Thursday, January 21, 2010

Affiliate Summit - Monetize Blogs for Affiliate Marketing

Hi guys,
We had a panel to speak on monetize your blog.

  • Ben Spark - Does a photo blog - Tim Jones  - Murray Newlands 
  • Some of the basics of blogging - all the panelist use Wordpress - This is the leader
  • Make sure you set up Permalink Settings on Word press. This is where By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. A number of tags are available, and here are some examples to get you started.
  • Word press has plugs in you should use.
    • All in One SEO
    • Google XML Site Maps
    • Broken Link Checker
    • Best Posts Summary
    • Word Press Stats
    • WP Super Cache
    • WP-DB Back up
    • Askismet << a must for spam
    • WP Contact Form III
    • E-Mail Respond
    • Disqus
    • Tantannoodles Photo Updates from Flicker  
    • Tweet this << Automatically send out tweet posts
  • There are so many plug ins for word press
  • Guest Posting is a big thing in the Blog world. This where you post on someone else's blog your material and you get the back link to your site. If you get this, this could be huge for your google ranking.
  • Try to find at least 10 blogs and have all 10 blogs try to link to each other
  • Try to Link to Deep pages within the blog
  • To Monetize your Blog, you can
  • How to Plan and Grow
    • The Tighter the Niche the Better
    • Build the Community
    • Valuable Content
    • Build for the Long Term - Remember, its your readers site. Let them build it
    • Consist value for the reader
    • Movement to Video - You build a lot of trust with Video
  •  Building the Blog
    • Recommend to get customizable Template 
  • Example of Blogger that had success
    • Tricia Meyers - She was a lawyer, now full time as a mommy blogger. twitter >>@sunshinetricia, tricia@sunshinerewards.com, blog>> www.tricia.me
    • When she finds a hot topic, she gets the key word, domain, server, and wordpress development within a few hours
    • She showed her Twight Blog 
    • This blog is all about selling stuff
    • Banners
      • Look for Merchants from Affiliate Networks
      • Hot top Banners 125 X 125
      • Customize 120 X 600 works well
        • Static Banners
        • Auto Update Banners
      •  She does a lot of product reviews
      • She uses the Pop Shops - plug in for word press >> for product feeds
      • She really like Ebay affiliate because you can almost find anything there. She suggested to sign up with Ebay directly because you can get better widget and tools.
      • Also with Ebay, you get paid for every new member that signs up
      • She uses a PHP Plug In from Ebay that automatically pulls in products to page - the latest aution items - 5 items
      • She uses Widgets from Amazon - Also uses the Share A Sale Widgets
      • Other ways she is making money
This is the area I was most impressed with. Everyone is Blogging. The show focused a lot of attention toward this group of people. I plan to be one too!!
God Bless,
John
Dolphin Blog 

Tricia responded to email I sent to her and I want to put her answer in my blog post.
Here are the answers to your questions:

1. You mentioned that you got your wordpress free templates from a program / company called thesis. I searched and searched and could not find anything on this. Can you help me where to find these free templates? It’s actually not a free theme. If you want a free one that is decent, you might want to check out Cutlines (it’s what I have on the Twilight site). The one that I mainly use is DIY Themes Thesis. http://diythemes.com/  I paid the $164 to be able to use it on as many sites as I want as long as I stay a developer.

2. When you said at the mentor session, you can turn around and build a blog in 1 hour I was really impressed. I just want to make sure the steps you do are....
Topic >> Find Key Words to Build >> Get Domain >> Buy Server >> Find Wordpress Template >> Build Site and Content >> Promote Sight  To launch the site in an hour, I have a couple of cheats. One is that I already have my server. And the Thesis theme. So I just 1) find my topic, 2) buy the domain, 3) install WP on the domain along with my “set” of plugins that always use, 4) customize the keywords and the colors/logo. The first couple of times it definitely took me longer because I had to learn which plugins I wanted to use and how to customize Thesis. Now it’s just second nature. I also then link to it from my main blog so that Google will find it within 24 hours.

 

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