Using blogs for your affiliate marketing efforts
Mike Paetzold back once again for day 3 of my stay here while on The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour . I am traveling from blog to blog across the internet stopping for a week at a time. Hope you are enjoying my series here on affiliate marketing. Feel free to leave your comments as you may just win a prize.
First a quick review of what has been covered so far.
- Day 1 – Affiliate Marketing – The tools of the trade
- Day 2 – Creating or setting affiliate landmines
Now today we will discuss using blogs for your affiliate marketing. This is a topic near and dear to my heart and I may be just a bit prejudiced abut the topic because I am an avid blogger.
Blogs are one of the great ways to take advantage of the free traffic available from the search engines. The downside is that it takes content and that can involve work. Not a subject that some people want to hear about.
The big advantage though is that once the work or content is created it can continue to draw traffic for days, months and even years. When you think about that the return on your effort makes it well worth the effort.
Here are 4 ways that you can use blogs to improve your affiliate marketing.
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Direct promotions in conjunction with your email marketing.
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Product reviews
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How to’s
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Credibility or authority
Now lets look closer at each one.
Direct promotions
Email spam filters have become tougher and tougher to get your messages through and often the words you would like to use in your promotion will trigger spam filters. If they can’t see your email they obviously can’t act on it.
Here is where a blog can help you. Add your promotion to the blog because you can use the hot trigger words like free, auto pilot and such terms that would trip up your email with the spam filters. Just use a teaser in your email then link directly to the blog post.
You can say exactly what you want there without fear of the filters.
Reviews
Product reviews done properly can be a very effective pre-sell device. Give an unbiased review of a product showing the good and the bad points with a call to action.
Because blogs allow interaction you can gather outside confirmation through the comments which will be added social proof for the product.
Finally you should be able to rank well for the product name or product name review and get extremely targeted traffic. This traffic already has an interest in the product and is just looking for validation of the ourchase before they decide to take action.
Training
Blogs can be an excellent way to supply your followers with training so they can consume the products you promote.
For example last week when I visited Tony Tezak Says.. I was writing about list building. When I am explaining creating the 3 page web site that is the perfect place to make a recommendation for my favorite web host. When I talk about autoresponders I can easily add and I strongly recommend Aweber because of their excellent delivery and these features …
These little landmines can easily help you sell products or services with out really selling. Because you have been providing quality information they trust your recommendations and are more likely to follow it.
Credibility or Authority
Blogging can help people to know, like and trust you because of the quality of the information you have provided. This goes a long way to creating the relationship for them to trust your recommendations.
As Jeffrey Gitomer says in “The Sales Bible”…
All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends and all things being NOT so equal, people STILL want to do business with their friends.
Use your blog to create those friendships so people will want to do business with you.
Those are 4 ways that blogs can help your affiliate marketing effort. To get a complete tutorial on setting up WordPress to be a search engine magnet check out WordPress Made Easy.
Thats all for this lesson. Tomorrow we will discuss using content for your affiliate marketing.
About the author
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Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs. Currently you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.
You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. |
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Tagged with: Affiliate Marketing • auto pilot • Bald Guy • Blogger • Conjunction • Credibility • Downside • email marketing • Fear • Free Auto • free traffic • Hot Trigger • Marketing Efforts • Marketing Product • Marketing Promotions • Marketing Tools • search engines • Spam Filters • Time Hope • Tools Of The Trade
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing • Guest
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I made a prior comment, but somehow got the capcha wrong. Maybe my eyes are failing me, but I want to share my opinion that using the capcha is a mistake. I normally would not have bothered to try again. And am only doing so to communicate this message.
Mike has excellent information in this blog article. Keep up the good work, Mike!
Great explanations about how to use blog(s) for affiliate marketing. Blogs are taken over the marketing through websites for many reasons. Easy of managing a blog is certainly one.
Fred