2 Ways to Increase Your Affiliate Sales

This technique is a quite simple technique, which lots of people actually don’t take advantage of which they should, it just went through my mind and it really was an awesome idea because people don’t use it. I haven’t seen one page at all where they use this relatively simple technique. For those who doesn’t know much about affiliate marketing I will just explain it in a few words.

Affiliate marketing is you selling another one’s product to a customer where you get a percentage of a sale, the percentage varies from product to product. A product which has a rate about 50% is a quite good products for you to sell to others.

That was short, but that’s the basics. I see lots of newcomers in affiliate marketing just promoting lots of products they haven’t tried yet and maybe even isn’t yet to try. That is something you shouldn’t do, you should stand up for what you say. Not just say some crap about this product you haven’t tried, which in the end even can be scam and methods that doesn’t work. Please understand the importance here.

If you offer your audience some bad stuff they will never ever gain trust to you and if they don’t trust you, you will not be able to sell them anything. So you are really playing with your audience here, don’t offer some bullshit to them, it has to be value.

When you are trying to sell affiliate products you should start with a review of the product where you are mentioning some of the benefits maybe some of the stuff that could have been better – then you show you have read it, but you are still satisfied with this product and want to recommend it.

Also be sure to tell something about the creator of the product. It can build up some credibility and make the person buy because he/she knows that person who you are talking about. So that is definitely a way to gain some trust on this affiliate review.

When you have written your review you should create your own sales page (this takes time, but it is worth it if you want to sell this product) where you explain the benefits of the product (no negative stuff here, that should only be in the review) and (here is the main part) that you offer a bonus if people buy with your affiliate link.

Then they should send the receipt and then you will send the bonuses you will give them because they bought through your affiliate link. You might already have a product (of yours) which you can offer as bonus, it just have to have some value. The bonus should at least have the half price of the product (the one you try to sell)

If you offer those bonus you really should gain a couple of more who wants to buy it through your affiliate link, I really see this as a very powerful way of doing affiliate sales.

I hope you can use this blog post to something, it really is powerful if you have the audience and the strong will to succeed online. Willingness is one of the keys to success online.

The Real Purpose for Building Alliances

Alliances is something we create each day, an alliance is an agreement between two or more parties. This alliance could help each other to reach a goal or just help each other to reach individual goals.

Alliances is not just two or more people working together it is people who (somehow) want to do the same thing. We had the “Holy Alliance” which was formed in 1815 which had Russia, Prussia and Austria as former members, all in all it had around 23 members. The alliance was created because everybody wanted to achieve the same goals to instill the Christian values of charity and peace.

That’s one alliance, which was built to reach the goals they wanted. They all wanted the same thing, so it was easy for them to co-operate. This was a political alliance, there is alliances everywhere. We can somehow consider separate families as alliances, of course not an alliance as the “Holy Alliance.” To mention something that is ongoing in our time, NATO.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a military alliance, in these times (as of 9/11) they are helping Afghanistan, where they have deployed troops as well as trainers to Iraq. Which just is another example of a very powerful alliance.

Different Alliances, Different Purpose

Alliances like NATO is a big alliance, it is countries with common interests. Now these big alliances are maybe not the best thing, because the system of NATO is rude. You can’t really use it for anything, but let’s stay on topic.

I wouldn’t try to build a product with a big alliance (25+ participants) I guess we could all write a chapter of a book, but nothing more complicated. I would just ‘limit’ an alliance with this big amount of participants to only chat and improve each other individually, because that would not get so complicated.

With small alliances you will find it easier to manage the thing, if you are working towards a common goal, lots of difficulties could be there. Just keep in mind if you are working (as NATO) towards a common goal then I think you should not expand your alliances with more than 4 persons/companies. For an example if you want to launch a product together. I wouldn’t do that with 25 people, it sure could be powerful but you will still not get the same result as if it were 4 person creating a product.

So for these ‘small alliances’ I would use them for launching products much like joint ventures. So I would limit these kinds of alliances to at most 4 participants.

The Purpose of An Alliance

Everything is relative. The purpose of your alliance could be to have fun, work together, help each others and so on. While your neighbor’s alliance could have a complete other purpose.

In a school alliance it could be to help each other to study, motivate each other, share notes, and stuff like that. A blogging alliance could have a common interest of raising each other’s blogs, but only if it is worth it. If you do something good, you will get to know. If your content suck, you will be the first to know.

Some people can’t handle the constructive critique, you possibly could get from an alliance, if that’s the case then an alliance isn’t for you.

So you can go off in the comments and tell me, if you had an ally, what would the purpose be? There is no wrong answer.

After all an alliance is lots of things, but in the end an alliance is a place where you support each other.

How Alerts Can Help Your Blog and Your Brand

Why You Should Monitor You Niche?
A blogger’s life is often very busy, maybe you have a day-job and only blogging part-time or just blogging, sometimes you find it very hard to find time to actually write posts and come up with the ideas. If you are watching your niche you will find it much easier to come up with topics etc.

You will not only find it easier to find ideas for blog posts you will also be able to see the news in your niche and be one of the first to write about them. Lots of people who are those kinds of types, they write about the latest news in their niche and they have built  a great profile of expertise.

You will also be more likely to network with others, you will know what everybody else talks about. This enables you to be albe to connect with these guys and they will know that you are into your niche.

How to Set Up These so Called Alerts

There is lots of ways to set up these alerts up, there is also a couple of places to get these news from.

Twitter alerts: there is lots of ways to help you get these alerts on Twitter. Some of these are in Twitter clients other is on a seperate webpage. What I would do to get these Twitter updates, would be to use the Twitter client called “TweetDeck” set up a search for your desired thing you want to follow. Twitter’s search also allows you to get a rss feed from a keyword search.

Google Alerts: Google Alerts will show you any type of new on those keywords you choose. You can choose whether it should be from news, blogs, web, video or groups, etc. You can receive these alerts via email or rss.

I have said that there is loads of ways to do this alert thing, and there it, but I think the far most effective is the Twitter search, because that really is “real-time” update. The Google Alerts is good, but Twitter search is faster.
Google Alerts is good for searching for something small, like your name, your dog or something like that.

What Kinds of Alerts Should You Use?

Industry types: words which is related to your niche, no names. Maybe just the niche name, if you are writing about “Sex and The City” you maybe want to do a TweetDeck column just for “Sex and The City” – in that way you would be able to talk with people who is watching “Sex and The City,” maybe they are asking some questions and you would be able to respond.

Names, brand types: this could be your blog’s name (your blog’s name wouldn’t work good on Twitter, they would probably mention your username), your brand, you competitors, urls etc.

Interaction in Your Niche

If you do the Twitter searches you will be the first one to answer any questions that comes into your niche, which will give you some kind of expertise in your niche, or at least some credibility.

So you will stay up to date with your niche and you will be able to interact and talk about the latest news in your niche.

How to Keep Your Blog Posts Alive For Longer Than A Day

I think lots of people want to make their blog posts be more popular over a longer time frame. They keep getting this feeling that they have to write every day, which they aren’t supposed to. Of course every day is good, if you can keep up with it, but if you can’t, then it isn’t cool. I think it is an extremely important thing to do. If you can make your posts more popular over a longer time frame, then you would be able to:

• Get more comments
• Get more page views
• Get a lower bounce rate

So this is definitely benefits that would help your blog grow, bigger community and so on. Can you see the benefit from having a post which is popular for a bigger time span. These aren’t the only benefits, not at all, though you can imagine what the benefits are.

Keep The Posts in Circulation

Some people doesn’t like this method, but I think it is great for three reasons.

It helps when you have a writer’s block, you will get some content and then be able to relax.
It will increase your Google Page Rank for that specific page (gets linked to, more etc.) Will gain more comments, overtime.

What Exactly Is Circulation?

It’s quite simple, it is when you have published a blog post, let’s say 5 months from now. It was a good post, which could get rewritten and get some new points.

I think that you should rewrite the whole post, instead of just editing it, if you do so this post would be much more unique and people who have followed your blog for over 5 months, would be able to recognize the post if it is the same post.

So you need to rewrite it, this wouldn’t help if you have the writer’s block, where you mind keep stopping you from writing, but if it is the kind of writer’s block where you can’t find a topic, this would be an ideal way to break the ice – or at least try to do so.

Edit the Posts

Edit your headlines, will work. Headlines is the key to a blog post, if the headlines is good, you shouldn’t fail, to get people to click on the link, from the front page to the posts page. I think this is important, if you make sure that you have a powerful headline. It matters!

Edit your opening lines, is the second thing that the reader gets to see, this really is where you need to impress the reader and make him/her read the whole post. It is like in a newspaper, I don’t know what you would call it, it is like a sub-header, it is what gets the person interested in your article.

Edit Your Formatting, is good. If you restructure a post just before publishing it. Make it scannable, readable. Just make it simpler in the formatting.

Writing New Fresh Content Which Gets Popular

Didn’t like the “circulation method?” On that occasion I have some other ways to write some posts that will be alive for more than one day.

Keep it simple, when you write something that is going to be popular for more than one single day, thereupon you have to make it simple. If it is simple then every single body and brain will understand it in this world. If they understands what you say, then of course.

Try to tell a story, this will only be a success if you are good at finding the relevancy of a story (if you are not, you should use this “method.”) But this will simply add some relation to the article and make it more personal, it just have to have a certain level of relevance.

Link to older posts, might help your older posts to get a bit more views. You should do that with a good anchor text and maintain the relevancy the link. You can easily do this and if you do it the right way people will click on it.

Short about how you can improve your blog post’s live, did this have an impact on your blog? I would love to know.

How to Build a Powerful Blogging Alliance

What Exactly is a blogging alliance?

A blogging alliance is a couple of bloggers working together trying to improve each other’s blogs. It is a phenomenon that really works. The blog alliance doesn’t have to be all about blogging, it can just be a few blog owners chatting and just chillin’, but sometimes still serious and they help each other out.

If it is possible for you to build an ally with a few other people then you should do it.

Other people will call it a “mastermind group.”

We are on a conference call, quite often. We discuss different stuff, as I said not everything is about blogging. You guys can talk about a lot of other stuff than just blogging. It doesn’t have to be Internet marketing related either, but this really depends on your time.

If you have the time to network with people in a much funnier way (like this) then you should do it. If not, then you should just talk about blogging, Internet marketing stuff all the time.

What Can a Blogging Alliance do For Your Blog?

A blogging alliance can do a hell lot to your blog, it can inspire you to write more posts, help other bloggers. You can learn from their failures and they can learn from your failures.

You share failures and success, which definitely is the way to go.

But a blogging alliance reach a deeper level, than just telling success and failures. The best thing is that when you have a blog alliance you are not feeling obligated to tweet, comment or what so ever. Only if it really is good content and something we would like to share with our readers.

I am, though, much more likely to share an article with one from my blogging alliance than just a random guy posting a link, because normally I know this is quality. I really know that each one of these guys are providing quality.

What it really can do for your blog is a lot. It only depends on the people you are building this alliance with. In our blogging alliance we have some unofficial guidelines, why we share and so on. I think that every single blogging alliance should make it clear with each other what we want to get out of this. Otherwise you guys will be so confused, with each other.

The Conference Call

This is a fun part, probably the best. It is where the most active members are just chatting throughout the evening/morning/night (as we are from all around the world) – we talk about blogging related stuff, off-topic, we rant (lol, mostly one person only)- there is not a thing we don’t do. We laugh, generally just having a great time.

The biggest call is Saturday, that is where everybody have the time to be online and just is online, after our big live show, we also are holding each Saturday.

We are having this weekly call, but that isn’t all. We are constantly having conference calls, we are having, on most days, one call. Sometimes we are having none, but most days we have at least got one.
It is at least 30 minutes long the call, but normally it is much longer. I have met new people. This really benefits, every body.

How You Should Build Your own Blogging Alliance

You shouldn’t be afraid of starting a blogging alliance. Just explain to the people you would like to join what it is. How they can benefit from it.

If you aren’t trying this you are really missing a lot of good stuff. You always have someone who can answer your questions, no matter what time it is.

You could talk to 3 bloggers you talk/network with and ask what they think about the idea and you should tell them that they should consider doing it, because it can improve their blog. If they say that they would love to try it and so on – you should tell them to invite a few people, to it.

There is no exact guide at all, just do it. Not many are doing this. And I can tell you that a lot of people are missing something here.

We just use Skype to do everything here, chats, conference calls and so on. Skype does it all.

There really is no “how to” create blog alliance. The only thing you should do is consider them as friends, not competitors. If you consider them as competitors, then you will have a hard time to build a reasonable relationship where you are helping each others. You need to be friendly and consider them as friends. Help them and they will help you.

Want to Know More About Blogging Alliance?

How to Build a Powerful Blogging Alliance by Rob Rammuny

How to Build a Powerful Blogging Alliance by Nicholas Cardot

How to Increase Your Blog Readership 10-fold

This is the text version of the live show the 13th of January 2010. I hope you can use it and thanks for everybody who showed up. Much appreciated.

Introduction

So there are two key things you need to do to gain readers from Google and the word of mouth method.

• Write consistently
• Build credibility

If you write consistently, you will get better search ranking in Google, because Google likes frequently updated blogs, in general Google just like content.

You need to stay up-to-date with your topic, if you aren’t doing that you will simply fall out, you need to give away fresh content, to able to compete with others. So what you read about your niche, is something you really need to educate your readers in, but of course you need to be unique.

Post about the new but add your angle to it, so it gets unique!

Guest posting for Newbies (read it even if you aren’t a newbie)

Guest posting isn’t something I’m doing enough, to be honest. I once did one at Teenius.com (sorry Simon, but I didn’t), which didn’t gave me any traffic at all and when I get no traffic = no readers.

Remember you are writing guest posts to get readers, not traffic. To get known. To get your brand out.

Analysis of The Blog

When you are writing guest posts on other blogs, then you need to study 10 different posts and see which of these posts are the most successful and see why they are so successful as they are.

So analyze the blog you want to write for, because then you will be able to see what kind of content you should write to get success on that blog. I’m not saying that you should copy the topic. Not the writing style, well at least not that much. But just see how he have done it.

Is it a list post, what is it? How did it become that successful?

Networking is Important

When you want to get a guest post on a blog you don’t know or at least you do not know the blog owner, I think it’s important that you build a stable relationship with the blog owner first. Because then he’ll be more likely to approve your blog post.

You can do it by tweet him and say that he has an awesome blog and you would like to have is instant messenger username. Then he will probably give you that, if he want to network with others.

Then write a bit with him everyday, for 3 days or so, if possible not less. Then ask him on the fourth day, if it is okay to give him a guest post and if there’s any chance for him to approve the post.

If he answers yes, then give him the post on the sixth day, not instantly. Two days after, he shouldn’t think this relationship is all about getting some traffic from his blog.

Keep chatting with him, for 14 days and if you like keep holding the contact to him (but do not write every single day, just once in a while). It will be best to keep the relationship on going as you will be a good friend of his and then you can eventually after that, do some business together.

If you do not want to do this, just send away a sample to him and then hope for the best. Worst case is that it wouldn’t get approved. Best case is the opposite.

Using Twitter to Get Readers

It is far from easy to get readers from Twitter, it is easy to get visitors come straight to your blog, but chances are that you’ll never see them again. P(getting a reader from twitter of all the visits you get from twitter) = 1%.

For the non mathematicians that just means that the chance (p is for probability) for getting a reader from Twitter who already got to your blog from Twitter is 1%.

The easiest way to get Twitter visitors to stay loyal readers is to build a relationship at first. When you want to turn visitors into readers then you probably should start laying out a foundation to a relationship.

Start by tweeting to some of your followers and so on, just interact. The formula to get Twitter relationships is:

Twitter + Interaction + Friendly Tones + Being Funny + Being Helpful = Twitter relationship

It’s quite simple, just be simple and helpful.

Make Visitors Feel Welcome

It’s critical that you make your visitors feel home, so they eventually is going to subscribe to your RSS feed. You can do that by using the WordPress plugin called “WP-Greet Plugin”

When you for an example have written a guest post on DaneBlogger.com, you can set this plugin to show a message, to every people who gets to the site from DaneBlogger.com to say “Hello DaneBlogger.com Reader, I hope that you enjoyed my blog post. If you did, subscribe to my RSS feed”

How BlogEngage is Going to Help You

When we are talking about gaining blog readers, why don’t we talk about BlogEngage.com?

Blog Engage is a community driven by the awesome man called Brian. He is f*cking helpful, really. This guy is having a so, so awesome heart. He is just amazing.

Blog Engage is so much more powerful than Digg, which I have mentioned before (Why Blog Engage is More Powerful than Digg and how to use it)

Digg is more for tech blogs where Blog Engage is more for bloggers who blogs about blogging.

To be honest, I haven’t been able to reach the Digg front page, have you? If so, then keep doing what you are doing. But it is much easier to reach the front page of Blog Engage. Of course it isn’t that much traffic you get from that. But still, it’s really hard to get to the Digg front page.

That was, all the topics we got around in the 13th January live show. I hope you enjoy it! The next live show is the 27th of January 3 P.m.

What is the Real Difference Between Ebooks and Reports

Yesterday, I discussed with a friend of mine, what the real difference between a report and an ebook is, many actually doesn’t realize the difference. I think everybody should know the difference, to be able to outline what you want to write. So when you have read this blog post, you should be able to see the difference between a ebook and a simple report.

Well, let’s start with reports.

Reports:

A report goes over different methods and briefly tells you about the effectiveness of each of the mentioned methods, a report is usually 30 pages or less, if more people will refer it as an ebook.

Some people, like to create a free report as a snippet for their ebook (to get some mention and a part of the marketing.)

To be clear the reports give you the basic knowledge of the topic. The ebooks teaches you how to use the basic knowledge.

So the reports often is focused on one specific subject only and it discuss it in all the way to the end of the reports.

Ebooks:

Ebooks is focused on a particular subject, but approach it from different angles and cover a much wider variety of things about the topic through the different chapters. The most reports I’ve read do not include chapters and are quite “essay-alike” (straight-forward-text).

Ebooks generally contains much more information than a report, the problem almost every reports will run into is not delivering much information on how to implement the methods. That’s why you should use a report to market your new ebook which is for sale. Then give them a bit of advertiser in the free report.

The ebooks are normally more worth because everybody can use them and describes how to do something, but in the end it depends on the value of the report and ebook.

So What to Choose?

It really depends on what you want to do with it. What you want your outcomes to be.

If you want to make money using this, you might want to create both. Use the report as a prelaunch which is for free download (should be high quality as hell!) in that way people will subscribe to your newsletter and you can post whenever the product you are going to sell, is going online, you will be able to mail the people who have downloaded the report.

But if you just want to build a stable readership you might just want to create a report and then create a list, of the people who download the report, if the report is good then you will be able to mail them whenever you want. If you have a blog post you want to promote or so.

So it really depends on what you want to do.

Some Great Social Proof Examples

I have in a blog post explained what social proof is,

I showed this picture:

You see, one persons starts looking up – then there’s added two more, some more people again – and then it start to get all crazy. That’s social proof.

Now, if you see @Mashable’s Twitter profile and sees his follower count, what do you think then? You think “He knows what he’s doing, so why not follow him?”

I have been doing some massive Twittering the latest days – and I really have gained some followers. I started at 500 now I have around 2000 – and that’s around two weeks – to see the stats just go to TwitterCounter.com. Anyway it is easier to gain followers if you already have a punch of them. Because of social proof.

Now 2000 followers isn’t that much, when you start to have a following base of 10,000 or so – you really start to feel the power of social proof.

If you on Twitter have around 250 followers you will instantly think that 2,000 is many followers and even if you’re listed on 50 lists – you really start to see, that this guy is tweeting with value.

I have seen some Twitter profiles that has around 7,000 followers but is only listed 3 times or so and if you have 2,000 followers and is listed on 50 lists – you can see the difference. I try to “judge” people whether they are delivering tweets with value or not by looking at the listed, because no spammer is listed and tweeps who only tweet links to their own blog aren’t listed that much (unless that’s the purpose of the Twitter account.)

Now my Google Friend Connect is on 20 members – that isn’t that much – I have seen lots of people having many more members, but I normally Google Friend Connect isn’t used that much, so yet it is some people who’s joined my Google Friend Connect (feel free to connect – in the sidebar, all you need is a Google account)

It’s just, if you have like 700 members on the Google Friend Connect you really are showing that you have some readers that cares about your blog.

Now, bloggers like Brian Clark (CopyBlogger), has lots of social proof to show. It amazing, if you see his posts, they get like 500 retweets each time. That’s also social proof. The comments on Darren Rowse’s (ProBlogger) blog is also social proof – some gets more than 300 comments.

That’s also why blogging gets easier for every day that goes. You get faster at writing (because of habits), you market your blog each day, so you get more readers who also promotes your blog (over time you don’t need to promote your blog posts as much as in the start).

The start of a blog, is the hardest part, because you need content, you need people to help marketing your blog (word of mouth) etcetera.

How Blogging Can Give You Good Habits

I recently recorded a video about good habits in blogging – You can watch it below.

Those who are subscribed to my YouTube channel would have seen this some days ago – anyway – so subscribe if you want the latest videos

Using Google Analytics: Bounce Rate

I personally know lots of people using Google Analytics to keep track of their blogs stasts. I myself is a big fan of Google Analytics, there are lots of stuff like Analytics, but lots of those services are horrible compared to Google Analytics. As I said many are using Google Analytics and if you are not using Google Analytics you should start doing that.

If you don’t know how to implement Google Analytics and have tried (it isn’t hard) I’ll make a video on that in some days. Probably before the year change. (Wow man, 2010? this year has passed fast!)

Now, I can’t mention one good reason not to use Analytics, but I can easily mention 10 good reasons to use Analytics.

1. You can keep track of all visits.
2. The best available counter, more precisely than other sites (Yes, also CPanel, thanks @DavidBeKing for mentioning that).
3. You can count average time on site.
4. Google is the creator, so it’s good. No doubt LOL.
5. You can have all your domains collected one place, at one account.
6. Other accounts can view your blog’s stats, if they have permission. Which makes it good if two persons shares a blog.
7. What is the difference since last night? (Change in %.)
8. How many new visitors? (in percent.)
9. It’s possible to compare results: search engine traffic vs. direct traffic vs. referral traffic.
10. See what keywords are used in the Search box – And how many visits from search engine (Google).

That’s the 10 reasons to use Analytics, my own experience tells me that Analytics is the best service on the web, for keeping track of your blog, but actually this blog post, wasn’t written to get you to use Analytics. This post was created to tell you what the bounce rate is.

Bounce rate is a feature in Google Analytics, many people finds it very unclear what this feature actually does. So in a few words I’m going to explain.

So What is it? And How Is It Calculated?

A bounce rate is the percentage of people who only views one page, and then closing the browser or typing in another address in the address bar. Normally there are three reasons for that:

1. The reader, finds your site (referral, search or direct traffic) and they take a quick look at it finds out that it isn’t what he/she is looking for. Therefor he/she is closing the browser. (Negative bounce rate.)
2. Your site doesn’t deliver what’s needed, it isn’t informative. (Negative bounce rate.)
3. He/she read the the latest blog post on the frontpage and then leaved. (Positive bounce rate.)

Of course there’s other reasons why the person is leaving without clicking through your site and only giving the blog one page view.

In the first case, there’s nothing to change, you can’t deal with that. If it isn’t what they are looking for they leave. This is also the most unlikely think that happen.

Second case, you can do something. You can write better blog posts. Maybe a better design, just look what can I improve here? Then you have the answer, maybe let others take a look, then they can tell you what to improve.  Always remember that you’ve to work effectively on your content, your layout placement of your pictures etc.

It may not only be the informativity(can you say that? LOL) of your blog, maybe you generate great content, and it’s being read, but you need links in you blog posts, if you’ve got links in your blog posts, people will be able to navigate within the blog post, that’d make it a lot better. Then they might go to another of your blog posts (this is called internal linking.)

It may be a lot easier to implement links in your blog posts if you’ve a lot of articles, then it would be a lot easier to create links that match. If you link to other posts, they’ll also increase its value (wearing Google’ss glasses)

One rule tells us that you have to make the first impression in eight seconds, so you have eight seconds to get the reader staying on your site. So you’ve to make a good first impression in eight seconds – In eight seconds you can do a lot:

• Read a headline
• Read a brief-description of the blog post
• Evaluate the quality of content, layout, navigating

That’s pretty much what you need to do, to keep your bounce rate down – And that’s the best thing to do, now bounce rate isn’t everything. You should take more time on the “how long time does the user stay on my site” feature, keep that as high as possible.

That’s all from now – Remember to watch me on UStream tonight! DaneBlogger’s Live Show!