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How to Use Affiliate Marketing in an Effective Way - DailyBlogTips

How to Use Affiliate Marketing in an Effective Way - DailyBlogTips


How to Use Affiliate Marketing in an Effective Way

Posted: 22 Jan 2016 12:01 PM PST

Affiliate marketing is a channel that poses low risks and high rewards for both merchants and marketers.

When done right, affiliate marketing, also known as outsourced marketing, provides merchants a host of benefits: low-cost advertising, fixed commission-based fees, and brand visibility.

For affiliate marketers, affiliate marketing means the freedom to choose the products to advertise, when and where to work, and a passive income source.

Best practices for affiliate marketers

Affiliate marketers face a substantial amount of competition today.

There are, however, a number of things you can do to effectively use affiliate marketing and paint the products and services of the businesses you promote in the right light.

Maintain a great first impression

First impressions are as important when someone visits your site as when you meet someone in person.

When a visitor comes to your site, how is their experience?

Look at your site from the eyes of a new site user:

-How long does it take for your page to load?

-Ensure your site is easy to understand and users navigate to the different areas of the site just as easily.

-Stay away from overly complex site design. Simpler is generally much better.

This doesn't mean that the site can’t look great. Aesthetics is good, but the usability of the site needs to be the top priority.

Different tools can be used to test and improve website usability:

Five Second Test
ClickHeat
GTmetrix

Create great, descriptive content

The old saying “content is king” has never been truer. High-quality content is essential for affiliates who want to increase their, among other things, SEO page ranking.

To achieve this:

-Your content must be reader-friendly. Keywords are fine, but if you stuff too many or inject awkward phrases here and there, your content becomes a liability instead of an asset.

-The content must be engaging and informative. Create descriptive narratives of the products and services you offer so readers understand what they're getting.

-Exude honesty in every post, or readers will lose confidence in your site.

In addition to written content, consider branching out into video. Videos have a number of benefits, but foremost of them is:

Sites with video keep visitors around longer than sites that only have text.

Create video content that:

-Introduces a product or service
-Reviews a product or service in detail
-Shows how a product works
-Compares one product or service to another

With videos, you have just as many options as with written content.

However:

Creating video content is more time and labor-intensive than written content. You may not have time for daily videos, but having several videos can boost the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing.

For the best possible results, remember to only create quality videos. Once done, post the videos on your site, social media, video sharing sites, and other places for better visibility and a wider reach.

Use analytics

How are visitors engaging with your site?

Analytics tools allow you to easily track what visitors are doing on your website:

-Determine which types of content resonate the most with them
-Understand whether banners work better than in-text links
-Track sales

All in all, analytics software provides actionable insights into how to improve your site and make it even more effective.

Some of the top analytics tools available include:

Google Analytics
Clicky
Mint
Kissmetrics
ClickTale

Only work with products you trust

Many affiliate marketers choose the products and services they promote by looking at the bottom line. It’s hard to blame them since they're running a business and want to make money.

This leads to marketers promoting and writing about products they have never used or would not normally choose.

Doing so causes a number of problems, the most notable being:

You can’t create high-quality content based on items you have no experience using or you don't actually like.

Marketers should only choose products they would recommend to a friend or family member.

As an affiliate marketer, keeping your visitors' trust is paramount, as dishonesty has its way of shining through, causing you to lose visitors and your brand reputation in the long run.

Limit the number of products you promote

One cardinal sin many affiliate marketers commit is promoting a host of different products. Not surprising, as many products can equate to increased income.

However:

Bear in mind that you need to stay within your niche so you can keep and grow your audience.

You also don't want too many competing products on your site. This diminishes the trustworthiness of your content. By limiting the number of competing products you promote, you afford each the full attention it deserves.

In general, never have more than two of the same type of product on your page from competing companies.

Create a resource page

Another great tip to make the most out of affiliate marketing is to create a resource page.

This page can include links to sites, services, tools, and products your audience will find useful. Because you'd rather only promote products or services you use yourself, the resource page can contain your affiliate links.

Final word

Affiliate marketing as an income source takes time and effort, but the results are well worth it. Use the tips enumerated above to improve your effectiveness as an affiliate marketer. When properly implemented, they can make a huge difference in how well you do.

About the Author: Red Akrim is the CMO of Cloudswave and is fervent about helping others use the power of Cloudswave.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!


Four of the Best WordPress Plugins to Make Your Job Easier - DailyBlogTips

Four of the Best WordPress Plugins to Make Your Job Easier - DailyBlogTips


Four of the Best WordPress Plugins to Make Your Job Easier

Posted: 21 Jan 2016 08:47 AM PST

So you started your blog. You're plugging away, having a swell time, and so far you've been doing okay.

Way to go, you.

But running a blog is hard work and at some point you're not going to be able to juggle at the balls in the air. You could use some help.

One option is to hire a bunch of people to work for you. The best part about this is that you can make them call you "Boss" or "Your Majesty".

The worst part is, it can get expensive to hire people.

This is where plugins come in handy. The best WordPress plugins out there will make change your life FOREVER!

A plugin is software that can plug in (AHA…see what they did there?) to an existing computer program and do a job that the existing program doesn't already do.

Plugins are awesome tools that can save you massive time and money, and probably more than a few headaches.

Keep in mind, though, that too many cooks in the kitchen will make your blog miserable. AN overabundance of plugins will slow your site down and make the user experience pretty frustrating.

Stick to ten plugins, absolutely maximum, and you'll be good to go.

"But hang on," (you may be thinking), "There are literally hundreds of plugins out there. I know this…I just Googled it. How do I know which ones are worth using?!"

Excellent question, and one I am more than happy to help you with! I've played around with a ton of different WordPress plugins, and I've narrowed my list of must-haves down to four.

These are my four top WordPress plugins and are great at what they do. They will save you time, money, and stress and make your whole job easier.

One helps you out with SEO, one gives you spam protection, one helps you create pop-ups and builds your email list, and one keeps your publishing schedule and social media organized.

And the best part? They're all super affordable. (And by affordable I mean practically, or actually, free. What's. Up.)
Ya ready to hear about them? Great.

Best WordPress Plugins #1: Yoast SEO

Helps with: SEO optimization
Price: Free for the basic version (premium starts at $69/year)

Yoast SEO is one of the most well-known SEO plugins out there, and with good reason (this is my favorite on the list of the best WordPress plugins). It's awesome. Yoast is a great tool for automating all that technical white hat SEO things so you don't have to worry about it. Talk about a load off your plate.

When you download the plugin, it will show up on the existing sidebar of your WordPress navigation page as "SEO".

The free version (which is really all you need right now) comes with some awesome features, like these:

  • Post titles and meta descriptions: This feature lets you set a template for for your titles and meta description on search engines.
  • Ordinarily, you wouldn't have any control over how the title appears in search engines. With Yoast you do, which will help with your click-through rate.
  • Sitemap: Sitemaps are a super important element of good SEO. Sitemaps help search engines index your site. You can enable the sitemap with the swift click of a button, and grab the link in a jiffy. Awesome.
  • There are a ton of other built-in tools in the Yoast plugin, which you can read about on the plugin page.

Best WordPress Plugins #2: Akismet

Helps with: Spam protection
Price: Name your own price (which can be free)

Nobody, least of all you, has time for stupid spammy comments on your posts. No, thank you. Akismet is the ultimate in spam protection for your blog. It automatically catches spam and makes it disappear before you even see it.

Awesome.

There are a few different plans to choose from, but my favorite (and the one that will do just fine for your blog) is the basic plan, which allows you to set your own monthly price. You can download it for free, but why not donate a dollar or two to help them out? After the basic plan, the premium plans start at $5, and go up to $50.

Best WordPress Plugins #3: SumoMe

Helps with: Growing your site's traffic
Price: Free (for the basic version)

SumoMe is one of my all time favorite plugins. Mostly because they have really amusing marketing emails. But also because the plugin is awesome.

Once you install the plugin, you can download apps like the List Builder (lets your create a fancy lightbox pop-up to capture email addresses), Scroll Box (an email collection box that pops up whenever you tell it to), Heat Maps (helps you see where people are clicking on your site), and Smart Bar (among plenty others).

Personally, I love the Scroll Box app. It's a polite way to ask for a reader's email address once they've popped around your site for a bit. You can choose at what point on the page you want the box to appear, how often you want it to pop up, and what you want it to say.

The only downside to the free version is that it is plastered with the SumoMe logo. The only way to get rid of that is to upgrade to the Starter version (which is $10/mo, or you can get the Pro version for $100/mo). I don't think it's a deal breaker, but it is something you'll have to deal with if you use the plugin.

Best WordPress Plugins #4: CoSchedule

Helps with: Content marketing and social media
Price: $15/mo

CoSchedule connects your WordPress blog to your social media sites with a freaking cool drag-and-drop editorial calendar that makes scheduling your posts (across all your platforms) a breeze.

CoSchedule allows you to plan ahead and publish your awesome content, consistently. It gets rid of the headache of remembering when to publish, and also remembering to update all your social media platforms.

Never again will you have to spend hours posting the same information to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and your blog.

Literally so annoying.

You can easily move blog posts around and plan/edit your posting schedule. Then it automatically adjusts the rest of your social media to those changes. Freaking legit.

Go Forth and Use These Top WordPress Plugins to Improve Your Blog

So there you go. These plugins are four of the best WordPress plugins out there, and I'm pumped to share them with you! They will absolutely make your life easier and help your blog be the best it can be.

I'd love to hear about what plugins have worked for you, whether or not they are on this list. Really, I want to hear all about your blog in general!

Shoot me at email at john@blogsheriff.com to talk about plugins, or anything else. Can't wait to connect with you.

Best,

John and the BlogSheriff team

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!