Thursday, November 7th, 2024
What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is a “middleman” service that you provide, where you as an online marketer, promotes physical, digital or a service product that’s owned by others, in exchange for a commission.
You as a blogger, website owner or media advertiser acts as a bridge between the buyer and the seller. You store no inventory or handle the monetary transaction. You get paid once a sale is made.
You as an affiliate marketer can join any existing affiliate program at no charge, that’s specific to your niche. All you then do is market these high in demand trending products on your site.
Check “YES” If You Agree:
– Do you own a computer or a mobile device and have Internet access?
– Do you have free time available to start your own online business part-time or full-time?
– Can you follow direction by learning the lessons of a concise training program?
– Are you capable of writing detailed articles reports and reviews on time or are willing to learn?
– Are you reliable and promise to treat this like a real job and not just a hobby?
– Do you want to stop jumping from one program or method to the next with nothing to show for it?
– Do you want to create your own online business and blog that you can be proud of to show your loved ones?
How would you like to set up your own work from home office, and claim a portion of your rent or mortgage, computer and Internet usage as a business expense?
To Become Successful As An Internet Marketer:
1.) You need your own product or an affiliate product to promote
2.) You need targeted traffic to your site to promote that product, and
3.) You need to find ways for your site to convert, to earn a commission
NOTE:
Internet marketing comes down to: Product, Traffic, and Conversions. Keep it that simple.
The 3 Most Common Words In Affiliate Marketing: Product… Traffic… Conversion$
Every action you take when it comes to Internet Marketing, falls into one of these 3 categories:
• What is the Product you are promoting?
• How are you getting traffic to your site promoting this product?
• How well is the product and the traffic method converting? How many sales are you getting?
Everything you promote, every Internet Marketing program you come across, you need to determine:
1.) – Product:
What is the product? The product could be an Internet Marketing program, an eCommerce product, a software program, a digital eBook, etc.
• How much commission does it pay?
• Is it in demand or trendy?
• Does the product solve a problem?
• How well is it selling?
• Is the product trustworthy
• What is the price point compared to similar products?
• Is the price too high or too low?
2.) – Traffic:
How do you or the Internet Marketing program you bought, recommend you get targeted traffic to that product?
• Is the traffic method free or paid?
• SEO?
• Facebook and Social Media Advertising?
• Solo Ads?
• Email list?
• Google or Native Ads? etc.
3.) – Conversions:
It’s all about conversion. How many sales are you getting? It comes down to the product you’re promoting, and the traffic method you’re using.
• If it’s the wrong product it won’t convert
• If the traffic method is wrong it won’t convert
• If it’s the right product but the wrong traffic method it won’t convert
• If it’s the wrong product yet the right traffic method it won’t convert
• Always know what your conversion rate is
So for every product, every marketing program you promote, every traffic method you use, plug in these variables to determine why it’s not converting and making you a profit.
Why Become An Affiliate Marketer?
Over the past several decades, the real world has shifted online, and so has the money. This whether it’s for a commercial website or a personal WordPress blog. Whether it’s for turning a profit through advertising, or finding a way to improve exposure for your business.
Today’s currency for success, relies heavily on being able to cultivate more attraction to your online presence. While the world may be getting smaller, the Internet is quickly getting much larger, and it seems that everybody wants a piece of the pie.
The good news for affiliate marketers is, that the majority of visitors going to the millions of blogs and websites online, are getting funneled through the rather narrow search engine portals, based on their keyword selection.
This leaves the market far from being saturated, regarding a division of resources. Therefore, there are plenty of ways that you can successfully direct more people to your blog.
Your Online Journey Starts HERE
However, with everything good, there is always some bad.
Most of the ways that you can drive traffic to your blog, is only understood by those who have dedicated themselves to refining Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and digital marketing strategies.
This merely because they are more driven to do so, to pay better attention, as SEO is a forever moving target.
The WordPress Affiliate Marketing Blog
If you subscribe to the current micro persuasion model that is public relations, then you would most likely agree that the Internet has now become the new frontier of marketing everything.
WordPress Blogs are now the medium of choice, this for entrepreneurs and businesses when it comes to reviews, brand recognition, product and service awareness, and bringing all this media closer to your consumers.
E-commerce sites are now widely accessible and have gone full bore mainstream, and are now the preferred way of shopping, rather than driving down to the local mall.
Everything and anything can now be purchased online, from clothes, to a cure for diabetes, to computers, to cars.
Your Presence Online
The Internet is now one big mass conversation and a humongous department store. So every company and marketer, are now scratching and clawing to join in, to get into the new rat race.
The initial and essential issue for any and every company now is, the need to immediately create an online presence.
This because once they are there online on the Internet and have made themselves accessible, people are bound to find them or eventually seek them out.
Consumers are now on an endless quest for more information, so the key becomes to present it in front of them, by actively refining better marketing techniques.
Imagine if your blog lands on the first page of Google for a highly sought after product, based on a strong buyer keyword search term for the query.
You can then literally get 100’s of targeted free traffic on a daily basis, this to bring your brand closer to these buying people, who are searching for you online with money in hand.
This is what Affiliate Marketing blogging is all about.
Blogging For Profit
So the learning curve for entrepreneurs and marketers, is to find different methods to harness the power of the mighty Internet.
So what’s explored are the various ways, the new and the sexy ways that are available to you, to spread your virtual net to capture these consumers.
What’s explored, are the best known practices and the highest sustainable methods to gain traction in this fickle, yet massively profitable industry.
What works today for your blog in SEO, can easily become passé tomorrow.
So what you need is a foundational plan, using both tried true and tested methods, along with learning new upcoming Internet marketing trends, that obeys to Googles nuances.
Blogs and Blogging
The concept of the Web 2.0 movement, was to give the power back to the consumers. So they, we, can command the power of becoming the content producers ourselves.
Blogs have now become an indispensable and the sole tool for marketing products, services, and spreading brand awareness to the masses.
With blogs, anyone can now join in on the big conversation, the revolution, and reach out directly to their clients, their customers, with an effective built-in feedback mechanism.
How To SEO Your Blog
Bloggers have the ability to curve SEO in their favor. This to quickly, effectively, and legally raise their blog rankings. In some cases, to outrank the original manufactures website themselves.
After all, the majority of new conversions are generated from fresh traffic. These are the highly sought after first-time users, who’s come straight from the search engines to your blog.
So that’s the target, the objective, which is also the greatest feeling and the holy grail, and that’s to land on Googles first page, or gasp… be Number One.
A Constant Elusive Moving Target
The Internet is abound with new and innovative ideas, that can and usually does change on a daily basis.
So what’s needed is a source, to be kept abreast on what’s new and trending in blogging and the latest in SEO.
The next new wave is just around the corner, so it pays to be informed, and get ready for it.
Content SEO And Analytics
When it comes to driving traffic to your blog, your first effort has to come from your own backyard.
The first and foremost rule for building an excellent foundation for driving more traffic to your site, is by creating unique captivating content.
As a small business owner, you need to fully utilize the vast array of tools that are now available at your disposal, for you to make your blog a great experience for your visitors.
The first rule of content creation, is that you need to diversify and distribute this content among as many of the various media formats as possible.
This includes textual, images, audio-visual, video, and so on. Every business needs a specific skill-set to survive and ultimately succeed.
This is why those who are willing to acknowledge their strengths, will always receive more attention, more publicity and ultimately more business based on their higher web traffic numbers.
SEO 101
The first thing that you need to do, to start increasing your web traffic is to isolate the specific skills that will qualify you to succeed in your chosen niche.
This could be your salesmanship, creative business modeling, financial acumen, investment savvy, or strong research skills.
Most small business blogs that make it big, they do so because they don’t over load themselves with business jargon.
It’s because they can extract the qualities of other businesses, into their various articles and anecdotes, that the general public can relate to and can learn from.
Your blog should serve as an exciting and informative target for your audience. Having greater public visibility, will naturally lead to an increase in web traffic and sales.
Creating Relevant Content
When you begin to create content for your site, you want to identify the different styles that will benefit you the most.
Determine whether the information you are wanting to convey, will be better discussed in a short video, or will it be better to create a podcast or a textual article.
Having a more significant variation in the styles of your content, will allow the visitors on your site, to scratch their different itches depending on their mood at the time.
By using the various types of media that’s available to convey your information, you can then satiate your visitor’s thirst, by they learning through video, audio, or the literary outlets.
When it comes to the frequency of posted content, you want to make sure that you do so on a regular basis. Nothing turns away an existing visitor base quicker, than a stagnant blog.
People are only willing to invest their time in a site, that continues to develop and grow, rather than wasting their time on a blog that seems to be dying out and heading towards the cyber graveyard.
Tracking Web Analytics
Beyond the different types of content that you need to create, you also need to keep your eye on your website analytics.
This is usually provided in-house through portals like WordPress, or through Google analytics. If you don’t already have Google analytics on your blog, it’s an easy sign-up process.
Once you’ve signed up, you should begin receiving precise analytical data on your blogs dashboard within a week.
The precise analytics that you will receive, allows you to identify your best performing posts within your content quickly.
Always Be Tracking
You can then determine whether or not a new video or article received public approval, which is determined by the amount of time spent on average, on that particular piece of content.
If they sat through an appropriate amount of time to view the content in its entirety, then you can be rest assured since you’ve done your job.
However, if they move away after just 20 seconds on average, you may need to revise your judgment regarding the topic or style of the content.
Keeping an eye on the analytics of your blog, and tweaking your content accordingly will allow you to understand the tastes of your targeted audience better.
This will help you to cater to your visitors appropriately, so that you can then work in nurturing and growing your visitor base.
Satisfied visitors will always refer your site to others that they know, which will result in an increase in web traffic to your blog through word-of-mouth.
One way to encourage this behavior, is to continually maintain a high level of credibility among your existing visitor base.
Search Engine Optimization
Once you’ve determined the style of content that you are wanting to create, and as you focus on the quality and the frequency of the content itself, you need to start thinking about search engine optimization, SEO.
Creating content that is SEO friendly, is the easiest way for you to attract more traffic to your blog, because it’s fed to you for free by the search engines. This traffic is also precisely accurate over any other method.
The first step to making your site SEO optimized, is by making sure that you submit your sitemap and blog links to the various search engine platforms.
While not every URL that you submit to the search engines will make it onto their search index, a majority of them will grab on without a hitch.
Once you complete this step, it allows Google’s crawlers to index your site and display it within their search results.
This should also be done for the other search engines as well, such as Bing and Yahoo.
Search Engines Remain The Best Traffic
Once you’ve submitted your blog to the search engines for indexing, then do so for the rest of your content, and for everything else that you create in the future.
Doing SEO is allowing the search engine bots, which crawls through every site on the Internet, to categorize and rank these sites in order of their relevance, based on the specific keywords used.
The higher the significance the blog is to a particular keyword, the better the chances are that it will appear higher on the search rankings, the aim being the first page.
This is extremely important, because your efforts to drive traffic to your site isn’t geared toward those people, who already know about your site.
But instead, it’s targeted towards those people who never knew your blog existed, and are only looking for options based on the keywords that they entered into the search query.
How To Rank Higher
Search Engine Optimization is a highly competitive field, and a constant work in progress. It is a combination of art and science, linguistics and anthropology.
It’s the ability to understand the mind of your best customer, and determining a list of possible keywords that they might use to get to the topical content of your article.
Take a look at the content that you have already created, and make a list of all the possible keywords that your searching visitors would use to find an article that’s similar to that one.
Each of the key phrases that you consider, should be three or more words long. These are known as long-tail keyword phrases.
One quick way to research, to compile a list of keywords fast, is to use one key phrase and enter it into Googles search bar.
Once the results appear, scroll down to the bottom of the page. There you will find around eight to ten related searches and key phrases.
This list might help you find a few more phrases, that are strongly related to your original keyword phrase and content.
Repeat this process several times with different keywords, so that you can assemble a wider range of keywords that are relevant to your content.
Once you’ve identified your keywords, make sure that the ones you’ve determined, are used in the theme and the body of the content, especially the first paragraph.
Optimizing For The Search Engines
For each article and content that you produce, define a distinct keyword phrase that should be present in the title and subtitle of the piece.
It’s essential that none of the keywords that you use individually, accounts for more than 1.5% of the total word count of the article.
If you include excessive keywords into your content, it automatically leads to the search engines lowering your rank in their index, which is known as keyword stuffing.
When creating your blog post, you want to add at least two to three different keywords in the title tag of your article.
Include the most important keyword phrase in the metadata and description, as they will remain there for as long as the article is published.
You don’t want to get overzealous and stuff your tagline with errant tags, this because doing so might cause the search engines to lower your ranking.
It is essential that you identify the best possible search engine keyword phrases, and dedicate a few unique ones to each article or piece of content that you write.
Properly optimizing your blog content with SEO, and keeping a close eye on the web analytics of your site, is the first step to boosting your website traffic.
Using Social Media For Your Blog
Social media, has now become the best way to attract targeted traffic to your blog, other than using the search engines.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest and Medium, allows you to pinpoint and interact with your most active audience.
The first step to utilizing social media to drive more traffic to your site, is to make yourself visible on these various platforms.
Utilizing Facebook
Having a fan page on Facebook, is the first step to increasing your visibility on the site.
After creating your blog that’s niche specific, what you want are willing readers to “like” your fan page.
Once it’s established, make sure that you link back to your blog, as doing so will guide the potential reader back to your site.
Also use Facebook to announce any new developments in your business, that would be relevant to your followers.
You can use it to publish posts about your offers or discounts, that are available on your blog.
You can provide updates through your fan page, about new content that is now available to read.
Your Facebook fan page, can also be used as an open forum to pose subtle marketing research questions, this to gather customer feedback.
This would generate more interest in your blog, because what most people like are those who are interested in hearing their opinion.
Facebook because of its massive membership base and reach, has also quickly become one of the key avenues for new media advertising.
You can efficiently accomplish this through its paid advertising program, that would feature your business across a broad range of people in your targeted demographic.
Utilizing Twitter
Twitter is short sweet and precise. The primary advantage of using Twitter to increase your web traffic, is that it is widespread and concise, as it has a strict character limit. It caters to the atrophied attention span of those in a hurry.
Twitter allows your business to interact with others, in short and witty bite-sized texts, allowing them to keep up with the latest trends and concerns about your industry or niche, this in a prompt way.
The first thing that you’ll need to do, is get a Twitter handle and get involved with relevant discussions across the twitterverse.
When you find an open conversation where you could supply pertinent information, take the time to post your input along with links back to your blog, or any other content that adds value to the discussion.
Utilizing YouTube
Another highly valuable option for boosting web traffic, is by posting videos on YouTube. In fact, the site has become extremely relevant when it comes to SEO recently.
YouTube can be an incredibly valuable tool for your business. It will however require producing videos that are exceptional and worth sharing.
To start working with YouTube, you’ll need to create a profile so that you can begin posting videos on the site.
Making The Most Of YouTube
YouTube is great for social media campaigns, and driving more traffic to your blog.
To get the most out of your efforts, you have to make your videos appealing while standing out from the crowd.
More importantly, you have to make your promotional channel intriguing. This will help to bring in more subscribers, and an increase of visits to your blog.
Websites Guest Blogs And Forum Posting
Although these methods might be more time consuming to boost your blog traffic, this when compared to the other social mediums, they are however more relevant.
Unlike social media, the links that you post in the comment sections of other blogs and forums, usually lasts longer and are more focused.
The idea here is not to go overboard with links back to your blog, anywhere and everywhere that you can.
So find relevant discussions about your niche, on other competing blogs and conversation sites, such as Quora and Reddit, that people will often visit to solve their problems or to get informed.
Making Your Comments
The most important thing to remember, is you only want to post just a few links back to your own blog, on each site.
If you go overboard with commenting, the site administrators may remove the backlinks to your page, or remove your comments altogether.
You also want to make sure that the comments that you make are meaningful, and adds value to the topic that’s being discussed.
Otherwise, you’ll come off as nothing more than a spammer, effectively ruining your chances of increasing traffic to your blog.
Once you do make an insightful comment, is when you link back to your blog, which adds value to your point or broadens the scope of the topic that’s being discussed.
Advantage: Start Your Own WordPress Blog Today
Without emphasizing it too much, there are a variety of methods on how you can get traffic to your WordPress blog, and make money as an Affiliate Marketer.
If done right and you have the patience, you shouldn’t need to use email marketing campaigns or paid advertising to get targeted traffic to your site.
What the most established authority blogs will do however, is have a squeeze page with an opt-in form to collect email addresses, to keep their audience updated on the latest developments in their business or blog.
The popularity of your blog should continue to grow without difficulty, once you find the best methods to promote, such as developing proficiency in SEO and Social Media.
The Internet is a massive infinite platform, and there are more than enough visitors and buyers to go around, provided that you focus in the right areas.
Realize that when you first begin attempting to get traffic to your blog, that the results might not always initially be there, so the key becomes to not get discouraged, and never give up.
Then eventually, you will hit pay dirt because of your persistence, and the traffic and the income will begin to flow to you one way or another.
