As an affiliate, a large number of you will use wordpress as a blogging platform or even as your core affiliate website.

The beauty of WordPress is that its totally free, comes with a great and easy to use CMS, and utilises plugins that can do just about anything you can think of.

Wordpress has a number of valuable features that you may find useful:

• Easy to change the look & feel of a site by simply changing the theme used
• Add your content quickly and easily, no HTML knowledge required
• User accounts allow you to outsource certain tasks
• Choosing the right theme ensures effective on-page SEO
• Plugins allow complicated code to be added to your site to deliver useful functionality, without any knowledge of PHP or other coding languages

But what next? What comes beyond using wordpress as the basis for your website? Google has always said that websites should be built with users in mind, naturally built sites with naturally generated links. Thus, as webmasters it is important to deliver good quality content. Content, however, is both interesting, uniquely written articles on a broad range of related topics, and functionality that users find useful. For example, the Walk, Jog, Run website [walkjogrun.net] provide running routes. It’s a free online running route planner that allows runners to see how far they have walked, jogged or run over a course.

So why is this important for affiliates? Link bait. If your website offers something that users find interesting, it will attract links from admiring webmasters. Links that are on-topic and relevant, two elements that are important in obtaining positive responses from the SE bots.

Route Finder

Another example of a site that provides a useful tool is Bikes.org.uk which has developed a Route Finder tool for cyclists, mountain bikers, walkers, runners and even sailers.

The Route Finder tool is available as a Widget, iPhone App, Android App and as a Wordpress Plugin. The wp plugin allows webmasters to embed routes into wordpress posts and pages. It is ideal for Wordpress Blogs dedicated to cyclists, mountain bikers, runners, joggers, walkers, hikers, swimmers, canoeists, sailers, motorbikers and anyone else looking for routes, trails or tracks, on roads, paths, trails or even on water.

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This being our first year as affiliates we may have missed the boat for Christmas sites, but it seems other affiliates are reaping the rewards. Christmas is a great time for affiliates and if you can catch on early to that idea for a site that will have the edge on the leading products for Christmas it can be a rewarding time of year. This is something we will look at more closely for next year. Oh well seems like Santa may not visit these two affiliates, well not this year anyway.

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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.

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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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Day 1 and we are ranked at number 4,758,080. After only 5 minutes, our blog site is joined to this community and I can already see some of our latest posts. Hopefully with more blogging to our site and automatic updates of our posts, we can improve our ranking, and hopefully this will help drive more traffic to our site.

Automatic updates of your sites blog posts can be updated to Technorati through the update services of your wordpress writing settings. Add in http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping to the update services.

Feel free to join our blog at Technorait.com.

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- What is a Blog

A Blog is a chronologically ordered series of Web site updates, much like a diary.

A blog can be many things, a diary, a review site, a photo gallery and even a marketing tool.

Blogs are good at generating high search engine rankings. This is because your content is fresh and current. This is key for any blog site that wants to attract new visits and retain existing bloggers.  Search engines give a priority to web pages that have been updated recently or has new content on the keywords being searched. A better search engine ranking means more visitors, therefore more readers and comments. This could provide a popular blog site or a review site to come back to time and time again.

There are millions of blog sites around the world and according Wikipedia, the main blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs as of December 2007.

Many people use blog sites to document changes in their life, this can be useful to share these personal details with others, like friends or family that you may not see that often.

An example site is Gizmondo.com, basically a gadget guide that brings out the nerds in many of us!!

- What is a Blogger

A blogger is the person or people who are writing the blog posts or a user that responds to the blog post/s.

- What is blogging

Blogging is a way of sharing thoughts and ideas with others. It makes the internet a better place.

Blogging and social network sites are the craze at the moment, even celebrities use these sites as a community to network with others. Businesses also use blogging to promote and build their business.

Heard about twitter, a free micro-blogging site that allows people to stay connected in real-time. Users can display updates to their network of friends via text-based posts via the Twitter website, RSS feeds, SMS text messages or through applications such as Facebook, Feedalizr, TwitterMobile, Tweetie, Twinkle and a few more.

Twitter had over 5 million visitors in September 2008 and could be a good network tool for Affiliate Marketers.

According to The Guardian there are many celebrities that are using Twitter, as this is a very popular way to communicate with your friends.

Blog sites can also make money, especially if it’s a popular invaluable resource.

The most common way to earn money from your site is from advertising. Google Adsense is a popular way to include ads to your web page. These ads can be matched to your blog content and therefore be of interest to your readers. Basically you get paid a refferal fee each time a visitor clicks on an of these ads.

Another way to make money from your blog would be from affiliate links. An example would be, a blogger is blogging about website design. He can look for popular website design software, templates, themes or anything related to website design and try and locate an affiliate program that might offer a reward (referral fee) for generating and referring business to the end merchant, so effectively the merchant sells more and the affiliate makes a commission for generating more business. Win win all-round.

Companies (merchants) have Marketing departments and they tend to have quite large marketing budgets and they may see this as a great way to drum up interest in their products and services. They use this marketing model to build up their business or promote their products. Most often they use an Affiliate network and pay only on performance, so its a risk free marketing.

A blog site provides a good means for the Customers to see others people using, commenting or reviewing products or services.

For anyone new to blogging, I would definately recommend reading the following books – Blogging for dummies and ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income.

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I heard the other day on the radio about High profile celebrities using twitter, a micro-blog site used to stay in touch with peoples day to day updates, whether it be there thoughts or something they’ve done during the day. Basically another social network site like Facebook and Myspace but more about blogging and what are you doing…

As a newbie to affiliate marketing, I’m constantly thinking about ways to improve our affiliate project site and build it up to be a useful resource for other affiliate newbies and affiliate marketers. I’ve stumbled upon other affiliate blog sites that have twitter and digg this links on their posts, so wanted to learn more about it as I can see this as a useful resource for networking.

I’m currently reading Blogging for Dummies and will research this more. Once I have a better understanding I will post more up on the social networking and blogging categories on this site. Check back here for more in the next few days.

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This book provides a useful resource for all kinds of bloggers, whether you’re blogging about a hobby or a someone doing it for a business. Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition gives you all the basics so you can get a good start. And if you’ve been around the blog a few times and want to advance to the next level, Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition even takes a look at podcasting and videoblogging.

The author’s advice in the Dummies series is aimed at getting you up and running as quickly as possible. The book explains what blogs are and what they are not. It also explains the different types of blogs, and how and why they are different from websites. The good thing is that the author looks at all the options and draws up comparison charts which show the features, cost, and options offered by various providers and software programs. This includes popular features such as the ability to display adverts and upload photos. It also gives tips on blogging and how to get the most out of your blog.

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