So far in this series about ‘Blogging for Affiliate Profits’, you have learned how to:
- pick a niche, product, keywords and plan your blogging for affiliate profits, and
- create your marketing pre-selling process, how to write compelling reviews, collect contact details, and refer interested visitors to vendors through your affiliate link
Now it is time to work on the one remaining component – getting prospects to visit your pre-selling page and follow through to buying whatever you are promoting as an affiliate marketer.
Because you have chosen to use blogging for affiliate profits as your model, the first step is to set up your blog.
How To Set Up
Your Affiliate Blog
Get a Domain Name and Web Hosting
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Unless you are just starting and have absolutely zero budget available, you should consider buying a domain name and web hosting for your affiliate blog.
Why a domain name?
It is more professional. You can make it keyword-optimized. You can brand your blog using it. It is not very expensive. It gives an impression that you are a serious business, not a dabbler.
Most domain name registrars charge less than $10 for a domain registration for a year. There is some advantage to registering your domain for 2 years or more. Pick a name in one of two ways – theme-centric or product-focused.
If you plan to promote a series of financial products, a themed domain name including related terms in the title may be a better choice. I have TravellingSecrets.com which will be themed around the travel niche.
If you plan to promote only one product or a very small group of related products in your affiliate blogging, having a domain that is more narrowly focused is better e.g. I have IncomeDotComReviews.com on which I plan to write only about John Reese’s offerings with his new Income.com business.
A few services you can use to register a domain name are:
A web hosting account is a slightly more expensive choice and so you should think about it carefully if you’re on a shoe-string. Budget hosting is usually a poor choice, because these sites tend to go down unexpectedly, leaving you worse off from lost traffic.
If you can pay a modest $15 to $25 a month for basic webhosting, there are some excellent services available. Here are a few I have used and like:
Best of all, most come with cPanel access and Fantastico, a commercial script library which automates the installation of web applications to a website. This means with a click of your mouse, you can install as many separate Wordpress blogs as you like, and have a cluster of them for each themed niche affiliate blogging process you wish to set up.
Choose a blogging software or platform
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Many people use Wordpress blogs. That is because this software has many cool plug-ins which make it easier and simpler to track some metrics and study how effective your affiliate marketing is.
If you are not technically skilled enough to install and customize a Wordpress blog, or can’t buy your own web hosting right away, you could start with a hosted solution like a Blogger.com blog which is easier to get up and running.
Customize Your Blog
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This is too diverse a topic to get into in depth. Each person has a different style, taste and choice. Set your blog up the way you think looks best, and which will attract most of your potential audience.
At least, have a stats tracking code like ShortStat or Google Analytics included, so you can measure audience behavior on your blog.
You will also need a ‘lead capture’ process, which in most cases is a simple name and email opt-in form (we’ll discuss this later).
Add Your Affiliate Links
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There are many ways you can present your affiliate link on your blog.
Banners: Many affiliate programs offer banner ads (graphic or text). You can put them at the top of your blog, or along the sidebar, and some visitors will click on them to visit the vendor website.
Buttons and Mini-ads: These are similar to banners, but can be positioned on other places on your blog where readers may catch a glimpse.
Editorial Text: Considering that most visitors to your blog come for information, to learn something from you, the chances are great that they will be reading your blog posts. Using text links to products and services you are promoting as an affiliate is most likely to get clicks from your most qualified prospects – people who read your blog.
Automated link directing: These are slightly more questionable methods, such as having an affiliate page pop-under the blog either when it is first loaded, or when a visitor leaves the blog, or having a video auto-direct to the affiliate link after it finishes playing, or even more trickier black-hat tactics that are hard to detect.
Including An Opt-In Process
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Like we discussed in the earlier article about blogging for affiliate profits, the most successful super-affiliates do not focus on one-shot attempts at making a sale. Instead, they get interested or curious prospects to raise their hands, and add them to a follow-up system that allows them to keep reminding them about the products and services they promote as an affiliate.
How important is it to follow up?
I revealed details about one of my very successful affiliate marketing campaigns that sold 100+ copies of a $27 ebook in one week. The report is available for download as a PDF – click here.
See how each follow up message pulled in sales – from the SAME audience. In percentage terms, here’s how each message accounted for sales:
Email #1 – 43.2%
Email #2 – 26.7%
Email #3 – 18.1%
Email #4 – 11.9%
If I had NOT followed up, I might have not made 60% of all sales!
Now do you see how important it is to follow up – and keep following up? That’s one fantastic reason to build an opt-in process into your blogging for affiliate profits.
Email Autoresponder or RSS?
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RSS feed subscriptions are great for blog readers. It notifies people who visited your blog about new updates and reminds them to come back and read them.
However, when you are blogging for affiliate profits, you may be better off with an email autoresponder to follow up. This is because different people will see your affiliate review at different times. So if you use an RSS based follow up to direct them back to your blog, the earlier visitors will read every fresh update one at a time – but later subscribers will find ALL of them already published!
This does not work as well as a steady ‘drip’ of follow up messages, each one pushing a prospect relentlessly towards the buying decision.
There are many ways to set up an email autoresponder. Most hosting services will include follow up autoresponders in your account. However, it is usually better to sign up for a stand-alone email autoresponder service because they handle the high-maintenance task of getting ‘whitelisted’ by various ISPs and web-based email services like Hotmail and Yahoo, which will ensure your follow up messages actually get delivered to opt-in subscribers.
I use Aweber.com exclusively for this purpose, and have had high deliverability rates until now. Other services you might consider are GetResponse and Email Aces.
Craft Your Follow Up Emails
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In your blogging for affiliate profits system, you want everything to hum along smoothly once you set the ball rolling.
And that is why you should have your email follow up sequence set up and ready before you get your first opt-in subscriber.
It’s hard to outline an email marketing strategy in a short overview, but here are a few principles:
- Do NOT be selling all the time
- Provide VALUE in every email you send out
- Make each message handle an OBJECTION, and overcome it
- Push prospects slightly towards a buying decision each time
- Make your offer progressively irresistible
Here is one suggested sequence for an affiliate promotion campaign. Some of the content may be taken from the affiliate program resource directory itself, as most vendors provide marketing material for their affiliates to use. The rest can be created by you.
Message #1 - Give a free report. It could be just a PDF document of your in-depth review, available as a download (and branded with your affiliate link in case readers click on it and buy)
Message #2 – Reminder to read the PDF they downloaded, and a link to your blog post explaining one benefit of buying the product.
Message #3 – An informative article about a problem the product or service helps a buyer solve.
Message #4 – Testimonials from customers explaining how they benefited from their purchase, and hinting that readers too may enjoy that advantage.
Message #5 - Link to your blog where you showcase another benefit of the product.
Message #6 – Special offer – add an exclusive bonus only available if they order through your link (and tell them how to claim it)
Message #7 – Feedback from your list members who bought, and details about how many people bought on your recommendation (adds social proof)
Message #8 – F.A.Q. (frequently asked questions) – where you raise each possible objection, and overcome each one with a reason. This can go on your blog too.
Message #9 – Last reminder, or time-limited EXTRA bonus… with a deadline to act.
Message #10 – Another article about something the product or service helps owners with… a problem, an opportunity, an advantage, a saving, etc.
Message #11 – A survey: Ask your list, “Why haven’t you bought yet?” The answers are often illuminating, and show you what objections you’ve not yet considered, and how to overcome them.
Message #12 – Last signing off note about this product, reminding them it is still available to solve a problem, and leaving the decision with your prospect.
Beyond this point, I wouldn’t often recommend pushing a particular product unless it is exceptionally valuable and will significantly impact a buyer’s life. If it will, then you may plan seasonal or annual promotion campaigns around events and situations.
For instance, tax planning software becomes popular around tax time. Shopping guides get ‘hot’ around the holiday season. Recreation and travel related products see a revival around summer.
Blogging for Affiliate Profits
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Now that you have everything set up and ready to go, you can begin posting to your blog.
What to post? How often? What more should I do?
Your posts could be soft-sell pitches for the product or service, or instead focus on providing useful information that attracts the target audience with a gentle nudge at the bottom of each post.
Test both approaches to see which works better with your audience.
If you go the informative posting route, take the keyword list you developed in the beginning and work your way down it. Optimize each individual blog post for one specific keyword in your list.
Include the keyword once in the title of your post, a few times in the body, and use it to hyperlink your affiliate link. Also tag each post with the keyword, and use the ‘Categories’ feature of WordPress to add another boost to keyword optimization.
Every time you blog, ping the major services like Pingoat.com and Pingomatic.com to get high visibility in the blog search engines. Also list your blog and RSS feed on all major directories, again to build visibility for your content.
In the beginning, write short, meaningful, content-rich and keyword-optimized posts of around 300 to 500 words.
Blog once a day or more often if you can.
After your blog gets indexed and listed on search engines, focus on a more sustainable blogging schedule (2 or 3 times a week, at least) and work on linking campaigns and other methods of driving traffic to your affiliate blog.
From every blog post, make sure you have a link to your in-depth review of the product you are promoting, and maybe even a direct affiliate link to the vendor’s order page (through your affiliate link).
In time, your review page will have multiple ‘feeding’ links from various sections of your blog, all funneling visitors to your review, which will lead the pre-sold prospects to click on your affiliate link, maximizing your affiliate profits.
Blogging for Affiliate Profits – Is There More?
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In 3 longish articles, I have given you a broad overview of how to use blogging as an affiliate marketer to boost your profits.
There are finer nuances involved in each step. Seeing proven campaigns and marketing material you can model and re-use will help. Learning advanced skills like copywriting, lead-capture page set up, and email marketing will help you take it a step further.
But all this can happen naturally once you get the basics right. So stop learning and worrying too much, and just get started. Throw up a basic affiliate blog. Pick one product to start test-promoting. Post a few messages to your blog.
Study your results. See what works. Keep doing more of it. Try new stuff. Find the best ones that pull the biggest profits for you.
Pretty soon you’ll find the ‘magic formula’ that most people never find – because they don’t test enough things. If you need clarification about some parts of this tutorial, please let me know.
And if you plan to get more advanced training about affiliate marketing, here are a few helpful resources. Some of them are free. Others involve paying a modest fee. All are guaranteed to further your affiliate marketing knowledge and bring you increased profits in your affiliate blogging:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Nice set of articles on blogging for profit, Dr. Mani.
Good, solid, informative stuff.
I especially like your ideas about how to set up the autoresponder system. I always have questions about that in terms of what works best.
Keep up the informative content!!
Your fan
Dena