Our Top Wordpress Plugins
We are utilising more Wordpress plugins as we get better at webdesign and want to add more functionality to our websites. We thought we’d write a review of the ones we’ve used so far.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We have seen an influx of spam comments to our site and this plugin has helped get rid of them to the spam folder where we can review them to make sure they are spam.
All in One SEO Pack
This has been a great tool to help get this site to number 1 on google search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for websites to improve the amount of hits they get.
Similar Posts
Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is very useful to direct readers of your blog to other related content they may be interested in on your site. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.
Social Bookmarks
Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. You can pick from a large number of social sites which makes this plugin great.
WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This is useful for determining how much traffic you are getting and what they are doing once they get there.
Wordpress Popular Posts
Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them on a list. As you can see we use this plugin on our sidebar. It means readers can immediately see which are the most popular articles on a site.
WP125
We use this in our sidebar as well to easily manage 125×125 ads within your WordPress Dashboard. It allows you to run ad campaigns for either a specific amount of time or indefinitely.
Useful tool for affiliates – easycontentunits
As we are getting more and more into affiliate marketing we are coming across more and more useful tools. One we have come across is easycontentunits.com and we think this would be a useful tool for many affiliates. Users can use it for price comparison for a product which has multiple retailers, creating top sellers lists or to highlight similar or related products.
This site allows you to pull in links from merchants of multiple affiliate networks rather than limiting you to only include an affiliate networks own merchants. Have a look and see what you think.
Exploring PPC and PPL
Recently we have been looking at the use of PPC (Pay Per Click) and (PPL) Pay per Lead usage. Pay Per Click is a web based advertising scheme used on search engines and content websites where an advertiser will pay when a visitor to a search engine or content website clicks on the advertiser’s advert and redirects to their company page. Pay Per Lead is where the advertiser will pay per lead that is generated from a click to their website. This lead might be signing up for a newsletter or the person registering their email address for a brochure or documentation.
We have signed up to a couple of agencies and are exloring their use for the affiliate and the return that can be gained. It will be interesting to see the results over time.
We are getting there
We are still busy with our first site. We had some design questions so it has taken a little longer than we initially expected but it is now progressing at a good rate and we hope to have something live very soon. It’s been hard. At times we have thought about whether the idea was viable but as we have read on other sites you have to persevere even when the going gets tough. We think this is because we are new to this. As we get more experience we will get better at this and sites will get easier. We have even sat down together and discussed ideas for after this next site so nothing has put us off for good so far.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. So if a website contains a link to a new website or web-page then that link is called a backlink for the destination webpage.
Backlinks are important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The reason for this is that the number of backlinks is one indication of the status or importance of that website or page. The more backlinks a site has, the more popular that website is deemed to be as more people are linking to it. Search engines use backlinks as a way of determining where that website appears in the ranking on search terms. There are other factors involved but improving backlinks is one way to increase the SEO of your website.
We are just discovering backlinks and will be trying to generate some useful, genuine backlinks to our site. To find out the backlinks on a site in Google you can type the following into the search field:
links:www.affiliateproject.co.uk
Earn money online from Amazon Affiliate Program
The Amazon Affiliate Program, also known as their Associate Program is an affiliate marketing program that rewards bloggers or publishers websites up to 10% for click throughs that result in a purchase.
The program is very simple to use and offers links, banners, product images, widgets and even your own Astore.
Amazon is a trusted brand and I suspect almost every household will purchase or will have already purchased something from Amazon at somepoint in their lifetime.
Amazon is so successfull and provides very competitive prices for almost any product you can think of. This is a major benefit of using Amazon’s Affiliate Program.
Because Amazon is a trusted brand, their reputation helps promote the products on your site.
Amazon runs its own program rather than through a affiliate network. Amazon will handle all customer service, delivery and tracking of sales generated via a cookie, however I think the cookie only last 24hours.
On the plus side, if you refer someone to Amazon and they purchase something else un-related, then you may earn commission for referring that customer. It’s not uncommon for people to browse and buy other products from Amazon.
There is 2 separate commission programs to choose from. The first being Classic free structure, 4% commission of all qualifying products sold from referrals
The second being Performance free structure, earn from 5 – 10% depending on how many units you sell but has some limits.
The choice of which program will depend on the product you are intended to promote. For example a book that only costs £10-15 at 5% commission is not going to mount up to much so the second program may work best. Now if you choose to promote a larger item, then your commission would be higher and you would probably want to consider the first program because you may not sell as many units and also the limits on your referral fee might not be as good. My tip would be to take some time to figure out how many units you expect to sell and the average commission you expect to get from those referrals.
Check back here or subscribe to our rss feed as we track our progress on using Amazon Associate Program.
Busy, busy, busy
We are hard at work at the moment trying to create our first niche site. This is keeping us very busy outside of our full time jobs and family life as we are having learn many new techniqiues and the affiliate industry. We are busy signing up to affiliate networks. We are busy writing and devloping the website which we hope will bring a good return both in visitors and revenue. We are on a steep learning curve. As we are currently developing this we can’t give too much away at the moment but once we have it up and running we will be sure to post our experiences and tips for future affiliates to follow in our footsteps. We will try to blog as much as possible as we keep on with our new site.
First Affiliate event
We’ve just signed up to go to our first affiliate event. It’s being held in London on March 26th. We found out about it on a affiliates4u forum and we look forward to meeting like minded people and others in the industry. We are hoping that we will have our first couple of sites up and running by then, hopefully making some money so we will feel like real affiliates. If you are going as well then let us know and we hope to see you there, if not, why not sign up. Details on affiliates4u which is listed in our blogroll.
UK Affiliate Census 2009 Results published
A study carried out by Econsultancy in association with Affiliate Window and backed by Affiliates4U have just released this 2009 Affiliate Census report.
More than 1000 affiliates completed this survey. The report is essential reading for those new to affiliate marketing and even good reading for existing affiliates who may need to improve on how the do things, such as which linking methods is most common and more interesting statistics about how much revenue other affiliates are making for the merchants.
True content was cited as the most important method for affiliate marketing amongst those surveyed. 36% of affiliates chose this as most important category for generating revenue.
Majority of affiliates (46%) are part-time affiliates with 34% being full time. Only 20% are hobbyists.
Credit crunch doesn’t seem to be putting affiliates off as 55% see the economic crisis as an opportunity, 30% see this as a threat to there affiliate business.
Download the report here http://econsultancy.com/reports/affiliate-census and find out more about the average affiliate including average time spent on affiliate marketing, revenue generated, volume and traffic and much more.
Linkbacks
What are linkbacks and how do they work. This is something we have just come across having added our blog to the Technorati website. Since we have done this we have some requests for pingbacks. Being new to this we were unsure what pingbacks were so having researched it we thought we’d explain what they are for anyone else new to blogging. A pingback is a form of linkback. Linkbacks come in three forms, refback, trackback and pingback. So what is the difference:-
- Refback – Visitor to linking site clicks on the link, and his browser takes him to the linked site. A Refback uses the HTTP referer header to discover incoming links. Whenever a browser traverses an incoming link from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor) the browser will send a Referer header indicating the URL from where the user came.
- Trackback – A trackback is a way of letting a website know that you are referencing them or linking them in your posts. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles.
- Pingback – This is similar to a trackback. The pingback system is a way for a blog to be automatically notified when other blogs link to it.
So we received pingbacks from some sites because they linked to our Technorati link so we then received a pingback telling us ablog had linked to our post on Technorati.
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