Ebook Sample Content Preview:
Blogging Decisions
What is the blogosphere, really? It's a place where anyone—man, woman, child, or automated feed scraper—can slap up templates or build a site of their own and update it with useful(?) information or tales of their weekly shopping trips to their hearts content. It's both a powerful tool utilized by businesses and websites on a daily (or more often) basis and a running personal diary put up online for all to see. The blogosphere is filled with experts and novices, and people who think they are experts who are really novices. It's a mixed-bag of content and expertise, or lack thereof. It's a community experience that knows no real bounds. Or boundaries.
As such, blogs can be a boon or a bust to your affiliate program. Nevertheless, they are being touted as the fastest, easiest, most simplistic way to promote affiliate products and generate sales. But are they? Let's explore both sides of this issue.
Why Blogging Might be a Bust
Many of the very things that make blogging a 'natural' choice for affiliate promotions are what make blogging the wrong way to effectively market as an affiliate.
First of all, let's take on the very blogosphere itself. It's a crowded place. It is true that the blogosphere is filled with a variety of interests, and holds something for everyone, but in the midst of all that interest, it's increasingly hard to be found. Even the best, most prolific, and most dedicated bloggers take months and years to build a solid following. A blog is absolutely not the place to go for instant traffic.
The community aspect of blogging can be great, but couldn't it also be a bust? All that commenting and free-for-all outside commentary might work against you and discredit you. And you need to think about how valuable that following is. This will largely depend on your spectrum of product offerings. If you have a variety of products that a customer might want to come back for, or an upgradeable product suite, staying in touch with buyers could be a great thing. If your product is more of a one-time-only purchase, there's probably no recouping the time investment you will incur.
Content refreshment is one of the biggest recognized benefits of blogging. You can post quickly and easily everyday and thereby please those search engines and hungry blog-followers with new content. There's no denying that. But you need to think this through—how much can you come up with to say about your products? Can you keep your products upfront on a blog? How many times can you spin it? And most importantly, what happens when your well of topics dries up? Those search engines and readers will be waiting for more, and you'll be grasping for new post ideas.
It's easy to get a blog started and keep it running for a few months, but Big Dog kind of income demands that you construct a more long-term plan. Theoretically a blog is a long-term prospect, but without something new to say, one can only live so long.
We also need to tackle the issue of being able to feature multiple products. This flies right in the face of the discussion we just had in the last chapter, doesn't it?
By doing that, you're dividing your forces and taking the focus away from your top-seeded efforts. You've created a marketplace of confusion, and you've made it hard to figure out what the right—simple—solution is.
We also need to talk about blogs from a structural standpoint. Unless you can build your own blog (and even if you can this is tough...), blogs and templates do not allow for a high level of flexibility. There is a basic structure, and it is very hard to add the buttons and features in the places you need them to be. Consider, too, that sometimes the structure and design you've worked so hard for may be impacted (rearranged) by the length and amount of your postings.
Now it might sound like we're completely anti-blogging for affiliate programs, but that's not exactly the case. Let's wrap this discussion up by looking at how a blog might still be a useful tool.
Website & Content
The obvious choice would be to put that effort into your website and content. You can achieve the same results by simply refreshing the content of your website. You can add to its archives and additional resources sections (without muddying the primary pages we established before), and still give current information and additional value to your customers and to the search engines.
Not only can you add additional content, but you can test and tweak and change the content you have and test it against past versions. As you'll learn, even very small, seemingly insignificant changes can really make a big difference to traffic and conversions. Spend the time you would spend posting on a blog to look for ways that you can tweak or enhance your website.
And don't forget—you've got that master site to build. Instead of devoting time to a minimal-return blog, why not get started on your big catch-all so that you can dominate your niche traffic?
Articles, Articles and More Articles
All the articles you write, or hire out to a freelance writer to have written, do not need to be posted on your website. In fact, they shouldn't be. Use those primary articles and tutorials on your site, add some new stuff now and again to keep everyone happy, and then submit to article directories. Utilize profile and link capabilities to link back to your website, the authority on Widgets. (You might know this method by other popular names, like "Bum Marketing” or "Article Marketing.")
- File Size:18,891 KB
- License: Master Resell Rights
- Category:Ebooks
- Tags:2015 Ebooks With Video Master Resale Rights