Archive for 'Tools'
How To Streamline Your Affiliate Marketing on Wordpress
Posted on 07. May, 2009 by Derrick.
I know its been a couple of months, but I’m happy to say I’ve finally finished a new video on an excellent wordpress plug in I use on all my websites to help me streamline my affiliate marketing, it called Ninja Affiliate, and it basically does 3 things very well all within the Wordpress Admin panel:
- Makes it quick and easy to add affiliate links to your wordpress blog including a very powerful feature that automatically converts your keywords into affiliate links
- Creates professional redirect links
- Cloaks your affiliate links preventing affiliate theft.
you can learn all about these features in this short video I have made explaining all these points, and why I’ve invested Ninja Affiliate
Please feel free to leave any feedback or comments below!
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Preview of Alvin Phang’s Atomic Blogging 3.0 System
Posted on 05. Mar, 2009 by Derrick.
I’ve been out of action for the last 2 weeks due to my offline work and projects and have just found some time to make a new post. Over the last 3 months I have done a lot of research on the net for blogging and internet marketing resources. One of the resources I have come across is Atomic Blogging by Alvin Phang. I signed up to his mailing list, and ever since have received various emails including his recent engagement!. .
In the last few days I have received a number of emails with regards to his latest version of Atomic Blogging. Having decided that blogging is definitely something I want to continue, I read with interest what his Atomic Blogging would provide me.
The system he sells inlcudes his
- Blogging Guide 3.0
- Atomic Blogging 3.0 Wordpress Plug-in
- Atomic Blogging Nuclear Nodule Pack (A collecton of Wordpress plug-in’s Alvin Recommends)
- One Month Free Access to his Atomic Blogging VIP Membership including his Atomic Blogging 4.0 Wordpress theme and 500 Fresh New PLR Articles every month.
- Interview with Yaro Starak
- Private/ Master Label Rights for the Barking Traffic Videos (14 Videos), Adsense Revenue Exposed and Bloggers Guide To Profits ebooks plus eWriter Pro Software for writing ebooks.
Limited Time Bonuses:
- Atomic Blogging Keyword Research Tool Version 2.0
- Interview with John Chow and Carl Ocab
So after reading what the package included, besides the actual Atomic Blogging 3.0 Guide, the key products I found of interest were the Atomic Blogging 3.0 Wordpress Plug-in, as I have not come accross this plug-in before. Most social bookmarking plug-ins I found only add the functionality of making it easy for others to social bookmark your article, but don’t actually submit your article to the social bookmarking sites. If you have ever submitted your own article to Digg or any other social bookmarking site, you will know it can easily take 10-15 minutes to do. This software submits your article to up to 15 social bookmarking sites everytime you publish a new post! This will definitely be a timesaver and help with traffic.
The other product is the Atomic Blogging 4.0 Wordpress theme. I still haven’t found the perfect theme, but always interested to try a new one and see how well it works. Also the Atomic Blogging Nuclear Module Pack would be very useful as I’m constant looking for new plug-ins to provide more functionality to my blog, so hopefully there will be a few new plug-ins I can use here.
The final product that looks very useful is the Atomic Blogging Keyword Research Tool. I’m only just beginning to realise how important keyword research is, so again, I look forward to test this one, and find out how useful it is compared to other tools I have used.
Anyway I’ve decided to buy the Atomic Blogging 3.0 Pack, and look forward to do a more detailed review, once I get a chance to study the Atomic Blogging Guide and test out the Plugin’s and software. If you are already a user or have any comments to add please feel free to comment below!
Click here to check out Atomic Blogging 3.0
Popularity: 100% [?]
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How To Increase Your Click Through Rates And Maximize Profits From Affiliate Programs On Your Wordpress Blog.
Posted on 11. Feb, 2009 by Derrick.
Before I get to the meat of the article, I thought I would first define a few terms just in case you’re a newbie: If you already have some knowledge in this area, feel free to skip the definitions and go straight to rest of the article.
DEFINITIONS
What is an affiliate program?
An Affiliate program is simply a program you can join that allows you to sell specific products for a commission. Usually when you join such a program, you will be provided with a specific affiliate web link to the product sales page. This allows the Affiliate Program to track referrals to their site from your link, and thus compensate you for any referrals that actually lead to a sale. This is probably one of the easiest and fastest ways to create an income online, as you don’t need to create, deliver or provide support for a product - you just recommend it.
What is a Click Through Rate?
A click through rate or click through ratio is simply the number of times a link is clicked on and goes to the linked web page over the number of times that link is shown within a specified timeframe. (Also known as “impressions”). For example if this article was visited 100 times, and one of the specific links were clicked thru 20 times to another webpage - then the click thru ratio would be 20%.
THE PROBLEM
So if you’re an affiliate marketer, ie an independent sale’s agent for specific products, you would normally make your sales through having a website with links to these products. There are many other ways to do this such as creating advertisements that link straight to the their sales page (and therefore not requiring you to have a website) as well as email marketing (which requires you to build a list). For the purposes of this article I’m focusing on people who have set up a website or blog and primarily write articles that include links to the products they are recommending.
Most people who do this, simply insert their affiliate links into their blog or website: They simply copy and paste the affiliate link into the post. Now here’s the problem. Most affiliate links look horrible and meaningless as they are computer generated and created primarily to produce a unique link so your referrals can easily be tracked. Here is an example of how these affiliate links can appear:
http://www.AffiliateProgram.com//a.php?a=CD13798&b=25367&d=0&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4110&s1=&s2=&s3=&s4=&s5=
Of course this is not the link that will be in the text - however this horrible link will show up in the status bar. (usually at the bottom of the web browser). They appear when you hover over the link - revealing the address of where the link will take you. Because the link is meaningless and looks ugly, many people will choose not to click through and therefore you are losing opportunities for sales. These are visitors who have somehow found your website as a result of the the time you have spent with traffic generating strategies. You can stop losing these potential sales.
THE SOLUTION:
There is a way to minimize the loss of these click throughs and that is by creating professional looking and meaningful links. This is done by creating a redirect ie - creating a nicer looking link that redirects to the actual affiliate link. Here are some examples of such links:
http://www.YourDomainName.com/AffiliateProgram
http://www.YourDomainName.com/recommends/AffiliateProgram
http://www.YourDomainName.com/Goto/AffiliateProgram
Compare these links to the one previously. Which would you prefer to click thru on? As you can see, these links look much more professional, meaningful and therefore more likely to be clicked through. By creating these links you should be able to increase your average click through rate. Also since redirects conceal your affiliate ID’s within the actual affiliate link - you are also stopping people from stealing your commissions by removing your affiliate ID and replacing with their own!
So how can you set these “redirects” up? I’ve been using a software that not only creates these redirects but also helps you manage and track your affiliate links within Wordpress. Normally when you use the affiliate links you have no idea how many times they are actually clicked on unless you login to each individual affiliate program and check your statistic there - This can be very time consuming if you have subscribed to many affiliate programs. This software makes it much easier to see an overall picture of how effective each of your affiliate links are - all in one place.
Besides this great benefit and helping you make more money and preventing loss of income from stolen afffiliate ID’s, the software has many other features which also help you save time and maximize your affiliate programs. For more information about Ninja Affiliate click here and watch their video on how you can do this and more.
Popularity: 73% [?]
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Directory Submission - Save Yourself Up To 179 Hours But Still Get Your Site Listed In All The Directories.
Posted on 11. Jan, 2009 by Derrick.
Just got off the phone from a friend of mine who is an SEO Expert, and he suggested using another tool to get your websites submitted to the directories. Before we go further, here is a quick summary from Wikipedia of what Directories do and why they are important in getting traffic:
‘Today submission of websites to web directories is considered as a common SEO (search engine optimization) technique to get vital back-links for the submitted web site. One distinctive feature of ‘directory submission’ is that it can not be fully automated like search engine submissions. Manual directory submission is a tedious and time consuming job and is often outsourced by the webmasters.’
If you don’t know already, back-links, or links from other sites coming to your site, is a very important variable to show search engines that you are an important site - as it is expected that the more links to your site and the better quality links - (including links that are relevant, from highly ranked sites) , the more favourable the search engines will rank you and therefore get you more traffic.
Notice also the quote said - it’s a time consuming job. I tried Directory Submitter as mentioned previously, and it took me about an hour to submit to 10 directories - very time consuming if you realise that there are 350 sites in the FREE Version of Directory Submitter, and over 1800 in the paid version. (ie it would take about 35 hours to submit to all the directories for the FREE version and 180 hours for the paid version!! (It is however worth taking a look and reading the copy of Directory Submitter to understand more about directories)
Why does it take so long? Well, to get your site listed in any Directory, you need to provide details of your website :
- URL
- Category
- Sub Category
- Title
- Description
- Keywords
So normally you would need to firstly have a list of all the directories, and then go to each directory and submit these details. VERY TIME CONSUMING.
Directory submitter allows you to firstly input this data into its database, and saves time by having the listing of all the directories within the program (with page rank, so you can start from the highest page rank(10) to the lowest(0)). You just click on the directory you wish to submit to, and it loads the page up into its inbuilt browser, and automatically copy and pastes the details you have entered previously into the directory’s site submission page.
This definitely saves time, but you still often need to select the best fitting category, as every directory has a different category system - so just looking through their category structure to find the category that best fits your site takes time, and sometimes the program doesn’t always fill in all the blanks (if the directory has additional fields etc). So that’s Why it takes time, even with the time saving features of Directory Submitter. (which probably at least cuts the time needed by half.)
So naturally I complained about the time it takes to submit to the directories to my SEO friend, and he suggested a much better option that I wasn’t aware of - Directory Maximizer - A service that will manually submit your website to the directories for you. They only charge 14cents per directory - That means instead of investing 1 hour to submit to 10 directories, I can get it done for $1.40. (And my time is definitely worth more than that! - I’m sure yours is too! 
Other advantages of using this system is:
- Increased chances of link approval as they ensure your site meets all the directory guildelines
- Live up to date reports on the progress of your submissions
- Choose how many directories to submit to - and can select by page rank
- Target multiple search terms by submitting up to 20 different tiles and descriptions
- Control the pace of the submissions - as it is better to step the submissions over a period of time (2-5 weeks), as a sudden influx of back links in a short period of time, does not look good to google.
Anyway, This definitely seems to be worth the cost, and is going to be my first job at outsourcing work that is going to make me more effective - you can take a look at Directory Maximzer here.
Have you done directory submissions? - What do you think?
Stay tuned later today, as I’ll be writing about how to write articles
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Blogging Progress Report Thursday 8th January 2008
Posted on 08. Jan, 2009 by Derrick.
Hi All,
Had a busy day today.
Here are the goals I Kicked today:
TRAFFIC GENERATION
- Sketched out my 2 ideas to generate traffic. . to be implemented in the next two weeks - I’ll reveal these when they are ready to be launched
- Left comments on about 10 blogs - One thing I have to improve is to devise a better way to keep track of these other than ticking them off on two different sheets. . I’m finding its taking me about 10 - 20minutes per blog visit and comment, so end up spending about 1-2 hours doing this.
- Submitted my site to Alexa - by the way, I checked out my Alexa Ranking a couple a days ago, and was blown away by my ranking - I’m in the top 1 Million Sites Baby!
CREATING CONTENT
- Wrote my Jan Goals Blog Entry
- Wrote this Entry
- Wrote My Preview for 3 Software Programs
- Getting my New Blog Design Ideas together
RESEARCH & STUDY
One the major frustrations of building the blog, is that there are SOOO many things I want to get done - I have so many ideas, but at the moment am limited by time and assistants (ie I have none at the moment - so I need to look into how I can get some help
- Anyway one of the things I’ve spent 2-3 hours doing today is evaluating the value of some software that should save time, improve my blog standing and make money - I’ve found three that look very useful:
- Directory Submitter - Free & Paid Version - Just submitted to 10 directories tonight
- Article Submitter - Free & Paid Version
- Ninja Affiliate - Paid Version Only - wordpress plugin to make affiliate management much easier
In my next post I’ll give a quick preview
Oh. .yeah. .and still no Moolah :). . (but that’s all according to plan 
- see my earlier post
Derrick
Popularity: 43% [?]
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MLM, Technology & Web Prosperity - Embrace or Ignore?
Posted on 02. Jan, 2009 by Derrick.
I’ve been exposed to sooo many MLM opportunities since the 1990’s that my usual response now to them is . . . bleh.
Not that I think they are bad. Its just not my cup of tea these days. I have had a few very good friends get me involved with some of these companies and one thing I have learned is that it is never as easy and simple as the hype that is used to sell them.
To be successful, as I guess it is with anything you want to be successful at, you really need to live and breath the stuff. Maybe I’m too old school? Maybe the internet and technology has changed that? I don’t know.
Anyways, why this rant?
Well, about 10 days ago I got a random spam email about this Web Prosperity company. Its been headed up by a David D’Arcangelo (who I possibly may have heard of). Apparently he headed up Wealth Mastery with Anthony Robbins. I haven’t posted earlier, due to my general weariness and healthy skeptism towards MLM’s however a few more people I know have gotten behind it independently of me, prompting me to make this post.
I Value Quality of Product / Service:
I always need to know the quality of the product before I can get behind something. At the moment they are in prelaunch, and you can’t really demo the software, which is meant to combine 9 software products into one, including autoresponder and web meeting.
I’m already paying $19/month for aweber and am extremely happy with their service - this is one company that really does customer service right, and web prosperity adds another 8 products including the web meeting (that probably would be the most useful other tool that I would be interested in) starting from $29.
My Verdict
Anyways, from a general product standpoint, it seems to be good value, but I’m waiting to see the product before I make any calls. As it Is a MLM - that is an affiliate program with multiple tiers, and if the product / service is actually good -
then it could turn out to be a great product to promote so I signed up during this pre-launch period as its FREE to do so, so there’s nothing to lose:) . anyways, if you want to hear about it from the man himself and check it out yourself click on my link here
Love to hear your thoughts & comments,
Derrick
Popularity: 16% [?]
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New Coaching Program Available For a Limited Time
Posted on 18. Dec, 2008 by Derrick.
For those of you, who have missed out on Alex Jeffreys’ coaching program, you should consider Tellman’s new coaching program here - heres also giving away one of his previous programs that sold for $3997.00 for Free, - just click through and you’ll get access to this program. . I’ll review later as well, when I get the chance to review all the videos etc
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