blog promotion

It’s been quite a long time since I wrote something on a topic that is my favorite, talking about affiliate marketing. It happened so because of me acquiring and managing AffiliateHat.com and transferring all of affiliate marketing related stuffs to that blog and focusing more on general marketing and blogging tips here in this blog. But anyway today I would like to talk about a simple affiliate marketing topic w/c is about promoting offers in blogs.

Most people make the mistake of thinking affiliate marketing in blogs is just like affiliate marketing as a whole. Totally false. In promoting in blogs, you are more toned down, laid back and careful. When you use a blog, in most cases a make money online blog, you risk your reputation, unlike in the traditional, landing page–pay per click combination wherein people would not even know (or care) your true name and personality.

Another is when promoting outside the blog, the tactic tends to be more of hardselling whereas in blog, you’d more likely have to be transparent and honest to your readers.

Last year I made a post about why some bloggers make so much w/affiliate referrals and I got a lot of responses about it. The truth is, your conversion rate would depend on how reputed you are in your industry. I see a lot of big bloggers promoting shit products and I doubt that they don’t make any money with it. Why? Because they are famous!

Another big factor is how you write your reviews. Obviously, the only good way to promote something in your blog is through product reviews. Again most people do wrong with it by stuffing their readers too much to buy the product, making it obvious that they are being biased. What happens then is that readers get annoyed and leave.

You see, things are about different when you do use your blog as a marketing tool for affiliate offers. If you are looking out to use your blog as a tool for affiliate promotions, make sure you’re not doing it wrong, or maybe you should rethink of the strategies that you would use. Remember, it takes a lot of time to build a reputation online. But it only takes a while for you to completely ruin it.

A lot of bloggers in the industry mostly talk about getting traffic flowing into blogs by doing the traditional things. Blog commenting, forum and article marketing, social media, even offline interaction. These free ways, while it has been used a lot and is certainly a great way to target visitors to your site, it’s not the only ones!

Most people don’t bother to talk about paid promotions because not a lot of people are interested spending dimes with it. But the truth is it’s actually a powerful way to drive traffic to your blog. I have used some of them here and some of them in other blogs and so far it’s really doing good. Without further ado, here they are:

PPC Marketing – Who said PPC is just for affiliate offers? After about 1 1/2 month my blog has started, I spent some $50 each in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. I am getting dead cheap clicks for every long tail keyword and I can say it really did well. The tip is that you need to make the users understand that the ad directs them to a blog of that certain topic. Use a landing page as well! Here I have a welcome page as a landing page so that new users can explore the content of my blog more and figure out how it can benefit them. Believe me folks, it converts the curious dudes into readers/subscribers.
Paid Review – While there are tons of ways on doing advertising on a blog, paid review obviously is the best. Why? Paid review targets the audience well, gives permanent backlinks, and guess what, adds kudos to your blog easily. Let’s face it, bloggers are paid to review. And I have never seen a negative review, believe me! Most of the times the blogger just recommends the site and that alone can sum it all up against other paid advertising options on blogs.
Paid Social Media – The social media days are getting more saturated. Before it’s like you can put a humor content and get tons of great responses. Now it’s different! Ok, so the idea here is to post some really nice content. Then buy 100 diggs/stumbles/reddit/propells or whatsoever. These diggs wouldn’t get you in the front page but at least they can get you traction. You are getting noticed now. If you’re submitted content is liked, then prepare your server for truckloads of traffic.
Press Release – PR (not to be confused with page rank) is something that I haven’t really utilized for my blogs. Some people however do have some success with it. A release usually costs $100 and up and it’s a high risk, high reward form of promotion. It is gonna either flop so bad or do good. Problem is that most people are tired reading a release stating “this guy started a blog about making money online”. If you’re into the IM niche, Im not sure you should use this as an option.
Sponsor a Contest – Seriously a contest can give you a lot. The quality of traffic that can come back to you depends on what you sponsor. Most users are curious on why this dude gave this prize away so if you sponsored something really nice then more likely people will pay you a visit or even a comment. Look who looks better, one who sponsored an Ipod or one who sponsored an Internet Marketing Book? 😉

There are tons of paid options but basically these are what I think the most effective. If you have some $100 to spend or a credit card, then why not try to invest in it. Quality of Traffic and targeting is what the paid advertising gives that most free promotion tactics don’t. What do you think?

Affiliate Marketing in Blogs

Paid Promotion Is The Key