A very special THANK YOU to Mike Paetzold for guesting here at Blog Income Life for the past week.  The series gave me some golden nuggets and exposed areas where I can certainly do some tweaking.  Below are some things that I took away

#1.  LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT
Every little zig that should ‘ave  been a zag, when corrected leads to knowledge and better understanding.  Of course there was a zig – mine!  Little things like the difference between an author and an editor in your admin make a difference.  Note to self: pay close attention to detail.

#2.  BLOGGING & LIST BUILDING
List building is an important fundamental in internet marketing, particularly if you, like me, have affiliate marketing as the next step in building a blog income.  What I found interesting in Mike’s post is that the blog and the list can serve each other equally well.  Use the blog as a billboard for your own ad inviting people to sign up for a newsletter,  a free ebook or perhaps even a webinar.  As your list grows from this source and others, you can now email your subscribers to update them on your latest blog posting.  This may sound redundant but not necessarily so.  People are busy and may not have the time to visit your blog daily to check for fresh content and if you post only three times a week or even weekly, sending an email to your subscribers is just plain good service.

#3.  NICHE & KEYWORDS
I have never seen such a clear cut flow chart of how to organize your niche and  supportive keywords:

Niche
Category
Keywords

Assigning a value to each category and the supportive keywords is very interesting.  I like the idea of using a term with four words, getting that to page one quickly, then fight for the more competitive three words within that term – the two words become more difficult, but at least you’re on your way.  Do this with each category and sprinkle your post with other keywords that you want to tackle down the road.  Its all about planting seeds for your success.

#4.  POST REVIEWS

On the heels of affiliate marketing, doing a review post on your affiliate is a good way to drive traffic to the affiliate sales page.  Mike pointed out that a good first set of reviews could be about the services you are already using – for example, I use Hostgator as my host, I use iContact as my autoresponder, and my platform is WordPress Direct There are other services that I use.  Some have affiliate programs.  Taking this bit of advice from Mike, I’ll be posting reviews on these products that way not only might the article result in a few affiliate sales if the my readers sign up for the service, but it will be useful information for others when deciding on which service to subscribe to.

#5.  FINDING QUALITY AFFILIATE PRODUCTS

Test. Test. Test.  As an affiliate you are promoting someone else’s product and the first step is to know that product.  I think that this is particularly true of courses and software.  Try it, if you like it, then become an affiliate.  Sometimes if you know the vendor very well and have already had a good experience with his previous products, you can go on reputation.  Another way is to check reviews on the product before you decide to promote it yourself.

Thank you, Mike. 

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

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