Affiliate Marketing

Dinner followed by heavenly beverages…, everyone was determined to squeeze the truth out of him. But Joel kept insisting, “I got $1515 by selling some products online”. Then he went on to say about affiliate marketing and how he sold his product, which led to another & another ….

7 years ago, I had no idea what internet marketing was; Back then, there was no facebook, twitter or social media. It was affiliate marketing that made the buzz.

I still remember Joel’s simplified definition.
“Affiliate marketing is a way to earn commission on sales that you help generate. You are like a virtual salesperson. There are few things you will need. One is the product to sell, a place to advertise the product and then get visitor eyeballs on that advertisement. ”

After all these years, it still remains true.
These words inspired me to get into affiliate marketing.

Let’s look at these 3 ingredients in detail.

1 . A product or service, a great number of people might need or want.

Your first step is to do some research in your chosen field and find out what products people are buying.
For those who are just starting out, I would advice for you to choose a niche that is related to what you are good at or interested in.

For example, if you are a dental assistant, a good niche market may be people who want to prevent tooth decay in children. Majority of people who dip their hands into online marketing choose a topic that is popular or generic like weight loss or alternative medicine. There is really nothing wrong with this, but since such niches are quite popular, you will surely have a lot of competitors. Thus, it is much better to choose a market segment that is not popular.

2 . A place to display or promote that product

Television shows have those irritating ads at regular intervals,
Billboards showcase eye-popping attractive women (ok and men!) at every turn…

These ads remind people of certain products, highlighting advantages and promoting their brand.
Internet marketing is not that different except it happens in the internet land. In the online neighborhood, we use blogs, websites, forums, email, paid advertisements, facebook, twitter and what not etc to promote products.

3 . A source of targeted visitors

Getting visitors to your site isn’t sufficient. Each visitor needs to take some action, such as buy a product, click a link that leads to a pre-sales page, register for a product etc. Only then, will you get the commission from the product.

The equation is simple, product in demand + traffic => sales and profits.

Start with the first ingredient-Find a product you can sell! Get started now!

You see, I frustrate very easily. I’ve also never really managed my need for instant gratification. Working without any promise of reward is kind of tough for me, especially when there are plenty of projects on my plate that do guarantee payment.

I’ve also chased niches that I wasn’t passionate about because I thought, “I can write about that and it looks like something that will make money.” Later, I discovered that I hated those niches, and I didn’t necessarily want to be known for those areas of expertise.
Trying to get to know the communities in those niches wasn’t much fun either. I didn’t like reading those blogs and I didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute to the conversation.

So I know a thing or two about not being ready to start a blog.
And since there are so many other failed blogs out there, I know I’m not alone. Fortunately, my mentor Travis Van Slooten gave me an opportunity I’d never had before. As a freelance writer I’d done lots of one-off projects, but Travis gave me the chance to work on some blogs full-time, week after week, in a way that would let me see results.

This experience gave me the opportunity to learn what it takes to start a really successful blog. It’s sort of a “are you really ready to do this” and “is this the right opportunity” checklist that anyone can use to decide whether or not they’ve hit on the right idea.

Are you willing to put in six months of focused effort before seeing any results?

It will take at least six months of posting twice a week to start seeing your traffic make it into the thousands instead of the “low hundreds.” When your traffic is in the thousands you begin to realize that this blogging thing might just have a chance of working out after al.

The exact numbers will depend on how much work you put into promoting your site, and how good you are at focusing on long-tail keywords. But in general, traffic jumps a little bit every time you add new content, so consistently adding new articles matters.

It also takes about six months to actually hit your stride. It takes about six months before you’ll really feel comfortable enough to reach out to the greater blog community and to interact with other voices in your niche.

It takes about six months to create posts that aren’t quite so stiff. It takes that much time to create posts that have a little bit of personality and pizzazz, because it takes about that long to get confident.

It takes about six months to build out your site enough for people to take it seriously, to know that this is not just another failed blog project that will be gone tomorrow.

After six months you may well be able to think about things like monetization. You’ll have accomplished something, and you can ask yourself whether you’ve had enough fun along the way to work your plan for another six months.

Do I like and know this topic well enough?

Remember, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with this topic. Enough to write at least 48 posts every six months.
If you’re really serious, you’ll also plan on writing at least 24 guest posts every six months (if not more). You’ll need to spend an hour or two reading the leading blogs in your niche. You’ll also need to comment on and share their content. Oh, and did I mention all the time you’ll be spending talking about it on social media sites?

If you don’t love the topic or know the topic it’s over before you’ve begun. Remember, you’re not guaranteed a reward in six months either. It might take 2 or 3 years to make your blog make some kind of a living.

You’d better wake up every morning wanting to talk about this stuff.

When will I work on this?

You now have some idea of the workload. When will you devote time to this? What will you sacrifice?
You’ll sacrifice something. For some people that will be a day off. For others it will be thirty minutes of time on television shows or video games. But this project will require a sacrifice.

What will you give it, and is the prospect exciting?

Can you add something to the conversation?

Now, what are those blogs saying? Can you add something to the conversation that’s unique and distinct? “Me too” isn’t going to cut it.

Who will you help?

Got good answers to all these questions?

About the Author

Carmen Rane Hudson is the Content and Social Media Manager for TVS Internet Marketing and a freelance copywriter. She specializes in helping small businesses meet their writing and blogging needs.

If you haven’t made your YouTube Channel visible in your blog already, watch this video. You’ll definitely see an increase in your YouTube channel subscribers since users can directly subscribe by just clicking the button in the side bar. Don’t believe me? Try out click the subscribe button on the right sidebar of this blog, and see

You have other more important things to work on and you are not in a position to outsource your twitter activities.

You want to, but you just can’t find the time ?
So what do you do?

This was a dilemma I faced about 10 months ago.
(In one of my previous posts I was deliberating whether bloggers need to create a social media presence in every platform

I wanted to make “connections” on twitter and grow my twitter audience. Given the fact that I do have a enjoyable full time job and I only spend about 45 minutes at night on blogging/social media activities, I was trying to figure out a optimum way to achieve this.

After a few “experiments” I think I’ve found a way to increase my twitter productivity and I’m sharing this hoping it will be useful for you too.

1. Have clear goals on what you want to do with Twitter

Just having a twitter account for the sake of completing social media trilogy isn’t sufficient.
What do you hope to achieve with Twitter?
Is it to build a brand presence on twitter? Generate more sales? Increase lead generation etc

I had 3 things in mind;
1. Engaging with others
Blogging success is built upon the audience. So I wanted to use twitter to extend that platform, reach out to like minded bloggers in my niche and make friends.

2. Share valuable insights
I read a lot! I wanted to share useful web articles, videos etc that others might learn from.

3. Promoting my blog post
Use twitter as another medium to drive traffic to my blog posts.

2. Find the right balance between automation and being “personable”

Being active on Twitter doesn’t always mean you have to manually tweet everything.

I would love if the overlapping area was just one circle!
Overall, you need to find the comfortable balance between being personable and automation. You also need to see how it’s perceived by your twitter audience.

3. Create your twitter automation strategy

I know that some people might frown upon twitter automation. When I say automation, I don’t mean spamming with automated tweets. Even for twitter automation, you need to have a strategy and proper planning.

From the goals you mentioned in in step 1, what can you automate?
Then divide that into further tasks that you can fully automate, semi-automate.

So for me, I know that I don’t want to automate engaging with others. That’s something I want to spend time on, and need to to find the time to!
The other 2, sharing useful content and promoting my blog post can be automated.

Example of a fully automated tweets would be, that every time a new blog post is published, it’s auto tweeted. So my blog posts are promoted on my twitter account and I don’t have spend time on it, except setting it up.

Example of a semi automated tweets would be, When I read a useful blog post or article, I use the firefox plugin for buffer and it will schedule the posting of these tweets.

For more details on specific tools, read 10 Twitter Tools to Increase Your Productivity via slodive.com.

4. Squeezing time for “personable” tweets

A few ways I try to be “personable” on twitter is by

• Responding to any questions/comments
• Giving my feedback on blog posts other has tweeted
• Having “natural” conversation with other twitter users
• Thanking people who have retweets or tweeted my posts (I wish I do this more often)

etc

All of these require some time. The good thing is that you don’t need to sit in front of a computer to do this!
Using a smart phone app or directly accessing twitter site on your mobile you can tweet on the go!

When you are waiting in a queue, traveling somewhere, between meetings! etc
All you need is just 1 or 2 minutes, can if you can scramble about 5-10 of those, you can find the time to be personable on twitter!

I hope this blog post gave you some ideas on how you can be more productive with twitter and still get more out twitter.

Are there any twitter productivity tips you can add? I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below.

The Converged Media Imperative a white paper published by Altimeter Group, did a great job in providing details on how brands must Combine paid, owned & earned Media.

In order to discuss the interplay of paid, earned, and owned media, let’s first define each of these terms as they apply to digital channels:

Paid media are display or broadcast advertising

In digital channels, paid media include banner ads, Pay Per Click (PPC) search ads, advertorials, sponsorships, sponsored links, and pay-per-post blogging. The common factor of all these channels is that they are a form of advertising for which a media buy is necessary.
Example of confluence with other forms of media: an ad on Facebook that consists of content from the advertiser’s newsfeed post.

Owned media

Owned media are all content assets a brand either owns or wholly controls. Owned media channels include websites, microsites, branded blogs, videos, and the brand’s own(ed) presence on social media and social network channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Owned media is largely content marketing, i.e., content a brand owns and/or publishes that involves no media buy.
Example of confluence with other forms of media: A TV spot (paid media) finds perpetual life on an owned channel, e.g., the Old Spice Guy on YouTube.

Earned media

Earned media is user-generated content created and/or shared by users. (It bears mentioning that some consider shared media to be a separate channel. More on this below in Outlying Channels.) Types of earned media include consumers’ social media posts, tweets, reviews, videos, photos, and open online communities. Another component of earned media is mentions in media or on social channels that are the result of PR or media relations. For brands, earned media is the most elusive and difficult of the three channels; while it can be influenced, it cannot be directly controlled.
Example of confluence with other forms of media: Display units that scrape relevant and targeted user reviews from ecommerce sites and input them directly into the ad creative (Bazaarvoice). Also notable is Sweden’s Twitter account, which is fully under the control of a new Swedish citizen each week.

Outlying channels don’t neatly conform to the categories of paid/owned/earned media. This is to be expected from some forms of digital media. Online contests and sweepstakes, for example, are often hybrids of paid, owned, and earned media. And as mentioned above, shared media (“likes,” “retweets,” “shares,” etc.) are considered by some to be a wholly separate channel from earned media. Moreover, shared media may or may not contain original content (e.g., a comment or other earned media) added by the sharer. Co-created content is another category that could be assigned to earned or to shared media. We acknowledge these arguments, but for the purpose of this report we will consider “shared” media to be part of earned.

Converged Media utilizes two or more channels of paid, earned, and owned media. It is characterized by a consistent storyline, look, and feel. All channels work in concert, enabling brands to reach customers exactly where, how, and when they want, regardless of channel, medium, or device, online or offline. With the customer journey between devices, channels, and media becoming increasingly complex, and new forms of technology only making it more so, this strategy of paid/owned/earned confluence makes marketers impervious to the disruption caused by
emerging technologies.

Stay tunned for part 2 of this post, where I’ll outline 11 Success Criteria for Converged Media

Overall there were 5 speakers, 2 were Google employees and 3 locals (including myself). Sharing the podium with Google employees was an awesome experience!

I spent a great amount of time preparing for it over the last 2 weeks. From finding useful content, putting the slides together to practicing the talk. (after all, I had to be on par with Google speakers!).
As a results, you would have noticed less activity on this blog. But I’m back on track again and have some posts lined for the the next couple of weeks.

Anyways, The topic I choose to speak about was on improving Google Local Search Rankings. It’s one of the most under utilized areas in terms of search engine optimization.

If you have a business that has a physical location (for example a restaurant, hotel, real estate business etc), you can benefit from increasing your rankings with Google local.

This presentation contains actionable tips that you can put in to practice right away, to improve your rankings in Google Local. Here are the slides..

The previous posts, I’ve written on this 5 minute series have well received by the readers, so I thought of continuing it.

5 Minutes Blog Improvement Tips for the Overly Busy Blogger

17 Blog Design Improvements That Can Be Done Under 5 Minutes

Here are a few blog promotion tips, that take about 5 minutes or less to implement.

1. Choose about 3 blog in your niche and leave a thoughtful comment. (Refer, How To Comment On LOTs Of Blogs FAST )

2. Get 25 backlinks to a previous post by submitting it to Social Monkee

3. Reply to your blog comments. Make sure you have a plugin installed so that that commenter is notified.

4. Use HootSuite or similar tool to schedule tweets and facebooks updates for next few days.

5. Add one of your popular posts to JustRetweet (Others will retweet your post)

6. Find a forum in your blogging niche and answer a few questions.

7. Any new social media platform profile you want to set up? e.g Pinterest

8. “Pimp” your social media profiles. Do you have a custom theme? A great Facebook timeline cover etc

9. Use buffer to tweet some of your old posts. You just need to add it to the queue.

10. Auto publish your blog post feed to Google plus.

11. Thank a few people who re-Tweeted your posts

12. Write short email templates (e.g Guest post request)

13. Send a short email to a blogger you’d like to get to know more.

14. Add your blog to blogging directories (e.g Technorati, Alltop)

Over to you! The next time you can squeeze in 5 minutes go implement one of these ideas.

Anything you can add to this list? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Let’s be realistic, it doesn’t happen with every post.
However, you might notice that some posts you write, do a lot better than your “normal” posts.

Can you think of such posts in your blog? Any post that stood above the others?
Is it a coincidence?
Is there a “strategy”?

Today, I thought of analyzing one of my old posts. I would like you also to do the same by looking at your blog post achieves. (see the action points towards the end of the post)

Out of the blog posts I’ve written for Better Blogging Ways, this post seems to have attracted the most number of backlinks.

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect it to be a such a link bait post.
I was writing an “ordinary” blog post, where I wanted to share my experience and help others who might be in a similar situation. (That’s usually the intention of every post I write!)

It’s been about 3 month since I wrote the post. I didn’t do any “out of the ordinary” blog post promotions, but to this day it still get links and views!
This post has turned out to be an “evergreen” post that gets links even to this day!

So what’s this post I’ve been talking about,
Niche Site Disappeared From Google Results After Penguin Update What I Did To Recover

Even a few days ago, this post was linked to on Problogger! (Search for Shamelle within ProBlogger you’ll find the post)

So, I thought of revisiting the post to see if I could figure out, the “secret source” (if at all any!). Here are a few reasons why I think so many people linked to it. (Would love to hear your comments/opinions too. Please leave a comment below)

1. The blog post was “timely”

Google just updated their algorithm and a lot of people were in a similar situation. They didn’t know what had hit them or how to recover from it.

Other bloggers writing about the Panda update came across my blog post and was generous to link back to my blog post, to fuel their conversation.

2. I solve a problem many people were struggle with at the time.

When I was tying to figure out to get my blog re-indexed again I didn’t even think of writing a post at the time. All I wanted to do was get that niche blog on the first page of Google as soon as possible. I kept a note of what I did to the niche blog. It was mainly for my benefit so that I won’t forget what I did and didn’t do! After a few days, I was surprised and relieved when it was ranking in Google again.

So I thought if I write about it, it will help others too.

Indeed it did! I got loads of links from forums where other bloggers linked to my post because the steps I provided worked for them too!

As a result, I got several links from Forums which discussed similar issues.

3. It’s in the title

To the point, there was no bluff, the title was clear on what the content was. (If I say so myself ;-))
It had a problem – “Niche Site Disappeared”
It had proof – the title mentioned that I solved the problem
“Curiosity stirring” – Makes people wonder “How did he/she do that?”
SEO blend – included the main keywords people would type in when searching for a similar problem in Google. The post ranked well in Google.

Even today(at the time of writing this post!), if you type “Niche Site Disappeared” in Google, my post will be the first result in Google!

4. It’s in the content!

Delivered on the title. My post was based on several days of trial and errors. It included sufficient details which made it easy for others. Overall, the post was comprehensive and well researched.

I’ve seen many posts that have scrumptious blog post titles but when you read through the post, you have to kick yourself for clicking through the link, and wasting time on the post!

5. Personable – emotional appeal

I could have just written “just the tips” only but I didn’t. Instead, I wrote about the background of the particular niche blog, that got de-indexed from Google. The reason behind this was I didn’t want anyone to conclude that it was just another spammy niche blog that got de-indexed. I wanted to highlight the Google casts a nasty spell on “Good” blogs too!

At the time of writing the post, I didn’t write it with the intention of having an emotional appeal. I felt like I should tell audience about the background of the niche blog. On it’s own, it carved into a good story I guess.

Repeat and rinse!

When you have been blogging for a long time, it’s important to look back at content you have written and see what has worked.

In this post I focused on a successful post. It’s equally important to re-visit those posts that haven’t got any comments, shares etc as well and do a similar analysis on why it didn’t work.

Your turn now,
1. 1. Go through your blog content achieves
2. 2. Pick a post that has done well within your blog
3. 3. Similar to what I have done above, ask yourself, why you think that blog post stands above the rest

In the comments section below,
Leave a link to your “best” post and why you think it was well received by others.

And now let’s step into today’s “guru”.
Derek Halpern from Social Triggers, is known for applying psychology research for marketing/blogging to gain better results.

If you’ve heard Derek’s podcasts or watched videos, you’ll notice that he has a “commanding” personality, knows what is talking about and always ends with actionable tasks that people can put to use.

If you haven’t implemented these by now, I really encourage you get started!

How to Use Short Line Lengths to Impress One-Off Visitors

In the post What’s the Perfect Width for Your Online Content? it was revealed that
Online readers comprehend shorter line lengths better than longer line lengths

Derek mentioned a sneaky trick that will get people to read at least the first few lines of the blog post.

I use that trick in this blog post too.
See more examples,

4 Practical Ways To Increase Blog Post Readability – Get Your Blog Post Read!

How To Turn Blog Readers Into Raving Fans Who Happily Spread The Word About Your Blog Content

Figured out yet? The trick is to use a half-width image just below your headline.

I continuously strive stick to this advice. Just to weed out the monotonous nature I try to vary the placement of the image occasionally.

How to choose a color for high conversions

The blog post, What’s the BEST color for high conversions? was such a curiosity creator! When reading it, you’d think that Derek would reveal an actual color! Well, he did; but it wasn’t what I was expecting.

The key takeaway was,
It’s not about any one color. It’s about finding the right color that stands out from the rest of your design.

Basically, there needs to be a distinction between “action” colors and “passive” colors.
In this blog, the action color is light blue.
However, I had a shades of dark blue in heading too, which were not “clickable”. So, I took the advice and changed some things around.
Now, if you see a light blue link (or any text in blue!), that means you need to click it

How to write well research comprehensive posts that add value

Derek doesn’t publish new posts often; but when he does it’s highly valuable and there’s always something new that I learn from his posts.

This is something I am working on and trying to adapt; publish well research posts that bring value to my audience. This is by far the most difficult thing to do, consistently!
It’s easy to write list post such as
17 Blog Design Improvements That Can Be Done Under 5 Minutes
than a 5 hour post (research, experiment, write!) like
How To Prevent Copy Paste Bloggers & Auto Bloggers From Stealing Your Blog Post Content which was over 1000+ words.

I must admit that keeping to a weekly publishing schedule and delivering gems every week is tough! So I use a mix of about 10% list posts and 90% research posts on this blog.

Are you a social triggers fan? What actionable advice have you applied in your blog and seen results?

Have you ever Googled your name? If not yet, at some point of time, you will surely be. Now, what do you see when you google your name? If you see sites or profiles that are not yours, I can dare say that you need to do some personal SEO to give your brand presence a boost. Wondering what could be the purpose of pushing yourself through the SERP:

It will do reputation management for you, means it will push all the negative feedback of the first page of SERP.
Your brand name will be dominating the SERP.

Here are few things that you can do to give your brand presence a push:

Google + profile

Have a Blog

Use your name in the URL if you do not get a domain with your name.
You need to have an About Us page in the website.
Add Your name somewhere in the title.
Make sure all your social profiles are linking to this website.

Use Authorship

You can take your personal branding to next level with Google’s Authorship markup. By enabling Google Authorship mark-up, your image will appear when a key phrase is triggered. It will help you increase click through rate and help you establish yourself as a brand.

Here’s what appears when you type “Better blogging ways” on Google

Twitter

This is another social media site where you need to have your account on at any cost. Though Twitter and Bing are hobnobbing with each other, Twitter still ranks high in Google. So, get your account on Twitter and have a link to your main website from there.

Linked In Profile

Change the profile URL. Numeric URLs are of no use, you need to put your name in the profile URL so that search engines can associate this to your name.
Double check that the profile is visible to the public because search engines are unable to crawl hidden profiles.
Company name, Position, Locations etc are some fields that will appear in search engine snippet, so make sure that you have fed them with exact details.
In the “Website” section, you need to add links to your blog and other social profiles.

Facebook

I hope you are already active in facebook given its enormous popularity. Although I accept that Facebook is for chilling out and this account has got nothing to with your branding, it would be great if you can manage to have a vanity URL for your FB profile. Just a request – please do not use any unprofessional image as your Facebook profile primacy picture.

About.me

This website is fast gaining currency among professionals. What I like the most about About.Me is that it is super simple. You will basically get a single page to present all the information about yourself. Just go a bit creative with the background and the texts and you brand will get another shot in the arm.

Guest Author Bio

Michael Evans is a passionate writer and he is contributing author to Phsacca.com that offers Company Registration services in Cyprus.