Effects of News and Viral Sites on Affiliate Marketing

Compared to evergreen content, newsy content characteristically always have a very short life span. If you are unable to quickly take advantage of the moment, you hardly stand a chance while doing affiliate marketing on a viral website. Some kind if dilemma if you ask me! Characteristically, news sites tend to get more views on their home page. For that reason, it is best to highlight your best promotions on the home page. News content is not entirely useless for affiliate marketing. They are most effective in promoting deals which are time bound and hot, exact same way the news itself could be hot. You can always try to make the deal hot news and it gets attention and clicks that way.

Let’s say for example a dealer is offering a 20% discount on a certain product, instead of just plastering the promotional banners all over your website, you could write a news article alerting your audience of this once in a while offer to buy a good quality product at a very reduced price. You get your commission as a marketer if in your news promo, you add an affiliate link to the product from the dealer to enable them easily secure the offer. Many marketers rely on same strategy for pre-order and product launch announcements as well as highlighting best deals during popular sales seasons like Black Fridays.

Tips for Writing SEO-Compliant Content

As every online marketer very well knows, targeted traffic is very crucial to succeeding in affiliate marketing. The more targeted traffic you can drive to your website, the more the sales you can make. Therefore, your first duty as a marketer is to explore credible ways to build traffic to your affiliate marketing website. You can’t get organic traffic if important Search Engines like Google are unable to locate your website easily then rank it for searches. That is what is technically called SEO, Search Engine Optimization and it usually takes some techniques to get it right. Part of those techniques is to have a good placement for your website on Google SERP pages. If you do that correctly, you will attract more visits, which is good for affiliate marketing, especially if it is targeted. SEO is a very important success factor in affiliate marketing and it all starts with the content. By using these tips, they can help you to go a long way to create content that is search engine friendly.


 
Here are some of the techniques you need to get your content ranking high on SEO.

Choose Your Keywords Correctly: First you must decide on your keywords depending on the niche business you have settled for. This is where keyword research comes in. This you can do by using Google web technology tools to find keywords relevant to your affiliate marketing niche. Before writing a content, you should always have your chosen keywords in mind because every post must contain one or more of your chosen keywords for effects.

Target One Keyword at a time: You can’t afford to be aimless with your content creation. For that reason, every piece of content you create should have a clear purpose with a keyword as its unique identity. For best results, each article or piece of content should target one main keyword even if with some expertise, you may choose to add a few secondary keywords which help to capture clusters of long tail keywords related to your main keyword.

Use the chosen Keyword in Important parts of the Content: What counts here is to try to add the keyword in the right places on the content. Experts recommend that you place your keyword most preferably in the title, in the first paragraph, in the last paragraph, and in between. Adequate care must however be taken not to stuff your content with keywords as Search Engines like Google are now smart enough to detect such gimmick. If they do, they could penalize you severely for it. It pays to also include keywords in the alt-text of images.

Use Hierarchy in your Content: If you want to make your content easy to find by visitors, you must use hierarchy in it. This involves the use of Headers and Sub-Headers to show relationships between the different sections of your content. When visitors find it relatively easy to find and navigate your content, it makes them happier. The happier your site visitors are with your content, the more likely they are to stick around to view and hopefully click on your affiliate promotions. Search Engines too also love Headers because Headers provide them useful clues which help the Search Engines to better understand what your content is all about.

Build Internal and External Links: Link building is important because, the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to any content is an important ranking factor used by foremost Search Engines like Google. Therefore, when writing a new content, you must endeavor to find older content that is relevant to your current content and add links pointing at them. It is not smart to just embark only on promoting your affiliate marketing links. Using appropriate links also helps to promote your older content. Once you complete any article, it helps to also link to it from some of your older content making sure you use the main keyword in the anchor text of the internal link.


 

Popular Variants of Affiliate Marketing

The question is often asked by newbie marketers, how many variants of affiliate marketing are there? That question always leads many people to wondering whether there is more than one type of affiliate marketing. Indeed there is even though most established marketers argue otherwise claiming there isn’t really any distinction. For newbies in the business, it helps just to establish a little distinction hoping the information can help them to know where they are and what approach they need to succeed faster. For their benefit, let us limit our discussion to just two types of affiliate marketing.

Product Centric Affiliate Marketing and Content Centric Affiliate Marketing


 
What exactly do these mean?

1. Product Centric Affiliate Marketing

In real practice, most affiliate marketing efforts are traditionally built around a product/service. All that is required is to simply identify a product/service you like then use different marketing channels to promote it. One of these channels is to build a website around the product or niche the product belongs to then promote it like mad. Alternatively or in addition, you can build social media pages or groups around this product/service, buy ads on Facebook and Google, create email marketing, and sales funnel all to drive sale to this product/service to enable you earn handsome commissions. To maximize earnings, you could be doing this for multiple products and services simultaneously.

Also you could build dozens of small niche websites each targeted at the product/service you are selling. Even if you don’t have a website of your own, you can just buy ads from Social Networks, Search Engines, and other traffic sources to drive traffic to your affiliate products and services. The main business of a product centric affiliate marketer therefore is to build a business around simply selling a product/service through concerted promotional efforts.

2. Content Centric Affiliate Marketing

This is the second variant with some slight difference. As a Content Centric Affiliate Marketer, all you do is to build an audience by creating regular content online then use affiliate marketing as one of the ways to monetize your content creation. This is what most bloggers to online to earn a living. Your passion here is to share your content and build your brand.  Affiliate marketing is just one way you can make money from that passion. Assuming you write a very popular blog online with a high traffic of visitors. All you need do is to display banners and text ads around your blog posts to catch the attention of visitors to your blog. When these visitors click on these ads and or buy products through your links, you earn a commission. Good business no doubt but you must have an informative, educative and entertaining content to share regularly to keep the visitors coming. The advent of popular social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook which make it relatively easy to share content and photos has helped to revolutionize content centric affiliate marketing around the world.

It must be noted that nothing in the business restricts anyone to any of these two methods absolutely. In fact, it pays better to combine both if you can. A combination of both however requires some experience. As you go deeper and become more experienced in affiliate marketing, you will at some point find it very profitable incorporating the two approaches in your marketing strategy.

 

Effective Tips to Repurpose Your Blog Content

These days, many online marketers routinely blog for business! That is digital marketing. Digital marketing is a highly technical and very competitive business. In digital marketing, there are always innovations and new methods of reaching your audience as we all learn what works and what doesn’t at least for today. The growth horizon is unlimited. What works tomorrow may be different. Blogs are an excellent way for companies to educate their target audience, build relationships with potential customers, and position themselves as industry thought leaders. One drawback which many bloggers at times overlook is that even if your blog content is very good, it could get lost in the archives once newer content is posted. You may not easily come up with new content to continually replace the good ones. That is one real problem you can overcome by exploring ways to repurpose your blog.

Repurposing your blog content can help it reach a new audience, resonate with them in a new way, and drive leads. That is what most bloggers want to happen and you too can make it happen by repurposing your own blog.

These here 5 tips are very effective for repurposing blog content to bring in more traffic and convert more leads. You may add others which work for you if you have considerable blogging experience.

Don't fix what isn't broken: Performance is the key here. If you manage to have a good blog post that performs well over a long period of time, let it be. You may write additional follow-up blogs that link back to the original to drive additional traffic, but don't be afraid to keep sharing a well-performing blog if it's evergreen content. When a blog post is doing well, just leave it to keep doing well.

Continually update your blog information: Quality content always holds the key to good blog performance. Once you identify a blog post that does really well, but the information is outdated, you can update it with recent information. That way, you can continue to share and promote the piece, while having it remain timely and relevant to your audience.

Change the format: Blogging trends determine what readers prefer to see. So, over time, you can consider turning your written content into a video, infographic, or even podcast which can engage a new audience. Some users respond better to visual content than written content, so it's important to create content for that audience as well.

Build spokes off your hub: Literally speaking that is. This is one great technique that works with deeper exploration of a good content. If you have a blog post on a major or in-depth topic, you can use that as a "hub" off which to build "spokes." You can then write related posts and link them back to the original post. This helps extend the lifespan of the original post, builds referral traffic, strengthens SEO, and gives you quick ideas for creating quality content.

Tinker with the size of your content: You may decide to expand or shrink your content. If you have very long or very short content, you can easily repurpose it. For example, if you have a blog that offers 5 tips as this one, you can make a separate blog out of these 5 tips. You may also decide to break the post into 5 separate blogs using infographics, visuals, and more by expanding on the individual tips separately. It works the other way, too. If you have a longer blog, or other long-form content, you can rewrite it shorter for better understanding. 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Spend More Time Promoting Content than Creating it

As most bloggers know, quality and consistency are more important than quantity when it comes to content. Such good content takes time and other valuable resources to create. Even if you spend time creating very good content and people don’t get to know about it, you are simply wasting valuable time and efforts. That is where content promotion comes into the mix. Many experts believe from practice and experience that it is best to “spend 20% of your time creating new content and 80% of your time promoting it.”

If you blog, no doubt you are aware that writing and publishing content is very time-consuming. It does not end there. You must explore credible ways to get your blog out there for readers to find fairly easily. It is imperative therefore for you to find the best outlets to share and promote all the content you worked so hard to create. That is a logical expectation but sadly, not many bloggers explore this strategy to the fullest. It helps to know what social media or content-sharing platforms your targeted audience can be found. Google search techniques come in very handy here.  With it, you can get to know your target buyers’ online habits. That information will enable you to develop a potent strategy to reach them on the social media platforms they can be found in record numbers. A focused content promotion strategy will help you work smarter, not harder. You get better results that way.
 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Create the Content Your Readers Want

 Content! Content!! Content!!! That’s what brings readers to your blog. Depending on the nature of the blog, you’ll find that readers want to be entertained or educated. Highly successful bloggers know that and invest their time and effort to create focused content to meet their readers’ needs. They know that when your content is good, educating, informative and entertaining, readers keep coming back in good numbers. That is exactly what online marketers want to happen and their businesses do make something out of this traffic.

As most bloggers know, quality and consistency are more important than quantity when it comes to content. That is why it profits many bloggers highly if they commit to producing high-quality, relevant content on a consistent basis which their readers will come to depend on for a regular cadence of fresh content. Doing that consistently and over time, you’ll manage to build a loyal following of readers who are always hungry for more. The more good quality content you dish out to them, the more they keep coming back for more. That keeps the traffic in regular inflow and it benefits your business no end.

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Contract Content

 As an influencer marketer, you may not be a good content creator yourself but you can get others to do it for it. Blogging is all about content, good, current and relevant content and that takes some work. If you can’t do a good job of it yourself, not to worry, there are many professionals out there ready and available to do it for you. Many influencers are available to hire on a freelance basis to produce signature digital content on a brand’s behalf. Keeping up with the constant need for new, engaging branded content is sometimes not achievable with internal resources. 

That makes it imperative to bring in influencers to help with photography, writing and videos. The more the merrier and the sky’s the limit. If you hire a good influencer with credible online reputation, they can cross promote any resulting material from their working for you in their own platforms. That becomes an added bonus which inevitably helps to greatly increase your own reach. That scenario to me looks very exciting if you factor in the resultant effects.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

For the sake of my small business, I blog. Maybe, you blog too for same reasons. These days, nearly everyone who is doing business online blogs. Many people blog for one main reason, business exposure. Everyone else blogs for business exposure and customer attraction. Business exposure is what everyone blogs for. Besides updating your small business blog with fresh content that resonates with your website visitors, contributing articles to other blogs can further enhance your brand’s image. That is what is known as guest blogging. It attracts some good measure of exposure when properly done. Guest blogging offers several benefits which include:

– Building your reputation as an expert in your chosen field.
– Introducing you to industry leaders and influencers in your business field.
– Helping you increase the social media following of your business.
– Increasing the exposure of your brand.
– Providing the opportunity to link back to your business website.
– Helping your Search Engine ranking for SEO benefits.


 

6 Techniques to Blog Like a Pro

According to online marketing experts, nearly everyone now blogs to support their businesses. That is content marketing. You may be aware that blogging and creating other types of online content can provide a big boost to your small business marketing strategy. However, be informed that it takes a lot of planning to actually make content work toward your main business goals. If you are already into it or you want to commence blogging, there are blogging techniques you can deploy to get results like a pro. Here are some of such techniques.

01. Create Content That Gets Real Traffic and Links: The essence of blogging is to get traffic to your business. This you can do by using effective ways to increase links to your blog and improving your reach. That means you must always put a very good content out there. You can improve this content to make it more shareable particularly on Social Media.

02. Use Your Blog to Improve Your Business’s Online Reputation: The fierce battle for reputation is what makes online marketing tick. It is your business reputation that contributes largely to bringing customers to your business again and again. For that reason, no matter where you blog, you must pay particular attention to reviews and feedbacks relating to the content you are sharing. That helps you to monitor and work to improve on what is said about your business online.  One credible way to build a good online reputation!

03. Choose and Use the Right Keywords for Your Blog Niche: This technique is as old as content marketing itself and pros always emphasize it. If you want online surfers/readers to easily find your blog content by way of organic search, you need to deploy some SEO techniques. This will require you to choose and use some relevant keywords to your blog niche. That is called optimization which could be a bit tricky at times. SEO may pose a bit of technical challenges, so, if you are unable do it yourself, you can pay experts to help optimize your blog for you.

04. Always Provide Your Readers Personalized Content: This is very important for blogging. It shows you are an expert at something which you are able and willing to share it. If you habitually share sufficient good content regularly, you quickly get many readers hooked up to your blog. Posting generalized content on your blog may not solve specific problems your readers want solved. So, finding ways to create personalized content that is useful to an exact target audience is what works to get readers/traffic to your blog.

05. Use Customer and Competitive Research to Shape Your Blogging: Here, the use of Google Analytics comes in very handy. With it, you can research on and also “spy” on your customers and competitors to know what works for them and what doesn’t. Digging into customer and competitor data can help you find out which type of content gets the best results. That way, you can redesign your own content to better their results using Google Analytics research information.

06. Get More Email Subscribers for Your Blog: This takes a bit of time to set up and to garner sufficient emails. But, once up and running, it is a very good source of reliable traffic. You can lure your readers with token gifts like eBooks to get their emails. Your blog can also be designed with email subscription options which ensure your readers actually see your blog content as soon as it is posted. With their subscribed email addresses, your blog gets right in their inboxes as soon as you make the post.

Small Business Solution: Don’t Be Content with Success

 Every small business owner wants to succeed. That is because success is great and the feeling is always good. Even at that, it doesn’t mean you should be wholly satisfied once you achieve any minor goal you set for your business. Very sadly, many small businesses always fall into a holding pattern once they’ve achieved some semblance of success. When that happens, such small businesses usually fall behind the competition and slowly become irrelevant. Small Business Experts are of the view that, it is best to stay hungry and keep that fire in your belly that got you where you are. Complacency is fatal to any small business. As your business grows and expands, it helps to keep your eyes permanently on the ball. Don’t ever forget what got you started in the first place. You can’t sustain any level of success as an entrepreneur if you take your eyes off the goal because your business has got larger and larger to the level where you adopt less hands-on approach to the business.

Always bear in mind the motivation you had to grow your business when you were just getting started. As the business grows and you are likely to need some more managers and other team members to step in and help with the day-to-day business operations, you must continue to give direction to the business. Remain the undistracted pilot no matter the level of success the business has attained. You can’t afford to be complacent at any time. If you are in charge, remain in charge and be seen and felt by everyone as the person in charge.

How to Boost Sulforaphane Content of Cauliflower

Like broccoli, cauliflower contains sulforaphane, which is easily lost through improper cooking. Boiling or blanching cauliflower causes the greatest loss of antioxidants, so your best bet appears to be steaming. Unfortunately, research has not identified ideal steaming times for cauliflower.

Moreover, research reveals different varieties of cauliflower respond differently to various levels of heat and cooking times. In one study, blanching purple cauliflower at 70 degrees C significantly increased sulforaphane content compared to 50 degrees C, while immersion time had no significant influence. In Roman cauliflower, on the other hand, both temperature and immersion time played a role. 

Research shows steaming broccoli for three to four minutes is ideal, so I'd suggest using this as a general starting guideline for cauliflower as well. You can also boost the sulforaphane content of your cauliflower (as well as broccoli and other members of the cabbage family) by eating it with a myrosinase-containing food.

Facts Credit: mercola.com