Blogosphere… it is the place where anybody can use a template or create a website and update it with content that people may consider useful or with information about their daily routine.
A blog is an extremely powerful tool that both website owners and businesses can use regularly. Think of it as a personal diary for anyone to check out.
The blogosphere includes newbies and experts as well as people who believe they’re an expert but still a newbie. It’s an amalgamation of people who make up the community, which has no boundaries to it.
Thus, a blog, which is the quickest and simplest way to promote products and earn an income, can make or break your affiliate program. What are blogs really all they’ve been hyped to be?
Positive Aspects Of A Blog
• You can easily start one.
• It doesn’t cost a lot to get one going.
• You can upload valuable information for your visitors to read.
• You can use the various community tools at your disposal – commenting, virtual conversations, etc.
• You can foster a long-term relationship with readers that will lead to sales.
• You can feature your products on the blog.
• It’s the easiest way for content to be updated so search engines can find it.
As you see, there are a plethora of benefits and blogging can be beneficial, but it must be done correctly in order for you see the return on investment when promoting your affiliate products.
Blogs are many things, and some of its qualities don’t always fit into what an affiliate website is designed for. Of course, before you decide to create a blog, you need to consider what the negative aspects are.
Negative Aspects Of A Blog
The factors that make blogging a good choice to do affiliate promotions are the same factors that, when done incorrectly, can hinder the affiliate’s ultimate goal.
• The blogosphere is crowded, which means it’s already loaded with an array of content. How is your blog going to stand out to get found? You can be the most dedicated and best blogger out there, but it will still take you years to establish a strong following. A blog will not give you immediate traffic.
• The community feature of blogging is wonderful, but it can lead to a free-for-all where comments others make can hurt you. How valuable is the commenting feature to your affiliate marketing program? This will depend a lot on your product offerings.
• If you offer various products, customers could come back to you or ask for an upgrade, which makes staying in touch with them a wonderful thing. However, a one-time-only buy means you don’t have a good return on investment in your blog.
• Updated content is necessary for blogging. You can make a quick post on a daily basis, which both your followers and search engines want. However, the downfall is how often can you regurgitate the same thing about a product in a new way? Are the products going to be noted on the blog? What happens when your topics are all dried up? Your readers and the search engines will be waiting for new material, and you’ll have nothing to give to them.
• You can easily start a blog and maintain it for several months, but if you’re going to make real money, you need to come up with a longterm strategy to make it happen. While a blog can be a long-term project, you must say something new for it to live a long time.
• You also need to worry about featuring multiple products at one time. If you decide to invest your time and efforts into more than two products, you take the focus away from any particular one. This also confuses readers. You don’t provide your readers with a simple answer to their problems.
• You’re also limited in terms of structure for your blog. Unless you’re constructing your own (it can be done but is difficult), chances are you will be using a template. Templates don’t provide a lot of flexibility. You have the basic structure, and adding features and buttons where you want is difficult to do. Also, be mindful that your design and structure will be impacted by the number of postings you make as well as their length.
Should you consider a blog for your affiliate product? That’s really up to you to decide, and it can be a very useful tool for marketing an affiliate product.
Creating Your Affiliate Website and Earning Money From It
The easiest part of your gig will be attaining affiliate links; it’s the hosting part you’ll need to contend with. Where will you host these links so that visitors become buyers? This will take some doing. You must come up with a place that people will find you, where they come looking for help or information and where they’ll go through the buying process.
Difficult to do, but doable.
Before doing a single thing, you must come up with a strategy. Devise a plan that provides you with all the tools you need to sell.
There’s no reason to get too involved about where to attain a website; you can easily find out this information for yourself. Of course, the most popular names are HostGator and GoDaddy, but there are a copious number of hosts and site-building templates available for people to use. A person can use the one their ISP gives them for free or be their own host.
The point you must remember is that anybody has the ability to develop a functional website, which brings in traffic.
The focus, however, should be more on the website’s structure.
For example, if you’re promoting multiple products, and want to make money like the experts, you need to provide each product with its own site. That means dedicating your time between two or more sites. The sites don’t need to be big – a few pages in all (10 to 20 pages), depending on how many products you’re selling.
However, you must include all the elements search engines are looking for. Do this, and this can lead to visitors and targeted traffic that may or may not convert to buyers.
As you establish yourself, you’ll want to design a centralized website that directs visitors to the smaller websites that focus on a particular product. This website is used to clean up the non-targeted traffic due to the keywords used. These people are not always in “buy now” mode. Many times, they are in the “looking around now, buy later” mode.
While this is important, it can be addressed later. Your main focus should be building the individual sites and making money.
At the beginning of it all, your strategy will come to something similar:
• Target keywords, market and audience
• Pick certain affiliate products to promote
• Create a website around those particular groups of products
• Develop individualized websites for each product
• Design a master website that will target traffic and links them to the individualized products
Need some help visualizing this all? Here’s a good example of this plan:
You’re selling products related to fitness such as bodybuilding supplements, workout routines, workout equipment, etc. People who want muscle-building supplements don’t care about the workout routines or equipment. Even if you put up ads, you don’t come across as an authority on the subject.
Thus, you break them down into groups and market several of them together with their own website. Rather than one catch-all for the fitness-related material, you have a dedicated website for your visitors to check out and purchase from you. So, you have the following setup:
• 10 to 20-page website on bodybuilding supplements
• 10 to 20-page website for workout equipment
The sites provide your buyers what they’re looking for, not what they don’t need. Once these sites have taken off, you can create a main store that includes categories that direct back to the dedicated sites.
It’s a structure set up that expert affiliates use to make their money
