Now, links.
Links
You have most likely heard people talk about link building strategies. Some work, some don’t. Some Google likes, some Google hates. Let me just say this quickly, link farms don’t work, sorry. Now, moving on. I’m going to discuss internal and external links.
Internal Linking – it’s exactly what it seems like. Links on your site that link to another page in your site. I’m not going to get into the details of why it works, at least not now, remember this is Simple SEO. Here are a couple of tips to help your internal linking strategy.
- Link to another post – one of the easiest and best ways to create an internal linking strategy and to simply link to an older post. This works in cases that you may be doing a follow up post or you want to reference certain things that you said in a previous blog post.
- Link to landing pages – If you are not running a blog, but instead running an e-commerce site, link products to a specific landing page. If you sell lamps like mentioned above create a landing page for all vintage lamps and be sure to link to that page.
Like I said, very simple SEO today.
External Linking – Once again, exactly what it sounds like, also called inbound links. These are links that are coming to your site from an external or other site. Here are a few tips to help your external linking strategies
- Blogrolls – If your blog has a community of bloggers, then you may want to ask to be put on somebody’s blogroll (or if your content is good enough they will probably put you there without having to ask!).
- Guest Posting – I can’t talk about this one enough. Guest posting has so many positive things to it that I can do a whole post just on that. But, we are keeping it Simple today. Submitting a guest post will automatically give you a link back to your site. You are also going to increase the visibility of your blog because you are reaching viewers from the other person’s blog. Do a few guest posts, and your subscribers are going to increase.
There is 4 tips to help you start your Simple SEO strategies. Start with these and you will begin seeing better search results. Below are a few other quick tips for helping your SEO efforts.
- Google Webmaster Tools – way too many things in there to discuss in this post, but it will let you know if there are any broken links, duplicate content, and provides feedback on your sitemap.
- Stay up to date on SEO. It changes every single day. Here are a few blogs that will help you stay up to date.
Affiliate marketing is a business, very simple. Whether you spend 16 hours a day working on content creation and building links and searching for the best offers or if you plan out 5 hours a week for updates to the site, it’s a business. If you plan on making the big dollars that you can with affiliate programs, it is going to take some time. Don’t expect to start a site, wake up the next day and be a millionaire. One of the best things about being an affiliate is that you can make money when you are not “working”.
However, if you don’t look at your blog or website as a business, then you will find it more difficult to make money from offers. Content is going to be your most important part of getting commissions, so plan out some time each week, daily if you can, to write good content. If writing comes naturally to you then the writing part shouldn’t take too long. Be sure to do your keyword research before writing your content though.
Take the time to write out a business plan. Map out what you want from your site, and then how you are going to get there. This doesn’t have to be an exact detail plan. Start with a goal and 10 steps on how you can get there. Then break those 10 steps into 4-5 steps on how to achieve them and so on.
Plan the work and work the plan!
For those subscribers out there wondering why I have not made any blog posts in a long time, don’t worry, I am still here. I have been taking a little different approach the last 2-3 weeks and testing some things out. Instead of blogging everyday and putting material out there, I have been more or less just sitting back and watching and listening.
I feel this is a great approach to take every so often. There is a lot of great content out there and a lot of information being passed along through social outlets, and sometimes you don’t have enough time to catch it all.
Don’t think that I’m not here. Don’t think that I’m not listening, I am. In fact, I’m listening more than I ever had before.
What are you doing today to get better?
Everyone always talks about social media these days and how it has changed the way we live and the way we do business. I tend to agree 100% on this. It has made it easier to communicate with your customers and it has also made it easier for your customers to talk about you. If done right, social media can turn your business around and help you grow your customer base to levels you have yet to reach. However, if not done properly, it can kill your brand. Here are 5 ways that social media can kill your brand.
1. Open Forum
Your customers now have an open forum to talk publicly about you and what you have done wrong. Before a customer could write an online review of how bad your customer service was or how long it took to ship a product, but now that complaint is going to spread faster and longer. That 140 character tweet is now going to reach the followers of that customer and any others that it is RT by. If they have their account linked to Facebook, now it is going to reach all of their friends on there as well. Your company is now responsible for actions that you make. How you handle them online is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful company.
2. Slow Response Time
If I have a quick question about an issue with a company that I am using, let’s say for example a hosting company, instead of e-mailing them, I will simply send them a message on Twitter and wait for a quick response. Reason I do this is because there may be other customers out there with the same questions and same issues going on. Also, in my mind it should be a quicker response then sitting in an incoming mailbox queue waiting for somebody to respond to it. If you are monitoring your brand on social media, you will see that I just mentioned you in a question on Twitter and you should respond in a timely manner. Companies that take a long time to respond on Twitter irritate me, it shows me that they are not using social media to their full advantage.
3. Bad Reactions
I wrote a post some time back about how NOT to react to a bad review. No matter how good your product is, there will always be some bad reviews. Simply because you can’t please everybody. How you react to that bad review is a big sign of who you are as a company and as a person. If you own your own company and you are doing the monitoring of social media outlets yourself, then you need to be able to keep your brand and your personal reactions in check. If you respond to a bad review with an attitude or blame the customer, your brand is going to be shot down very quickly. It is extremely difficult to try and recover from an incident as that.
4. You’re Not Even There
If you are not even monitoring social media outlets then you’re wrong. I don’t care what business or industry you are in, you have customers and clients on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, everywhere. You need to be there, bottom line. If you’re not, you’re killing your brand by not listening to what your customers are saying about your or the industry you serve.
5. Lack of Useful Information
This can be summed up pretty easily, it’s not about YOU, it’s about your customers. Put out information that is going to be useful to them. If you sell custom paintings, send out a link about a local art show going on this weekend. If all you send out in your social media outlets is information about sales and your product this and your product that, your customers are not always going to care about it.
Do not make any of these 5 mistakes and you will be able to survive in the social media world.
I signed up for Third Tribe Marketing when it first launched back in February I believe it was. At that time the initial sign up fee was $27 / month. Has that been one of the best $27 / month investments that I have ever made. Remember my post about why I think reading books is important? Well, the main reason was that I felt that I could dig into the mind of a person for $20 when it would cost several hundred or thousand to hear them speak or consult with them. That is also the main reason that I love Third Tribe Marketing.
You probably want to know what Third Tribe Marketing is, so I will explain it to you. It is an online community launched by a few names that you may know, Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Chris Brogan, Sonia Simone, with contributions from John Jantsch, Johnny Truant, Dave Navarro, Chris Pearson and Aaron Wall. Wow, access to all these minds for $47 / month. Sure that may seem like a lot when you first see it, but think about all the knowledge you are gaining.
There are weekly calls from these internet professionals that you can download in mp3 format or the transcript so you can read at your own leisure. The transcript idea is huge for me because I can never pay attention to a podcast, my mind is always all over the place. Plus not only do you have access to the weekly calls (and they are all archived on the site so you have access to them), you have access to the forum that actually has so much information, it’s hard to keep up with at times.
If you have ever had quick questions or large ones on certain marketing ideas, this is the place to find your answer. I highly recommend using Third Tribe Marketing (affiliate link.) From the strategies discussed in the very first podcast, I made my money back for the whole year! There is no “magic formulas” in the Third Tribe community, just people working hard for a living. If that is you and then I suggest signing up.
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