Using WordPress Blogs For Affiliate Marketing

Written by Costa on November 30, 2009 - 23 Comments
Categories: Making Money

WordPress-treaure-chest

The main source of income for this blog is through affiliate marketing. The square banners on the left are all affiliate banners which makes me a small commission each time someone clicks on it and makes a purchase or a sign up. Some might be skeptical and ask, “Do people actually click on those banners?” The answer is, yes. Those square banners gets clicked a lot. If you use the wp125 plugin to manage those banners, you will see the number of clicks each of those banners gets. Whether those clicks converts into a sale or otherwise is a different matter, but obviously, the more clicks you get, the higher are the chances of making a sale.

Many serious affiliate marketers do not like using WoprdPress Blogs or blogs running from any other platforms a direct means of marketing their affiliate products. They prefer a dedicated site, normally consisting of a few pages with articles or reviews related to the product they are selling. Some might add a blog to their sites in order to add fresh contents for Search Engines so that their sites gets crawled more often.

Most of these sites however, are not updated regularly and are left on their own after the initial set up. The fact that they can still get decent traffic is due to the work done constantly at the backend. This would include running Adword campaigns, building backlinks, email marketing and many more. Though it may seem that these sites provides the marketer with passive income, it actually is not, for work has still to be done. If they slack off for a couple of months, their rankings in the SERPs will be easily wiped out by their competitors. Thus constant monitoring is crucial for survival. The advantage though is, as no frequent updates are required, these affiliate marketers can have many such sites, sometimes into the thousands, selling everything under the sun. Their full time job is just to keep tabs on their empire, which at present is made easy with the kind of scripts and software available.

affiliate-marketing

Things have changed in recent years as far as affiliate marketing is concerned. WordPress is fast gaining popularity as a preferred platform for affiliate marketers. High quality WordPress Themes made specially for such a porpose has been sprouting up. The Flexsqueeze Theme for example provides budding affiliate marketers an easy mean of setting up an affiliate site with a few clicks of the mouse. The recently launched Squeeze Theme also make things fly for novice Affiliate Marketers. With a few hours of work, a person with no knowledge of building web sites can have one that looks highly professional running for them.

However, it has to be emphasized that though anyone can set up a affiliate marketing site, it does not mean anyone can be successful. WordPress can only only make your life a bit easier when you are starting out. When the journey has begun, the rest will be up to you to make the most out of it.

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The majority of start ups fail due to lack of knowledge or the wrong knowledge. These are brought about by smart alec gurus who knows next to nothing about affiliate marketing or unscrupulous marketers out to fleeced newbies, taking advantage of their ignorance. Real information are hard to come by and if you want the truth, you will be made to pay for it, in the hundreds if not thousands. Even then, you are not guaranteed to be supplied with the hard cold truth. You will be told how easy it is to make tens of thousands each month using their secret formula that they have discovered. You will be coerced to part with your hard earned money and you may end up poorer than you were before you started.

By now, if you are still reading this article, you might be smirking.

“You blardy hypocrite! What is that banner I see in your header, claiming to make $15,677 per month!? Are you trying to fleece me also?” LOL.

No, my friends, I am not. I get nothing if you sign up for the video course. It is only when you have studied the course and felt that you indeed have what it takes and feel like becoming a full time member that I will start to earn something.

I could have direct banners links to the actual membership site and earn my commissions directly, but the fact that I have the banner links to the video course is because I have seen the videos and and I feel it is very very beneficial to everyone. There are 20 videos in all and in every video, great patience have been taken to make sure you understand what have been taught. It starts from the very scratch of what you should know before attempting to be an affiliate marketer to in depth explanation on what you should do.

These kind of videos are sold for nearly $497 in some places. It yours to view for free, in a fair exchange for just your email. There are no obligations whatsoever that you must sign up when you have finished the course. Do expect some follow up emails trying to convince you further though. After all they are Internet marketers wanting to make money. What do you expect. At least they gave away something with quality in exchange for that chance.

In many marketing promos with videos of these nature what you get will be long winded ramblings about how good their product is and how long it has taken them to come up with such a fantastic product. In every instance, there will be no revelation of what the actual product is and all they hope for is your curiosity has been aroused enough to spend money in order to find out.

So if you have ambitions to make money from affiliate marketing, have a WordPress blog or planning to start affiliate marketing with a WordPress blog, have no idea on how to start one, go give them your email and start studying the videos. You will not be sorry.

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Article by Costa Fong

@costafong

Who loves to mod and mess up WordPress Themes.

Costa has written 557 articles here. Some are awesome, some are lame.

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23 Responses to “Using WordPress Blogs For Affiliate Marketing”

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November 30, 2009 at 4:57 pm

Great post!

I used to think that before, if people actually click those items. But it’s true folks, people do click those banners.

Reply
scheng1

December 2, 2009 at 10:44 am

I’m still experimenting with affiliate marketing. Right now i use hyperlink within content method. There are a few clicks but no sale so far.

Reply
- Costa
  
  December 2, 2009 at 1:51 pm
  
  Hi scheng1,
  
  A few clicks is a good start. They will now have your affiliate cookies in their browser and if they decide to buy later on, the commission is still yours.
  
  Reply
techprism

December 2, 2009 at 1:34 pm

Nice Post.

I think If your blog is traffic rich then Affiliates banners do work.

After all these are meant for the readers only, if they like it , they click, if they are not interested they do not.

Reply
- Costa
  
  December 2, 2009 at 1:57 pm
  
  Hi techprism,
  
  It will also depend on what kind of traffic the blog is rich in. If all my traffic is coming for info on affiliate marketing for example, then there will not be as many clicks as compared for traffic coming for info about WordPress Themes.
  
  Reply
Sandy Naidu

December 3, 2009 at 3:17 am

Good points – I normally prefer the dedicated site route. banners is not something I have experimented a lot with – but I am going try and see how it works for me.

Reply
- Costa
  
  December 3, 2009 at 10:38 am
  
  I would think it takes the same skills. Only difference might be banners are visible side wide, so if your traffic are all targeted to your niche, the banners will attract more clicks even if your visitors are not reading the post related to the product.
  
  Reply
Mitko

December 7, 2009 at 8:38 am

Another great article! I am a web designer and an IT and started my blog 3 months ago. Although I am generating over 500 clicks a month so far I have generated no sales! The only reason I haven’t given up is I love my blog and the topic I write about, it’s what I am passionate about! However I feel sometimes I am preaching to the wrong crowd. I know every train has its passengers, I want to ask am I too impatient? I’ve raised my blog traffic rank from 17,000,000 to close to 5,000,000 and daily views from like 0 to 40-50 per day. How long does it take for a blog to start generating sales as well.

Reply
- Costa
  
  December 7, 2009 at 9:19 am
  
  Hi Mitco,
  
  A 3 month old blog is just like e new born baby. You may have the ability to get some initial traffic but I don’t think the traffic will be trageted because I doubt any of your keywords are in the Search results as yet. Without that kind of traffic, you will not be making any sales.
  
  A 3 month blog would still be in the Google sandbox, something that Google denies but every SEO guru knows it exist, because Google needs to be sure your blog is really legit and has contents before giving you some authority in their search results.
  
  Experts will go all out to get some strong backlinks to hasten the time taken to get out of the sandbox so their sites could be indexed quickly and have their keywords showing up in the Serps.
  
  If it is any consolation, I only inserted affiliate product links after spending 2 years here. That was when I saw many of the keywords I have been working on in the first page of Search results.
  
  There is no point getting a good traffic rank as this number do not reflect the true value of your visitors. All you need is a couple of hundred visitors who are really interested in your product, and you will get come sales.
  
  How long? It depends. If you are willing to spend money to get those really targeted traffic, you can start generating sales almost immediately.
  
  I do it the old fashion way, but it is free. That is, wait for the blog to age considerably, work on a set of keywords that I feel will be a “buying” type, get the backlinks in order to rank well in Search results, keep writing post related to the keyword I am working on. Wait again.
  
  The consolation is, you will not feel the agony of waiting if you enjoy what you are writing about. It only gets frustrating if you are doing it entirely for the money.
  
  Over the years, you will have a blog full of keyword related topics. Then you will see results. Haven’t learned any other methods that is faster or easier. LOL.
  
  Reply
Mitko

December 7, 2009 at 6:06 pm

Right, the sandbox, I’ve read about it, and since I am a web developer, I’ve developed certain local online stores. One of them.. picked up pretty fast, and in a month we were managing around 10 sales per day, but I guess the lack of such stores in the certain country made it much much easier, almost no competition. Yeah I will just keep on doing what I am doing eventually as you said, “the baby will grow up”

Reply
Bill Layton

March 30, 2010 at 1:12 pm

Hi,

I appreciate the articles, you have some very useful information. I am researching and choosing a WordPress theme for affiliate marketing so what you have here helps. I can’t help but wonder, however, why do you not choose a theme or template that is easier to read? This has to be one of the least attractive and most difficult to read blogs I’ve ever come across! Sorry, but it’s true… thanks for the info tho!

Reply