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Posts Tagged ‘Old Bald Guy Blog Tour’

Mike Paetzold back again for the final day of my visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. Today the discussion will be on finding quality affiliate promotions.

Now the easiest way is to promote products that you have bought that are working for you and tools that you actually use. All too often I have seen people ignore the items they use.

Every blogger that has their own blog and domain already have a service they can promote.If you really like your blog host and have gotten great support it is really easy to tell others about it and most hosting companies have an affiliate program. (Oh and if you don’t like your host enough to tell others you probably need a new host )

If you are building a list then you are using an autoresponder company. For my blog I use Aweber and have no problem mentioning it any time I talk about building a list. Gee, I just did didn’t I? Not hard to do is it?

Next is to find products that will help your own readers. One of the easiest ways is to use the big G (Google) and do a search for “your topic + affiliate program”.

You can find numerous programs for almost any niche. Check out what is available and sign up for those that will work for you.

For most in the internet marketing arena you can find digital products through Clickbank and PayDotCom. Digital products usually pay a much higher percentage than physical products do so if their are digital products for your niche these will usually pay more.

A couple other places to check are Commission Junction, Pepper Jam and Azoogle. Each has their own requirements to get approved for various products.

Remember that almost anything you can buy at your local mall or department store can be sold as an affiliate.

If you are just starting out I would not worry about finding affiliate products right away until you have your site up and some traffic arriving. Quite often the best affiliate programs will want to see the site you will be using to promote their program before they will approve you.

This is not a problem with the digital sites like Clickbank and PayDotCom but quite a few of the others want to see your site first.

Finally to properly promote a product it is important that you know the product. Other than some physical products (I have a site on LCD TV’s and I can’t test them all although I would like to) do I promote a product that I have not bought or at least reviewed.

It is hard to do a credible job for a product that all you know about it is what is on the sales letter.

Hope you have enjoyed my stay here and I am finished with this version of the blog tour. Does not mean I won’t be cranking out quality content and I welcome you to follow me on my regular blogs.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter

Mike Paetzold back again for day 4 of my visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. Today the discussion will be on using review posts for your affiliate promotion.

One of the best ways to pre-sell affiliate products or even your own product is to use a review post. This model works quite well if you follow a few simple rules.

!. Use the product name in your title. You want to rank in the search engines for the product name because you are looking for those that have heard of the product but are cautious buyers. They want more information on the product before they make a decision so they have gone to Google to find out what others have to say.

A good title tag will improve your chances of ranking highly for the product.

2. Give a fair review. Your visitor is not looking for they hype when following reviews (leave that for the sales letter) but more solid information on what the product does and who it is for.

Explaining how you are using it is key. Before the new FTC regulations I would normally have said give your exact results but that has become a problem now.

3. Compare the product to the competition if there is some and there usually is. (Link to the competing product too.)

4. What are the downside to the product. Nothing is perfect so letting people know what is missing or could be done better helps to build your credibility.

5. Ask for input from your readers. If you can get comments on your review it will increase the chance that your post becomes the tipping point that makes the reader decide to buy the product.

Follow these tips and you will find that doing honest reviews can be an excellent way to generate more sales.

Be back tomorrow for my last day here and I will be discussing finding the right affiliate products to promote.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter

Mike Paetzold back again for day 3 of my visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour.Today the discussion will be on finding your niche and gathering your keywords.

Unfortunately this is a step that gets skipped way too often. Have done it, own the t-shirt, coffee mug and more. Skipping this step always comes back to bite you unless you are using your blog strictly as a part of your email marketing.

So even though it is not fun at times doing your research first will pay off. Knowing who you are targeting and what they are interested in makes it much easier to supply that need.

So find your specific niche first and look to see if there is money being spent in that niche. If not maybe you need to choose a different topic. I am doing that thing I hate to do assuming that if you are creating a blog you are looking for it to generate income. If that is not true then you can ignore this part.

The second part of the equation is to find the keyword phrases that people are actually searching for AND that do not have a huge amount of competition. It is a tight line to walk.

Eventually you can rank for any term if you are willing to work hard enough for it. Low competition terms just make it much quicker and easier to get rankings and the traffic that comes with that.

Finally you need to build from the bottom up. It is usually easier to rank for a 4 word phrase than a 3 and a 2 word phrase is usually tougher.

Here is a picture of how I set up my niche sites after researching them.

The center is my main topic. Each of the categories will be related to that top keyword and will usually be more competitive than the keywords below it.

For example my topic is dog training. One of the categories would be dog training collars and the keywords could be electronic dog training collars, choker dog training collars, etc.

Start by doing a post on all of the lower level words like electronic dog training collars and you will build up to dog training collars because each of the 4 word phrases will have the 3 word phrase in it or a variation of it.

Getting this right can lead to traffic fairly quickly and eventually you can rank for all of them. For more on picking your niche and generating your keywords check out The Keyword Call. Tomorrow I will be back to discuss review posts.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter

Mike Paetzold back again for day 2 of my visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour.Today the discussion will be on integrating your blogging, list building and email marketing.

As an example Valentina and I had a miscommunication and my post from yesterday did not actually show up until earlier today here. Because she builds a list she could get people here by sending out an email to those people.

Now the blog can integrate into your marketing with list building and email marketing in 3 ways.

• Getting people to sign up while they are visiting the blog
• Letting people know that you have added new information on the blog
• Using the blog as a pre-sell for your affiliate promotions

Lets deal with them one at a time starting with adding subscribers.

There are numerous ways that you can add subscribers and I probably use most of them.

• An offer to join in your side bar
• A slide in that is delayed
• Light box pop when they go to leave
• The new ribbon opt ins that you see on the bottom of some blogs

Now some of those require a plugin or to purchase a script to run they will increase the number of subscribers that you get on your list.

Now depending on your autoresponder the second item can be automated to send out an email when you add a new post or to send out a notice of new posts every so often. Aweber and Get Response will tie in directly to your RSS feed allowing you to automate this process.

Anything that I can automate to save time and keep people informed are items I love to add to my arsenal. Check with your autoresponder provider to see if they have RSS automation if you do not use one of those two. A gentle reminder like that will help to increase your traffic.

The final item though is my favorite – Pre-selling your affiliate promotions.

With tougher spam filters making email delivery tougher and tougher if you use any of a number of terms like free, money making, etc this is a perfect way to incases your delivery rates.

Put your actual promotion on your blog where you can use those terms that help you sell but can ruin your delivery rate. Send a short curiosity arousing email and link it back to your blog post.

This way your email avoids the spam box and your promotion just may end up getting indexed highly on the serps. A winner all the way around.

Be back tomorrow to talk about finding the right niche and keywords for your blog.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter

Hi all. Let me introduce myself, my name is Mike Paetzold and this is the last week of my Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. I have been traveling from blog to blog across the internet and setting up my cyber tent to camp out for a week at a time. This is the last stop of the tour and it has been a fun time.

This week I will be talking about using a blog for affiliate marketing.

Now you can do this in any niche and it is probably easier to do in niches outside of the internet marketing area. Blogs work because Google has shown that they like blogs and the ease of use to add content helps you keep it current.

The topics that I will cover will be using your blog for…

• List building
• Finding a good niche
• Review posts
• Finding the right affiliate product

All of these things are important but the item that will help you the most is doing good research before you even start your blog. You need to find the right keywords to be able to rank and generate traffic from the search engines.

Finding the keywords that you can easily rank for and that are words searched for by buyers is the real key no matter what your business model. You can get more information on doing keyword research and finding a good niche check out the keyword research call.

Look forward to spending the week and look forward to your comments and questions.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter