Affiliate Marketing Domination

Posts Tagged ‘marketing blogs’

Start Affiliate Marketing – Choosing Topics To Blog About On Your Affiliate Marketing Blogs

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Affiliate marketing blogs are amongst the most powerful tools in your affiliate toolbox, but it’s important to be sure you’re achieving the greatest possible benefit from the efforts you put in authoring these or any blogs. So to start with, you need to always keep in mind the main reasons for using a blog as one of your affiliate marketing strategies.

The foremost reason, of course, is to drive sales by attracting and forwarding targeted prospects to the merchants’ sites via your affiliate links. But in with that are other purposes that help you achieve that goal at the same time. For example, arriving at a blog that’s full of helpful information gives the visitor the impression that the author is an expert in their topic, and thereby someone whose suggestions are liable to be helpful. And since search engines index pages, not sites, each additional post to your blog is one more potential signpost to lead targeted prospects to your blog in the first place.

So how do you determine which blog topics to write about – which topics will help you stand out as an expert in your field, bring in more targeted readers, and help build your affiliate marketing commissions to higher and higher levels as time goes on? You need to find the answers to people’s most common questions in your niche and write posts that either answer those questions or lead them to products and services that answer those questions – via your affiliate links, of course!

But before you can write those helpful answers, you need to know what the questions are. There are any number of ways to find them, from simple steps like visiting Yahoo Answers and niche-specific forums to more advanced techniques like searching for your niche keywords in Twitter streams. And don’t limit your research to online sources – in any profitable niche or sub-niche there are also books and magazines on the topic, so browse through a few of the most popular publications to see what topics they’re using to attract a targeted audience.

And, of course, your initial keyword research when you first decided this was a popular niche will provide plenty of topics as well – after all, each popular keyword represents thousands of searches a month, and those prospects are searching for information. Look at your initial list of keywords and pick the ten best to target first. Start by writing 5 different headlines that use & target that particular keyword, then write a post for each headline and post it to your affiliate marketing blogs.

It may take you a bit of practice to be able to come up with 5 different ways to approach each keyword, but it’s well worthwhile since you already know those phrases are being searched for regularly and every post you write is one more potential search engine results page listing that can bring people into your funnel. Plus, that targeted visitor will find the post they landed on and 4 more on the same topic of interest to them, and then other posts on related topics as well.

You’ve answered their questions or at least shed light on the issue for them and they now recognize you as an expert in your niche. So your credibility is already established when they read a product review post or a pre-sell page you’ve written, either of which can now lead them to the merchants’ sites through your affiliate links.

There will always be more questions people have, more keywords showing up in your research, and more ways to approach each keyword or keyword phrase you’re targeting on your affiliate marketing blogs. Combine this powerful list of topics with your ever-increasing ability to come up with creative ways to incorporate those terms and ideas into new blog posts, and your affiliate marketing blogs can keep on growing year after year successfully!

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Affiliate marketing mentor Doug Champigny is a featured speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America, and the author of several e-books, websites and blogs. For more advice on building your affiliate marketing business, continue reading at his Affiliate Marketing Domination Blog for basic information, or his Captain Affiliate affiliate marketing training blog for more advanced tips and techniques.

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Affiliate Marketing 101 – Plugins For Your Affiliate Marketing Blog

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://Affiliate-Marketing-Domination.com.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

As you’re setting up your blog, certain plugins should be added to make your affiliate marketing web site as powerful as possible. Since you only really have full control of your blog plugins on self-hosted blogs, when you start affiliate marketing you want to set up your own WordPress blog on your own hosting account.

Assuming you’ve installed your new blog, it’s time to decide which plugins you’ll want to include to help automate some of your affiliate marketing tasks. No doubt you’d like to start earning affiliate commissions as quickly as possible, so the more you can automate your systems without needing to become too technical the better!

The success of your affiliate marketing blog is dependent on targeted traffic, so the most important plugins are all going to be used to aid in that cause. First, you’ll want to make sure the search engines are aware of every posting you make, so one of the various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins is the first to install. These usually control your title, keyword and description tags and sometimes the URL chosen for each post, so be sure to pick one and install it before you make even your first post to your affiliate blog.

Once your audience and the search engines find your affiliate marketing web site, you’ll want them all to be able to find everything you have for them there. For that, use 1 or 2 plugins designed to create sitemaps. The search engines will want to follow an RSS feed while the visitors will want a simple linking structure, so be sure whichever plugins you use create both an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap. You don’t need to know the differences or the technical aspects – just be sure your affiliate marketing blogs are sporting both.

You can also get both direct traffic and search engine friendly backlinks to each post using plugins. Use one to notify your Twitter followers each time you post, and be sure your visitors see buttons they can use to let their followers know about your post through Web 2.0 sites like Twitter, Google Buzz and FaceBook at the very minimum. Numerous variations exist of plugins that will link to your affiliate marketing web site from the social bookmarking sites as well, so take time to explore a few and choose the one that’s best for your particular strategies.

Those are the basic plugins you’ll want installed for your affiliate marketing blogs, and with the advances in today’s WordPress system they all install with push-button simplicity – if you’re not familiar with how to install them either check the help files at WordPress.org or search for how-to help at directories like Google or YouTube.

As you become more experienced as an affiliate blogger, you’ll want to install plugins for your audio and video files too, to help attract targeted traffic from the podcasting and vlogging worlds as well – these are huge additional lead sources you may be able to tap into using your affiliate marketing blogs as you advance.

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Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new online marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Internet Marketing coaching program and the PowerStart Affiliate Marketing coaching program, and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well.

Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon! In the meantime, for more help getting started as an affiliate, see the Affiliate Marketing 101 lens on Squidoo and the Start Affiliate Marketing info at WetPaint.

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Affiliate Marketing 101 – Search Engine Optimization Tips For Affiliate Marketing Web Sites

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://affiliate-marketing-domination.com.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

These days, the most intelligent way to build your affiliate marketing web site is with a self-hosted WordPress blog, since much of your design and ongoing maintenance are automated on affiliate marketing blogs. But just as with static web sites, it’s vitally important that you properly manage the search engine optimization (SEO) on your affiliate marketing web site.

First, pay particular attention to the title of each post you make, being sure your target keywords or keyword phrase are prominent in the title itself. This is especially true for affiliate marketing blogs, since the title of the post is usually also used as the URL for that page and you’ll want the search engines finding those keywords both in the title and the URL to give you the best possible shot at high search engine rankings. Remember that Google, Yahoo, Bing and the smaller engines rate pages, not sites, so it’s important that every page be optimized for the keywords that particular page is targeting.

Next, using appropriate plugins be sure you’ve chosen the right tags and description for the page. Again these can affect your affiliate marketing blog’s position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Further, many engines display your description of the page, so you want it to be enticing to your target market in the hopes of having your prospects click through and visit your blog.

Understand and utilize the current SEO practices when writing your content – most search engines provide plenty of information on how they rank the pages they index. And while it’s important to use your keywords or keyword phrases in your copy for each post, never lose site of the fact that you’re writing your posts for your prospects, not the search engines.

When you’ve gone to the effort to bring targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing web site you want them to be pleasantly surprised at the amount of quality content, ease of navigation and the gentle flow of ideas that leads them merrily along their way to buying the products at the other end of your affiliate links. Your affiliate marketing pay will be negligible or non-existent if you’ve written your posts strictly to rank well in the SERPs and your target audience find it difficult to read or follow.

Finally, make sure you’ve also included your page’s target keywords in the alt tags of any images that accompany the text, in the links to that page from other pages on the blog, and in any description or summary you offer of the page for your index and/or RSS feeds. Get in the habit of doing at least this much SEO for each and every post or page on your affiliate marketing blogs.

Trying to remember and incorporate all of this while still keeping your pages strong for your targeted viewers may seem like quite a trick at first, but with regular practice it can become second nature and can result in a powerful and profitable affiliate marketing web site for you as it builds over time.

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Affiliate marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970′s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new online marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program, and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well.

Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon! In the meantime, for more help getting started as an affiliate, see the Affiliate Marketing 101 lens on Squidoo and the Start Affiliate Marketing info at WetPaint.

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