How do you find the best affiliate program to make money online?

The internet has introduced us to a new world of possibilities, and earning additional money is one of them.

There are thousands of companies who wish to expand their market and offer their goods and services online, and that’s where affiliate marketing enters the picture.

Affiliate marketing is an internet business model where you make commissions by advertising other people’s products or services.

You simply sign up for a program, set up your website with the company’s affiliate code, and then start promoting that company’s products on your site.

You get paid anytime someone clicks on that link or buys that product.

This helps companies reach a bigger market and gives you some extra cash. But choosing the program that is right for you can be difficult, especially since there are so many out there.

That’s why in this article we will give you 10 Things to Keep in Mind if you wish to find the best affiliate program to make money.

Things to Consider in finding the Best Affiliate Program to make money

An affiliate program is only as good as the payout.

The payout is the most important aspect to consider when picking the right affiliate program. And when I say payout, it isn’t just the amount of payout, instead it is also the promptness with which the payouts are made, the method of payouts etc.

Does that mean, that you should only look at the payouts?

Not really.

There are a few other aspects as well that you need to keep in mind.

Here are 10 of the most important things that you need to consider in order to find the right affiliate program.

Deciding the kind of business you want to promote.

Deciding the kind of business you want to promote for affiliate marketing is a difficult decision.

You might be interested in digital products like eBooks and physical gadgets, or maybe something more tangible such as clothing items that people can touch and feel before purchasing from your website; whatever it may be, knowing what you want will help you narrow down your search.

If you like gadgets and electronics, for example, joining an affiliate program that promotes those things would be a good way to start.

There are many different kinds of affiliate programs out there so it’ll be easy for you to find one that interests you.

Research various programs and compare them

There are a lot of affiliate marketing programs out there that you can join, so always do your research before you sign up.

Look at all the options available to you and then choose a few of your favorites instead of joining them all.

Do some research online on their background history, how much the commissions are, and whether they’re trustworthy.

Read some articles about how to find the best affiliate programs before you start this process in order to help you get started right away with your research.

Make sure the program is legitimate

Just because a company offers an affiliate program doesn’t mean that you can join it or that they are legitimate.

Do some research on the company’s history and see what people are saying about it before you sign up for an account with them.

You could read reviews, look at forums or blogs where other people share their experiences, or do a quick Google search to get more information about the program you’re looking into to make sure they don’t have any complaints and that they’re a legitimate company.

And remember, you’re not just looking for any company to sign up with; you’re looking for the best affiliate programs.

Only join reputable programs that provide quality products and services

Before you sign up with a program, be sure that they have decent products or services.

You don’t want to promote something on your website if it’s something that your readers won’t benefit from or will get annoyed with.

This is why you should always read reviews, check what other people are saying about the product/service, and make sure it’s something worth promoting before adding it to your site.

Read through their terms and conditions

It can be easy to skip over this step but it’s important that you read over all the rules and regulations for joining an affiliate program so you don’t break any of them.

Some companies have certain requirements, like how many sales or referrals you need before they’ll pay out or how much traffic your website needs in order to join their program.

If your site doesn’t meet those requirements then you won’t be able to join the program even if you wanted to.

Also, make sure that you’re aware of any fees they charge for using their program and what they mean by “fees” so you don’t get surprised later on while checking your account balance.

Look at their advertising options

Affiliate programs have a lot of different advertising methods available to their members.

Before you join, take a look at what they offer and compare them with other programs so you’ll know which one works best for your website and pays well enough for you to make money using it.

You can do this by clicking on the advertising tab and looking over the different options that each program has; if they have text links, banners, popups/unders, and more then you’ll have plenty of options.

Some top advertising agencies even have a section dedicated to affiliate programs that include some of the greatest options available for websites.

Read reviews from other members to learn what they think about the program

There are a lot of affiliate programs out there with a variety of different offers and commission rates so it’s normal for a member to change around once in a while and try different programs.

And that’s ok; it’s their choice and you shouldn’t judge them for it.

Depending on what they promote and what sort of audience they’re trying to reach, each program will work better than others.

That’s why members leave one program after a while and join another – because they want more money or higher commissions or a better selection of offers.

Try different affiliate programs until you find the best one for your site

As mentioned earlier, there are thousands upon thousands of affiliate programs out there which means that you can’t join them all but you can try a few to see which one works best for your website and audience.

There’s no point in promoting offers that don’t provide what your readers are looking for or if they have low commission rates so instead try joining a few different programs each month and see how well they pay.

Monitor your stats regularly

It’s always best to keep an eye on your affiliate program account every now and then because you could be missing out on potential money depending on what you’re doing and how often.

For example, an affiliate might sign up with a program right before it releases a new offer which means they’ll get more traffic on their website for this one deal alone; if they forget to check back after the offer or neglect their account then they could miss out on future deals and commissions even though they were generating a lot of revenue using the program before.

Be open to new opportunities and remain consistent

As an affiliate, it’s important that you never turn down a chance to make money and always keep up with your website so you don’t miss out on any chances of earning more.

That means being active online, following trends, trying different things, and monitoring your site regularly so you know what’s going on.

If your website goes down for a few days then you might miss out on deals that require regular updates, like how daily deals work.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make extra money from home.

There are thousands upon thousands of affiliate programs online so it can be hard to find the best one for your site but, with some research and personal trial and error, you should find the right company in no time.

Make sure that you know what commission rate a program offers before you join and take some time to look around at the different offers they have available so you know which one works best for your website/audience.

Only promote products that are of good quality and relevant to your site and readers.

Also, keep an eye on how much money you’re making from a program because if you are not getting what you deserve then there’s no point in promoting them.

Keep checking back regularly to monitor statistics, stay active online, try different programs, and be open to new opportunities as they arise.

With these 10 steps, you should be able to find the best affiliate program in no time.

Do comment below and let me know about anything else that you might be doing before promoting a specific affiliate program.

Black Friday is here and here are the best Black Friday deals 2021.

Money! It is something you spend a lifetime to make. There is so much hard work and sweat involved.

So, if you try to save some of that by looking for cost-effective products, there isn’t anything wrong that you are doing.

And that is why I always prefer to shop around to find places where I can find the same, quality product and service for cheap.

It is hence that I usually buy most of my tools and services during the Black Friday sales.

I keep a journal and record the details of the product that I want to put there on my wishlist or, the ones that I have bought for cheap.

And here I am sharing one such journal with you. These are some of the essentials in digital marketing and these tools are usually available for a discounted price if you buy them during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales.

So, onto the tools then.

The Best Black Friday Deals 2021

The tools that I have picked are all running discounted offers until Cyber Monday, so you have some time to purchase them. Also, these are the tools and services that I have been using and I absolutely love.

It is hence that I am recommending them.

I do not recommend anything that I do not personally use.

With that out of the way, here are the discounted best black friday deals 2021

AmalinksPRO

This is one of the best Amazon affiliate plugins available out there in the market today. It helps you add links to Amazon products with your affiliate code embedded in them.

Most importantly it helps you stay on the right side of the terms and conditions of the Amazon associated program.

This plugin is available for 50% off.

Click here link to buy AmalinksPro now!

Angie Gensler Products

Angie is an internet marketing expert and she has some awesome products in social media management which include social media (Instagram and Pinterest) tools and courses.

She is running 50% off sales in this Black Friday deal.

Visit the below link to check out all the offers and buy the ones that you need.

Appsumo

Appsumo is my favorite marketplace when it comes to buying subscription products for a one-time fee.

That’s right.

There are a ton of products that are otherwise available for a monthly subscription, at a one-time lifetime fee, that you can find at Appsumo.

You can check out all the available products and services at the below link and pick the ones that you need for your business.

There’s a 10% discount offer running at Appsumo right now.

Tailwind

Tailwind is our favorite scheduling tool for both Pinterest and Instagram. There are a ton of features that can help you simplify the tedious task of planning and posting to your social profiles.

Automate this monotonous task with this simple and easy-to-use tool.

You get a 50% off on the annual plan for the first year which is a huge saving.

So go ahead a create a FREE account first using the below link and then upgrade to any plan to get your discounted price.

Thirsty Affiliates

If you are promoting affiliate products (other than Amazon affiliate products) on your blog or, podcasts then you need to cloak the links.

Cloaking is an important exercise and is essential to safeguard your affiliate commissions.

I use Thirsty Affiliates to cloak all my affiliate links because it is easy to use and even tracks all the clicks.

You can save up to $70 on this plugin in this Black Friday deal.

Pretty Links

I use pretty links all the time in my blog and my podcasts. I do this so that I can give an easy-to-remember link to my audience so that they can click through to my podcast episode or, the blog post.

Creating these easy-to-remember links with Pretty links is easy!

They have some excellent Black Friday deals running which can give you a nice discount of up to $70.

Click the below link below to avail your discount!

LinkWhisper

One of the key aspects of SEO is link building. While external link building is important, internal link building is also important.

And external link building can be a tedious job if you try to do it manually.

But thanks to Link Whisper, it now takes not less than a few minutes. It is just about clicking and adding.

The best part. I have seen huge movements in some of my posts immediately after I use Link Whisper to build internal links.

Link Whisper is available at a $30 discount this Black Friday.

Click the below link to grab yours now!

Hostinger

Hostinger is my preferred hosting service provider, because of its excellent uptime, fast servers, and wonderful customer support team.

I have most of my websites running on their servers on various plans that include Managed WordPress, Basic Hosting, and some dedicated virtual servers as well.

You can get up to 80% off on various products at Hostinger, this Black Friday.

Click the below link to check out the offers.

Hostgator

Hostgator is another hosting that we have used and recommend. We still have a few of our websites running on their Managed WordPress hosting.

They too, have some excellent servers and are also very friendly when it comes to Customer support.

You can get up to 75% off on all of their hosting plans.

Click the below link and then use the code below to get your savings.

CODE – CYBER21

Designrr

Designrr is an app that I use to convert my blog posts to simple PDF files that I can then use as lead magnets.

I also use them as a content upgrade in my blog posts.

The app is simple to use and can export a variety of content types and create pdf files in a click of a few buttons.

They are running some amazing lifetime deals and also have a $100 discount.

You can check it out at the below link –

SocialBee

SocialBee is my favorite social media scheduling tool.

It helps you schedule to almost all social media channels and even to your FB groups and LinkedIn profiles as well.

They are running a Black Friday offer where you get 30% off for the first 3 months.

You don’t want to miss it.

Use the code to get the discounted offer – SOCIALBEEBF21

Click the below link to access the offer!

Generatepress

Generatepress is the simplest and the lowest cost theme available in the market today. It is super fast and easy to configure as well.

Generatepress premium is priced at about $50 for a yearly license. But you can now get a 25% off your purchase this Black Friday.

They have lifetime licenses as well which too is priced super cheap.

Pick the one that suits you and never spend another dime on a WordPress theme.

Click the below link to access this black Friday deal.

OptinMonster

Optinmonster is a simple opt-in form builder plugin. I was using this plugin before switching over to Thrive Themes.

It isn’t because Optinmonster was bad. It was because I wanted some of the other features and applications that came as part of Thrive Themes and an Optin form builder was part of the bundle.

Optin Monster is available at a discounted price this Black Friday.

You can get the plugin at a 60% discount today!

Click the below link and get your copy.

I hope you found this simple handout useful.

Do let me know if there are any other products that you are looking for and I can send you the details.

If you liked this, please do share it with your social media channels so that others also can benefit from it.

You could have a stunning e-commerce website, but if your conversions are low, you’re not likely to earn some serious revenue.

While increasing your conversion rate is no cakewalk, there are tried and tested conversion rate optimization tactics you can leverage.

In this guide, we’ll look into five tips to help you boost your e-commerce website conversion rates and, in turn, increase your bottom line.    

Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

These are some simple tips that you can easily implement on your website and shouldn’t take too much time. But they can bring a lot of difference in the conversions.

Let us look at each one of these in detail along with a few examples where they have worked well.

Provide an on-site search option

An excellent way to increase conversions is by providing your potential customers with convenient and seamless user experiences.

Essentially, the easier it is for visitors to browse and find the products they want on your website, the higher the chances of buying.

An excellent way to ensure quick and easy shopping experiences is to provide an on-site search feature.

Below are a few tips to help you implement an e-commerce website search option effectively.

• Place your search feature in a prominent location. Ensure your search bar is easy for your visitors to see.

You can place the search bar at the top or just below the navigation menu for maximum visibility. This allows visitors to search for products, services, and others quickly.

• Offer advanced search options. Allow visitors to refine their search by including filters. You can also add predictive text the way Amazon does to help users speed up finding what they want.

• Leverage user search terms. The terms your visitors search for on your website indicates their search intent.

Use this information to optimize your website content, including blog posts, product category labels, pages, etc.

Doing so helps increase your web page’s visibility in search engine results pages. It also lets you optimize your product and other pages for on-site search.

• Use reliable Content Management Software (CMS). Simplify optimizing your web content for user search by utilizing a powerful CMS.

This allows you to create, rearrange, and design your website with minimal coding to simplify finding content on your website. 

Use product images strategically

You can do so much more with your product images than using them to represent the items you sell visually.

Product images are a great way to set your potential customers’ expectations and give them a good idea about what your product looks like.

Consider these tips to help you use your product images strategically.

• Showcase your products in multiple settings. Use product images that display your items in various backgrounds and settings.

For example, you can include a product image of the item in a display setting and another showing how it looks when used. This set of product images from Gorilla Carts is a classic example of this.

It’s an excellent way to help shoppers visualize the items better, encouraging them to click on that Buy Now button. 

• Opt for powerful ecommerce platforms. Most modern ecommerce platforms for small businesses make it easy to showcase product images. This simplifies displaying product images for better aesthetics and conversion optimization.

• Emphasize your products’ distinguishing features. If you sell similar items, highlight their specific features in your product images.

Shoppers are not likely to buy if they don’t see much of a difference among your products.

• Leverage user-generated content. Complement your product images with photos from your satisfied customers using or wearing your products. It’s a great way to engage potential buyers and build trust with them.

• Integrate this tactic with your social media strategy. Post your product images on social media with a compelling caption and a link leading to your website or product pages. This lets you reach more customers and boost your conversion opportunities.

Use compelling CTAs

Your calls-to-action (CTAs) can be powerful e-commerce website elements that help compel your potential customers into acting on your conversion goals.

To improve your CTAs’ effectiveness, make catchy and compelling CTA buttons to encourage conversions.

Here are a few tips to help you do just that.

• Use one CTA per page. Use a single CTA button for each web page (when possible) to help visitors focus on one offer at a time.

If you use more than one CTA button, create a visual hierarchy, such as showing ghost buttons as secondary CTAs. 

• Run split tests. Conduct split tests of variations of your CTA button colors, shapes, sizes, and copy. 

For example, you can test whether your potential customers respond better to “Sign up to join our webinar on summit vs. conference” or “Register today to our webinar: The difference between a summit and conference.”

• Ensure clear and specific CTAs. Avoid using vague copy in your CTAs. Your potential customers should know what they can get when they click the button.

You can also add other elements such as social proof to make your CTAs more persuasive, increasing your conversion rates.

Employ scarcity

According to psychology, the pain of losing something is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining it.

You can use this to your advantage to motivate your potential customers into signing up or buying now, so they don’t lose out on your offer.

When applied strategically, using the scarcity principle can help improve your website’s conversion rate.

Consider these few tips for leveraging the scarcity principle on your e-commerce website.

• Display the number of items left on your product or checkout pages. This helps encourage potential customers to purchase now before you run out.

• Use a countdown timer to show promo end dates. It’s a great way to incite a sense of urgency from your visitors, motivating them to make purchasing decisions faster.

While the scarcity principle isn’t applicable at all times, using it when it makes the most sense can do wonders for your conversion rate.

Offer discounts strategically

Providing discounts is one way of encouraging purchases and conversions.

After all, most people are generally happy with buying something for less than the original price.

However, overusing discounts has its downsides. This can lead shoppers to wait for special offers before buying or not purchasing unless your items are 15% to 20% off.

The key is to play your cards right and offer discounts strategically using these tips.

• Avoid offering discounts on a whim. Ensure your discount offers help get new visitors into your sales funnel.

This allows you to leverage discounts to build relationships with your existing customers, push new platforms, and reward referrals (among others).

• Use discounts to support your other marketing efforts. For instance, you can offer exclusive discounts for people who sign up for your email newsletter. 

Be deliberate about using discounts to optimize their benefits and avoid common pitfalls. This way, you can better ensure their effectiveness and boost your conversions and sales.

Take your conversion rates to new heights

While optimizing your website conversion rates often takes some elbow grease, the time and energy you spend can be more than worth it.

Follow the tips in this guide to kickstart your conversion rate optimization efforts and help set your business up for success.

If you have been struggling with internal link building, then this Link Whisper Review is going to give you a different perspective on the entire process and also learn the effectiveness of Link Whisper in helping with internal link building.

So what exactly is Link Whisper and how does it help in internal link building?

Before we look at it, it is important to talk about internal link building and where this fits in the entire SEO worldview.

To confess, I am not an expert in SEO, and just like you and most other marketers out there limit my knowledge of SEO on the information that is available online.

And that limits it to writing shareworthy and valuable content, keyword optimizing it using the basic SEO structure that Rank Math guides me on, and then focusing on building backlinks.

While that first part isn’t difficult because I control all of it, the second part which involves building backlinks isn’t something that I really control.

In fact, I am at the mercy of the people that I reach out to and the ones who find my content valuable enough to link it to.

And, in all truthfulness that is something that I too struggle with, just like every one of you out there.

I have spent a lot of money on people who claimed they could help me with SEO and backlink building, but most of them turned out to be a farce and were a waste of money.

It is hence that I regularly keep reading articles and blogs that can help me with SEO, especially Brian Dean’s backlinko and Matthew Woodward’s blog.

Anyways, back to our discussion.

While I was experimenting on all of these, I came across this article on internal link building and the impact that it can have on your search engine rankings.

At first, I dismissed it as yet another gimmick.

But then I happened to see some proof of how the rankings were impacted and that kind of convinced me that there is some truth to it.

There started my attempt at internal link building.

But then, a month into it and I was ready to give up.

The entire process of linking to your old articles and ensuring that your latest ones are also linked to some of the older articles was a painful one.

I was spending hours together to do and yet I wasn’t able to get the kind of results I was looking for.

There were no ways I could have continued that way.

I had to find a way to simplify this.

There started my search to find software that could automate this or, at least simplify the entire process.

And that finally landed me on this WordPress plugin called Link Whisper.

So what does this plugin does is something we will talk about in this Link Whisper review. We will also look at the functionalities of the plugin, its interface, how good it is, and a lot many other things.

Let’s get straight into the review.

Link Whisper Review – What does this plugin do?

Link Whisper is a plugin that was created by Spencer Haws, who himself is a niche affiliate marketer.

I particularly like products created by fellow marketers, primarily because of the fact that their products are well researched, considers practical applications, and are kept updated always.

Link Whisper is one such product that solves a big pain for marketers like me who do not have hours every day to spend on activities like internal link building.

It simplifies the entire process of building internal links by nicely integrating them into your regular article writing process. So before I get into a review of link whisper, let me show you some features of the product and how it works.

Installing the plugin is simple, just like any other plugin.

After installing the plugin, you will have to activate it by entering your license. You are now ready to use the plugin.

Once you have installed the plugin, you will find an option to start with setting the plugin up.

That might be looking a little overwhelming, but it is extremely simple. You can set it up by simply following some of the videos that they have in their knowledge base or, even pick the basic options and get started with.

These settings give you a lot of flexibility in choosing what piece of content to link to and how. So, what you choose will entirely depend upon what your requirements are.

I have kept it simple as you see in the above screenshot.

In addition to the “Settings”, the “Link Whisper” option on your sidebar will have a few other items –

• Reports
• Add inbound internal links
• Auto-linking
• Target Keywords
• URL changer

The report is where you get to see everything about the links in your posts.

You can see that the reports tab has multiple sub-tabs that include a dashboard, a links report, a domains report, clicks report and an error report.

Of all of these reports, to be very frank the only 2 reports that I usually look into are the links report and the clicks report. My usual reference is this dashboard which gives me a fair idea of what is happening with my blog.

I can click on each of those options to find more details, like click on “orphaned posts” and you will be able to see all the details about the posts where there are no internal links.

The second option “Add inbound internal links”, takes you to the same links report tab that you see in the reports option. It basically gives you a glance of the links status on your posts and also gives you the option of creating inbound internal links.

Something to note here is that you will not be able to add “outbound internal links” and “outbound external links” from this screen.

The “Auto-linking” option is to create automatic links. You can create auto-links rules by entering specific keywords and URLs that you want to link to.

In the below screenshot you can see how I created a link to one of my posts.

I did this to demonstrate how it works.

I do not like building automatic links and hence don’t use this option a lot. I prefer the manual method of building links using the post-editor dashboard (which I will show you in a little while) and the link report tab.

The next option is “Target Keywords”.

This is a very interesting option.

In fact, it shows you a list of all the keywords that you are targeting for a specific post. Link Whisper uses these keywords for internal link suggestions.

It even pulls up keyword suggestions from Google Search Console (this could take a few days from when you publish the post to populate).

It also pulls in keywords from most of the WordPress SEO plugins as well. I use RankMath and you can see in the below screenshot that LinkWhisper has pulled target keywords from Rank Math.

This is some extremely handy information at your fingertips.

If you expand the dropdowns, it will also tell you the details about what position your site is ranked for that specific keyword, how many clicks that has generated, and what is the CTR.

The final option is the “URL Changer”.

This isn’t something that I have used until now. But from what I understand, it helps you change URLs and replace them with newer ones.

So that’s with what you get in Link Whisper.

Before I move on to telling you about my experience with the plugin, let me show you one of the coolest things in this plugin. In fact, this is the screen that you would be using the most in this handy little plugin.

It is here that the entire magic happens most of the time.

This is the Link Whisper linking dashboard on the post editor.

What you see below is a screenshot of how it looks.

That was the last post I had written. You would see 2 options below the post – Link Whisper target keywords and Link Whisper suggested links.

Link Whisper target keywords is where the plugin shows you the keywords it pulled from your SEO plugin and Google Search Console (if any) and you can add custom keywords as well.

The Link Whisper suggested links option is where you will be able to see all of the link suggestions for the specific post. Now, this is pulled using the keywords for the post that you are writing.

It also gives you 2 options – to show link suggestions based on the category of the post or, to show link suggestions using the tags for the post.

You can simply filter the posts depending upon the dates that it was published on if that is something you want to use.

And then finally, it is about deciding which link to insert into your post by checking it and clicking “insert links into the post”.

At this point, there are a couple of things that you might want to keep in mind.

• The suggested anchor text for the links aren’t always great and sometimes it is pretty long. You have 2 options to change this. If you want to just shorten the anchor text, you can just click on the words and it gets deselected, like in the below demo.

• You can also click on the “edit sentence” button to edit the entire sentence.

• If you click on the arrow next to the suggestion, you will get a list of suggested links which you can choose from.

• Before you click the “insert links to the post” button, ensure that you have saved the post. Because when you click that button, the page loads for LinkWhisper to insert the links and if you haven’t saved the post, you mind just end up losing the last edits that you made to the post.

That is all there to Link Whisper.

It is a simple tool but extremely powerful and easy to use.

With that out of the way, let us quickly look at my experience with Link Whisper.

Link Whisper User Review – What I liked and What I dislike

Finally, let me get into the review of Link Whisper and tell you some of the features that I like and what I disliked. We will also look at the pricing and other details as well.

If you are looking to buy Link Whisper, you are given a variety of choices in the number of sites you can use the plugin on.

The single site license costs you about $77.00

But if you are lucky, you should be able to find a limited period deal on the plugin on Appsumo and get the same single site license for only $49.00.

Sometimes, Spencer is also generous to give you a 10% discount on his products. So if you get one then you are super-lucky.

Anyways, back to our review of Link Whisper.

We will be looking at 3 aspects for this review –

• Ease of installation and use
• Effectiveness of the plugin
• Support

If there is anything else you would like me to talk about, please comment below and let me know.

Ease of Installation and use

We saw that there isn’t particularly anything different in the installation process. It is similar to all other WordPress plugins. Activation is also easy and so is the configuration.

The interface is pretty simple and most things can be accessed from the Dashboard (reports) screen itself. I would rather have preferred that tab to be named as “Dashboard” instead of reports”.

Anyways,

The rest of the options are about setting things up one time or, maybe once in a while (like the URL changer or, Autolinking).

The “Add inbound internal links” option, doesn’t do anything particular other than bringing you back to the Dashboard. In fact, I would just have removed that option and built that directly into the dashboard itself.

But then, maybe there are people who might prefer that to be in there.

Overall, if you look at the setup and the other options in the settings panel of the plugin, things are pretty simple and easy.

Coming to the core feature, which is adding internal links on your posts. It primarily happens on the post editor and that is a pretty neat and simple layout.

So adding links is a breeze.

The only thing I would have wanted is a prompt saying “please save your work before clicking insert links”, or, maybe a feature that can save the draft and then insert the links when that “insert links” button is clicked.

Else it is one of the best plugins in terms of usage.

Effectiveness of the Plugin

I am sure this is what most of you would have been looking forward to in this Link Whisper review. Because at the end of the day, what is important is to know is if the plugin works.

In one word – the plugin works and works amazingly well.

But, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind.

Internal link building is not a substitute for good content. It also isn’t a substitute for any of the other things like optimizing your content for keywords, keyword research, etc.

It only helps you with one aspect in the entire SEO framework. That is, building a good link structure.

And this aspect, it does amazingly well.

I use Labrika to track my posts and see how it has changed over a specific period of time.

At least 12 of the keywords that I was tracking which were in the 18-26 positions in SERPs improved over a period of 3 months and came into the top 10 results.

I hadn’t done anything other than focusing on internal link building, just so that I could track how Link Whisper did.

And I was pretty happy with the results.

PS: for the sake of proofing my keyword selection and posts, I am not posting any screenshots or, details about the posts.

So overall if I am to give you a one-word review of Link Whisper, it will be – Amazing.

Support and Development

I didn’t really have any issues with the plugin until now, for which I had to get in touch with the Support team. But there were some generic questions that I had for which I reached out to them.

And their response was pretty good.

So I am assuming the support should be fine.

Also, the plugin didn’t really have any issues so, I guess the interaction with the support team might be very minimal.

And they have extensive documentation that takes care of pretty much every question you would have.

From a development perspective, I have the confidence that the development of the plugin will continue primarily because it is coming from a marketer and also because it is something he himself uses on his websites.

Link Whisper Review – Conclusion

To conclude this link whisper user review, there are many things that you will love about this plugin. And considering that it addresses one of the biggest issues that most bloggers face when it comes to internal link building, it is a must-have for anyone.

The simple dashboards, the user-friendly interface, and quick implementation makes it something that is easy to use and doesn’t add another overwhelming task to your list.

Overall it is a must buy and you should purchase this plugin.

Don’t forget to check out the Appsumo offer, if you are able to get it.

I hope you liked this Link Whisper review and found value in it. If you did, then do share the post with your social media friends using one of the links below.

Do comment and let me know your thoughts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some Frequently Asked Questions about the Plugin

Did you know that if you are not using affiliate link cloaking, you might be losing your commissions to a fraud hacker on the internet?

If you are new to link cloaking, then this article is for you. Read on to know the importance of cloaking your affiliate links and how it can save your hard-earned affiliate commissions in your business.

Typically we affiliate marketers are so engrossed in promoting our affiliate links, that we wouldn’t bother to take the time out to go and evaluate the reports and the commissions generated.

I was no different.

It was by chance that I happened to go through the traffic generated vs commissions earned report for a specific program that I was an affiliate for.

The program was high converting and in demand. So I knew that if I send visitors to their sales page after a soft-sell, it would typically result in good conversions.

I put together a good blog post and A/B tested it to find the best converting one.

The final copy was not salesy but ensured that the reader takes action.

Everything was set!

The page had started converting and I had started earning decent commissions.

But then suddenly, it stopped.

The traffic was the same or, better at times. Yet sales weren’t happening.

I was surprised.

The program owner couldn’t help much because I was talking vague, without any real data.

After brainstorming, I came up with a hack.

I added a simple offer on my page. Anybody buying using my link had to send me an email with the purchase receipt to get access to a limited period resource I had put together.

The next day itself saw about 3 people writing to me with their purchase receipt.

I took this information and went to the program owner, who at first wasn’t ready to reveal any information. But after much pleading, he agreed.

When he sent me the details of the sales, I was shocked.

All the 3 sales were credited to a different affiliate, who had nothing but a crappy website to show for his efforts.

That’s when I realized that even affiliate commissions can be stolen.

How this happens is a lot of technical stuff and isn’t relevant for our discussion.

But how we can stop this is relevant to us. It is by using affiliate link cloaking.

In this post, we will learn more about it and how to use it the right way!

What is Affiliate Link Cloaking?

Before we dive deep into understanding everything about link cloaking, let me define affiliate link cloaking for you –

Affiliate link cloaking is the creation of a shortened, branded, clean-looking affiliate link that is trackable and easily manageable, from an otherwise ugly-looking affiliate link.

So what exactly is cloaking?

To understand this we need to understand how affiliate links work.

What I am going to show you here is how all affiliate links work, irrespective of which network or, the program they are associated with.

So, every affiliate link has 2 primary objectives – The first one is to track where that sale is coming from, which means “YOU” in this case. The second one is to track the sales page or, the funnel page that the sale is being generated from.

There could be other secondary objectives like the source of traffic etc.

But that is not relevant for our discussion because none of that really matters to us.

So, back to the primary objectives.

Affiliate networks and merchants use unique IDs to track these 2 metrics. They would use an affiliate ID that is unique to you to track all of the sales you are generating and another unique ID to track the pages that are generating the sale.

These IDs are tracked using parameters.

Not sure what parameters are?

Let me show you one with an example. The below is an affiliate link from ShareASale.

https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=1820605&u=3xxxxx&m=97231

If you look closely, there are 3 different numbers there.

The first number is the ID for the page or, offer that is generating the sale. The second number is my affiliate ID which will track the affiliate who is generating the sale. And the 3rd number is the merchant ID which is used by Shareasale to track the sales being generated by the merchant.

Since these affiliate links have to accommodate all of these variables, it is common for them to look ugly.

In fact, ugly will be an understatement. It is horrifying.

And asking anybody sane to click on a link like that, especially if they aren’t as informed as me and you about how variables work will be evil.

Now let us look at how a cloaked link will look.

https://dkspeaks.com/get/longtailpro

Compare that with the earlier link.

Which one would you be comfortable clicking on?

So that’s what cloaking is all about.

You have transformed an ugly-looking link into a professional-looking, clean link that is even easy to remember.

Wouldn’t it be easier for your reader to click on something that is linked to that kind of a URL instead of the horrifying URL that you saw earlier?

How does Cloaking Work?

Now that we have seen what the entire cloaking thing is, and how such a link looks, let us look at how this works.

“Oh! com’on buddy.

Let’s cut the crap and move to the meatier part of the post or, else I am clicking over to that next page in the Google search results”, you are thinking.

I understand.

..and I promise. Holy Promise!

Just another couple of seconds.

Because this is important for you. Understanding this will help you decide on how you would like your links to appear.

Game!

So let’s continue.

In essence, cloaking is nothing but redirecting.

Yeah! that’s right.

It is redirecting. You are setting up a URL (the custom link you created) to redirect to another URL (the affiliate link).

When you create one of those cleaner URLs on your website (remember that the cloaked link is a branded link which looks like it is a link on your website, because of the domain name in the link. Check it out below once again), you are creating a link to a page that doesn’t really exist on your domain.

https://dkspeaks.com/get/longtailpro

So what happens when somebody clicks on that link?

The server looks for that page and in a normal scenario would return a “404 – page not found” error.

But instead, in our case here – the server searches, and when it doesn’t find that page on your website, it will fall back onto an alternative URL, which in our case is the affiliate link.

Now, how does the server know that the fallback URL is the affiliate link?

It is coded into a script that takes care of it when you cloak the link.

If that had your head spinning, then I am sorry.

But that was essential so that you understand (fairly understand, I mean) how all of this thing works.

Now that we are done with it, let us look at the benefits of link cloaking and how to do it.

Benefits of Cloaking an Affiliate Link

Why should affiliates cloak their links?

Why can’t the affiliate network or, the merchant provide a cleaner link?

They do.

Some networks do provide links that are cloaked, but that still has a couple of issues –

• These links won’t be branded with your domain name
• It still looks ugly and difficult to remember because of the way it is created.

Check out one such example below. This is a link that was generated at CJ.com.

https://www.tkqlhce.com/d977lnwtnvAEIBEFCBACCIFIBKG?sid=01

Now that looks even more horrifying. Isn’t it?

Yes!

It is still a cloaked link. But the single benefit that this link gives is that it encrypts all the tracking information like your affiliate ID, the merchant ID etc.

What could be the use of such a link?

It is to help prevent scammers steal your commissions.

What? STEAL!

Yes. You heard that right.

We will discuss that in detail in a little while from now.

But, for now.. does that kind of link cloaking work?

If you linked to something like that, will people click on it?

Unlikely.

This is why we need a good link cloaker tool (my recommendation comes a little below if you are curious to know about that)

Benefits of Link Cloaking

It is a good practice to cloak your affiliate links and you would find every affiliate marketer recommending this.

One of the reasons for it is to prevent affiliate commissions from being stolen. But there are other benefits as well. Let us look at some of them.

Easy to remember

When you mention a link somewhere like in your podcast or, in a social media post, the objective is to ensure that your audience or, readers visit that link. Even if they don’t do it immediately, you would love for them to remember the link.

Isn’t it?

A normal affiliate link isn’t something that can be remembered unless you are a super computer based on IBM’s Watson.

But a cloaked affiliate link is indeed easy to remember.

Prevents Affiliate Commission Theft

This is something we discussed earlier. Cloaking prevents affiliate commission thefts.

Wondering how can somebody steal affiliate commissions?

In this age of smart scammers, is it that difficult?

Not really.

Scammers install codes on computers and browsers. These codes have the capability to change affiliate links by substituting the affiliate IDs.

In addition to this, there are also instances where a uses decides to buy a product after visiting your blog post or, reading your recommendation but, then deliberately strips off your affiliate ID and purchases directly from the website.

In a way, this is also a commission loss for you.

Cloaking affiliate links helps prevent all these types of affiliate commission losses. It blocks all of these activities and ensures that you get rewarded for your efforts.

Link Management

Cloaking also helps in easier link management. While this might not be possible if you use a self-created javascript code to redirect visitors, most other cloaking software and plugins help do this.

There are 3 ways in which cloaking helps in link management.

Firstly, it helps you ensure that your affiliate links are no-follow.

You don’t want to waste your link juice by linking out to affiliate URLs and thereby hurt your search engine rankings. Right?

Link cloaking helps prevent this by adding a no-follow tag to your affiliate links. That way it is helpful to improve SEO rankings as well.

Secondly, cloaking helps you keep all of your affiliate links organized. You can create categories for your links and add specific affiliate links to them.

For eg: Organize all of your hosting-related links in one category, page builders under that category, and so on.

Thirdly, it is easy to manage your links using a cloaking plugin.

In an event that the URL to the destination needs to be changed, you wouldn’t have to spend hours searching for every URL on every post to change it.

Just change it on the redirect page and it changes automatically on every page you have added this link. Isn’t that quick?

And finally, cloaking also helps you to track your affiliate links. You can see how many clicks are being generated by each link and accordingly track your conversions. Cloaking affiliate links are extremely helpful with link tracking.

Helps build trust

Marketing is all about trust.

And that is exactly what you are trying to do with your content. isn’t it?

Now imagine that you build all of that trust with your audience and when it is time for them to take action, you present them with a link that looks dubious and doesn’t even look like something related to your website or, domain.

Do you even think that people will click on those links?

No, Right?

This is where cloaking comes in.

Since cloaking uses your domain to create the redirect, the linked URL looks very much like one that is a part of your website. This increases the trust factor in your audience which then increases the probability of somebody clicking on it.

Those were some of the benefits of cloaking.

Now that we have seen the benefits of cloaking, the question boils down to how do we cloak affiliate links. Right?

WordPress Plugins to Cloak affiliate links

There are numerous plugins out there that can help you cloak your affiliate links. But that can be a topic for another post.

For the purpose of this post, I will keep it simple.

There are 2 simple WordPress plugins that I would recommend.

Thirsty Affiliates

Thirsty affiliate is my go-to wordpress plugin and my favorite one. It is in fact, the top most affiliate link cloaker out there.

It is simple, easy to use, and gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of link management and staying organized.

The best part is that you get most of these features even in the FREE version. But if you go for the PRO version, you get a ton of other features as well.

Pretty links

This is my second favorite plugin. I was a user of this plugin before moving over to Thirsty Affiliate.

In fact, if I have to create a redirect for a URL other than an affiliate link, I still use Pretty link.

Pretty link is again very easy to use and has a simple interface.

The FREE option comes with almost all important features. But if you are looking for some advanced features you can go for the PRO version as well.

Over to YOU

So, what do you think about cloaking your affiliate links?

Do comment below and tell me about your favorite WordPress plugins for cloaking.

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, then do share it with your social media circles by hitting one of those social media buttons below.

See you in another post.

If your fingers are itching to enter your credit card details on that page selling the next “Affiliate Marketing Course” that teaches you the secret to earn millions in the next 30 days, then you might want to read on before you satisfy your itch!

Okay! So you are browsing around the internet trying to find “tips and tricks on affiliate marketing” to crack the code and start making money.

And you suddenly stumble upon that YouTube ad that talks about the secret code that top affiliate marketers are trying to hide from you and which will make you a millionaire in the next 30 days. All you need is to join the course that teaches you this “secret code”.

Seen that?

Me too!

Numerous times. In fact, YouTube is full of these ads. There are thousands of videos that these so-called “successful affiliate marketers” put out there on YouTube.

And in this post, I am going to break that secret and tell you the “CODE” that every affiliate marketer has been hiding from you.

I am not sure if you want to call me a “successful” affiliate marketer, because I am not the kind that flashes dollars, luxury cars, and huge mansions.

But I make a decent income from my affiliate marketing business that helps me do what I want to do in life, enjoy time with my family and buy things without having to look at the “PRICE TAG“.

And that is the definition of “SUCCESS” for me. You can read more about me on my about page. Maybe, you might be able to relate to my story.

Anyways, back to what we were discussing.

In this post, I will be breaking the “SECRET CODE” that everybody has been hiding from you until today and that essentially means that you will not have to buy that next affiliate marketing course.

Do you need an Affiliate Marketing Course?

Internet marketing is a very strange business.

Why strange?

Because it is probably the easiest business out there.

It doesn’t need a ton of investment, no door-to-door selling, you don’t have to be in the shop for 19 hours to sell your products and above all, can be done from the comforts of your home.

Yet, very few people succeed in internet marketing.

Why?

Because internet marketing is simple!

Yes, you heard that right.

Internet marketing is simple and the simplest things are the most difficult to implement and succeed. Because we human beings are hard-wired to believe that if something has to be worthwhile of trying and succeeding at, then it has to be complex and difficult.

And it is here that the entire digital marketing industry thrives, including affiliate marketing.

So, does that mean that all affiliate marketing courses are scams and that you do not need any courses?

Not really!

Learning and teaching can never be a scam. And it is important to learn and upskill yourselves.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the internet and digital knowledge is that it is available for FREE on the internet.

And when something is can be made available for FREE and can be consumed for FREE, validation of the worthiness of the knowledge that is being shared becomes difficult.

This essentially means that there is no way to validate if what you are learning is right or, wrong.

Also, because of the amount of information available online, it is extremely easy to get overwhelmed.

It is here that courses and training become important.

They compile real, worthy, and practical information and present it in a format that is simple to understand and implement. This takes away the overwhelm and also ensures that you are getting information is validated for worthiness.

So you would need courses that can train you and teach you.

After all, digital marketing, affiliate marketing, etc. are all skills. And for somebody who is new to these topics will need to fall back onto a training or, course to teach them these skills.

Am I contradicting myself?

Wasn’t I telling you that you don’t need to buy that next digital marketing course?

Let me clarify that for you.

The Secret Code to Affiliate Marketing Success

One of the easiest ways to get the attention of your audience is to tell them that you have a “SECRET” that you are going to share with them.

Didn’t I catch your attention when I said the same thing a few paragraphs above?

And when that “SECRET” that you are going to share is about becoming a millionaire overnight, no force in the universe can STOP you from entering the credit card details onto the order form.

Agree?

I am sure you do. Because I was in exactly the same position a few years back.

Back then, Clickbank was flooded with push-button software that could generate tons of traffic and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And I bought every other software that came out only to find that, while the push-button was there, it did not work to do any of those things that it promised to do.

In fact, it only trained my fingers to push the button so much so that I could push a button even as I slept. It did nothing else.

The latest trend of “SECRET CODES” is just the same. Except that now there are no more push-buttons. Instead, it has been replaced by a “SECRET CODE”.

Go to YouTube and search for Affiliate Marketing Course and you will find thousands of videos with thumbnails that stare onto your face and read about “the trick to make millions” from affiliate marketing.

Why is everybody making the same kind of videos with a similar-looking thumbnail?

Because it works!

The “SECRET CODE” and the “SECRET TRICKS” are terms that can draw you into watching the videos and then lead you into the rabbit hole of “affiliate marketing courses”.

So, coming back to our question.

Am I contradicting myself?

Absolutely not!

I absolutely recommend affiliate marketing courses to everyone. You should in fact, join a good affiliate marketing course before you get into it seriously.

This can save you a lot of time and will help you succeed faster in comparison to, you trying to do it on your own, with all the free information that is available online.

But what I don’t recommend is, joining that affiliate marketing course that promises you the “SECRET CODE” to becoming a millionaire overnight.

In fact, stay away from any course that promises to teach you a SECRET.

Because the secret to succeeding in affiliate marketing, that these courses will show you once you are inside is a simple code – “SLOG YOUR ASS OUT”.

Yeah! That’s right.

Slog it out.

You will have to work hard, follow a system and do it just like you would have run a real business. Success will follow.

There is no other secret code!

My simple advice – Join an Affiliate Marketing Course that teaches you the system and the details of how the affiliate marketing business works.

Then implement what you have learned and build your business.

Nothing can stop you from succeeding.

PS: I will soon be putting together a course that teaches you this system. There will be no SECRET Code. But for now, if you would like to learn more about affiliate marketing and the system, you can download my FREE GUIDE.

Here are 2 affiliate marketing courses that I recommend, if you are really interested in learning affiliate marketing.

• Affiliate Marketing Training by the She Approach – A very cost effective yet informative course
• 1-2-3 Affiliate Marketing by Pat Flynn – One of the best courses on affiliate marketing but on the slightly expensive side

Over to You

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and found the information valuable.

If you did then please do share it with your social media circles by clicking on one of the social media buttons below.

And do comment below and tell me about a course that you regretted buying. I would love to hear from you.

In this post, we will look at a very simple, easy, and quick way to create a lead magnet that converts in less than 10 minutes. If you have been struggling to create lead magnets, then this post is for you.

A lead magnet – One of the most talked-about things in internet marketing and especially affiliate marketing.

And in fact, one of the topics that have so many articles written that it is unlikely that you wouldn’t feel overwhelmed.

I too first started off with this post as a listicle with 10 quick ways to create a lead magnet. But then, I felt it would be wise to pick a single method and possibly the easiest rather than overwhelming you with a lot of information.

So, in this post, we will look at only a single method and a very easy one to create a lead magnet and that too in less than 10 minutes.

Ready?

Before you take your stopwatches out and hit start, let us quickly understand a few basics of a lead magnet.

What is a Lead Magnet and why you should create one?

A lead magnet is a very important part of your marketing strategy.

A lead magnet is a special offer or incentive that you use to attract new visitors to your site.

The goal is to get people to give you their email address in exchange for the lead magnet.

You can then use these email addresses to build a list of people interested in your products or services. You can then market to them by sending them regular emails and building a relationship with them.

People who visit your site and sign up to your list are called “leads”. Though I personally dislike using that term because I somehow feel that this term doesn’t consider the human aspect of the people giving out their email addresses.

Anyways, that’s how they are referred to.

Lead magnets can take many forms, from a free report, to a discount coupon, to an e-book. Lead magnets are one of the best ways to get more email subscribers and leads for your business.

At this point, I need to debunk a common myth. And this myth is what destroys the entire purpose with which you put together a lead magnet.

There is this myth that “FREE” has to be “CRAP”.

That you can offer anything, if you are offering it for FREE.

That isn’t how it is.

Lead magnets have an objective to meet. And it is not for “FREE”. There is a cost to it and that is cost is the “email address” that your prospect gives out.

It’s a cost to compromise on his privacy and allow you to communicate with him/her through emails.

Hence it is important that we understand that and provide value to our subscribers.

Why should you create a Lead Magnet?

Lead generation is an important part of any online marketing campaign.

Studies show that a sales doesn’t happen until a visitor is exposed to an offer at least 3 times. In digital marketing, where a visitor comes to your website and leaves, the only option of ensuring that you stay in touch with them is by capturing their contact details.

But then, why would a visitor share their contact details with you?

It is here that the lead magnet plays an important role.

Creating a great lead magnet is a quick way to generate leads for your business.

The goal of a lead magnet is to attract your target audience’s attention and provide you with their contact details which you can then use to build a relationship with them.

According to HubSpot and Marketing Profs, 61% of marketers use lead magnets in their lead generation campaigns.

So what makes a great lead magnet?

What should a lead magnet contain?

The idea is to create a piece of content that provides enough value to your visitors so that they will exchange their email address in return for the lead magnet.

The more attractive the lead magent is, the more people will share it. The more people that share it, the more people will visit your website. The more people that visit your website, the more opportunities you have to convert them into paying customers.

Therefore, the first question you should ask yourself is: “What is my goal?”

Do you want more subscribers? More leads? More traffic to your website?

The answer to that question will determine what kind of lead magnet you create.

The key to a great lead magnet is to make sure it’s relevant to your audience. You should also make sure that the lead magnet is relevant to your business and that it provides a lot of value to your visitors.

Now, when it comes to you and me, as content marketers – what would be a great lead magnet?

“CONTENT”. Isn’t it?

So today we are going to look at how to create a lead magnet from a great piece of content that we already have on our website.

How to Create a Lead Magnet in under 10 minutes?

Since the objective of this post is to keep the process of creating a lead magnet simple and easy, we are going to be using content that is already there on our blog.

If you have a blog that has a few articles on it, then there definitely would be an article that is hugely popular. And over a period of time, these articles lose popularity and give way to newer articles on your website.

But the fact that the article was valuable is something that is something that cannot be denied.

Then why not use those articles that are now dumped somewhere on those last pages of your blog?

We are going to keep the process simple. This process to create a lead magnet involves 3 very simple steps.

• Identifying the article or, articles that we want to use
• Extracting the article contents and refining it
• Generating the lead magnet

While the process looks complicated, it isn’t really!

The PDF generation process can be a little cumbersome but, I will show you a nice little software that can do the job in a few clicks.

Let us now take a look at each of these steps:

Identifying the article

The best place to identify the article that has popularity is to go to Google Search Console.

Head over to your dashboard and click on the “Performance” tab on the sidebar.

Once you are on the performance dashboard, you can click on the “Date” option as shown in the picture above.

In the dialog box that open, select a period of your choice. I would recommend 3 months which is a fair period to assess the popularity of your articles.

Once done you can click on “apply”.

When the results are populated, you can scroll a little towards the bottom and you will find all the search queries nicely arranged in order of the number of clicks.

But since what we need is a list of the articles, we go to “Pages”.

Now you should be able to see all of the articles arranged in terms of their last 3 months popularity.

In the above screenshot you can see that one specific article has dropped to half in terms of popularity.

There are different metrics that are available and that you might want to consider. Depending upon your business goals you can pick the one that suits you the most.

Now that article up there is something I can easily use for my lead magnet.

I would want to give it a nice twist and present it to my audience. Since the above results are for a recipe blog, I would present it as the most popular recipe on the blog.

Or, I could even create a collection of most popular recipes by picking the top 10 such recipes.

But for the sake of this post, I will use an article from this blog of mine. Since it is one of the most comprehensive guides on “what is affiliate marketing“, I think it will be an amazing lead magnet.

Now with that step done, let us head over to the next step.

Extracting the article contents and refining it

For this step I am using an amazing little software called “Designrr” that I have been using for some time.

You don’t need this software to do this, but it makes the entire process a lot easier. And since time is valuable for you and me as as content marketer, I recommend using this software.

It is only $27.00 and for that price, it is a steal.

If you do not want to use Designrr, then you can just copy and paste the article onto a word document, edit it and format it and then generate a PDF out of it.

But here I am going to show you how I do it with Designrr.

When you login to your dashboard, here is how it will look.

The first step is to “start a new project”.

Once you start a new project, you see the first option is to “import from blog post”. Click that and you will see a screen to enter your blog post URL.

Enter the blog post URL here and hit the “Fetch” button.

The software will take a couple of seconds to fetch the blog post. Once done, you can go ahead and enter the tags (this is an easy way of categorizing the ebooks that you create) for the book.

Then click on “Next”.

The next step is to pick a template. There are numerous templates available to choose from. You can pick any one that fits your requirements.

Once the template is selected, you can proceed to the next screen. The software extracts the blog post and presents it to you in an editable workspace.

Every element in the ebook is editable. You can import images, change backgrounds, change font, edit text and do whatever you would like to, with the ebook.

But for me, I would prefer the least effort in creating this lead magnet.

And since the software already gives you a nicely designed ebook, I don’t think I need to spend time customizing it again.

Anyways, now the final step is to publish your ebook.

Generating the lead magnet

Publishing the ebook is as simple as clicking a button.

Once you are satisfied with the contents and the design of the ebook, just hit the “Publish” button to generate the ebook.

You will be give multiple format options. But since we are looking at generating a PDF file, we select the first option, which is “for adobe reader”.

You can then enter the name of your ebook and the author name etc.

Once done, just hit the “export” button.

You can download it as a PDF file or, even create a flipbook. The flipbooks look elegant and attractive like in the below image.

And that is all that is there to creating a lead magnet.

In less than 10 minutes I was able to create a 67 pager ebook, that is nicely formatted and provides immense value to my readers.

Over to You Now

I am sure that would have triggered a few ideas in your mind to create a lead magnet.

This post on how to create a lead magnet was a very simple and easy guide to create the simplest lead magnet possible. You can use this technique and Designrr to create even better custom lead magnets like cheatsheets, eguides etc.

I hope you enjoyed this post.

Do share it with your social media channels by clicking the button below and don’t forget to tell me your thoughts about this post by commenting below.

Go ahead and create a lead magnet for yourself and start building your list.

You can get Designrr here.

If you have been trying to understand what is high ticket affiliate marketing, then this post is for you. In this post, I will explain in detail everything about high ticket affiliate marketing and how you can benefit from it.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent source of Passive income if you plan it well and implement the right strategies. One of these strategies involves promoting high ticket affiliate programs.

The first affiliate program that I started promoting was a Clickbank product on a Guitar Course called “Jamorama”.

Luckily for me, it worked out really well.

In fact, one of the primary reasons it worked out was because I created a niche website with a lot of information about guitars and guitar courses and then promoted this product on the website.

The articles ranked pretty fast on Google and traffic started flowing in.

This was my first experience with Niche affiliate marketing.

While the site gave me a consistent income, the problem was that it wasn’t really enough to make a living. If the traffic dropped in any month, then the revenue too dropped.

It took a very high conversion rate and a lot of traffic to actually make a decent income.

I had to find a solution to this problem!

There were 2 options that I had – One was to build many more such sites, and the other was to look for something that paid a substantial amount in commissions.

While my immediate response was to take the first option, my long-term plan was to follow the second option; of promoting products that paid a good amount in commissions. In other words, promote a high ticket affiliate program.

So what exactly is high ticket affiliate marketing. Let us look into it in a little more detail.

What is high ticket affiliate marketing?

If you are new to affiliate marketing then before understanding what is high ticket affiliate marketing, you will need to spend time on understanding the basics of affiliate marketing.

High Ticket affiliate marketing isn’t a completely different beast that you need to start learning from scratch. It is in fact, a niche sub-set within affiliate marketing.

It is a type of affiliate marketing where you promote products or services that sell at a much higher price than the norm. And, the higher the price the bigger the commissions you will get.

The usual affiliate programs that you would come across pay you about $20 to $100 per sale. If you have been promoting Amazon products under the Amazon affiliate program, then the commissions can be even lesser.

In contrast, high ticket affiliate programs would usually pay you thousands of dollars in commissions.

Wondering how they do it?

It’s simple. They price it a lot higher.

In fact, these products and services have extremely high perceived value and hence the prices are pretty high for these.

But with these higher payouts comes a heightened level of scrutiny and increased risk for the company so they generally prefer to work with hard-to-find, niche experts.

Does that mean that somebody who is just starting off cannot promote a high ticket affiliate program?

Not really!

You too might be able to join some of these programs where the entry requirements aren’t very high. And there are quite a few such programs, which I will be covering in my next post.

Benefits of high ticket affiliate programs?

The price points of high ticket affiliate programs are extremely high and hence not everybody coming over to your website will buy these products.

In this age, where people think multiple times before entering their email address in an opt-in box to download a FREE product, making somebody take out a credit card and pay a few thousand dollars is like moving a mountain.

It is hence that high ticket affiliate programs aren’t for everybody.

If you are somebody who plans to promote such high ticket affiliate programs, then you will need a working strategy in place.

We will look at some strategies for promoting these programs and making money with them but for now, let us first understand the benefit of promoting a high ticket affiliate program.

The obvious benefit of promoting a program that pays you higher commissions is that you will be able to achieve your financial goals faster.

Now, imagine if your goal is to earn $20,000 per month. If you are promoting an affiliate program that pays your $20 per sale, you will have to sell about 1000 of them to reach that target.

At the same time, imagine you are promoting a product that pays you about $200 per sale. You will only need about 100 sales to achieve your goals.

So the efforts needed will be much lesser.

In addition to that, the benefit of getting into that circle of affiliate marketers that is promoting these high ticket programs is that you get that much sought-after “expert” tag faster than you would have got if you were promoting low ticket programs.

Hence the benefits are pretty obvious –

• Faster achievement of financial goals
• Lesser efforts
• Better returns for the same effort
• Faster entry into the experts circle

What are some of the best high ticket affiliate programs?

Marketing has changed a lot in the last few years. Mass marketing has given way to relationship marketing because relationship marketing builds trust.

And trust has become the most important factor in sales today.

A lot of the top marketers like Seth Godin, Andre Chaperon have been promoting relationship marketing for quite some time now.

Though some of the marketers still continue with the older form of marketing – blasting out emails about anything and everything to everybody on their list, they too will transition over pretty soon.

Why?

Because of the diminishing open rates and CTRs for their promotions.

But why are we talking about “relationship marketing” in a post that is supposed to be about what is high ticket affiliate marketing?

That’s because, if you are planning to sell high ticket affiliate programs then you need to learn relationship marketing. Selling products that are high value needs trust.

Till the time you have not built trust with your audience, readers, and followers, you will never be able to sell high-value products.

Your audience needs to accept you as an authority and believe in you to solve their problems. And only then will they buy those high ticket products that you are promoting.

This is one of the reasons why you see most high ticket programs are at the top end of the sales funnel. And they usually start with low ticket offers.

So, what are some good high ticket programs to promote?

There are numerous programs that are available in the market. I will be writing another post with a list of all the high ticket affiliate programs suited for all kinds of affiliate marketers.

But for now, here are a few of the best high ticket affiliate programs that you can promote.

Clickfunnels – Clickfunnels is a program that can be promoted to a fresh audience and also a warmed-up audience, primarily because the funnel starts at a low ticket product and goes all the way up to a high ticket product which can earn you a nice commission.

Kajabi – Kajabi is an all-in-one marketing suite that takes care of every aspect of your marketing requirement. The product is priced extremely high. Not everybody is an ideal user of Kajabi. That is why their affiliate program also accepts registration only from Kajabi users.

I was promoting Kajabi until a few years back when I was using their services. But since moving over from them, I have stopped the promotions as well.

Kinsta – Kinsta is a premium Managed WordPress hosting solution that starts at around $30 per month for a single site, unlike the low-cost solutions that start at around the $3.00 mark.

The payouts for their programs are very high and you can earn anywhere up to $500 per signup and then 10% recurring for the life of the customer.

Authority Hacker – Authority hacker is a complete marketing course by the folks at Authority Hacker – Gael and Mark. This is one of the best and complete courses out there if you are really looking at building an online business. The amount of support and handholding that these guys do, you will not find it anywhere else.

The courses are priced extremely high because of the high perceived value and hence it is not for everyone. Hence promoting this requires extreme trust and relationship between you and your audience.

Now those were just the 4 major programs in 4 different categories that I usually recommend. But there are numerous such programs out there which I will be covering in another of my post.

Since this post is more about understanding what is high ticket affiliate marketing, these programs will give you a fair idea of how it looks.

What is a good conversion rate for high ticket affiliate programs?

One of the most common questions that all affiliate marketers ask is about conversion rates. Because eventually, that is what is going to determine the effectiveness of your efforts.

SO, what is a good conversion rate for high ticket affiliate programs?

Conversion rates are usually measured by the number of sales per visitor or the number of signups per visitor. A high conversion rate, in general, is desirable and considered good if you are evaluating the quality of an affiliate program, but not something that is necessary.

In fact, there isn’t something called the “ideal conversion rate” because a lot of it has to do with how you are marketing the specific product.

High Conversion rates mean that the visitor is doing what you want them to do. But for that to happen, you have to have a very strong relationship with your audience.

I would want 100% of my audience to convert. But that doesn’t happen in real life.

A 10%-15% conversion rate for a high ticket affiliate program is considered very good. This means that if 100 people will visit your site, you will have about 10-15 signup for the high ticket affiliate program.

But then again, that will depend upon your sales copy, your sales funnels, the quality of the product/service you are offering, your follow-up email strategy, etc.

Also, note that the conversion rate will be different for every high ticket affiliate program. As a result, you should not compare your sales or conversion rates with that of another person.

How to select a high ticket affiliate program?

Promoting a high ticket affiliate program needs a well-planned strategy.

Like I said a little while back, the price point of these products makes it extremely difficult to sell you a cold customer. Hence it is important that the product offers the amount of value it promises and that it is worth the price.

So, when you’re trying to decide which high-ticket affiliate program to sign up for, it’s important to first think about the type of offer they are running.

Is this a product that you would use in your own life?

If you’re not sure, think about what your target audience might need or want and find a program that meets their needs.

The product should align with your niche, your marketing strategy and should be something of value to the kind of audience coming over to your website.

While promoting a premium managed WordPress hosting on a “healthy living” blog, in the footer of the website where you mention, “hosted on xxx web hosting” is absolutely fine, it cannot be part of your overall promotional strategy.

Why?

Because your audience is not warmed up to buy a web hosting service. In fact, they are there to learn more about healthy living and not to start a website.

Hence, it is extremely important that you only promote products that align with your visitors’ interests.

Conclusion

Now that we understood what is high ticket affiliate marketing, the question is – is it necessary to promote high ticket programs as an affiliate marketer.

No.

High ticket affiliate marketing is very popular these days.

The more established marketers have all priced their products extremely high because of the quality of content they are offering and also because of their brand value. Hence these products offer a higher commission rate as well if you are promoting it as an affiliate.

So with these high ticket products, not only can you find very profitable products, but also get into an affiliate market with very low competition.

But before you start promoting any of these, think about your strategy and how a high ticket affiliate program will fit into it.

While higher commission rates, faster achievement of financial goals, etc. are all perks of selling a high ticket product, it is important that it fits the overall gamut of your marketing game.

Think, plan and then decide if you really want to get into the high ticket game.

My recommendation – You should!

Comment below and let me know your thoughts about the post and what is the one high ticket affiliate program that you are promoting as part of your strategy!

This post is a detailed guide on how to setup a WordPress website on Hostinger with step-by-step instructions. If you are planning to start a blog for affiliate marketing, then this guide will help you set one up easily.

If you are looking for a reliable hosting provider, then you might want to check out Hostinger.

WordPress isn’t difficult to install with their famous 5-minute install. Yet at times it can be difficult with doing it, considering the many different interfaces and hosting dashboards.

Some companies provide you with cPanel access whereas some others provide a custom dashboard if they do not want to spend on making cPanel available for their customers.

Hosting companies have hence simplified this process by providing 1-click install options to their customers. But then again this too has its own problems.

Nevertheless, my objective with this series of posts is to simplify this and provide a step-by-step guide to install a WordPress website with different hosting providers.

Why Do I Recommend Hostinger?

Hostinger is my favorite web host and since the time I have switched over to them about 5-6 months back, I should say that hosting issues are the last thing that I have had to look at.

Their semi-managed WordPress hosting takes care of most issues and the fact that their servers are pretty reliable gives peace of mind from the usual hosting problems.

I have a detailed Hostinger review in here. You can read the review to know why I recommend Hostinger.

Here are a few of the reasons why I absolutely love them –

Simplicity of use

The way most hosting providers arrange their directories is extremely confusing. This becomes overwhelming if you are hosting multiple domains with the same provider on the same server.

Most hosts have the primary directory mapped to the root folder usually called public_html. Then every one of the other domains you add is hosting inside this.

The file manager looks so cluttered with the WordPress files for the primary domain and then a folder each for the addon domains and if you have subdomains, then folders for them too.

This is where Hostinger won my heart.

They have one of the best directory systems.

Every domain lives in a separate directory of its own. So you are not left hunting for the folder where your domain or, the subdomain lives.

This makes things pretty easy to manage.

Clean interface

I spoke about the difficult hosting dashboards a little while back. This can be a big issue when it comes to installing and managing your WordPress installations.

A lot of the hosts use custom dashboards to provide some simplicity but that doesn’t prove to be of much help. One of the cleanest interfaces that I have seen is that of Bluehost, but that too at times feels extremely overwhelming.

Hostinger has one of the cleanest interfaces around and you will simply fall in love with how it is laid out.

All required information is available at your fingertips and managing your server becomes extremely simple.

Easy to Manage

Once you have installed a WordPress blog on Hostinger, managing it is pretty easy directly from your Hostinger Dashboard.

You have access to the plugins that are installed, the themes, and all other required information like backups, database, etc. all laid out in a simple dashboard.

You can even enable and disable plugins from here, add recommended plugins, etc. from here itself.

When it comes to running a WordPress blog, I found that Hostinger provides the best resources and support.

If you are still looking for a hosting provider, I would recommend Hostinger. Check out their plans here.

How to Set up a WordPress Website on Hostinger

With that out of the way, let us get into the process of installing a WordPress website.

I am hoping that you have already registered a domain name for yourself. If you haven’t then you can register one at Godaddy. They are the largest domain name providers and hence for the sake of ease, we are assuming that you have a domain registered with Godaddy.

Let us get straight into the step-by-step guide on how to setup a WordPress website on Hostinger.

Step – 1: Change your nameservers

The first step is to ensure that your domain is mapped to the correct hosting server.

If you bought your domain name from Hostinger itself, then this step is not required because it would already be mapped to your server.

But if you bought it from a different registrar like Godaddy, then you will need to change the nameservers.

The steps to change are pretty much the same.

For this guide, we are assuming that the domain is registered with Godaddy.

The first step is to find your nameservers. On Hostinger, you should be able to find it on the left-hand sidebar panel. Copy these and keep them in a notepad.

Once you have your nameservers, head over to your domain registrar’s page, Godaddy in this case, and find something called “DNS”.

This “DNS” option takes you to a page where you see the DNS setting for your domain name. Here you should be able to see the current nameservers for the domain.

This is what you will need to change to your Hostinger nameservers.

Once you click on “Change”, you are taken to the nameservers page where you can enter the new nameservers. Just ensure that you are entering these correctly.

In Godaddy, there is an additional page where it asks you if, you would like to connect the domain to a website you have already built on Godaddy itself or, enter your own nameservers.

Since we are hosting the domain on our Hostinger servers, you will need to select “Enter my own nameservers”.

Once you are on the nameservers page, just enter both the nameservers in here.

In some hosts, there could be more than 2 nameservers. In such a scenario, you will have to enter all the nameservers. With Hostinger there are 2 nameservers.

Once you have entered your nameservers, do not forget to “SAVE” your changes.

That completes step-1.

But keep in mind that the change takes some time to reflect.

While some registrars could take a little longer and usually they say that it could take any time between 24-48 hrs, the changes usually happen in about 2-3 hours. This process is called domain name propagation.

Once the propagation is complete, we are ready to move into Step-2

Step-2: Add Domain Name

The next step is to add our domain name to our hosting. This step is pretty easy when the nameserver propagation is complete.

Firstly, you need to go to the Hosting panel on your Hostinger server account. There you should be able to find the option to “add a website”.

When you select that option, you are taken to a page where you can enter the name of your domain and a password. This password is critical because it is the password you will be using to connect to your server (only for this domain) using an FTP or, SSH account.

So, ensure that you are saving this password somewhere.

Now that your domain is added to your hosting, there should be a directory for it in your file manager. This is where the entire action is going to happen.

IMPORTANT: When you host a domain with a different hosting provider than the one where you registered your domain from, the entire DNS is moved to the hosting provider, which is where you will have to manage it, from that point forward. While doing this you also need to keep in mind that your emails are configured properly because the MX records too changes when you change your nameservers.

In another of my post, I will show you how to edit and map your MX records or, create an email address.

Now that we are done with the domain part, let us move onto the next step – setup a WordPress website on Hostinger.

Installing WordPress

The best part about WordPress is the simplicity of installing and using it. I still remember the good old days when WordPress used to be a small package and installation barely took 3-4 minutes.

While the CMS has grown with a lot more feature additions, the install process still remains the same and it is still as easy as it used to be.

Here are the steps involved in setting up your WordPress site –

• Create a database and keep the information handy
• Download the WordPress files from wordpress.org
• Upload the files to your server
• Open the install.php file and follow the instructions
• Your WordPress website is installed.

This is the regular installation process. But this too can be a little difficult for people who aren’t well versed with creating a database and uploading files etc.

It is here that the 1-Click install comes in handy.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will use the 1-Click install.

NOTE: The 1-click installs were as secure as the manual install until a couple of years ago. But as things progressed, the installation process has become very secured and hence it becomes a preferred method of installation unless you otherwise prefer the manual method.

Let us look at how to use the 1-Click Install method to setup a WordPress website on Hostinger.

1- Click Install

The 1-click install used an inbuilt script that gathers all the required information and does the job for you. It helps you skip all of the above steps that I spoke about when you are manually installing WordPress.

Here are the steps involved in installing your WordPress website.

STEP:1 – Selecting the Domain Name for Your Installation

The first step is to go into your Hostinger dashboard and select the domain name that you wish to install WordPress on.

This is only if you have multiple domains on the same hosting account like me. But if you do not have multiple domains then, you can just select the one that you have and proceed with the installation.

STEP:2 – Finding the Auto-installer

The second step in the 1-click install is to find the “Autoinstaller”.

Go to the search box on the top right-hand corner and enter Auto installer. The dashboard widgets filter as you enter the terms and will show you the auto-installer.

Click on the Auto-installer.

Step:3 – Choosing your CMS option

Once you have selected the auto-installer, you will be given a choice of selecting the CMS platform. There are multiple CMS platforms like Jhoomla, Drupal, etc.

But since we are going to use WordPress, you can select that as your CMS.

If you are planning to use your website as a store, then you can choose the 2nd option of Woocommerce + WordPress.

Step:4 – Configure your installation

It is now time to configure your installation. You will have to enter the details for the WordPress website that you are setting up in this step.

The information that you will have to enter is as below –

1. Directory name – This is to be left blank unless you want to install your website in a custom directory.
2. Administrator Username – This is the username for your WordPress admin dashboard. This is the username that you will be using to login to your wordpress website. Keep in mind that you will not be able to change it later.
3. Administrator Password – This is the password used to login to your WordPress website.
4. Administrator Email – This is the admin email for your website. In case you forget your password, this is the email that will be used to reset it. This is also the email where you will get alerts and updates about your WordPress installation.
5. Website Title – Enter your title of your website here. You can always change this in your WordPress admin dashboard.
6. Database Password – The 1-click install, creates a database for you without you having to do anything. But the database will still need a password. Create a strong password and enter it here.
7. Install – Finally click the install button and your site will be installed.

The installation process might take about a minute or, so. Once done you are ready to manage your WordPress website.

Step:5 – Manage your WordPress website

Now that your website is installed, it is time to do some housekeeping. The first steps can easily be done from the Hostinger dashboard itself.

Once the website is installed, it should show up as a line item. When you click the 3 dots, you will find an option to “manage”. Selecting it will take you to your WP dashboard inside Hostinger where you will be able to manage some of the basic things in your installation.

The few things that you might want to manage are as below –

1. Edit website – This will take you directly to your WordPress admin dashboard where you can edit everything in your website.
2. Manage database – This takes you directly to your MySQL database. This is handy in case you want to fiddle around with your database. But be cautious, that if you are not aware of what you are doing, then this could break your website.
3. Setup SSL – This will help you install your FREE SSL certificate. SSL certificates have become a critical part of website security and also Google rankings. I will show you how to install it in the next step.
4. Install Patchstack – Patchstack is a firewall and security service that can prevent your wordpress website from malicious codes and hackers. Installing this is recommended.
5. Plugins – Here you will find a list of recommended plugins that you can install.

Now that we are done with the housekeeping, let us move onto the final step and a critical one.

Step:6 – Install SSL Certificate

Installing an SSL certificate is a critical part of your WordPress setup. It is important from a security perspective and at the same time from an SEO point of view as well.

All Hostinger plans come with a FREE SSL for your website. So you don’t have to spend anything additional for purchasing an SSL certificate.

Installing the certificate is a simple one-click step.

Just click on the “Setup SSL” option which will open a dialog box with the list of domains available. Just select the domain name that you wish to install the certificate on and click “Install SSL” and you are done.

Self-install

The self-installation process is a little more time-consuming but gives you more control over the installation process. A detailed guide on how to do it can be material for another of my post.

The process to setup a WordPress website on Hostinger using the self-install method is the same with pretty much all other hosting providers as well.

But here are the core steps involved in the installation process.

STEP-1 : Download WordPress Files

STEP-2: Unzip the files on your computer and zip it again (reason – otherwise it will create a new directory called WordPress)

STEP-3: Create a Database and save the details

STEP-4: Upload the files to your directory and extract it

STEP-5: Open the installer and enter the details

STEP-6: Enjoy!

Over to You – Your Thoughts

I hope this step-by-step guide on how to setup a WordPress website on Hostinger is informative and helpful to you. If you liked this, then do consider sharing it with your social media circles by using one of the sharing buttons below.

If you have any questions or, need help on anything else, then please comment below and let me know.

In this post I will show you the 10 most essential WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers. If you are looking at streamling your affiliate marketing business and getting the most out of it, then this post is for you.

I have always been an advocate of using a website for affiliate marketing. One of the primary reasons being, the ability to build your list and market to your visitors using an email marketing system.

And if you are looking at putting together a website, then the easiest way to do it is by using WordPress. One of the primary advantages is in installing the website, which is a 10-minute job.

But there is more to it.

WordPress is one of the most flexible Content management Solutions available today which is one of the reasons for it being the most used CMS on the internet.

It’s flexibility comes not from the core WordPress installation but from the hundreds of thousands of plugins that enhances the functionality of the CMS.

Everything from security to monitoring to shopping, can all be taken care of, by using WordPress plugins.

In fact, even the nuts and bolts in terms of designing a high converting website/blog can also be done by using one of the many WordPress Plugins that are available.

The best part!

Most of these plugins are FREE and can be easily installed using the WordPress dashboard itself. There are a few others that follow the freemium model, but these too offer the basic functionalities for free.

So, when it comes to building an affiliate marketing website, managing the website becomes extremely simple and easy.

But then, there is a disadvantage to this flexibility as well.

What is it?

Installing numerous plugins and especially ones that are poorly developed can slow down your website seriously impacting the SEO of your website.

Hence, it becomes important that you pick the right plugins for your website – only the absolutely essential WordPress plugins.

But, how do you know what are the essential WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers?

That is precisely what I will be covering in this post.

Here I mention 20 of the most essential WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers – both FREE and Paid and a few FREEmium ones as well.

Essential WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketers

One of the core essential of a website, setup primarily for affiliate marketing is page load speed. The objective with such a website is to ensure that you pages are able to rank on the first page of Google.

And with Google considering Pageload speed as a critical parameter to ranking websites, you just cannot afford to slow down your website with a poorly coded framework or, WordPress plugin.

It is hence that I recommend using a good, fast theme for your WordPress website.

And when it comes to plugins, only install the rightly coded plugins and only the absolutely essential ones that doesn’t pull down your page loading scores.

So here are some of the most essential wordpress plugins for affiliate marketers, that I have picked based on my experience. You necessarily need not use all of these.

Pick only the ones that you need.

The plugins that I have mentioned out there will provide you with the following functionalities –

• Link Cloaking
• Page Builder
• Optin form builder
• Internal Link building
• SEO related plugins

Let us first start with the FREE plugins.

Free WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers

These plugins are available for free and can be downloaded and installed directly from the WordPress repository. A few of these also have a paid option if you are looking for additional features.

Thirsty Affiliates (Free and Paid)

One of the most important requirements in affiliate marketing is cloaking your affiliate links. This can help you avoid affiliate link robbers who can hijack your affiliate links.

WordPress provides simple solutions to cloak your links and while there are many plugins that are available, the best one that I recommend and use is Thirsty affiliates.

Thirsty affiliates gives you a lot of options for customizing your links even in the FREE version.

You get additional features when you go for the paid version of Thirsty Affiliates but that is not required in a normal case.

Pretty Link (Free and Paid)

Pretty link is another such plugin that can help you customize, shorten and cloak your affiliate links. From a feature perspective, I like Thirsty affiliates more than Pretty links.

But if I have to use a redirect, I prefer using Pretty Link instead of Thirsty Affiliates.

Pretty link also has a paid version if you want additional features but again, that isn’t something that is required for running an affiliate marketing website using WordPress.

Duplicator

One of things I love using is templates.

Because templates simplify work, especially repetitive tasks and can save you a lot of time and effort.

I like templatizing WordPress installation as well.

What exactly do I mean by “templatizing WordPress”?

Okay!

Imagine you setting up a WordPress blog for a specific niche with everything you need, like the plugins, themes, design etc.

Now, you need to setup another similar website and you start all over from scratch setting everything up again.

How much time do you think you will need to do that?

The exact same time as the first one. Isn’t it?

Now, imagine if you have a ready made installation, which all you need to do is upload and extract and your website is up and running – with all the required plugins, themes, the design etc.

How much time would you have saved?

Duplicator does exactly that for you. It create clone your existing website and install that on a completely new domain in a few clicks – in about the same time that you would install a WordPress core.

Isn’t that a time saver?

Duplicator too has a FREE and a paid version. The paid version is helpful if you site is huge.

But in most cases, you wouldn’t need it, because the copy that you will be creating is of the framework with no content. So, the FREE version should be more than enough.

WP Fastest Cache

One of the critical aspects of SEO is page load speed.

Google with its later web vitals update, has emphasized on this again and hence it is important to ensure that you site loads fast, if you have any chance of getting ranked on the first page of Google.

While there are many elements in a fast loading website, there are some low hanging fruits that are easy to fix.

Caching of your website is one such low hanging fruit.

Caching plugins are one of the most essential wordpress plugins for affiliate marketers. And using a caching plugin like WP Fastest Cache, is one aspect of that.

This is an easy to configure plugin and doesn’t take a lot of time to setup.

WP Fastest Cache also had a paid version but that wouldn’t be required for your affiliate marketing websites.

Litespeed Cache

Litespeed Cache is another caching plugin like WP Fastest Cache but has a lot of features and tweaks that are not available in other FREE caching plugins.

The only limitation is that Litespeed works well in servers that run Litespeed, like Hostinger.

The plugin requires some configuration. Though it isn’t complicated, it isn’t easy as well.

I will be creating a video showing how to configure Litespeed Cache, in a few days.

RankMath

If you are to make any money with your affiliate websites, you need traffic to it. And organic traffic is one of the primary traffic sources when it comes to niche affiliate websites.

In order for your sites to rank in search engines, you will have to optimize your pages and hence SEO becomes one of the critical activities.

SEO can be confusing and overwhelming. But we do not need to be an SEO expert to do some of the basic optimization steps on our websites.

All you need is RankMath.

While the entire world swears by Yoast SEO, I prefer RankMath primarily because of the fact that everyone of the features that you would pay for in Yoast, is available for FREE in RankMath.

Installing and configuring is simple and they have a lot of documentation and videos to show you how to configure the plugin. Just follow these are your site is SEO optimized.

RankMath also helps in optimizing the content that you write, for specific keywords. It will show you the issues that you need to address and the things you need to take care of, if you are to get your articles ranked on Google.

WP Product Review

WP Product Review is a review plugin.

I write a lot of product reviews and hence use this plugin a lot.

When you are reading product reviews, as a prospective customer you would like to see the important points of the review neatly laid out.

I would like to see the features, the pros and cons of the product, the pricing and an overall review rating of the product all in one place, so that I don’t waste a lot of time reading stuff that I might not need.

WP Product review helps you do that. It helps create nice review posts with a snippet that shows all the important points from the review.

This plugin has both a FREE and a paid version, but the FREE version should be good enough for an affiliate marketing website.

Paid WordPress Plugins for Affiliate marketers

While FREE wordpress plugins can do most of the job, there are certain specialized things that might need a paid WordPress plugin.

I don’t mean to say that these FREE plugins won’t do these things, but the fact that plugin creators are also marketers is enough to understand that some of the essential features would go behind a lock and key and you will have to pay for it, if you wish to use those features.

Here are some of my favorite and recommended Paid WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers.

Amalinks Pro

If you planning to promote Amazon products on you website, then Amalinks Pro is one of the most essential plugins.

The Amazon affiliate program has a lot of terms and conditions, which if you do not comply with, you could easily end up getting you account banned.

In addition to that, if you do not have access to the Amazon API, then showcasing Amazon products could become very difficult.

Amalinks Pro takes care of all of these things and it facilitates displaying Amazon products in beautiful showcases and comparison tables. All in very easily to implement steps.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is another of the caching plugins like Litespeed Cache and WP Fastest Cache.

It is a very powerful plugin and has a lot of features that other plugins like WP Fastest Cache doesn’t offer. The fact that your website’s GTMetrix scores will see a huge jump as soon as you install, activate and configure the plugin, is enough to prove its power.

WP Rocket isn’t cheap, but for the price you would pay for it, it is an amazing plugin and I can assure you that you would recoup your investment pretty fast.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is an optin form builder plugin.

If you have read my posts, you would know that I am an advocate of list building. In affiliate marketing too, if you are not building your list, you are wasting a lot of money.

Sales don’t always happen at the first instance that a visitor visits your website. You have to consistently follow up with them and keep promoting your products in a well planned way.

In order for all of this to happen, you will need to build your list.

And in order to build a list, you need an optin form on your website where you can offer something of value to your website visitors, in return for their email address.

Thrive Leads helps you do that.

It has a very simple and easy to use interface and you could be building a variety of beautiful optin forms in a matter of a few minutes.

Thrive Leads is a part of Thrive Suite.

Thrive Architect

Thrive Architect is a landing page builder.

While this isn’t something that everybody needs, I would recommend it if you are serious about building a long term passive income generating business.

Using Thrive Architect, you can build product specific landing pages, silo pages, review pages and a lot more. The interface is a simple drag and drop builder, which makes building pages extremely easy.

Thrive Architect is also a part of Thrive Suite.

Optin Monster

Optin Monster is another optin form builder plugin. I have used Optin form builder before I switched over to Thrive Suite and I was super impressed with the flexibility that this plugin offers.

Thrive Suite can be a little out of reach for affiliate marketers who are starting off. So if you are not planning to go with Thrive Leads, then I would recommend Optin Monster.

Link Whisper

Link Whisper is a handy plugin that can help you build internal links on your website.

Link building is an important part of SEO, but an extremely difficult one. I used to sweat at the thought of link building. It would takes hours to follow some of the steps that Brian mentions in his post about backlink building and still you would get only a few responses.

That’s when I came across a post on Internal Link building and its role on ranking websites in search engines.

The process was pretty tough and took hours, but at least I was sure that I was building some links.

The results simply stumped me. Some of my pages that weren’t there even in the first 10 pages of SERPs, came to the 2nd and 3rd pages of Google.

I had to find a way to simplify this process and hence searched through to find a wordpress plugin that could help me. I used quite a few different plugins but none could really give me what I was looking for.

That’s when I happened to see this plugin called Link Whisper.

It is a superb plugin that makes internal linking a breeze. It has a nice dashboard which shows you the status of each of your posts and makes internal linking a matter a clicking and saving.

If you are serious about SEO, then you need Link Whisper.

Genius Link

This plugin isn’t a lot spoken about, but is one of the best plugins that I have used so far, at least from an Amazon affiliate’s perspective.

One of the biggest problems I have faced with the Amazon affiliate program, is in not being able to monetize traffic from different countries.

My websites attract audiences from different countries but the Amazon link that I include in my posts and articles are from a specific Amazon website, meaning for a specific country.

Any visitor from a different country, clicking on these links used to browse away because they would be redirected to the Amazon website for their specific country and I would loose my commissions.

Genius links solves this issue by customizing the link by localizing it. So now, depending upon which country the visitor is from, he is directed to the site for his specific country and I still earn commissions.

Genius links also has a lot of other features from and affiliate marketing perspective and is one of my favorite WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers.

Shortpixel Adaptive Images

Shortpixel Adaptive Images is another plugin that helps with optimizing your website and speeding up the page load times.

It optimizes the images on your websites and renders them from a CDN, thereby reducing the loading times.

I was always of the impression that this is not something that I need for my websites because there wasn’t a lot of images that I was using on my websites.

But when GTMetrix scores showed me that that images on my website were pulling down the page loading scores, I decided to give it a try.

And, I was amazed at how this plugin helped improve my page load times.

If you are looking at optimizing your website and you use images a lot (which you should), then this plugin is an absolute essential.

Over to You – What’s your Favorite Plugin?

So those were my list of absolutely essential WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers.

Which out of these is your favorite plugin and which do you think is something that’s on your shopping list?

Comment below and let me know.

While this list of WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers is based on the ones that I have been using, it might not be an exhaustive list.

I will keep updating this post as I add new plugins to my list.

If you liked this post, then do share it with your social media circles by clicking on one of the buttons below.

If you are wondering how to do affiliate marketing with Youtube, then this post will give you a complete step-by-step guide to starting and building a real online affiliate marketing business with Youtube.

Videos are one of the best and easiest ways of driving FREE traffic. Do you agree?

I started off with videos and videos have been my first love when it comes to content generation. In fact, my first affiliate marketing strategy had video at its center point.

I used the launch-jacking strategy (more about this strategy in my next post), and combined it with Youtube videos to make money.

It wasn’t difficult to rank these videos on Youtube and consequently on Google and this would drive a lot of traffic to these videos.

The system worked and works even until today though not as effective as it used to be. I haven’t made a video in some time now. Still, some of those old videos make me a passive income even today.

This is in spite of the fact that they are no more ranking on Google or, on Youtube’s first page. Traffic still trickles into those videos and I also see purchases happening on those product recommendations.

So the question is – is this strategy effective today?

It still works. At least a quick search on Youtube proves that it indeed works.

Here are the results from Youtube’s 1st page for a search for a newly launched product – “7-day digital landlord”.

Out of those search results at least 3 of them belong to people that I know are making good money with affiliate marketing.

Though the number of views isn’t great, this is absolutely free traffic being generated to your video. Even if 10% of them click through and buy the product, that’s passive income.

And considering that these established affiliate marketers are continuing to make these kinds of videos, it proves that the strategy still works.

So in this post, I am going to tell you more about this strategy of doing affiliate marketing with Youtube and a nifty tweak to this strategy that can make it more effective. I will also show you 3 other strategies that can help you make money with affiliate marketing using Youtube.

How to do affiliate marketing with Youtube?

One of the biggest problems people face with affiliate marketing is, generating traffic. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can take a lot of time and paid Ads are something that you might not prefer when you are just starting up.

In such a situation, how do you generate traffic to your content and generate sales?

The answer is “Youtube”.

Affiliate marketing with Youtube isn’t very difficult (note that I used the term “very”, meaning there is some amount of difficulty for sure, even with Youtube).

While there are no shortcuts to success even on Youtube, there are some very simple, tried and tested strategies that can help you get started very fast on Youtube.

The 3 strategies that I explain below are all personally tested by me. But before I get onto those strategies, I would like to put across a few disclaimers –

• In affiliate marketing, you have 2 options of linking to the product using your affiliate link – direct linking and indirect linking using a bridge page (I will explain this in detail). The 2nd option is a long term strategy and a sustainable model but requires expenses like an autoresponder etc.
• Youtube and all other types of content marketing requires being consistent. If you do not post regularly, your blog/channel will not grow as required. So, be ready to create content and that too regularly if you are in it for the long term.
• You will need to spend some time setting up your channel, adding a channel art etc. I will not be covering these aspects in this post. There are a lot of videos on Youtube that can help you do this.

Linking and Promoting Your Affiliate products

I spoke about 2 different methods of linking to the product using your affiliate link. Let us look at how these 2 methods work.

Direct linking –

Direct linking as the term suggests, is directly linking to the merchant’s webpage using your affiliate link. This is the easiest method of promoting an affiliate product.

You get your affiliate link for the product you are promoting and link to it from the content you are promoting. It’s that simple.

What direct linking does is, that the visitors coming to your Youtube video or, blog post clicks on the links and is directly taken to the merchant’s page (product page). There they may decide to buy the product or, browse away depending upon how they respond to the pitch on the sales page.

There are a few disadvantages to this method –

• Once the visitor clicks on the link and browses away from your content to the product page, you have lost them forever. You will never be able to contact that visitor. In fact you wouldn’t even know what happened to his journey.
• This is a wastage of the efforts that you have put in to generate traffic and bring those visitors to your content. Once they click over they are gone forever.
• Since you are asking the visitor to directly click over to the affiliate product page, there is nothing that is really differentiating you from the other affiliate marketers. So there is no solid reason for the prospect to buy the product from your link.

Nifty Trick – I have used this method a lot but with a slight twist. In the Youtube video or, the blog post I would offer a few bonuses to people who would purchase from my link.

I would then, tell them that in order to claim their bonuses, they will have to go to a specific page and submit their claim.

This trick helped me build a list of all the buyers. The only disadvantage was that I still lost a lot of traffic – of the people who clicked over to the product page but never bought the product.

Linking using a Bridge Page –

This is a far better and a more effecting way of linking to your affiliate product.

In this method you put together a simple bridge page. This page could be a simple landing page with an optin form offering a freebie to the visitor. Once they optin to the offer, they are redirected to the product page.

This method takes care of all the disadvantages in the direct linking method. You capture the visitors’ email address which you can then use to market using emails.

But this needs an autoresponder, a website/blog and a landing page builder (I recommend Thrive Architect). If you think you don’t really want to spend on a domain name, hosting, landing page builder etc., then the solution I recommend is Aweber.

Aweber is the best autoresponder service that I have used. It also saves you the money you would otherwise be spending on a website, landing page builder etc. because you can build beautiful landing pages using Aweber itself.

But the choice is entirely yours.

A couple of things about the bridge page –

• The bridge page could be a simple optin page asking people to optin to get more details about the product, which then redirects to the product page.
• Another method is to put together a freebie that complements the product you are promoting. It would work wonders if you can create a short ebook or, guide that is an addendum to the product. You then ask your visitors to opt in to get this freebie.

With that out of the way, let us get into the 3 strategies for affiliate marketing with Youtube.

Launch Jacking Strategy

This has been my favorite strategy for a long time. In fact, I built my entire business on this model which I later refined when I learned more about marketing, especially relationship marketing.

Launch jacking works even today and there are a lot of people who are still making a decent amount of money from this strategy.

So what exactly is launch jacking and how does this strategy work?

How does this strategy work

Launch jacking works only if you are updated about the latest launches at least 2 weeks before the actual product launch happens.

It basically involves finding a product that is about to be launched and then creating an entire marketing plan around it. There are two resources that I recommend in order to stay updated with these launches –

• Muncheye
• JVNotifyPro

You can also find a lot of Facebook groups and pages where marketers promote their launches. You can join them and get details about these launches. You can also join their affiliate program there.

Marketers would usually start putting together their promotional pages and other assets much before they actually launch. So you can request for affiliate access to these products early.

Once you have affiliate access, you will need to get access to the product in order to do a quick demo and walkthrough.

In order for this, you will have to reach out to the product creator and check if they have a test login that you can use. Most marketers do provide test logins. But in the rare case that they don’t, you will have to buy the product which is what I recommend. Don’t worry about that expenditure because you will soon recoup that.

Now comes the main part of the strategy.

You can pick any of your favorite screen recording software. I would recommend either Veed or, Wondershare Filmora both of which are user-friendly tools that I have used a lot.

Then record your screen as you do a demo of the product. You can walk through every aspect of the product, what it does and how it works etc. You can also record the walk-through of the sales page and show the price of the product, the OTOs, etc.

Once you have done producing the video, upload the video to Youtube. Follow the basic Youtube SEO guidelines with your main keyword being “Product Name + review” or, “Product name + demo”.

Do not forget to link to the product page using your affiliate link, in the description box.

Now, wait as your video ranks on Youtube and traffic starts to trickle in.

This is the simplest method to do affiliate marketing with Youtube. We will discuss some tweaks to this strategy in order to make it even more effective, in a little while.

But before that, there are a few things you might want to keep in mind when implementing this strategy.

Clickbait headlines

People tend to use Clickbait headlines when creating these kinds of videos. They will use headlines like, “Watch before you buy”, “Do not buy XXXX product before watching this video” etc.

These kinds of headlines will generate clicks but will not convert because of the simple reason that people lose trust when you get to know that they were cheated into clicking on a video.

This isn’t something I recommend.

Don’t look for shortcuts. Use basic headline writing techniques that can hook Youtube users into clicking over to your videos.

Call to action

One of the biggest mistakes that most affiliate marketers do is in not including a call to action. We assume that our readers/viewers/listeners will take action by default and click on that link we have put out there.

But the sad fact is that it doesn’t happen that way.

We aren’t programmed to take action without being asked to take action.

So, include a call to action just before your link. Say it aloud in your video. Ask people to go and click the link in the description box.

Bonuses

Using bonuses is a strategy that a lot of affiliate marketers use, in order to be different from their competitors. Affiliate marketers have been using it for years which shows that it works.

In fact, bonuses are something that is used by the product creators too.

In order for this strategy to be effective, you need to ensure that the bonuses that you are offering is valuable.

I have often, seen marketers putting out 30-40 different bonuses out there and all of them are PLR products that they get from PLR sites and provide no real value to the buyer.

Imagine giving a bonus on “Meditation and Yoga” to a buyer who just bought a product on “how to create youtube videos that convert”.

My recommendation is to create something unique. Something that complements the product you are promoting. You could create and audio file, a short eguide or, a checklist etc. that is some way enhances the value of the purchase.

Why did I stop using this strategy?

I stopped using this strategy for affiliate marketing with youtube, a few years back.

Why?

Because, in spite of the strategy being effective it didn’t really help me build an audience that was engaged. Though this strategy was making money for me, it wasn’t really providing any value to my audience.

When online marketing changed from “mass marketing” to “relationship marketing”, I too tweaked my strategies.

These days, I use a modified version of this strategy that involves an element of relationship marketing. This is what I am going to cover in the next sections.

Launch Jacking + Relationship Marketing Strategy

This is a tweaked version of the launch jacking method that we spoke about earlier.

This is something that I learnt from some of the affiliate marketers that I used to follow on Youtube. Experimenting with this method proved that I was able to build a loyal following and an engaged audience.

In this strategy you follow everything that we spoke about in the core launch jacking method with the only tweak that your videos offer value to your audience.

How?

By not always talking positive about products and recommending them.

In other words, by “calling a spade a spade”.

Often times, it happens that in spite of a product not being that great we recommend it to our audience just because we are an affiliate of the product and that we can earn money when somebody buys it from our link.

This is one of the primary reasons why “Product reviews” have lost credibility over the last few years.

Instead of doing this, we could create genuine videos talking in detail about the products, their pros and cons and finally giving a genuine recommendation, if it is a buy or, not.

This way, your audience will learn that you are an honest reviewer who is not reviewing products for money.

As they experience it, they will find value in what you are offering and build a relationship with you.

But does this impact the money I am making?

In the short term, you will. But as you build your fan base, you will experience higher click-through-rates and consequently better conversions.

A nifty little trick is to subtly push another good product in these videos where you have a negative review for some specific product.

Relationship Marketing Strategy

Over the last few years marketing has changed. The noise filled, mass marketing strategies have given way to relationship marketing.

Marketers like Seth Godin, Andre Chaperon and many others have been advocating this for long. Though there still are a lot of people who are doing the conventional method of marketing, a lot many others have switched and changed their approach.

Pat Flynn, for example have been a marketer who has been using relationship marketing in his affiliate marketing. And probably that is why he has been so successful for this long and continues to be successful.

I too am gradually moving over and implementing relationship building in my business.

And this has given me a lot more than just money and success. It is the peace of mind that I am doing the right thing.

So, back to our discussion.

How do you implement this in your plan to do affiliate marketing with Youtube?

It’s simple.

You start and build a Youtube channel where you give a lot of value. Create videos which gives out a lot of information and help your audience solve problems that they might be facing.

The channel should be more of information than just product reviews.

As you do this, promote products that are contextual to the conversation. You can also do review videos in between where you implement the previous strategy of even reviewing products aren’t that great and being open to your audience about why you wouldn’t recommend them.

This strategy takes a slightly longer period of time than the others, but will give you much better results in the long term.

You can use the tips mentioned in the video from Pat Flynn below, to grow you channel fast and get results faster.

Why this is the best strategy?

This is the most effective of all the methods that we discussed in the post. And this in fact, is the best strategy to do affiliate marketing with Youtube.

Why?

Because you build an element of trust with you audience, when you provide value to them and also are truthful in your reviews.

And when your audience trusts you, they will come back you again and again. They will be regular visitors to your channel, to your blogs and also subscribe to your email list thus giving you an even better chance of marketing to them again and again.

Unlike most other strategies that give you results faster but aren’t sustainable in the long term, this method is sustainable and long term. You don’t have to worry about algorithm changes or, policy changes impacting your videos and your income.

Over to You – Which Method do you Prefer?

Whatever form of marketing you do, ensure you are building trust with your audience.

Building a relationship requires time. But once you have build that relationship and trust, your audience will come back to you again and again.

It isn’t different with Youtube as well. Most successful channels out there have been their audience base on the foundation of trust.

So if you are in it for the long term, build a channel that provides value.

But if you want to make some quick money with affiliate marketing with Youtube, then follow the simple launch jacking method.

Comment below and let me know which out of these is your preferred method of affiliate marketing.

If you found this post informative, then do share it with you social media circles by clicking the button for your favorite social media channel below.

Frequently Asked Questions about Affiliate Marketing with Youtube

If you are looking for a managed web hosting, then this Hostinger review will help you make a decision if Hostinger is a service that meets your requirement or, not.

Okay! So I have had quite a journey when it comes to hosting service providers and I have moved across web hosts.

As my portfolio grew, I also had the opportunity of checking out multiple web hosts and almost all the reviews that you see on this website are coming from a real-world experience.

I started off with a cheap hosting, back in 2002 which resulted in us losing all of our data and files. Since then we have never gone for “CHEAP” when it comes to hosting providers.

Our quest has always been for quality, reliability, and support which is possibly why we let go of some of the hosting providers.

I still continue to use Hostgator and Bluehost for Shared hosting and Godaddy for Managed WordPress. Greengeeks is something that I used for WordPress hosting for a few of my websites and they too are really good with their services and support.

But like they say,

Never put all your eggs in one basket.

I too didn’t want to take that risk. That is one of the reasons why I decided to host with multiple hosts. Also, I have clients for whom we build websites and host them.

Back, to the topic of the post – Hostinger review.

I recently moved some of my primary websites to Hostinger. In fact, I was looking for a faster Managed WordPress solution which also gave me the flexibility to control things when it came to the server.

While Hostgator Managed WordPress was a good solution, the problem was that their control panel gave you little control over how to run your websites.

Godaddy Managed WordPress too was good but the problem was they had configured their server timeouts at a little low, because of which some plugins like Thrive Architect, which took slightly higher server resources, had problems updating. Hence you would very frequently see a “server timed out” error.

This was why we had to look for other options. And most other managed WordPress hosting services were priced exorbitantly which I felt was a little unfair.

That’s when I came across Hostinger and I decided to check them out.

It’s been about 6 months that I am using them and I should say that I was pleasantly surprised with their service.

Anyways, let us move into a detailed review of Hostinger Managed WordPress hosting.

Hostinger Review – The Good and the Bad

I am a little too obsessed with customer support. And you will see this in most of my reviews. You can compromise on some of the things if you get a support team who is willing to help, stretch themselves and make you feel comfortable and in safe hands.

I learned this through experience. We often, overlook this critical part to find ourselves in the middle of a mess of a support team who are either rude and often surprise you with “my way or, the highway” statements or, will act out one of Christopher Nolan’s movies – difficult to understand and decipher (Disclaimer – No offenses to Nolan and I am a fan of his movies)

Hence, this review too will have customer support as the most important part. But at the same time, we will also be covering other aspects.

But I didn’t want to go into the details of the company, their start, etc. because for me so much of details of the company history really don’t matter. If they have been in the market for about 10+ years and have only grown since then there definitely is some amount of reliability on the company.

Anyways, Here’s what I will be covering in this review –

• Pricing and Cost to Benefit Evaluation
• Server Control and Options
• Speed and Flexibility
• Ease of use
• Customer Support

I will keep the review simple so that you can easily make a decision.

With that let’s get straight onto the Hosting Review then.

Pricing and Cost-Benefit – Hostinger Managed WordPress Hosting

One of the first things that anybody looks for is affordability. I know how it feels when you have to shell out a lot of money and you haven’t even started.

Hostinger is probably the lowest-priced web hosting service around. I can safely say that you won’t find an even more economical and affordable Managed WordPress hosting service provider anywhere.

Hostinger’s plans are the lowest of any hosting plans in India. The WordPress starter plan where you can host about 100 websites with a decent 100GB storage barely costs about Rs.199 per month.

For that matter, even the plans available at Hostinger USA are also the lowest when compared to some of the other hosting service providers.

Plans start at $1.99 per month and the best valued WordPress Starter plan where you can host about 100 websites is priced at $2.99 per month.

While these managed WordPress plans might not be as comparable to the managed WordPress services provided by some of the bigger names in Managed WordPress Hosting like WP Engine etc., they still take care of most things that you would expect them to, in a WordPress blog.

If you look at it, there isn’t truly anything more than what they manage, that you will need help with. For anything else, you have their support team which has the capability to answer and resolve any kind of issue.

Let us look at some of the features that these plans provide –

• Unlimited bandwidth
• WordPress Optimized Servers
• FREE SSL from Let’s Encrypt
• FREE Domain name
• FREE CDN
• Cloudflare Protected servers
• A beautiful and easy to manage server dashboard
• Unlimited databases
• Unlimited subdomains
• Unlimited FTP accounts
• An excellent caching service at the servers

So if you are looking at all the bells and whistles, then you have it and a little more on Hostinger. And for the price that they charge, the cost-benefit is immense. You can so much more for every dollar that you spend.

Server Control and Options

One of the biggest drawbacks with most Managed WordPress hosting solutions is the minimal control that the hosting providers give you. This is the case with Hostgator (my review here) and similarly with Godaddy (read the Godaddy review here) as well.

While this might not seem to be a big problem at the face of it, the fact is that the lack of control comes in as a pain many a time, for eg: if you want to change the PHP settings.

Another problem that I faced with Godaddy was the inability to install my SSL certificates. Godaddy mandates installing SSL certificates that you have bought from them only, which isn’t something that I liked.

This is exactly what I loved with Hostinger.

You get control over pretty much everything in Hostinger. You can change PHP settings, install your own SSL certificates (but you would not do that because SSL certificates are available for FREE), have complete control over your database and files, etc.

In addition to all this, you even get SSH access and WP CLI access as well. So if you have trouble installing files that are a little on the heavier side, you could easily do it by logging into the server using your SSH access.

Speed and Flexibility

This is one of the most important parts of the service provided by Hostinger and which I just cannot stop admiring. The servers are amazing, blazingly fast, and show a huge improvement in your page load times.

Litespeed Caching

Hostinger uses Litespeed on their servers. Litespeed is much ahead in terms of technology in comparison to Apache which is what most other web hosts use.

In addition to the server configuration, some of the other aspects like the default availability and installation of Litespeed Cache help speed up your website tremendously. And since the servers run on Litespeed, it syncs really well with the Litespeed Caching plugin. Combined together they offer excellent speeds.

PHP7 and PHP8 Support

Hostinger supports PHP7 and this is a huge benefit. PHP 7 is the latest fully compatible with WordPress version in PHP releases and it is much ahead of its predecessor, PHP5 when it comes to speed.

Some benchmark tests show that PHP7 is twice as fast as PHP5, which in turn translates to a faster website loading speed.

While PHP 8 is also available for an upgrade, it isn’t really recommended as of now as there could be compatibility issues with various plugins and themes.

Cutting Edge NGINX Caching

Hostinger’s Managed WordPress plans come with support for NGINX caching. This results in a significant boost in WordPress performance. This is done by turbocharging the loading of static content via streamlining of data. It is said that when it comes to serving static content, Nginx is the king!

NGINX has surpassed Apache in popularity as well, thanks to the better performance and speed that it offers.

HTTP/2 Support

HTTP/2, also called HTTP 2.0 is the successor to HTTP 1.0 and it is much faster, secure, and a lot easier to use in comparison to its predecessor.

HTTP/2 has a lot of features which eventually results in faster page load times. It loads multiples resources together which helps in faster page load times.

Also, HTTP/2 is binary and not textual. This means that it is more compact and hence travels faster and is much more secure than HTTP 1.0.

Overall all of this leads to a faster loading WordPress website.

Ease of use

Dashboards can at times be extremely overwhelming and sometimes confusing. I have even come across dashboards where you need to click here and there to go from one thing to the other.

Add to it the difficulty of accessing the file manager, the database, etc. and you have a disastrous day waiting to happen.

Godaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting has one such confusing dashboard.

Some of the others too have similar dashboards which at times becomes a little difficult to handle.

Hostinger is a lot different when it comes to ease of use. The dashboard is a nice and clean one with all the important information neatly laid out.

Everything that you need is nicely laid out in blocks and is easily accessible. And the interface is the cleanest that you will find.

And you still have all of the things that you look for in a Managed WordPress solution.

1-Click installer

The 1-Click installer in Hostinger gives you access to install numerous different applications in addition to WordPress of course.

But where they are different is in the way you install it and manage your WordPress blog. The installation process is simple and easy.

And once you have installed the WordPress site, you can easily manage it from the hPanel dashboard itself. You can install plugins and manage them by activating and deactivating them from the dashboard itself.

User Friendly Dashboard

We already spoke about the dashboard and its user-friendliness. Hostinger has one of the easiest and cleanest dashboards that I have seen in any hosting provider.

Zyro Website Builder

Zyro is a powerful website builder that comes with an AI writer that writes the basic content for you. Zyro is owned by Hostinger and you get access to this application with your hosting plans.

So if you do not need WordPress or, if you do not want to code your website from scratch, then use Zyro and build a fully functional and feature-rich website and that too using the simple drag and drop plus click and edit feature.

Daily Backups with a Restore Option

What good is a web hosting if they do not take backups of your websites?

Since our first experience when we lost all of our business just because our hosting company did not have a good backup mechanism, we have always ensured that we find hosts that treat backups are a critical aspect of their business.

Also we always keep a secondary backup option for that unforeseen situation. We prefer using Jetpack for that.

Hostinger has an excellent backup solution. They do a daily backup of all your website files and databases.

The best part is their restore option. I should rather say, one-click restore option. It is comparable to that of Godaddy who has the best backup and restore option of all the hosting providers that we have used until now.

Customer Support

And that brings us to the final part – customer support.

Like I said in the beginning, I am a fan of good customer support. I love a support agent coming to me and telling me why it is taking time even if that is because they goofed up, instead of somebody who prefers putting me on hold for minutes together without telling me what is happening.

Hostinger has one of the best customer support around. They are friendly, knowledgeable, understand what real customer service is all about, and cares for their customers.

I reached out to their support multiple times. Many of those were for issues that weren’t really related to the hosting and their support team could have just shooed me away like other hosting providers saying, “it is not our fault”.

But Hostinger support agents patiently listen to me and check if there is anything that they can do to help me. If there is nothing, then they would politely tell me what I need to do and how I need to proceed.

That is what real “going out of the way” to help a customer means. And I am super impressed.

I would recommend Hostinger to anyone, just because of their amazing support. I would say that the excellent services are just a byproduct.

What’s Not Good in Hostinger – The Cons

When I am doing a review, it becomes imperative that I also talk about the cons. Else it will sound as if I am advertising the product. Isn’t it?

But the fact is that there could be situations where you come across a product or, service in which you really aren’t able to find any negatives.

In that case, trying to find a negative would be nit-picking.

It’s the same with Hostinger as well. Though there weren’t really anything negative about their service, I did some nit-picking to find some negatives. But keep in mind that there are really something that you should be concerned about.

Cloudflare Support

Hostinger has Cloudflare support built in their plans. So enabling a CDN for your blog is like clicking an on-off switch.

If you have known how Cloudflare activation works, you would know that it involves changes nameservers and doing some maintenance with DNS etc. All of this is a little pain.

But Hostinger makes it easy by providing you an option in their site management tools. You just click it and Cloudflare can be enabled or, disabled.

Now that’s not a con. Isn’t it?

That’s right!

The con is that, this support is free only for one domain. For every additional domain, you need to pay a small fee.

While I am ok with paying that amount in order to get over that pain of enabling Cloudflare the alternate way, that still pinches.

The only thing I wish is, that the Cloudflare plan could have had a few additional features like their “Auto Content Optimization”, which is otherwise charged at $5.00 per month extra.

Hostinger could always enter into an agreement with Cloudflare and provide some additional features for that extra amount.

But then again, this is more of a nit-picking that a negative about their support.

Lack of On-Demand backup

This is something I wished Hostinger had.

Their plans come with a daily backup option but they do not provide you with an on-demand backup option. This is a feature that GoDaddy offers and comes in real handy when you are doing critical updates to your plugins, themes or, even when you are upgrading your WordPress install to a major release.

Again, this isn’t really a deal breaker. But it would have been a welcome addition, if it was there.

Conclusion – Over to You

Hostinger is the best hosting provider that I have come across until now. Their amazing support coupled with the exceptional services and affordable pricing makes it an ideal solution for both people who are starting out or, are already using other hosting providers.

I would recommend that you check out Hostinger and you will not be disappointed.

You can check out Hostinger here.

How not to promote an affiliate product?

This is the first of a series of posts on affiliate marketing mistakes.

Affiliate marketing is all about trust and once you build trust, it is probably the easiest passive income system on earth. Because trust not just helps build your credibility but also helps increase traffic to your websites.

Top marketers like Pat Flynn, Spencer Haws and the likes built their online affiliate marketing businesses on trust. And when you look at their businesses, you would see that they are in it for the long term.

They weren’t running their businesses in the fly-by model. They built their business, brick-by-brick, stone-by-stone and did it in such a way that it will live for a very long time.

Their businesses can be inherited by their kids and will stay as GENUINE businesses.

Why did I emphasize “GENUINE Businesses”?

Because a lot of newbie marketers fall for the shiny-object syndrome when they start off with affiliate marketing. In fact that is how affiliate marketing is promoted by a lot of GURUs.

According to them, you just hit the “START” button and money starts rolling into your bank accounts.

But the hard fact is that “it is not TRUE”.

Affiliate marketing just like all other businesses, involves a lot of hard work. But once you have done the hard work and set it up, then your business will keep generating passive income for life. All you have to then do, is keep tweaking things depending upon how things are evolving.

Though there is hard work involved, there is no other passive income generating business like Affiliate marketing.

But then there are a couple of things you should keep in mind with this business model.

• You wouldn’t become a millionaire overnight or, even in a month. It takes some time for a consistent livable income.
• There is no push button software on earth that can help you speed up any part of this business or, achieve overnight success. If something of that sort is promised, then it is a scam.
• There is no “SECRET” methods, sources or, goldmine etc. in affiliate marketing. Though a lot of so called GURUs promise all of these, the fact is that there is nothing like these. They are only trying to scam you.

Now with all of that out of the way, let me get onto the affiliate marketing mistakes for this post.

Affiliate Marketing Mistakes – What not to do when Promoting a Product

It was the last week I got this email from one of the affiliate marketers that I have been following for some time.

I have this habit of following people in my niche, especially people who are doing well just so that I am updated about what is happening in the industry and what people are doing.

After all when there is already a system that is in place and if somebody is doing it successfully, why would you want to reinvent the wheel. Isn’t it?

This is the exact same thing I recommend my mentees as well.

So I happened to get this email from this affiliate marketer (BTW, she does an awesome job with email marketing. You open your inbox and you will find one email from her every day. The only problem is that it is all promotional emails. There isn’t really any value in any of the emails which isn’t something I recommend).

Affiliate Marketing Mistakes # 1 – Never send only Promotional Emails

One of the biggest mistakes that affiliate marketers make is sending only promotional emails to their subscribers. They think that their subscribers joined their mailing list to receive only promotional emails.

I had done this mistake in my earlier days.

The result – a list of about 15,000 subscribers who were engaged with my blog posts and had bought my recommendations eventually ended up as a dead list with nobody opening my emails.

If you have built a list, I am sure you would realize the amount of effort that went into building that list. Every subscriber added to your list is a lot of hard work.

Don’t waste that list. Value each of those subscribers and provide value to them.

Anyways, back to the email I received.

So here’s what the email is all about.

This is about a product from a creator called Venkata Ramana and the product’s name is Swift.

Here’s how the sales page for this product looks.

Check that headline – “1-Click App puts any Link in Front of Up to 110M Hungry Buyers in Less than a Minute”.

When I see that kind of a headline, the first thing that comes to my mind is – If there indeed was such an app and this could happen in less than a minute, then wouldn’t every single person searching for “how to make money online” on the internet be a millionaire?

After all, traffic is the biggest problem for everybody. Isn’t it?

But unfortunately, that doesn’t happen because there is no such source.

When I see sales pages like that, I run as fast as I can from even the shadow of these products and product creators. And my recommendation is that, you too should do the same.

Affiliate Marketing Mistakes # 2 – Stay Away from Shady Products and Marketing Tactics

Never ever promote these kinds of products because they do not provide any value to anybody. It is just another way of making somebody buy something that is nothing more than crap.

There are a bunch of such product creators on the internet and you will find most of them selling their products on JVZoo or, Warrior Plus because these platforms doesn’t really quality check the products that are being promoted on their platform.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration if I say that almost 70% of the products that you would find on these 2 platforms are crap and is nothing but a way of conning people.

I have been there, done that.

I used to buy every other such product that promised traffic and money in one click and in seconds only to find that it is totally farce and was just another way of inducing somebody to buy the product/service.

Once you are in, you will be shown a few more upsells and upgrades. You will buy those too, but with the same result.

I am sure that isn’t the experience you want to give your subscribers or, prospects. They joined you because they trust you and think that you will be able to solve a problem of theirs.

Don’t break their trust.

Stay away from such CRAPPY Products. Promote only genuine products from good affiliate programs.

Before I get into what this product is and why I recommend that you stay away from it, let us check the email that I received.

In addition to the fact that it is promoting a crap product, it also mentions the name of Neil Patel and says that this is something that he too has been using.

Utter lies and absolute CRAP!

I am sure this was one of those emails that the product creator would have given their affiliate marketers. And affiliate Marketers blindly use these emails.

Affiliate Marketing mistakes # 3 – Never Use Readymade email from Merchants

Most product creators and merchants provide emails swipes to their affiliates as part of the resources. And most affiliate marketers blindly copy these swipes and send it over to their subscribers.

In fact, some of them even forget to change placeholders. The emails that you receive will have something like {firstname_fix} etc. written in the greeting.

The subscribers on your list might also be on some other lists and there would be other marketers who would be sending similar emails to their list. In fact the product creator would also be sending the same email to their lists.

Now imagine if these subscribers see the same email coming to them from multiple sources.

They would surely mark it as “JUNK” and move on.

These readymade email swipes from product creators are supposed to be used for inspiration. You can customize it and tweak it according to your audience and your personality.

Your audience is used to seeing a specific style of writing from you. That style is what connects them to you. Maintain that style and write an email that suits your writing style.

Now that we spoke about some of these affiliate marketing mistakes, let me tell you about the product that I was talking about.

Do you know the what is that “Traffic Source” that the sales page talks about?

It is “Slideshare“.

And the strategy is to create powerpoint slides or, PDFs from your blogposts and submit it to Slideshare and other PDF sharing sites.

So, what exactly is this “1-Click App“?

It is a crappy software that generates powerpoint slides and PDFs from your blog posts.

So much for the hype. Isn’t it?

And the funnier piece is that the product doesn’t even talk about what to do with all of the PDF that you create!

These document sharing sites are extremely good for traffic generation. But they aren’t as easy as it is made to look. You will have to create valuable content and that takes a lot of hard work.

It is not just about copying and pasting the blog post. It is about presenting it in such a way that it is engaging and informative.

And once you have done that, you will have to wait for people to read those presentations and then click over to your offers/blogs/websites.

This traffic generation method is a volume game. You will have to create hundreds of presentations in order to generate a decent amount of traffic.

It isn’t impossible though and it is a good traffic source if you are willing to do the hard work. But none of these 1-Click apps are going to help you with that. And it is definitely not a 1-minute work.

Over to You

I hope these tips made sense.

Affiliate marketing is hard work. But the reward for the hard work is like no other. There are no short-cuts.

In fact, there are no short-cuts to making money or, getting rich except the lottery system.

So, if you are seriously looking to build your business using affiliate marketing, then be ready to put in that hard work. And don’t fall for that next shiny-object. Save your money and use it for something worthwhile.

Do comment below and let me know if there are any other affiliate marketing mistakes that you can think off.

This Thrive Suite review is an extension of a detailed review I had written about Thrive themes some time back.

Thrive Membership has now been rechristened as Thrive Suite. And rightly so. If you read that earlier post of mine, you will realize that I was already referring to Thrive themes as a “Suite”.

It has been some time that I have been using Thrive themes.

But my requirement was that of a landing page builder and an optin form builder. Hence I was using only Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads out of all the plugins that were available in Thrive themes.

As my business progressed, I switched on more of the plugins like Thrive Comments, Thrive Optimize, Thrive Quiz builder, and very recently I switched over to Thrive theme builder.

I was super happy with my earlier theme GeneratePress. It was a low-cost option and with its quick customization options, it was easy to use.

But I wanted more customization options and more control over how my blog looked. I didn’t want to hire a designer because there was more than one blog that I was managing. It would have cost me a bomb.

Moreover, I have always felt that theme designs built by designers somehow reflected their personality instead of mine.

With all of that in mind, Thrive theme builder looked the perfect option and hence I made the switch. I will write a detailed post about how this switch worked and if Thrive theme builder was able to fulfill all my requirements.

But for this post, I wanted to do a quick Thrive Suite review.

Thrive Suite review – What will we cover?

Two of the biggest and best landing page builder softwares are Thrive themes and Optimizepress. I have already written a detailed comparative study of Optimizepress vs Thrive themes in one of my earlier post.

This post is purely about my experience with Thrive Suite, the pros and cons and if this is a right purchase for you. But will this purchase be a right fit for you, will entirely depend upon your business plans and goals.

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links and if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a small commission from your purchase, without any additional cost to you.

So here is what we will cover in this review –

• Who are Thrive Themes and What is Thrive Suite
• What’s included in Thrive Suite
• Thrive Suite Pricing
• Do you really need Thrive Suite
• What I liked about Thrive Suite – Its Advantages
• Cons of Thrive Suite

Let’s now deep dive and take a look at each of these –

Who are Thrive Themes and What is Thrive Suite?

Thrive Suite, earlier called as Thrive membership is a collection of themes and plugins that are conversion focused. We will come to that a little while later.

But first let us look at the credibility of the product and its creators.

It was long back when popup builders were a difficult thing to do. Email marketing was big and everybody out there was talking about building an email list.

But there was a huge problem. To put an optin form that can capture email addresses, in place was a humongous task unless you knew coding.

That was when developers started working on plugins that could simplify the job of building an optin form. 3 products that soon gained prominence were Popup Domination, Hybrid Connect and Optin Monster.

I used to follow the folks at incomediary.com, who incidentally were the ones who created Popup Domination. So I started using the plugin on my websites.

Though the plugin was cool, I wasn’t really happy with the options it gave me. And that was when I stumbled upon Hybrid Connect, which was an immediate hit for me.

It worked well and gave me everything I needed. Most of all I was super impressed with the support they gave me. And that made me a customer of theirs for the lifetime.

Marketing gets you a new customer. Support gets you a repeat customer. And exceptional support gets you a lifetime customer

dkspeaks

Shane Melaugh, the creator of Hybrid Connect is the same person who founded Thrive Themes.

When they created Thrive Leads, an optin form builder plugin they switched me over to Thrive Leads from Hybrid Connect for FREE.

What more can a customer ask for. Isn’t it?

Since then, I have been using some of the other products from Thrive themes.

There is one thing that background story would have told you about the company behind the product – Not only do they have amazing products, they also have an exceptional support team.

So what is Thrive Suite?

Thrive suite is a collection of 10 plugins and a WordPress theme builder (as of the time I am writing this post). Here are the plugins –

• Thrive Product Manager
• Thrive Architect
• Thrive Optimize
• Thrive Leads
• Thrive Quiz Builder
• Thrive Ultimatum 
• Thrive Apprentice
• Thrive Comments
• Thrive Ovation
• Thrive Clever Widgets
• Thrive Headline Optimizer

The WordPress theme builder comes with 2 ready made themes and includes the following –

• Thrive Theme Builder
• Shapeshift Theme
• Ommi Theme

Thrive Product Manager

Let me start with this thing first because this is what I like the most about Thrive Suite.

The first thing that would come to your mind when you see so many different plugins and themes are – What the heck! Do I have to install all of that one-by-one, activate them, enter the license and so on to use them?

But then Thrive Product Manager takes care of all of these.

All you need to do is install Thrive Product manager

All that you need to do is select the plugins you want to install and click on “install selected products”. Once the plugins are installed, it will take you to the activation screen which again is a matter of a click.

I was super impressed with this way of managing the plugins. This takes care of the problem of installing and downloading multiple plugins and licensing each of them.

Thrive Architect and Thrive Optimize

Thrive Architect is a landing page builder which is far ahead of its competition. This was the 2nd product from Thrive themes that I used for my websites.

In fact, I was using Optimizepress for building my landing pages because at a time when there weren’t any solutions to building landing pages, Optimizepress came out with a landing page builder and it was a boon for us marketers.

But then with time, requirements too changed and Optimizepress fell off in the competition. That was when Thrive themes came out with Thrive Content Builder, which was later renamed as Thrive Architect. You can read about the story of my switch to Thrive Architect and a comparison between Optimizepress 3.0 and Thrive Architect here.

Thrive Architect is a powerful plugin and can be used to design all types of landing pages. In fact the homepage of this blog of mine and almost all the other blogs that I run are designed using Thrive Architect.

You can see there are a quite a few elements in that design, all of which were designed using Thrive Architect. Here are the primary elements in that screenshot –

• Menu bar with a highlighted menu item
• Background image with a faded overlay
• Call to action button with a 2-step optin form

If you scroll the page you will find a lot many other elements on the page, all of which were again designed using Thrive Architect.

Now if you thought, designing all of that would have taken hours, then you are mistaken. The entire page took less than 30 minutes to design.

How?

By using something called as “BLOCKS” which is one of the core elements in Thrive Architect.

You can start by using one of the many templates (about 300+ templates as of writing this) that are available and customize it according to your needs.

Or, you can start from a blank template and build your own page using blocks. This gives you a lot more flexibility and options to build a page of your liking.

There are more than 120 different blocks available for pretty much everything from blog post articles, pricing tables, testimonials, about sections, etc. that you can use and easily build your landing pages.

One of the biggest problems in creating landing pages is ensuring that there is uniformity in all of your pages. You don’t want a subscriber to see different designs on your landing page, opt-in page, thank you page, and download page.

Thrive Architect makes is easy for you to maintain uniformity with their “smart landing pages“.

What are Smart Landing Pages in Thrive Architect?

Thrive team calls a smart landing page as “a Revolutionary New Way of Creating Landing Pages on Your WordPress Site”.

To put in simpler terms, smart landing pages are collection of landing pages and associated pages that have a similar styling and aesthetics and can be controlled using centrally managed options.

The difference between a smart landing page and a normal landing page is that the smart landing pages have a lot of smart features like Smart Color Management, Global Styling and Global Fields, all of which helps in faster and easier landing page creation with uniform styling and branding.

Thrive Optimize

Thrive Optimize is an add-on for Thrive Architect that can help run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Once the add-on is installed, you will see an option “A/B” on the Thrive Architect editor. All you need to do is click that and you will be taken to a page where you can add a variation of the page.

It is important to A/B test landing pages to see what version works well and converts better. And Thrive Optimize makes this easy for us.

Thrive Leads

Thrive leads was the first Thrive plugin that I used. It was the experience of using Thrive leads that led me into using all of the other Thrive themes plugins.

Thrive leads is an optin form builder plugin. The best part is that it helps you build optin forms that are conversion focused.

Thrive Leads has a nice dashboard with everything that you need on a single window – your lead pages, important statistics and optin form creation tools.

Lead generation forms are organized into lead groups, so you have easier access and control over similar lead magnets.

Thrive leads can help you create a variety of lead generation forms like Scroll Mat, Lightbox, Slide in forms, Widgets, Ribbons, Post footers etc.

You also have complete control over when and where to display your optin forms. You can display the forms based on tags, categories or, even specific pages or, posts.

You can also control when the form shows up on the screen. The best part is that you can even make some of these forms as an exit form or, a smart exit form (a form that shows up after a set timeframe or, before the visitor exits the page, whichever comes first).

Thrive leads uses a similar drag and drop builder like Thrive Architect and is hence extremely easy to design. There are plenty of ready made templates that you can use as is or, customize it depending upon your requirements. You can design a variety of optin forms from a very simple one to complex 2-step and multi-step optin forms.

Integrating Thrive leads with your auto-responder is also pretty easy. There are API integrations available with pretty much every other autoresponder. In addition to the most common ones like ConvertKit, Aweber, Getresponse, Mailchimp etc. there are some of the lesser known autoresponders too, available for integration via the API.

And in the rare case that your autoresponder is not available, you can always use the HTML forms to build your optin forms.

Thrive Quiz Builder

One of my favorites in Thrive Suite is the Thrive Quiz Builder plugin because it helps me build my list easily.

How?

Let me explain.

The possibility of an engaged visitor signing up to your email list is much more than a cold visitor who is presented with an optin form.

But how would you build that kind of an engagement with a brand new visitor coming over to you website?

By using quizzes!

A quiz is an interesting way to make somebody take action on your website/blog. People are usually excited to learn something interesting about themselves or, even self-assess. And a Quiz can do that pretty easily.

But building Quizzes can be extremely difficult unless you use a SaaS platform or, have in depth knowledge of coding that into your website.

Thrive Quiz Builder takes away that pain.

You can build beautiful interactive quizzes by simple clicking and selecting.

Select from multiple quiz types depending upon how you want the results to show up. This would essentially depend upon what your goal with the Quiz is.

You have options to select a Numeric evaluation, % result, right/wrong evaluation or, even create a simple survey.

Once done, you can select from a variety of template styles and complete your designing process. Again the entire designing is similar to that of all Thrive products, so you wouldn’t find it too overwhelming.

And finally, it is time to frame you questions. I can tell you that you are going to love this part as much as I do.

The dashboard is a nice workspace where you can frame your questions and use multiple logics to connect responses and questions by simple dragging and dropping connectors.

What I usually do is that I create all the questions and their answers in a notepad. Once I have all of that ready, it is just a matter of copying and pasting it into the quiz builder workspace and connecting the responses.

Thrive quiz builder like most other Thrive plugins gives you a lot of insights with their handy analytics.

Thrive Ultimatum

Do you know what’s the one thing that helps sell?

It is the fear of missing out (FOMO). And that is one of the reason you see most marketers using those timers on their salespages.

But the problem with these timers that leverage FOMO and scarcity, is that you would either need to know how to code or, you will have to use a SaaS platform which could turn out to be very expensive.

Thrive Ultimatum is a plugin that helps you do it without all that hassles.

You can create a variety of timed marketing campaigns thereby leverage the power of scarcity and improving conversions.

All you need to do is pick a template and customize it just like you would do with all other Thrive products and your campaign is ready. There are numerous templates that are available for multiple scarcity types like 7-day specials, festive specials, end of month specials etc.

Once you have completed designing, just add a call to action with a countdown timer and you are done. The timer runs automatically and will help you decide what you want your visitors to see once the timer expires.

The reports are also user-friendly and can provide you with a lot of insights.

Thrive Apprentice

Thrive Apprentice is a course management plugin.

While I haven’t yet used it full-fledgedly, it is a very powerful plugin for people who want to have more control over how they deliver their courses.

You can adjust the way your course dashboard looks and even tweak most of the course settings to suit your brand aesthetics. Uploading the course content is also pretty easy and you have complete control like drip feeding course lessons, attaching multiple course formats like PDF, survey forms, documents etc.

Thrive Apprentice also gives you the option of integrating it with various checkout softwares, so you need not worry about accepting payments.

You might find the plugin a little difficult to use, in the beginning. But once you get used to it, it should be pretty easy to manage the entire course platform.

I liked the plugin and am currently in the process of using it to put together the course for my website at The Blogging University.

Thrive Comments

The very essence of blogging is engagement. And one of the primary ways of engagement between the audience and the blogger is “commenting”.

But commenting has lost its charm over the last few years, primarily because of the way it was being used by people to get backlinks. People would spam blogs with worthless comments usually submitted by BOTS just because they have an option of adding a link to their website.

Another reason for the failure of the commenting system was the lame commenting system. The “commenting” feature in any blogging platform is just lame and doesn’t really give anything for the commenters or, the blogger other than a mere interaction.

Why should one comment on a blog? How can a blogger get more out of the commenters efforts?

Thrive comments addresses all of these and make “commenting” and enjoyable experience.

How?

By giving you complete control of how you want to manage your commenting system.

Thrive comments gives you the option to decide “what happens” after a reader has posted a comment. You have the option of encouraging them to share your post, see related posts or, even redirect them to a post or, page of your choice.

You could even redirect them to view an optin form thereby building your email list. This is something that I love the most because who is a better prospect for your email list than somebody who has already engaged with your post?

Another interesting option is to incentivize the commenters by voting on comments and also giving badges to them based on their comment quality. This helps in boosting engagement. And the best part is that you can decide on different actions depending upon somebody being a first time commenter or, a returning commenter.

Thrive Ovation

Testimonials help demonstrate your authority and trustworthiness to your visitors. Most business owners use testimonials to emphasize their and their brands credibility to their prospects.

But often, collecting these testimonials and displaying it on your website can be a herculean task. Collating the testimonials from different channels, designing and displaying it etc. can take a lot of time and effort, leave alone the efforts involved in tracking them.

Thrive Ovation simplifies this entire process.

You can capture testimonials by integrating it with Thrive Architect or, Thrive leads in addition to importing testimonials from social media channels.

Displaying the testimonials is also easy and can be done either by using WordPress shortcodes or, by creating testimonial pages using Thrive Architect.

Thrive Ovation is a huge time saver if you are somebody who uses social proof a lot.

Thrive Clever Widgets

Thrive Clever widgets is a simple little plugin but is very powerful if you use it the right way.

It basically adds a display login to your widgets thereby helping you to decide where and when you want to display a certain widget.

WordPress widgets are very powerful but gives you very little control over their display. Imagine if you had control to show your Instagram widget with a follow button on a post about optimizing Instagram profiles. Wouldn’t that result in better conversions that showing a generic social media widget?

Thrive Clever widgets gives you this control so that you can create a more targeted offer/content for your visitors. This leads to better conversions and more engagement.

You can use Thrive Clever widgets to display your widgets based on categories, specific posts or, specific pages.

Thrive Headline Optimizer

Thrive headline Optimizer is a A/B testing solution for your WordPress post headlines and probably the only good solution available out there.

You can use the headline optimizer to test out multiple headlines for your blog posts and see which one performs better.

All you need to do is select the headlines that you want to test, enter your alternate headlines and run the test.

Once your test is complete you can decide if you want to choose the winner or, you want it to happen automatically. You can also choose the test criteria which means, you have complete control over how the A/B test runs.

That brings us to one of the most important component of Thrive Suite – The Thrive Theme Builder.

Thrive Theme Builder – The Easiest Customizable Theme

I switched over to Thrive theme builder about 2 months back. Until then, I have been running my blog (say, blogs) on Generatepress.

In fact, Generatepress is still one of my favorite themes. It is one of the low cost, multi-functional themes around and gives you a lot of option to play around with.

But then custom designing with Generatepress is limited and could be a problem for a lot of people who aren’t well versed with CSS and styling.

It is here that Thrive theme builder scores.

Using Thrive theme builder you could build a completely custom theme with everything to your liking without really doing anything to the codes.

Designing is similar to that of Thrive Architect and you could just click, edit and style everything to make your blog look unique to yourself.

To be frank, I didn’t want to pay a few thousand dollars to a designer to custom design my blog and then realize that the blog reflects more of his personality than mine.

And Thrive Theme Builder solved this problem for me.

There are numerous page builders and theme designers out there. I have used everything from Thesis to Genesis and Studiopress. But none of them come even close to what Thrive Theme Builder can do for you.

And the best part – You don’t need to know anything about coding, to design a blog of your liking and choice.

Thrive Theme Builder has a simple site setup wizard that can walk you through the initial setup pretty fast.

You can start by picking up one of the 2 theme templates that are available as of now – Shapeshift and Ommi.

Once you have completed the initial setup, just go ahead and customize the design of your pages and posts. You can even choose a different design for different pages.

Customization is easy just like in Thrive Architect. You can use pre-made templates and edit the design or, build something from scratch by using the Thrive elements or, pre-designed blocks. There are more than 140 pre-made content blocks that you can use.

Now here is what I like most about Thrive Theme Builder.

Ensuring that there is uniformity in branding across your site is pretty simple and requires just a few clicks.

• Pick fonts for each different elements – headlines, paragraphs, quotes, bullets etc. Once done, this will show across your entire site and will be uniform
• You can pick your primary brand color and your entire site will be customized with a palette based on the color you have chosen. You also have an option of customizing it to your liking.
• Create and design a header and a footer and it will show up all throughout your site. If you want to make changes to any of these, all you have to do is edit it at the central panel and it is updates across the entire site.

Now that’s what I would call “EASY”.

Thrive Theme Builder is true to its promise about being conversion-focused. One of the key ingredients of better conversion is site speed and performance.

Thrive Theme Builder, and all of the other plugins in Thrive Suite are coded optimally to ensure that your website loads fast.

In addition Thrive Theme Builder also gives you the option of optimizing your blog for performance, in just a few clicks.

• You get built in support for caching and optimization plugins like WP-Rocket, WP Fastest Cache and W3 Total Cache. Optimization is just about clicking to install the plugin, then clicking to activate the optimal options for the plugin that you choose.
• If your blog is an image heavy one, then there is support for image optimization platforms like Optimole and Smush. Again, activating these is a matter of a few clicks.
• If your blog uses AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), then Thrive Theme Builder has support for AMP as well.

Now that we took a look at all of what is included in Thrive Suite, let us look at some of the other important aspects like pricing and support.

How much does Thrive Suite Cost?

One of the primary consideration when buying a WordPress theme is the cost. And that is one of the reasons why I recommend Generatepress for anybody looking for a sleek, simple and functional wordpress theme.

But what if you need multiple tools for running your business?

You do not have an option but to buy each of these individual tools/plugins and that can add up to a lot of money.

It is this problem that Thrive Suite solves.

Thrive Suite is more than just a WordPress theme. It bundles together a lot of critical and important tools into one suite.

So, how much does Thrive Suite cost?

Thrive Suite is a subscription-based product. There are multiple plans that are available based on your choice of payment and the number of sites that you are planning to use the suite on.

The basic plan gives you access to install Thrive Suite products on 25 websites and also gives you unlimited support and updates. It also comes with a 30-day money back guarantee.

• Thrive Suite Quarterly plan – $30/month
• Thrive Suite Yearly Plan – $19/month

If you are really looking to buy Thrive Suite, then the yearly plan makes sense because you save almost 40% in the yearly plan.

For people who need to use these themes for their clients or, on more than 25 websites, there is the agency plan which is available at $49/month billed annually.

Now, when you look at the annual payment, $228 might look a lot. But if you at it from a business sense that is an investment rather than an expenditure. That is a very low cost if you look at the value you are getting.

The suite gives you access to a range of tools, which if you were to buy as standalone products would cost you multiple times of what you are paying for Thrive Suite.

In addition to that, you can get rid of a few other plugins like your social media plugin, script installer plugins like “header and footer plugins” etc. because these are all inbuilt in Thrive Suite.

Moreover, if you compare the pricing with some of the other similar products available out there, you will find that Thrive Suite is priced much economically.

So, overall if you look at it from a pricing point, it is an economical buy.

Do You really need Thrive Suite?

Thrive suite is a recommended product for Bloggers, Solopreneurs, Web designers and developers.

But if you really need Thrive Suite, will depend entirely upon your needs and business goals.

Having said that, it is important to mention that a lot of the tools that are included in Thrive Suite are important tools for running an internet marketing business.

Take for example, Thrive Leads. If you are not building your email list, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Thrive Leads can help you get started with your email list building and also get better conversions from the same optin forms.

So, if you are serious about building your business, then you should consider investing in Thrive Suite.

What I like about Thrive Suite – Pros!

If you have read this Thrive Suite review up until here, then you would have realized that there is a lot that I like about Thrive Suite. In fact, I am a fan of Thrive Suite and its products.

Let me summarize some of the primary reasons why I love Thrive Suite –

Complete control over my Blog – Products like Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Architect and Thrive leads give me complete control over how I design, manage and run my blog. The level of customization options and the features that are available, makes it easier for me to run my business and at the same time know what exactly is it that is happening with my visitors.

All of the tools and plugins integrate with each other nicely and seamlessly. They are connected with each other very well and hence using them as a complete business suite is easy.

Regular updates – The folks at Thrive theme are serious about their business and not only values their customers but also takes pride in their products. They continuously work on updating their plugins and ensuring that it is up-to-date both from a features perspective and also from a security point of view.

In addition to keeping their product up to date, they are also constantly working to build newer products to help businesses. And the best part is that all of the new plugins and themes that they build are available to their existing customers in the same subscription. So no additional costs.

Integrations and Simplicity of Use – Thrive products come with a range of API integrations be it autoresponders, webinar softwares, mail delivery services, recaptcha services or, even social media services and automation services like Zapier.

This makes it pretty easy to use these services from your website. You will be surprised at the number of autoresponders that Thrive products integrate with. So integrating your choice of autoresponder (aweber is what I use and recommend) with your list building efforts is a matter of a few clicks.

Thrive products are also simple to use, if you put in some time to learn the basics of using them. There are a lot of video tutorials as well which can help guide you with using them.

Another feature that I like the most is the availability of a simple central panel where you can add whatever scripts and codes you want. So, if it is your Google analytics code, Facebook pixels or, retargeting pixels, you can add all that very easily in a single place.

Excellent Support – I am a fan of excellent customer support. So, even if the product isn’t top notch, but if they have a customer support team that is out of the world, then I would prefer going with the product.

The folks at Thrive theme truly stand by their product and this is evident in the amazing customer support they offer. I have reached out to them multiple times with multiple aspects that I wanted help on. Some of them weren’t even related to Thrive Suite, yet the kind of support and response that I got from their support team was superb.

They patiently listen to you and help you with every one of your queries.

Another thing that I liked, though it isn’t a big thing is the troubleshooting option. Unlike most other support teams, you do not have to create a login for their support team to access your website. You just need to go to the Thrive dashboard and create a simple access code and submit that in your support ticket. It is that simple.

Overall, there’s quite a few things that I like about Thrive Suite.

What I dislike about Thrive Suite – Cons!

Anything that I put in here would be more of knit-picking rather than a genuine dislike for the product.

Yet, I think I should mention some of the things that Thrive Suite could improve on.

Optimization Integrations – I use Shortpixel as my image optimization solution and I absolutely love them. In fact, I have a lifetime account with them. But unfortunately, Thrive suite doesn’t have a direct integration with them. Hence I had to manually enable and disable a few options which were actually conflicting with each other. This was a pain, because of the amount of testing involved in identifying where the problem was.

Similarly, another such integration was Litespeed Cache. I run my blog on a server that runs Litespeed and hence it made sense for me to use Litespeed Cache. It is an excellent plugin that has a lot of optimization options and you can expect to see a tremendous improvement in your pagespeed scores on GTMetrix and Google Page insights. Also it is a FREE plugin as compared to WP Rocket which is a premium plugin but with much lesser features than Litespeed Cache.

Unfortunately, Thrive Suite doesn’t have an integration with Litespeed Cache. I faced a few issues with the CSS and JS minify options in Litespeed Cache as it conflicted with some of Thrive Suite’s codes and had to spend some time trying to fix it. Though eventually I decided to uninstall Litespeed Cache and went with WP Fastest Cache (which has a direct integration with Thrive) because there was no support available from them.

I would have loved to see integration with these tools. Having said that, the Thrive themes team has taken these suggestions for their future updates though.

Closing Thoughts – What’s the final Verdict?

Thrive Suite is an excellent suite of products that can help with growing your business.

But would you need Thrive Suite?

That will entirely depend upon what your business goals are.

Thrive Suite is a product that is targeted for Solopreneurs, Bloggers and Content creators. But if you are small time blogger running a single blog and aren’t really planning to use at least 3-4 of the tools in this Suite, then the purchase isn’t worth for you.

At this point it is also important to mention that it is highly unlikely that you will not use the majority of the tools in this suite even if you are single blog owner. For eg: Thrive Theme builder, Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, Thrive Headline optimizer, Thrive quiz builder and Thrive Optimize are something that you will invariably use.

That should make the purchase worthwhile irrespective of the fact that you might be using it only on one of your website.

This coupled with the fact that there is no other similar product suite available in the market today and anything that is comparable is priced much higher, makes Thrive Suite a must-have and a recommended purchase.

Disclaimer: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. If you choose to click on those and make a purchase, then I would earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Please do note that being an affiliate has in no way influenced any of the things that I have mentioned here about the product. I only recommend products and services that I have used and am satisfied with.

Frequently Asked Questions:

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Do let me know your thoughts about this review and about Thrive Suite by commenting below.

If pricing has been a deterrent for you in buying SEMRush, then this affordable alternative to SEMRush is going to interest you.

SEMRush has been the chosen tool for most bloggers and marketers who are looking to rank their content on search engines.

In fact, I happened to stumble upon SEMRush after I read a post on Backlinko, that showed a demo of the tool.

At first, I was a little too overwhelmed with the many features of SEMRush, but using the tool during the FREE trial helped me get a better understanding of the many features.

But then, there’s a couple of things I realized after using the tool for some time –

• SEMRush is a wonderful tool from an SEO perspective. But most of its features are targeted towards an SEO professional and might be something that you as a blogger might not use.
• You can easily get overwhelmed with the features and options available in the tool and the fact is that there are barely a couple of features that you would use in your day-to-day blogging routine
• Understanding what to do with the analytics that the tool provides, is important to get the most out of the tool

With that being said, it is also important that you know that SEMRush is still one of the best SEO tools you can find online and if the price point isn’t something you are concerned with, then this is a tool that you could go for. You can check out SEMRush here!

Now, with that out of the way, let us look at the alternative to SEMRush.

All of these are much more affordable than SEMRush though they too come with as monthly subscriptions, which means you still need to commit to a monthly payment for all of them.

PS: Want to know how to get these and many other tools for a low one-time lifetime payment and not have to pay anymore. Then read on and I will tell you that nice little tip towards the end of the article.

In this post today, I will show you 3 tools that are SEMRush alternatives.

The one thing to keep in mind is that these 3 tools, though can be called an alternative to SEMRush, isn’t an exact replacement.

But they have most of those features that you as a blogger or, a marketer would need.

Let us take a look at these and their features.

Alternative to SEMRush – 3 Tools that can do the Job

Gone are the days of the tools that were desktop applications. It’s the age of the cloud and most software today are offered as a SaaS (Software as a Service). And SEO tools too, follow that model and are mostly cloud-based these days.

In fact, SaaS is a lot better as a service because of multiple reasons –

• You don’t have to install another software on your computer and increase all that unnecessary load on your computer’s processors and storage
• With most software needing to access third party online tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console etc., it can be a lot of load on your computer and you internet connection.
• You can access the software from anywhere. So the need to carry your laptop around is eliminated.
• Regular updates and fixes will happen online and you don’t need to be worried about downloading and installing another update on your computer
• There are no limitations to processing speeds and storage. Hence everything is a lot more faster and the only thing that limits you is the speed of your internet.

The 3 SEMRush alternatives that we are discussing today are also SaaS and hence accessible from anywhere.

Here are these 3 alternatives and their features –

Labrika – Our favorite All in one SEO tool

Labrika is my go-to tool when it comes to SEO.

The tool has helped me increase my search engine traffic by almost 235% on this blog. It helped with SERPs and increased the search engine traffic on another of my blog by almost 460%.

There’s a lot that this tool can do when it comes to SEO. My favorite one is the content optimizer.

This content optimizer tool, find competitors ranking for a specific keyword and gives you a list of recommendations to rank for that keyword based on the analysis that it does on these competitors.

Once you have optimized your article based on these recommendations, it is just a matter of copying it onto your blog.

Labrika has some other very interesting features that are similar to what SEMRush offers. Here’s some of them:

Full SEO Audit: This is an audit of your site for 39 of the most critical ranking factors

Technical Audit: The technical audit is an audit of the technical issues affecting the search engine indexing of your site. It does an audit of 72 such factors and give you a detailed report of where you need to improve.

Keyword Characteristics: It is a report that you give a lot of details about keywords, like how good is your keyword choice, tips, and advice on your keyword usage, etc. This includes the Number of main pages in TOP10; A list of relevant landing pages; The optimal click depth of a landing page; Latent semantics (LSI) and many others.

User Metrics: Labrika provides you a lot of handy user metrics like %bounce rate, average session time etc. in addition to a lot of detailed analysis of your users. The 2 features that I like the most are – a list of all search requests that people used to find your site and a list of all the pages with no traffic. This information can help you a lot in terms of optimizing your site.

Analysis of Competitor’s websites: Labrika provides a decent evaluation of your competitors and provides you with some amazing statistics that you can use to outrank them.

Some of this includes information like the list of competitors, Snippets of competitors, recommendations for texts based on the analysis of competitors’ websites etc.

Search Rankings Tracking: Labrika also tracks your search engine rankings. You can setup the frequency of running the reports and Labrika will send you a notification when the report is ready. Rankings are available for different Google locations and it is even downloadable in XLS format.

Domain Information: Labrika also provides you with a lot of information about your domain.

Essential Landing Page Elements: Labrika also does an indepth analysis of your landing pages and tells you what changes you need to do for better conversions.

Pricing for the tool

There are a lot of other features as well which are all very handy and comparable to SEMRush. The best part is that you wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with the information that you get.

Labrika is affordable and starts at only $19/month for 500 keyword search queries and 10,000 page crawling credits. This is more than enough for a blog that gets a reasonable amount of traffic.

You can check out Labrika here!

SERanking – My favorite All in One SEO tool

This is my favorite SEO tool and my most preferred alternative to SEMRush.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that it is very much similar to SEMRush and has a lot of similar features. So for a much lower price, you get pretty much everything.

In fact, SE Ranking does more than any other tool in the market today, yet it is not overwhelming. It is pretty simple and easy to use and even a newbie who is using a similar tool for the first time can easily use it.

Here are some of the features of SE Ranking.

• Keyword research and suggestions tools
• Keyword rank tracker
• Website Audit
• Backlink Monitor
• Backlink checker
• Competitive research
• On-page checker

Here’s a quick look at how the dashboard for SE Ranking looks.

Keyword research and suggestions tool – The Keyword research tool in SE Ranking gives a lot of information. In addition to showing you keyword ideas with its associated search volumes, CPC, ranking difficulty etc., it also gives you information about both organic search results for the keyword and paid search results for the keyword

You can use this information to develop your keyword strategy and use these keywords in your content and outperform your competitors.

Keyword Rank Tracker – The Keyword Rank tracker in SE ranking is one of the best that I have seen. They claim that it is a 100% accurate rank tracker which though there isn’t a real way to verify, looks to be true from whatever I could manually verify.

The tracker helps check Google/Yahoo/Bing/YouTube rankings for all locations and devices. It also tracks your competitors ranking for keywords and analyses the SERP for the top 100 search results.

Website Audit – SE Ranking provides you with a comprehensive website audit report that includes things like Technical errors, missing or, duplicate meta tags and headers, website loading speed related issues etc.

The report gives you a lot of information to optimize your website for SEO and is presented in a very easy to understand format.

But at this point, I need to agree that the Website audit report by Labrika is something that I prefer over SE ranking because theirs is a lot more comprehensive and actionable.

Backlink Monitor – SE ranking monitors your backlinks regularly and provides you with a lot of useable information like number of backlinks, the backlinks target ratio, new and lost backlinks, % of dofollow to nofollow etc.

It also gives you a lot of information about the origin of these backlinks like domain trust, Alexa rank etc. along with other information like the page trust, the number of external links from the page etc.

Backlink Checker – Backlink checker is the same as Backlink Monitor, with the only difference that it is for your website. You could get valuable information about the backlinks to your website, their quality, trust rank, are they do follow or, no follow etc.

The one feature that is my absolute favorite in SEM Rush is the backlink monitoring tool. They have a nice “Toxicity rating” for each of the domains/urls that the backlinks are coming from, which then helps you to disavow them, if you think that there are a lot of toxic domains that are backlinking to your site.

This feature isn’t really available in any other tool. The Backlink checker in SE Ranking is a little closer to this.

Competitive Research – The competitive research module is probably one of the most sought after feature in all of these tools. The competitive research feature in SEMRush is one of the best you could ever find but that doesn’t mean that the other tools do not have this feature or, that it isn’t as good as SEMRush.

SE Ranking gives you a detailed analysis of your competitors and provides some valuable insights as well. It gives you information like traffic, domain trust and page trust, the most popular pages and the PPC ads that they are running in addition to the usual information like backlinks, keywords etc.

If you are somebody who runs PPC ads, then the information about the most profitable PPC ads run by your competitors can come is very handy to build you own profitable campaigns.

On page checker – Finally the on-page checker which is a common feature that is available with all SEO tools. It analyses your pages for specific search queries and gives you a lot of information to optimize those pages for search engine rankings.

Pricing and My Opinion

SE Ranking is probably one of the closest tool to SEMRush and one of the best complete alternative. Features are comparable and easy to use and since the dashboard and presentation doesn’t look overwhelming, most bloggers will find it pretty helpful.

The pricing for SE Ranking is a little confusing though.

They have a usage based subscription model. But the lowest you can start off is for about $25.00/month. You can track about 250 keywords which is good enough for any blogger.

You also get most of the other features that you would need as a blogger. So that plan should be more than enough for anybody who is planning to use the tool for blogging.

But if you are looking for some of the other advanced features and more keyword rank tracking quota etc., then you will have to shell out a little more and pay around $59/month which is still a lot cheaper in comparison to SEMRush.

You can check out SE Ranking here!

Ubersuggest – Keyword Research and SEO Analysis tool

Ubersuggest is my favorite tool when it comes to keyword research. In fact, I use it along with Labrika for all of my keyword research and SEO analysis.

The best part about Ubersuggest is that they have a free option as well, which you can try before you actually make the decision to buy it.

Just like SEMRush, Ubersuggest also offers similar analytical tools –

• Complete Website Analysis
• Keyword Rank Tracking
• Keyword Research
• Content Ideas
• Backlink data
• Competitive Analysis

Complete Website Analysis – Ubersuggest crawls your website periodically and presents a detailed analysis for your website with information like the amount of organic traffic, the number of backlinks, the tracked keywords and their positions and the overall health of your site from an SEO perspective.

Keyword Rank tracking – You can add a list of keywords that you want to track and Ubersuggest will crawl and track them for you. You can see how the ranking for these keywords change and optimize your pages accordingly.

Keyword research – The keyword research module in Ubersuggest is extremely handy and easy to use. You can enter seed keywords to get keyword ideas or, even enter your competitor’s website to get a list of keywords that they are ranking for and which you can use to outrank them.

Content Ideas – The Content Ideas module show you content ideas based on the keywords you enter. You can check out these ideas and take inspiration from them to write an even better piece of content so that you outrank them.

Backlink Data – Ubersuggest gives you some extensive backlinks data which you can use to make decisions like disavowing harmful backlinks, planning your anchor text spread etc.

Competitive Analysis – Ubersuggest also gives you a lot of information about your competitors, like the keywords they are ranking for and you are not, the backlinks they are getting, Keyword gap between you and them and a lot of other useful metrics.

Pricing and Overall Opinion

Ubersuggest is an extremely useful tool with a lot of options and is something that is comparable to SEMRush. It can give you a lot of data that you can use especially if you are a blogger.

The best part about Ubersuggest is their pricing. Its one of the most affordable tools starting at about $12/month or, a $120 lifetime option. This plan should be more than enough for most bloggers and affiliate marketers.

Also, they have a free option which is something good for people who want to try it out.

You can checkout Ubersuggest here!

BIQ – All in One SEO Tool

This is a bonus tool and another alternative to SEMRush. This is BIQ.

I came across this tool a few weeks back when I saw it being mentioned in an email. Some of the features fascinated me and that’s when I thought of checking it out.

BIQ is created by the same folks who created SEOPressor. So you can be rest assured that they have a fair bit of understanding of how SEO works.

BIQ has a lot of the features that are available in SEMRush and is hence one of the best alternatives to SEMRush. The features are categorized into 4 primary ones –

• Keyword Research
• Content Analyzer
• Competitive Research
• Rank Tracking

BIQ has a very clean, simple and user friendly dashboard. You wouldn’t be confused with what you should do. You just need to select what you want to do from the 4 options presented and proceed. That’s it!

Here’s what BIQ can do for you –

Keyword Intelligence

Keyword intelligence is the keyword research module of BIQ. Just like any other tool, you can just enter a seed keyword and BIQ will provide you with keyword suggestions in 4 categories.

The first is Related Keywords which will show you all the related keywords to the seed keyword you entered along with the trend, volume, CPC, competition, intent and value. The best part in this is the “intent” which tells you what is the intent with which somebody will be using this keyword.

The second one is Content ideas where you get a bunch of content ideas . These are basically similar posts which were written for the keyword you searched.

The third is the Popular questions which gives you a list of popular questions that people are asking for that specific keyword

The fourth is trending searches for the keyword.

That’s a good amount of information for a keyword and this can help you write informative blog posts that can rank pretty easily on search engines.

Content Intelligence

The content intelligence module analyzes your content for 25 crucial ranking factors and gives you a list of recommendations to rank better on Google.

This is a very handy module though it has its own shortcomings.

The module gives you a list of suggested keywords which you should use in your article which is extremely handy from an LSI perspective. But the Wordscope score is a little confusing and the readability analysis is a little off when you compare it with some other tools.

Nevertheless, it is still an extremely useful module that can come in handy while writing your blog posts.

Rank Intelligence

This module gives you a list of keywords that you have been ranking for and you never realized that you were.

Interesting! Isn’t it?

This is one of my favorite modules in the tool because it gives you an opportunity to work and optimize your articles for those keywords that aren’t ranking on the first page. That’s a huge opportunity for additional traffic.

Further, you can add these keywords to the rank tracking tool so that you can monitor the progress of these keywords.

There’s a lot many other features and data that the rank intelligence tool gives which is all extremely useful in optimizing your content and getting them to rank on the first page of Google.

Rank Tracking

Rank tracking tracks the keywords that you want to monitor and updates you about their progress. You can see data for keywords that lost rankings, gained ranking positions and the ones that remained unchanged.

And you get this data for both Desktop and Mobile searches which is good if you are somebody who is looking to optimize your content for both desktops and mobiles.

Pricing for the tool

BIQ is as affordable as Labrika and the lowest plan starts at about $55/month and this plan gives you about 200 keyword researches per month, about 100 tracked keywords and about 5000 keywords in rank discovery.

While that is enough for most bloggers and solopreneurs, it still is a little expensive for the average blogger.

You can check out BIQ here.

The Best SEMRush Alternative – Conclusion

Before I give out my opinion, it is critical for you to understand a few things.

Deciding on picking an SEO tool, needs a careful evaluation on what you needs are. Depending upon your needs you might need some features or, you might not need them.

Paying that extra money for a feature that you don’t need or, plan to use isn’t a viable business decision. You will be wasting your money (earning it isn’t the easiest thing though).

It also depends upon your decision on doing it yourself or, hiring an agency to do the job for you.

Based on the above considerations, you can pick the tool that suits you.

If I were to suggest a tool, assuming you are a blogger and affiliate marketer like me, then my first choice would be Labrika, followed by SE Ranking.

Ubersuggest can also do the job for you, if the features that are available on it is all that you would need. In fact, it would be the first choice in that case.

Whatever is the tool that you buy, the most important thing is to put it to use. If it sits there and gathers dust, then it is of no value.

The Secret to not pay for another Subscription

Now onto the final part. The secret to getting tools like these and a lot many others without paying for a monthly subscription.

I know and I can understand the pain of paying a monthly subscription to a tool, especially if you use it about 4-6 times a month.

Though, the subscription model has a lot of advantage and ensures that you get the latest feature updates from the service provider, it can sometimes be a burden for a lot of new bloggers and affiliate marketers.

But there is a way you can get the same benefits but without paying for a monthly subscription. I use this regularly and most of the tools I have purchased is through this method.

Wondering what that is?

It is Appsumo.

Yes. That’s right. Appsumo is a marketplace that has a ton of amazing deals from some of the top product and service creators and almost all of them are available for a one time payment for a lifetime access.

If you want to save a few thousand dollars every year, I would recommend that you check out Appsumo.

Frequently Asked Questions

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