A Platform to Test Your Affiliate Marketing Offers

Posted: 23 May 2012 05:23 AM PDT

I am always looking for new websites to use as marketing platforms for my projects and products, and an interesting one I found recently is called UKritic.com.

Think about it as a Squidoo for product reviews. Basically users sign-up and write reviews about the product they have used or bought. Unlike other websites with user-generated content, however, UKritic will give you a piece of the action if people reading your reviews end up purchasing the product.

In other words, they are totally fine to have affiliate marketers aboard.

If you are just getting started with affiliate marketing this might actually be a good place to test things out. That is, you could pick a range of products and niches you want to promote and test things out on their platform.

After that you check what types of reviews and products convert better, and then you decide if you want to spend time and money building a whole website around those or not.

Here’s a video explaining how it works in detail:

Right after you sign-up you’ll be able to start writing your reviews. Before your profile becomes public, though, you need to have at least one review approved by the moderators, which is a positive thing in my opinion, as it helps to keep the level of spam down.

If you visit the site you’ll notice that every review has three big orange buttons pointing to the seller’s website: one on top, on on the sidebar and one at the bottom. Guess what, you can provide your affiliate links when writing the review and those buttons will carry it for you, so you get commissions for buyers going through your Ukritic review. You can also embed affiliate links in the body of the review if you prefer.

Overall I think it’s a nice idea, and I believe the approach to support rather than prohibit affiliate marketing will definitely help this platform to become popular, so check it out here.

Original Post: A Platform to Test Your Affiliate Marketing Offers

How To Keep Your Brand Consistency As A Blogger

Posted: 22 May 2012 07:32 AM PDT

A brand is way more than your logo and slogan. The overall style that defines you as a blogger can tell people to expect this and that from you. People tend to like what they recognize. We give trust to things that all to something familiar. If you make it easy for anybody to perceive who you are and you stick to that persona you'll surely make a good impression in the long haul.

To state it upfront: diversity is undeniably good when you are a blogger. You can settle upon a wide range of topics to write about, you get to revamp the site from time to time and explore new ways to express yourself on the social media. A brand's life is more relaxed in the blogosphere than, for instance, in the B2C world where each product has to create strong recognition in order to sell. We all know that.

However, what I am going to say (in the next 200 words or so) is just this: once you have defined your own style, stray from it no more so that you'll earn readers' trust and build a loyal fan base.

Clean your blog's appearance

When it comes to the design of your website, every detail should make a harmonious statement. Choose an assembly of no more than maybe 2-3 matching fonts (Kernest can help you combine them aesthetically). Decide the class parameters for links and set some unitary rules over when to use bold and italic in the body of the articles.

Images and color palettes used on the site also need to be coherent all together. And the core element, your logo, should be nothing less than wonderful. It's a good idea to hire a designer on this, to be sure the graphics will be distinctive and appealing. If you're on a tight budget, 99designs can be a great alternative.

Create a post trademark

It may be a crossed interview held simultaneously by two bloggers with a single interviewee. Or a face-to-face type of post like Daniel does. Or anything you would find relevant. Find a special formula of post and regularly spice up your blog with it. This is a trait of A-list blogs that you can easily put into practice.

Admit your own biases publicly if they exist

It's pretty hard to keep 100% unbiased – and actually few blogs try to. The essential thing is not to camouflate your partialities behind a fake objective tone, or you will lose credibility. First of all, choose carefully who you advocate and make sure you do believe in that party, so that you can write about it in a convincing manner. After that, go ahead and tell people: "This is me and those are my beliefs; now hear what I have to say".

For instance, if you'd like to advocate Microsoft and hence you love Internet Explorer, make your readers aware of that, so that they won't be intrigued that you refused to review their app just because they're on the Firefox bandwagon. You got my point. Maybe you're not in for Pulitzer award, but anyhow it's good to be honest.

Use whitelabels

Customize and adapt everything that may interfere with your public presence and wipe out parasite messages. For instance, we often use third party services to create and disseminate web forms and surveys, newsletters or press releases. In respect for your own image, all materials that are sent to the public should display your own logo and bare the minimum identification elements of the original service.

I really am tired of those newsletters I occasionally with a prominent Vocus mark on their headline. It takes me some 5 seconds to realize the message is actually from a financial blog I subscribed to, and this thing sucks. Consider spending a few bucks more and maybe buying a license for the sake of having a whitelabel material that you can customize for your own brand.

Design a brand-centered Facebook fan page

Apart from the website itself, Facebook is the second best piece of web real estate for your blog. Customize your fan page to display the distinctive appearance of your blog. The cover photo can be a sample of your site's header or a combination of graphics that resemble it, like Lifehacker has. You can unleash your creativity with the Welcome tab HTML – make it speak clearly about your brand!

Remain a real person

A friend’s advice: don’t let your own personality be assimilated to the blog itself. You are the head of it, but you may lose opportunities of networking and personal development if you incorporate your image totally in your work. Put up a profile for yourself on social networks, apart from your business pages. This way you will add value to your business online presence, by proving there is a real human behind it.

Good luck!

Laura Moisei has a degree in Communication and writes for 123ContactForm.com, an app that helps users create web forms and surveys for any blog and webpage. Laura's daily delights are blogging, photography and good food.

Original Post: How To Keep Your Brand Consistency As A Blogger

“How to SEO Your Blog Post Series” plus 1 more

How to SEO Your Blog Post Series

Posted: 22 May 2012 01:03 PM PDT

This guest post is by Keith Bishop of Online Digital Junkie.

Google’s Panda Update, as well as the recent post from Darren about hosting a guest post series, has prompted me to take a deeper look into the implementation and search benefits associated with putting series on my own sites.

What I found tells me that publishing a series can be a good move if it’s done correctly. So let's look at when a series is a good idea, as well as some of the issues that need to be avoided for the optimal search performance of the series you publish.

When to use a series

A series is best used when you have a lot of material and media that would slow your page load time if you published it all in one article. Long load times can have a negative effect on your search ranking, as well as causing users to hit the Back button before your post ever finishes loading.

You can check page download speeds on sites like Pingdom. My personal goals are to have all of my main landing pages load with 1.5 seconds, and the rest no longer than two seconds.

Another great time to use series is if you find a group of posts on your site that have similar content with overlapping keywords. This scenario causes your own pages to compete with each other and suffer in search rank. Under these circumstances it would be beneficial to rework your content into a series and allow it to build upon itself. The result of this, as I will explain later, will harness all of the combined SEO benefits and push your series up in the SERP.

The last, and probably most applicable, reason to publish series is when you have a lengthy subject that you are covering over an extended period of time. I certainly don't want to read a 10,000 word article on the same subject—or have it delivered to my email. Everyone needs a little variety.

The negative aspects of series

Series have their downsides, as far as usability and search rank go. The worst part is the increased load time that the user experiences while navigating to each article, instead of having it load all at once on a single page. Most of the time, this is a good trade-off—the only exception being a long text article which will likely load quickly as a single post, and won’t benefit from being split into parts.

Another issue arises when the middle or last part of the series ranks better in the search results than the first part, and that becomes the landing page for search users. This is sort of like showing a guest your home by walking them through the garage first, and it’s something you want to avoid. The solution? Optimizing your series navigation.

How to link your series for greatest SEO and usability

Proper linking is accomplished by using the [link] element in the [head] section of the post page. This hints to Google that the page is part of a series, and also indicates the position of the document within the series.

To accomplish page ordering, we use the [rel="prev" and rel="next"] attributes that in the [link] pagination. This will ensure that the first part of your series will almost always be the one to show up in the search results. Note, though, that Google says “almost always” when it discusses this, so there must be occasions where the search engine likes an article deeper in the series for some reason.

Pagination is easy in WordPress, and there are probably some short codes for the other content management systems that will make it easy to implement in those as well.

Let’s imagine that you want to publish all the material in a series at once. All you need to do in WP is to put the entire series of articles into one post, then add [] wherever you want to break the content up into separate pages or parts. You can then modify the look of your pagination links with CSS.

If you want to drip-feed your series to users over an extended period of time—perhaps in weekly installments—use a head injection plugin that will allow you to add the [] information to the series manually as you publish each article.

A good WordPress plugin that takes care of this is HiFi (Head injection / Foot injection).

Hand-coded blogs will need to have this information added manually into the head section. Here is an example of what the code looks like.

<head>

<title>Your Page Title</title>

</head>

Naturally, the first page in the series will not have a [prev] attribute and the last page will not have a [next] attribute. This is how the search bots know where the series starts and ends. Clickable navigation links will also need to be coded at the end of each article in the series.

The most beneficial reason to use the [prev/next] attributes is that the search engines will count the series as one article and funnel all the SEO benefits from the series through to the page that’s shown in the search results.

This means that all of the likes, G+, tweets, and links back from the entire series will count together, instead of competing with one another. I don't know about you, but that gets me excited.

What not to do

You may still find information about this online, but what you do not want to do is link your series using the [rel="canonical"] attribute on your links.

This method will prevent the wrong post (e.g. a later part in a series) from ranking higher than the one you wanted (the first part in the series), but it also tells the search engine that this is duplicate content and it shouldn’t be indexed. The canonical attribute was used in the past under a slightly different set of circumstances, and is no longer applicable to series.

Too bad there isn't some way to certify our content so that we could get the SEO benefits from our content when it gets scraped or syndicated. That would be awesome, but it is likely a dream for another day…

Keith currently writes for Beauty & Bandaids and is currently obsessed with his new outdoor adventure watch. Watch obsession to new blog is OCD at its finest.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to SEO Your Blog Post Series

The “On Fire” Blogging Success Formula [Case Study]

Posted: 22 May 2012 07:03 AM PDT

This guest post is by Stephen Guise of Deep Existence.

It was July, 2011. My personal development blog, Deep Existence, was flying high. Every new post I published would get at least 20-30 comments and a good number of social shares. Not world-class blogger numbers, but pretty good for a young blog (five months) and with solid forward momentum.

Later that month, a spider bit me, and a chain of health problems ensued. I also got a full-time job. Between the two distractions, Deep Existence wound up being mostly ignored for the next seven months.

When I was ready to jump back in, I figured I just needed to post consistently again to reignite the community.

Wrong. So wrong.

No matter how fantastic I thought a post was or how many hours I spent researching and crafting it, the response to my blog was tepid at best—not even close to the “good old days.”

Even when I revamped the site to be more attractive (including a pricey new logo), and initiated a consistent one-post-per-week schedule, it didn’t matter. Finally, I understood why.

Quality can’t fend for itself

If anyone tells you that great content attracts readers, they’re fibbing. There is false information out there that says if your content is good enough, people will come.

I will dispel that myth with a simple, hypothetical example. Let’s compare ProBlogger to Papa Joe’s blog.

ProBlogger: Thousands of people are visiting, sharing articles, and commenting every day.
Papa Joe’s blog: A few dozen people per day find his articles, and notice that they are not commented on or shared.

Now imagine if exactly the same, high quality article was posted on these two sites. The ProBlogger article would go viral. Papa Joe’s article might be tweeted once (by him).

And what if the next 300 articles were duplicated in the same way on both blogs over the next year? The results would stay mostly the same. Papa Joe would be ignored as ProBlogger soared.

The difference is that ProBlogger is sensitive to quality (a good thing) because this blog has high exposure and a favorable perception. But Papa Joe’s article quality doesn’t matter much. Visitors don’t know who Papa Joe is and he sure doesn’t seem popular, so his content will get an unfair docking. And yet, his articles are amazing. Poor Papa.

The blogging success formula

My blog fell from success to failure, and then I failed to return it to success. Through this process, I discovered the false belief that continues to circle in the blogosphere today: that quality content is good enough.

Even if you have a decent number of readers, it’s not enough.

There’s a reason this article isn’t on my blog. I am Papa Joe right now. The quality of my content has remained high, but people forgot I existed when I took a lengthy leave of absence. This is fascinating, considering that by then I had more subscribers and traffic than ever before.

In hindsight, I noticed something interesting about how my blog became popular the first time. The response to my articles was directly related to my activity outside my blog. And as I gained greater exposure, the perception of Deep Existence changed for the better, and people began to give my content a fair chance (and they liked it).

The perception shift was critical, but it grew rather methodically with my consistent exposure—just like a fire as it’s just getting started. But before too long, the flames were building upon themselves. So even when I stopped seeking exposure, the fire was strong enough to be sustained by quality articles.

But a fire without fuel dies, as did mine.

I stopped writing, and the fire faded lower and lower until Deep Existence was just a firepit of cold ashes. Months later, I began to add firewood—quality content—to the cold ash pit, but there was no flame to consume it. I needed a spark.

So here I am, striking the flint once again. Does anyone have a lighter?

Use sparks of blog exposure to…
Ignite the flames of improved perception.
Build firewood made of quality content to keep your blog on fire!

Has this formula of blogging success matched your experience?

Stephen Guise exists in real life and on twitter. He is now a doubleblogger™ at Deep Existence – Personal Development’s Deep End and Irrational Humor – Moderately Good Website. Stephen speaks in 3rd person fluently.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The “On Fire” Blogging Success Formula [Case Study]

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