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affiliate marketing tips
Setting Up Your Own Affiliate Marketing Blog
Setting Up Your Own Affiliate Marketing Blog
When you decide to embark on an affiliate marketing career, an affiliate marketing blog is a must have strategy. It can seem a little overwhelming to set one up if you’re not technologically advanced but setting up a blog is actually pretty simple with a few easy steps and should be an integral part of your affiliate marketing plan
First, you’ll need to register a domain (use Namecheap). This is your website address – also known as your URL. Make sure you choose carefully when you choose your domain and see that it reflects the topic of the niche. You’ll have to pay a small fee each year to keep your domain name.
Second, you’ll need to set up hosting. A2 Hosting is one of the most economical and popular options for hosting and gives you great technical support. You’ll pay a monthly fee for hosting – unless you want to pay up front for a discount.
Once you have a domain and hosting, it’s time to set up your blog. The easiest way to do this is to use Fantastico. This is a program built into A2 Hosting that installs your blog on the website. It’s very user friendly and doesn’t require you to have a technical background.
You’ll need to choose a theme for your blog. There are many options – from very simple freebies to very detailed, paid custom designs. When you’re starting out, it’s best to choose a simple theme. Once you’re more comfortable with blogging, you may decide to install something more advanced.
WordPress offers free themes you can install onto your site. These are easy to use, and you’ll find that you can be up and running with your blog in a matter of minutes. After using Fantastico to install your blog theme, you’ll need to set up the blog settings.
It’s important to make sure your blog is set up to be searched by search engines. Under Settings, you’ll want to give your site a title and a tagline, which tells people what the site is about. You’ll also want to assign an email address and set up your date and time zone. Then you’ll need to decide how you want comments and posts to be displayed on your blog.
Finally, you’ll want to personalize your blog. You’ll select a header that reflects your niche. You’ll also want to create an about page so that people can understand who the author is. This is known as an About page. Make sure you share a photo so that readers can connect more personally with you. Create a disclaimer page that helps you abide by any legal rules or terms of service.
As you write posts, you’ll want to make sure that you’re personal and friendly and work to develop relationships with your readers. This is the best way to build a community of devoted readers who will trust your advice.
Setting up your own affiliate marketing blog is actually quite simple. As you go through the process, it will get easier. The more you work with your blog, the more you’ll understand about how it operates and how you can use your blog to promote products in your niche.
So, now you have your blog up and running, let’s have a look at the optimal way to do a product review, an integral part of your affiliate marketing strategy.
The Best Way To Review Info Products Online
While reviewing digital products isn’t completely different from tangible products, there are some differences in the best way to review info products online. First, you’ll want to purchase the product yourself and then begin to implement it.
You can’t really review an info product unless you’ve tried it yourself. But as you implement, you’ll want to document the entire process from beginning to end. Begin with the buying process. What did the sales page look like? What was the cost? How did the message affect you?
Then move on to the process of buying and downloading and explain how that went – including One Time Offers, Upsells and Downsells. In addition, look for customer service information and test it out. Even email the author of the product to see what kind of response time you receive. Write about all of these tasks as part of your review.
As you document the process you’ll want to share both your excitement about new ideas or strategies as well as any frustrations or disappointments you have with the product. You’ll want to share your feelings about the product as honestly as possible.
At the same time, you’ll want to avoid giving so much detail that your reader doesn’t need to buy the product. For one thing, it’s plagiarism to share someone else’s system once you’ve bought it. For another, consider the fact that you’re working as an affiliate marketer, and you want to encourage sales of the product.
Your review of an info product can take several days or even weeks depending on the product. You’ll want to write as you use the course so that you don’t have to back and remember what you were doing and how it was going.
As you implement the product, you should be open about what’s going well and what isn’t going smoothly. You should also make sure that you discuss any results you’re having. For example, if you purchased a course on list building, have you been able to actually increase the number of people on your list?
The cardinal rule for an info product is that you always have to be honest with your review. When you’re honest, your readers will be able to trust what you say. Then when you make positive reviews and recommendations you’ll have better sales.
If you’re dishonest and gloss over problems, your readers may discontinue their trust in your recommendations, and you’ll see a decline in your sales as well. The best way to review info products online is to share your experience openly and honestly – warts and all.
Now we’ve looked at the best way to do a review, let’s take a look at what you should avoid when doing any type of affiliate product review.
The Best Way To Ruin An Affiliate Product Review
As an affiliate marketer, it’s important to make sure that you don’t get in your own way and ruin an affiliate product review. First and foremost, you want to deliver a review that people can trust. That means you must be honest about what you’re promoting.
So the first rule of thumb is to make sure that you don’t lie in any of your reviews. If you say something is wonderful, but it turns out not to be, you’ll lose the trust of your readers. You can only make money with affiliate reviews if people trust what you have to say about the products.
That means that you’ll point out some things you like and point out criticisms as well. It could also mean that you just tell your readers there’s a bad product on the market. It’s better to miss out on possible commissions from that one product than to mislead people into wasting money.
As soon as you decide to lie and say that a product is perfect, you destroy your credibility. If you truly do love a product yet still find flaws, you can be honest about it. Just don’t try to pass off a product as perfect when you’re clear that it isn’t.
It’s also important to choose quality products to promote. You may think something is going to be great, but after you purchase it and take a look, you realize it doesn’t deliver quality. In that case, consider it a small loss of your time and money and move on to something better.
Don’t try to promote products that you know don’t deliver. When you recommend junk products to your readers, you won’t be trusted. You’ll diminish your reputation, and you’ll have trouble bringing in income from your reviews.
Instead, make sure that you’re always honest. Discuss the positive things about the product as well as the drawbacks. Promote products that are high quality and will deliver valuable information and tools to your readers.
With affiliate marketing, it’s important to build relationships and trust. When you have trust and recommend a product, people will be more likely to make purchases. But if you recommend shady products, your readers will not only hang on to their money, but they may even quit reading your recommendations.
The best way to ruin an affiliate product review is to be dishonest and promote bad products. But if you avoid these behaviors, you can build a following that will help you to bring in steady income.
Anyone can make a career out of affiliate marketing but not everyone who attempts to succeeds. You should be ready to work hard and choose those programs that are genuine and that will provide you with an opportunity to grow and use your blog to promote great products and keep your reviews honest.
I hope these affiliate marketing tips have helped, and if you want to know more about affiliate marketing check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
7 Steps To Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing
7 Steps To Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing
To succeed in affiliate marketing, you’ll need all the gears in your affiliate marketing ‘machine’ to be perfectly aligned so that the machine runs smoothly and generates sales like clockwork.
In order to reach this stage, there are a few factors that you must be aware of and make sure that they’re all optimized so that your marketing efforts yield the best results.
Getting them wrong can end in frustration and a loss of time, energy and money, so you need an effective affiliate marketing strategy.
Let’s look at an effective 7 step affiliate marketing plan to get you started in the right direction.
Formulate A Plan
If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. Before even getting started on the content creation or buying a domain, you’ll need to assess if your niche is worth targeting.
Is it overly competitive? Are there enough products to promote? Will you be targeting long tail keywords?
You need to know your plan of attack and exactly what you’re going to do. That is your first step.
Research And Reach
The second step is research and reach. You must do a lot of research before diving into the niche. It’s fine to even spend a week or two doing thorough research.
You’ll get a feel for the niche and know just how far your reach will be. Better to be well-prepared than to get started and be unprepared.
If the niche you are in has a very small audience, your earning capacity will be limited. While you can still give it a try, it’s inevitable that you reach an income ceiling that you can’t seem to break through. So, be aware of this.
Traffic
Traffic is of paramount importance. The more targeted traffic you have, the more sales you’ll make.
So, you need to know where you’ll be driving traffic from and what you’re going to do.
Focus a huge chunk of your efforts on getting the right traffic to your web properties.
Content Creation And Marketing
No matter what affiliate product you’re promoting, there will be some type of content creation involved.
You could be writing blog posts or creating infographics or just pinning images on Pinterest – whatever the case, it is content creation and marketing.
People come online looking for information. They’re looking for content. The better and more engaging it is, the more visitors you’ll attract and retain.
Your goal should always be to help the visitor out. Avoid appearing like a rapacious marketer who only hard sells and hypes products up. It’ll just turn off most people and cost you sales.
Promoting
When you’re online, you must promote your content. Actively post your images in image sharing sites, share your videos in as many places as you can, get in front of as many crowds as you can, etc.
There are people on Pinterest who love gardening. There are also people in Facebook groups who love gardening. Let’s not forget all those people who subscribe to gardening channels on YouTube… because they love gardening.
Guess what? Most of them are not on all 3 sites. The audiences will be different. So, by promoting your content on different platforms, you’ll reach more people.
Analyzing
Analyze your traffic stats, clicks, sales, conversions, etc. Even if numbers scare you, after a while you’ll get a hang of things.
Once you understand the numbers, you’ll know how to scale your efforts and improve upon the winning strategies while ditching the poorer performing ones.
Knowing your numbers is a crucial skill to learn for any successful entrepreneur or affiliate marketer.
Rinsing And Repeating
Last but not least, find out what’s working and keep repeating your efforts. Rinse, lather and repeat.
Consistency is everything and your repeated efforts multiplied over time will result in avalanches of sales.
Follow the 7 steps above and you’ll be an affiliate marketer par excellence.
Now you have a plan, let’s look at some of the folks you will need to deal with in the world of affiliate marketing.
Who Are The 3 Types Of People Involved In Affiliate Marketing?
In your affiliate marketing journey, it’s very important to know that you’ll encounter 3 different groups of people. Knowing who they are is very important because you need to know how to deal with them.
Each group is different and poses its own type of challenges. By understanding how the different people in the groups behave, you’ll be better prepared to handle them and be in their good books.
Let’s look at the groups now.
The Publishers
The ‘publishers’ refer to affiliates just like you. These are the people who create niche sites or run YouTube channels or Facebook groups. Even the affiliates who use paid ads can be considered as publishers.
The goal of most publishers is to put out relevant content or ads that attract people who will click on their links and buy their affiliate products. The publishers are your ‘competition’ and you must watch them closely.
If you have a niche site on fishing tips, where you promote fishing-related products, the other sites that show up on the first page of the search results are your competition. They could be affiliates or actual brand name companies selling their products.
You’ll notice that there can be an overlap here because affiliates can sell their own products too. Let’s look at the next group to get a better picture.
The Advertisers
The ‘advertisers’ refer to the companies who create the products you promote. They recruit affiliates to do the selling and they also advertise on their own to boost their sales.
An affiliate who promotes other vendors’ products but also creates his/her own products to sell, now finds himself/herself in the advertisers group. Similarly, the company that’s selling fishing rods and publishes lots of fishing tips and content on it’s official blog is now a publisher too.
So, the groups can overlap. What’s important to know is that while fellow publishers can be your competition, you can also network with them to promote their products if they’re vendors too. So, now your competition has become a mutually beneficial relationship.
At the same time, the vendor whose products you were promoting, might end up ranking for a lot of keywords that you’re targeting, because their marketing is on point. So, the vendor you were trying to support, has now become your competition.
Alas, the tangled webs we weave! Generally, companies try not to compete with their affiliates. But if you notice that the one you’re supporting is posing competition for you, you’ll need to reassess your marketing strategy and see if you wish to still support them.
The Consumers
This group is without a doubt the most important of the three. The consumers are the people who come online looking for information and solutions to their problems. Most of them don’t come looking to spend money or buy stuff.
They want help. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to give them enough information to help them a little and whet their appetite for more information that will help them solve their problems faster and easier.
If you have a website on back pain, the content in your site can talk about the different causes of back pain and natural remedies that could help. However, if they wish to bring much needed relief, you can mention that the special ‘Pain Away Pulse Massager’ has been shown to help many back-pain sufferers.
Now, not only is the visitor better informed about his condition and has a choice of home remedies that he or she can try, but they have been subtly introduced to a product that brings much needed immediate relief.
What do you think they’ll do?
Soak in that Epsom salt home bath which is a home remedy… or get the pulse massager to ease their pain quickly?
Most of them will get the pulse massager. The content you provide is a vehicle that not only helps them become better informed, but also transports them through the invisible journey that they need to traverse to go from reader to buyer.
Understand the different people who are involved in this affiliate marketing circle and you will be much wiser in your marketing efforts.
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊