Efficient Blogging

How to make more money as an affiliate

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How to make more money as an affiliate

These are three strategies that have served me well and helped me dramatically increase the earnings of my blogs.

  1. Always look to see whether a site has an affiliate program

As I’ve mentioned before, you should start getting in the habit of always checking to see whether the company you’re linking to has an affiliate program. You’ll probably be surprised at how many companies do have an affiliate or referral program of sorts. Start by checking the home page for a link to an affiliate’s page, and if you don’t find one, definitely follow up with an email.

I’ve learned that some companies have them but don’t advertise them and keep them private. Then some poor companies don’t even know what they are, and that gives you the opportunity to explain it to them and possibly be the first affiliate.

Just recently, I did this with a small company. I loved the service that it offered and was already promoting it on my site, but I asked about the affiliate program and after a nice email exchange, the company ended up creating one just because I asked. It took maybe 30 minutes of work on my part and allowed me to turn those links I already had on my site into money-earning affiliate links.

  1. Search CJ.com for ideas

One of my favorite ways to find new affiliate programs (and companies, for that matter) that I wasn’t aware of is to search through CJ’s list of advertisers.

Once you log in, click “Get Links” from the home page.

affiliate link image 1

Next, you’ll see a categorized list of advertisers:

affiliate list of advertisers

You should first find the most relevant categories and click to see what unknown advertisers or affiliate programs are available to you.

affiliate categories

I regularly scour these listings and click and investigate any new companies that show up.

Just click the name of the company to get a more detailed description of what it does and offers as well as a link to the home page.

Just from the list above, I’m already getting some ideas for my wedding blog (if I had one). I see photo-stamps, which would be an awesome idea for a post. What better way to customize your wedding invitation than to use a postage stamp with a photo of the happy couple?

Also, “My M&Ms” I understand allows you to create your own custom color combination of M&Ms. This would be perfect on the tables at a wedding reception or in goodie bags.

Each of these options is an interesting article on its own, but even if you didn’t want to write articles specifically about these products, you could write something like “10 Ways to Customize Your Wedding” and find eight other clever ideas. (You could find these in five minutes on Pinterest.)

A list like this that just happens to mention a few interesting products could work very well since it’s something readers want to share and since you have some affiliate links included, you have a chance to make some sales, as well.

  1. Pull top posts in analytics and search CJ for affiliate links you can insert

This is my favorite way getting more out of my blog. Go to Google Analytics and then on the left sidebar click Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

affiliate top google analytics

You will see a list of your posts and pages on your site with the most traffic. This is a great place to begin looking for affiliate-linking opportunities.

After all, these pages are getting traffic, so doesn’t it make sense you should first focus your energy there?

Unless you stay on topic more than most bloggers I know, some of these posts will veer slightly off topic, and they may not fall into the category you searched for in CJ in the previous step. If not, then search for the appropriate category or use the search bar and see what comes up.

Next, ask yourself, why people are visiting the page. If you can understand their intent, then it will give you some great ideas on products that may be helpful for them.

Years ago, I created a post on one of my blogs called something like “Bible verses about death.” After doing this exercise, and from reading the comments, it dawned on me that many of the visitors were coming to the page looking for verses to use in a eulogy they were working on.

I did some digging and discovered an ebook that helped people write a great eulogy. And it had an affiliate program. I then put a link in the post just mentioning it as a potentially helpful resource. And it was, and people bought it, and I started making a little money from a post that hadn’t really earned anything before.

A warning about affiliate marketing:

Stay pleasant and genuinely try to help your readers with the products you promote. And if you don’t or wouldn’t use it yourself, don’t promote it.

I have found that the most success in affiliate marketing comes from looking for win-win situations. When you find a product that will really help your readers, you’re on to something. If you’re just pushing something on them because it pays a large commission, you will quickly chase all your loyal readers away.

Your job is to help make your readers’ lives better, and the more you can do that, the more success you will have. This really applies to all aspects of blogging.

“You can get everything in life you want if you will just help others get what they want.” -Zig Ziglar

How I made an extra $1000/month with 5 minutes of work

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How I made an extra $1,000/month with 5 minutes of work

Ok, this is a bit of a sensational chapter title, and just like The 4-Hour Work Week isn’t a literal guide to a four-hour work week but rather a guide to move you in that direction, this chapter’s goal is to show you a technique that will move you in that direction.

Even so, this technique did literally yield a bump of $1,000/month for me with just a few minutes of work. So, I hope you can use it to your advantage, as well.

I used Adsense to accomplish this, but in theory, any CPC ad network can yield the same results.

How it Works

Start by going to your top 10 most trafficked articles and see who’s showing up as advertisers. You may want to refresh the page a few times to see if different advertisers show up.

popular article advertisers

As you can tell from this image, taxrates.com seems to be paying for advertising with Google on my site. What we now want to do is go over to their site.

Of course, don’t click the ad since that’s click fraud. Just type it into your browser window.

Now look around and see if the site has an affiliate program. Oftentimes, sites have links to the affiliate program at the bottom of the page. If you don’t find one, send an email to ask whether they have one.

My biggest success with this method was from one of my highly trafficked pages. It was a small company that was extremely relevant to the post, and it did have an affiliate program. So I signed up, added an affiliate link to the post, and immediately started earning about $1,000/month just from those few minutes of work.

How to get custom-sized Adsense units on your blog

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How to get custom-sized Adsense units on your blog

Just recently, the Adsense team quietly rolled out custom-fit Adsense units which means, as you can guess, that you can create a custom height and width of your ad unit.

All you need to do is to create a new ad unit, and when you do, you will notice the site now has the custom option, just select that and you’re off to the races.

The pros of using custom-sized ads

The first pro is they will likely look better. Unless you designed your blog around the common ad sizes, there are probably places where you have ad units that just don’t quite fit as well as they could or you’d like. As a result, maybe they don’t look as nice as one that fits well.

Second, they will help fight ad blindness. Adsense units haven’t really changed their look in the past decade and so, almost everyone, including your grandma, can quickly identify them as ads and, consequently, will pay little attention to them. You now have the ability to break out of those old standard units and create a new size and shape that integrates nicely with your blog and may get more interaction from the readers.

The cons of using custom-sized ads

Your ads will almost exclusively be text ads. Since banner advertisers only create so many different sizes (300×250, 728×90, and 160×600 are the most common), you can bet you’ll see very few image ads in the 436×278 ad unit you created.

Because of the previous point, your earnings may suffer. Like everything, this is definitely worth testing to see if it legitimately hurts your earnings or not, but the Adsense folks do issue a warning that your earnings may drop when using these units.

I’ve used custom Adsense units as long as I’ve had access to them, and after testing on my site, I found no measurable earnings drop, and they fit better and looked better, so I’ve stuck with them.

How to find good keywords for your blog posts

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How to find good keywords for your blog posts

One of the essential elements of SEO for bloggers is to have a keyword phrase that you’re targeting with your blog posts. It’s OK not to target a phrase with every post, but if you want to get traffic from the search engines, it’s wise to focus on keywords for at least half of your blog posts.

Strategically working this keyword into your title without sounding like a goofball is an art that requires a lot of practice, but the more you do it, the better you get at it. And with many blogs getting more traffic from social media than from Google, it’s a good idea to focus on creating a title that’s catchy and will do well on social media while including a keyword.

Finding Keywords

As far as finding keywords, I really like wordstream.com/keywords. It allows you to get 30 free searches to see if you like it.

I also still like and use wordtracker.com as my go-to site for keyword ideas.

Once you have your tool, you’ll want to search very generic and broad terms about your topic. Pay close attention to the long-tail (more than three to four words) phrases, because these are almost always going to be easier to rank for.

I often like to combine two to three long-tail phrases to create my title because it gives me an opportunity to rank for all three of them.

For example:

When I was creating an article that was going to be listing a bunch of budgeting spreadsheets, I began my keyword research by searching for “budgeting spreadsheet.” It was clear there were a ton of people searching for that phrase, but what was exciting was that there were a ton of long-tail related keywords, as well.

I noticed these long-tail phrases:

  • Free budgeting spreadsheet
  • Household budgeting spreadsheets

I then combined them and added a number to make it a list to create my keyword-targeted title “10 Free Household Budgeting Spreadsheets”.

After getting some links to this post, I not only began  ranking for these longer phrases, but over time, I began to rank for the original phrase “budgeting spreadsheet,” as well.

How to come up with blog post ideas

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How to come up with blog post ideas

I have a variety of methods I use to come up with blog post ideas, but these are some of my favorites:

  1. Ask Amazon

If you head over to Amazon.com, select “books” from the search bar and start by typing in a variety of basic and more specific topics that fall into your niche to get some ideas.

As you dig around, you may find a bunch of books with titles that may give you some great blog post ideas. Oftentimes, a book title could just as easily turn into a huge resource blog post you could write.

blog post ideas amazon

For example, if I follow this “dog training” thread, I find books titled:

  • 14 Days to a Well-Behaved Dog
  • How to Raise the Perfect Dog
  • 101 Dog Tricks
  • How to Housebreak Your Dog in 7 Days
  • Training Crazy Dogs
  • How to Raise a Puppy

With a little tweaking and research, I could create blog posts out of each of these. And the great news is that you already know these are in-demand topics because they rank so high on Amazon.

  1. Check out related magazine covers

Magazine editors spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure what articles will draw in new readers. They post the best ones on the cover of each issue.

  1. Read other blogs and websites

This is especially important if your niche has lots of changes like cell phones or politics. But even if you’re writing about a more evergreen topic like gardening, it’s still good to visit other websites, blogs, videos, etc. to get ideas.

  1. Write about what bothers you

I don’t do this often enough, but showing emotion and your human side is always a good way to connect with readers. And one of the best ways is to write about what frustrates you. Be it how GMOs are destroying our food, how Rand Paul is so much better than the other politicians, how wrong it is to cut down trees, or any other topic that people get passionate about.

Writing about topics you care about will certainly offend some and you’ll lose some readers, but at the same time, it will add a much stronger bond with you and your followers.

  1. Reader questions

If you have a contact form or your email address listed on your contact page (which I recommend having and Contact Form 7 is a great plugin for that), then you’ll get questions from readers.

And when you get a question, you can bet that many other readers have that same exact question. Not only will these make great and relevant blog posts, but they also show your readers you’re listening.