Affiliate marketing

It there is somebody on this planet who still doesn’t know what affiliate marketing is, here is a short explanation: you get payed every time somebody buys a product or a service following your recommendation. You basically act like and online salesman; therefore, if you plan to become an affiliate marketeer, you should take a step back for a minute, forget all about websites, blogs, seo and other internet related stuff and do a little research on “classic” selling techniques. See what’s involved, what are the steps from approaching a potential customer to closing a deal, and after that, see how you can adapt all that knowledge to affiliate marketing. If you don’t have the time or resources to do it, visit the “Money Online” blog, because this is what I will be covering in my next series of posts.

The first sales model that I am going to blog about is A.I.D.A. It stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (also known as “Hierarchy of Effects“), and it’s probably one of the oldest around (it appeared in the late ’50s) but it is even more relevant today than it was back than.

Let’s see how it can be applied to blogging:

Attention
Placement of affiliate links
This is the first thing that you need to have in mind. Don’t think for a minute that placing your affiliate links in your side bar is enough to get attention and expect conversions. Imagine a product left on a back shelf of a store, while all the others are well placed in front on of the window; how many people will actually see that product?
You have to bring it under the spotlight from time to time and blog about it. Make separate categories for all the posts on products that you promote, don’t let them uncategorized or placed in others that are more or less related. This way people will understand that those are as “important” as your regular posts and get their attention.

Landing page
When you blog about it, don’t do it only with your loyal readers in mind. That post will serve as a landing page for visitors that have searched for terms related to that specific product or service, and they may never had heard about your blog before. Your frequent visitors will probably read it, but you have less than 10 seconds to get the attention of the new ones. However, do it in a professional way, not the usual all caps, large red fonts, and highlighted testimonials; everybody has had enough of that. Try to come up with an intriguing title (like you normally would for a regular article), but don’t reveal the product name… in fact don’t even say nothing about the product itself. A good approach would be: “Are you tired of -problem that your product will solve-……?”. Ok, I know that it is not the best example, but you got the idea, so be creative!

Interest
Type of products you promote
Your effort of getting people’s attention are useless, if what you are trying to sell doesn’t interest them. Unlike the previous stage, you should do this step focusing mainly on your loyal visitors, and promote products that you think are useful to them. You must resist the temptation of promoting products that are totally unrelated (regardless of how profitable they may seem) due to 2 main reasons:
1) It will annoy your loyal audience
2)There is little to no chance of ranking high in search engines for terms that are not related in any way to your blog.
However, you could chose some products that are not directly related to your niche, but still could be useful for people that come to read your blog. For example, if your blog is focused on “digital painting techniques” you may have success by promoting graphic cards.

Language
When you write the “promoting” article, think about who’s reading it. Depending on the profile of your audience, you may go for academic/familiar, formal/informal, etc. approaches. I have already covered this issue in “Blogging Language” article.

As a general idea, something is interesting if it’s relevant to the ones you are trying to reach and if it has the potential of bringing them some advantages.

Desire
It is easy to confuse “interest” with “desire” because the 2 concepts are similar. However, keep in mind that “desire” is generated by “interest” and not the other way around. Something may be interesting in the eyes of your readers, but this does not necessarily mean that they will feel the urge to actually own it. It is that “urge” that you should strive to trigger in their mind. Try to understand exactly what are their needs, and explain as detailed as possible how that product or service could help them solve their problems, improve some aspects of their activities etc.

Action
The ultimate goal - determining the reader to purchase whatever you are promoting. Everybody has some degree of natural caution, and your job is to help them overcome it.
First of all, you have to believe yourself in the quality of the product that you are trying to sell.
Second, you have to be prepared to answer every possible question, so you have to know the product inside out. When you answer to questions, do it directly on your blog, where everybody can see it, so you will gain credibility. Bloggers have a huge advantage over “regular” webmasters when doing affiliate marketing because of this, so make sure you capitalize this it also.

Final thoughts
If you look carefully at the order of stages presented above, you realize that this is the normal process that is taking place when you decide to buy anything.
First, it get’s your attention; second, if it’s relevant to what you are interested in, you want to know more about it. If it appears to answer to your particular needs, you begin to desire it. Finally, when you have no further doubts about it, you decide to buy.

So if this is the way you buy something, why not take the same approach when you are trying to sell?

In order to shed some light upon this issue, let’s write down some advantages and disadvantages that both strategies have.

1) Focusing on one blog

PROs
a) Putting all your efforts in one blog, increases your chances of becoming an authority in that specific niche and even bring you personal fame. This will make things easier for you, if later you decide to get involved in other projects.
b) Additional income streams; some programs are available only for blogs that receive a high amount of traffic.
c) Higher pagerank - which will attract more organic traffic, and also raise the value of your link sales.
d) Easier to manage.
e) Depending on your agenda, it may bring you some indirect income.

CONs
a) It may take a lot of effort to become a “big shark in the pond”, especially if the competition is tough.
b) In case of data loss, due to server/hardaware crashes, it would turn out to be a total disaster.
c) Higher risk of becoming a target for hackers (even Darren Rose had his newsletter hacked recently).
d) In case the niche that your blog is focused on loses public interest (this may happen due to various reasons), all your work will go down the drain.
e) If your experience a drop in SERPS (sometimes it happens for apparently no reason) you will lose a lot of organic traffic, which might have a negative impact.

2) Developing multiple blogs

PROs
a) Easier to achieve a pagerank 4 for 10 blogs than a pagerank 6 for one blog.
b) In case of data loss, the damages won’t be as significant as for the first type of strategy.
c) Having multiple income streams from various niches may proof useful if one of them becomes less profitable.

CONs
a) A lot more work put into maintenance and updates will be involved.
b) Higher costs, since you will have to pay for registering more domains, and purchase several hosting packages (unless you plan to go for a free platform like blogger, which is not recommended anyway)
c) Obviously, in every niche that you blog, there will be plenty of others that will rank higher in SERPS, receive more traffic, and ultimately have more credibility and authority than yours.

Having all this written down, it seems like neither of these strategies are flawless. Some of the “CONs and PROs” for each of them are too important not to take into consideration. Although I think that having too many blogs is not a good idea, and the more sites one authors, the more clear it becomes that he is only doing it for the money, I don’t think that keeping all your eggs in one basket would be the way to go. In my opinion, having 2-3 blogs and concentrating all your efforts on those would be a good choice. It ultimately depends on how much time your are willing to dedicate to blogging, and most importantly, on the number of topics that you are really good at.

Last but not least, it depends on your personality; would you prefer to be a big shark or a group of piranhas?

I have to set up my priorities, and since I am posting on this blog only for fun (as you may have noticed, I haven’t added any type of income stream here), the Money Online blog can not be at the top of the list.

I always prefer quality over quantity, therefore I think that posting a single well-thought article per week would be the best choice I could make. I will have to wait and see what kind of impact would this have on the number of my rss subscribers, although I doubt that it would matter too much, since I haven’t been posting on regular basis anyway.

If you want to post a comment or ask a question, feel free to do it, because even if I am not going to write too often, I will keep checking on a daily basis, and answer as quickly as possible.

Regarding the “they like Money Online” batch, I won’t be able to do it weekly anymore, because it would count for half of the posts published in one week and it will not look good, but I will do it every 3-4 weeks or so.

See you soon,
WMA

As I said in the article that I was talking about, it seems like more and more people are tempted to think that “this blogging stuff” must be a really easy thing to do, and they can get rich because of it.

A bad start
Usually this type of “bloggers” chose their niche depending either on how profitable it is in terms of high paying keywords, or on how low the level of competition is in that specific area. If someone dares to make this decision without even analyzing his strengths and weaknesses (remember Swot analysis of a blogger?) it is most likely that he will quit a lot sooner than he would have originally expected.

Here are the most common reasons why people that venture into blogging driven only by the hope of finding a treasure along the way, will eventually fail:

1) They don’t have any kind of expertise in that domain
Without knowing that niche inside-out, they will find themself in a position where either they have nothing to talk about, blog about things that don’t interest anybody, or even worse, say stupid things that make them look like fools in front of their audience (if there will be any). Needless to say that they will not last long, and they will not be making any money.

2) They lack passion
I am not talking only about passion for that specific subject that they have chosen. I am talking about passion for sharing the knowledge with everybody else. One has to feel the “vibe” when he sees the traffic going larger and larger everyday and number of rss subscribers increasing. The motivation must come from there and not from the number of contextual clicked. If money is the first motivational factor, nobody will stick around too long in this “business”.

3) They are not prepared for the hard work
In order to become a successful blogger a lot of sacrifices must be made, especially at the beginning. People must put a lot of time and effort into it, and forget about lots of other social activities. Again, if they do it for the money, they will realize that it’s not worthy.

4) They have unrealistic expectations
When people see John Chow’s monthly income or heard about how much Darren Rose is making, it’s pretty hard not to get the wrong idea. There are actually very few bloggers that got rich because of this (compared to the total number of blogs out there). When these people realize that a job at McDonald’s is payed 6-7 dollars per hour, while it would take months or even years to make that amount of money from a blog, they will quit…

5) They don’t realize soon enough that blogging is not for them
Once the enthusiasm is over, most of them find themselfs starring at the computer not knowing how to start a post and realizing they don’t have the abilities to do it, and that no money will fall from the sky.

But have no fear, several others will come to take their place.

The story

You have to “walk the walk” before you can “talk the talk”
Now how does all that monkey business relate to blogging? Well it seems like there are some bloggers that do nothing but replicate what some famous bloggers say. For example, if an A-list blogger says that a 120 x 90 adsense link unit will give you a low ctr, several others “smaller” bloggers will repeat this “advice” without actually experimenting to see if that could work for them or not. Another category of people would put it like this: “AAAA said …. I did not try it yet, but I will and let you know if it works for me”. Wrong again! If you just repeat what “AAAA” said, and have really nothing more to say about it, nobody wants to hear the same story again. However, if you have something more to add to the initial “story”, or better yet, if you don’t agree to it and bring arguments in favor of your statement, it becomes interesting. Further more, what did not work for them, may actually work for you. You never know unless you try it yourself, or at least giving it a serious thought.

A real example of “monkey blogging”
The first thing that comes in my mind as an eloquent example for what I am trying to say, is the controversy that was generated by the appearance on the market of the PayPerPost service. I remember that when it was launched a few well known bloggers where totally against it. This triggered an army of less popular bloggers that just kept repeating how evil PayPerPost was and how it “poluted” the blogosphere, without even brining their personal thoughts and obviously without actually trying the service themselfs. The funny thing is a lot of them nowadays use it a stream of income. Needless to say that their initial statement was worthless. It’s perfectly understandable that many of the A-list bloggers can’t benefit much from a service like the one mentioned above, but for others it may prove to be a considerable source of revenue (compared to what they are making overall).

The conclusion(s)

1)Filter every information that you read, no matter if it comes from Darren Rose, John Chow or any others. If something doesn’t work for them, it does not necessarily mean that it can’t work for you (especially if you don’t fit in the same category).

2)You don’t have to blindly agree with someone, no matter how famous he is. If you do agree with a certain statement, but don’t have nothing to add to it does not make an interesting post. Unless you have reasons to believe that your audience hasn’t already heard about it, it is better not to mention it again because it does not bring value to your blog. Remember that personal opions and solid arguments are the keys to content driven blogs. Be careful not to fall on the other side and disagree with everybody just for the fun of it.

3)If you have the chance, TRY IT YOURSELF, before talking about it.

Having this said, here is the second batch:

Designers-who-blog - as I have said before, the “looks” of a blog can be an important factor for it’s success. This particular one is not only a very good example of how a blog should look, but also it covers a lot of design-related subjects that (in my opinion) every blogger should be interested in.

SmartWealthyRich - covering a variety of subjects, from making money online to self improvement. Although it’s been “on air” only for 2 months, the number of articles published by Jonathan-C. Phillips (the author) is quite impressive and worth a visit.

Financial Podcast - an old timer that started back in 2004, focused mainly on financial topics (student loans, tax advices, banking etc). There are plenty of useful information here.

The Barrister Blog - if you are interested in law, than you should definitely check out this blog

how to tell if a guy is a jerk - something different than I would normally recommend, but very interesting for women readers (and I know there are some women reading this blog)

I enjoyed reading them and I hope you will enjoy them too.

I’m beginning to ask myself if I should continue with this trend or if I should focus more on subjects like contextual advertising, affiliate programs and others that are more relevant for the “Money Online” topic.
At a first glance, it seems like the second option would obviously be the choice I should go for. However, the articles about quality content, traffic etc., that are more general have received a far more positive feedback and I believe that those specific articles represent the reason for having people subscribing to my rss and converting new visitors to returning ones.

Therefore, I have decided to go with the flow, and write about what people seem to enjoy. Although I don’t like too much the idea of having a “general” blog (and not focused very well on a specific niche) it seems like the right thing to do. I will also write about methods to make money online, scams and other suff strictly related to this subject, but I will keep focusing more on tips and advices on blogging in general. It seems like people are more interested in this.

Basically I will keep doing what I have been doing the last couple of months, so (at least) theoretically speaking I couldn’t go wrong.

If you feel like I am making the wrong decision here, please let me know.

The stats

Furthermore, it appears that the main purpose of a large portion of these blogs is to generate income, especially those hosted on free hosting platforms that let you run adsense ads, like “blogger”. This resulted in lots of poor quality content, filled up with tons of ads that probably don’t generate enough money to buy a hamburger.

The cause
I do believe (and this is strictly my opinion) that one of factors that made blogs appear like mushrooms after the rain, is the widely advertised success of bloggers like Darren Rose (there are many others but I think he is the most representative figure for the “money making blogger” type).

It is a well known fact that since he has started the Problogger project, he has made a lot of effort to help bloggers make money online, by giving straight-forward advices and a lot of valuable information. What some may not have realized before actually starting to blog, is that due to his writing skills he makes things seem a little too easy to achieve, when actually it’s pretty darn hard. Although that particular blog is by far not his biggest earner, the word about it has spreaded like fire; seeing how much money he is making, and the fact that he is also revealing the methods to do it, in some people’s minds it triggered the idea that blogging is some kind of easy “recipe” of getting rich quick.

Nobody can deny that through his work, Darren has been an inspiration to many bloggers that actually made it. The thing is, that those people had the qualities to do it in the first place, and the advices given by people like him only helped them find their way to success. I am not going to talk about what are the qualities that bloggers need to have, since it has been discussed a lot lately and there is not much that I could add at this moment (you can read more about it on Dailly blog tips).

The failure
However, given the numbers provided by technorati regarding the total number of blogs, I can’t help but wonder how many “failures” are there. How many have you seen? Probably not many, simply because they lack exposure, and if you accidently stumble upon one, you don’t spend more that 5 seconds there. It would be interesting to have some statistics regarding the number of inactive blogs, to see how big the cemetery really is. If we substract the A-list, B-list, C-list and even D-list bloggers from the total number, there will still be enough “bloggers” to conquer a small country.

Conclusion
Keep in mind that no matter how easy it may seem, making money (online or offline) is never that simple.
Above all, blogging is about commitment, passion, knowledge, creativity, originality, skills, etc., so if you do it only for the money be prepared for a few weeks (or months - depending on how stubborn you are) of frustration and lack of social life.

I am in such a mood that I am even considering writing an article about “top reasons why you shouldn’t consider blogging if you want to make money online”… In fact, I may even do it, unless somebody else picks up the idea and does it first (should have kept my big mouth shut ).

Surprisingly, the way to fix this problem was simple and I was kicking myself for not doing it from the beginning.

First thing I did, was to keep some sort of a log or personal diary and write down what I had been doing every 60 minutes.
I decided to be very strict about it and wrote down each and every detail (like reading an email, answering a phone call, etc). I kept doing this for 3 days without reviewing it at all. Only after that I thought that it was time to analyze my activities. Believe me, I was very surprised to realize that I could have had a lot of spare time, but I was losing it piece by piece.

The “little” things:
A big share of my time was wasted on small things like watching the news, coffee brakes, cigarette brakes, surfing the net, unnecessary phone calls etc. I know that this may not seem too much but 5 minutes + 5 minutes + 5 minutes… and so on, equaled up to 2 and a half hours a day (besides the 30 mins- 1 hour lunch brake).

Furthermore, these “little things” were always interrupting me from working; from time to time to time… BAM! “You’ve got mail”, I couldn’t help reading it, and since I was there, why not check the stats to see if somebody has posted a comment on a forum where I had been promoting my renderings… and than back to work…. arghhh… where was I?

You need to stay focused on what you are doing and don’t stop until you finish it. Strictly referring to the blogging activity, it can take you an entire day to publish a post if you write a sentence, than stop to check the analytics software, than surf the net a little to see if John Chow has posted something during the last hour… than go back to write another 2-3 sentences, and so on. Just concentrate on finishing the damn article! (and forget about Darren Rose too until you are done with it )

Not setting priorities
This was another important issue that I was facing. I was either starting too many things at once, or starting with a specific activity that seemed more important, but was actually not as urgent as others. The results weren’t good for any of these situations. I wasn’t able to focus very well and not only I was always on the run, but the quality of the works that I was producing wasn’t as high as it could normally get.

Back to blogging again, if you have many ideas for your content, just note them down but don’t try to write more articles at once. It will take more time to finish them this way, and probably you won’t be able to dedicate 100% of your potential into each one.
Also, you need to concentrate on what needs to be done NOW! Finish this first, than start thinking about what you plan to do next, no matter if the second one would be so fantastic that it will hit the Digg frontpage. Probably it’s not the best example, but you get the idea.

Friends and family
Believe it or not your close friends and family members can actually “contribute” in a negative way to your success. No, I am not saying you should isolate yourself from them, but they must understand that what you are doing is actually a job, and you must treat it accordingly. I remember, when I first started working from home, that everybody was asking for small favors; and every phrase started with “Since you are staying at home, could you please…”.
You should learn to manage diplomatically these kind of situations; or in plain English, learn to say “no” politely, and eventually they will understand the importance of what you are doing and stop asking.

Schedule
Someone who tells you that he does not have time to do what they want to do is either a person who does not plan his activities or a person who fails to stick to his plans. Use a schedule and decide when you read your emails, when you are taking brakes, when you write your articles, when you promote your blog, etc.
Don’t waste your time on small things, don’t chat on messanger while you’re writing and don’t let others bother you.

It is nice to be your own boss… but if don’t ACT LIKE A BOSS you will fail!

Happy writing!

Don’t bark at the moon!
When you first decide to start blogging you must struggle to find ways to attract visitors and at the same time provide quality content to make them come back. The best idea would be to have a bunch of posts saved and publish one each day, while you concentrate only on promotion.
Every blog owner knows how difficult it is to make his presence noticed on the blogosphere. But what happens when you run out of pre-made posts?

When is it enough?
If you keep allocating too much time for promotion you will find yourself in a position where either you are not updating often or not producing quality content. If this happens, there is a high chance that you will lose your small group of loyal visitors that you have worked so hard to get. I am NOT saying that you should stop promoting your blog, but you must chose your promotion methods carefully, so they don’t take up too much of your time. I know people that spend around 4 hours a day, only to submit their blog to directories. This particular method may be a little useful at the beginning but you won’t get very far with it. Directories drive an insignificantly amount of traffic, and the link popularity that you gain from it may be useless if you are in a slightly competitive niche.

Your first priority must be to keep your returning visitors happy by providing them with the same quality content that made them return in the first place.
They can increase your popularity in various and natural ways (linking, submitting your articles to social media sites, word of mouth, pigeons, paper planes, etc) a lot more than you alone could. Even if they will not link to you after 2-3 visits, keep doing what you are doing and it will be impossible not hit the jackpot from time to time. Eventually people will not only post comments on your blog but also they will start to spread the word around.

Good things come to those who wait
“Loyal visitors don’t click on my ads!” - Yes, this is true. They are familiar with ad placement and within a period of time they develop a “syndrom” that many people like to call “ad blindness”. The best traffic for this purpose is coming from search engines, but since ranking in SEs is directly related to the number of anchored links, how will you be able to get it? This is why blogging is not for people that want to make money quickly…

It is almost like in the restaurant business: Build the restaurant, advertise a lot to get you started, but always try to improve your quality standards, don’t disappoint your clients, and the word will spread around.