Promoting Affiliate Programs with Hub Pages

HubPages is a revenue sharing web community that allows you to create web pages (known as hubs) about specific topics. You can then earn money through Google Adsense or by promoting Amazon and eBay products. When anyone makes a purchase through your listed Amazon or eBay products, you’ll get commission from that sale.

Your Adsense id show ads for 60% of the time anyone views your hub. Ad revenue for the other 40% will go to HubPages.

What can I do with a Hub? Or why should I even bother?

Here are some possible benefits of setting up a hub:

• You can direct traffic from HubPages to your website or blog.
• Potential to improve your website’s search engine ranking positions.
• PR benefits. I noticed that hubs which are older than 10 weeks are usually PR 3+. Some popular and older pages are PR 5+. You’re basically getting a free link with PR from HubPages.
• You can promote your affiliate link for specific products, programs or websites.
• Community building. If you have a forum or Yahoo Group, you could set up a hub to recruit more members. Hubs can also be used to promote your MyBloglog community.

Four Ways to Integrate your Hub Page with Affiliate Programs

These suggestions focus on using Hub Page as a means to promote your affiliate links.

1. Pinpoint your hub. Only focusing on a specific niche can make it easier to aggressively promote the affiliate program. For example, If you’re planning to sell software, create product review pages. This works well with a variety of online merchants. Find products to promote using Clickbank.
2. Include affiliate text links within your content. You can also direct readers to your blog, website or squeeze page.
3. Monetize your outgoing links make you money every time someone clicks on your link. Try not to overdo it because some visitors might be turned off by the ads.
4. Use image hosts that pay to put up thumbnails, screen shots or mini picture galleries. You’ll earn money for every one who clicks on your pictures. These usually works best on topics such as celebrities, entertainment or humor.

Hub Page does have some potential for promoting affiliate products, although it doesn’t enjoy the link popularity and traffic of similar websites like Squidoo.

Conclusion: Worth a look if you have some spare time.

Bumpzee: Affiliate Marketing Community

What are the requirements for my blog to be accepted into Bumpzee?

According to their website, your blog must be partly about affiliate marketing and the content on your blog should be unique and not purely self-promotional or produced for the sole aim of increasing sales or conversions.

Bumpzee allows you to set up a recent readers widget ala MyBlogLog on your website. You can also include a ‘Bump This’ widget (similar to the Digg badge), which allows users to bump your blog entry to the top of the community.

You’ll also have the option of allowing comments for your blog entries to show up on Bumpzee. This will allow other bloggers to see that you have a discussion at your blog and participate in it.

Bumpzee Communities - Affiliate Marketing and SEO/SEM

The affiliate marketing community currently has 508 members and aggregated entries from 173 blogs. Bumpzee also has a Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing community for professionals and other bloggers in that specific field.

Maybe it’s just me, but Bumpzee seems a little too complicated in terms of navigation and features. There are many specific sections on their website and each one seems to share a similar function.

For example there’s a individual page for entries, another for discussions (which includes blog comments) and yet another for tags. The profile page is too cluttered for my liking as well, even though it’s functional and offers a lot of useful features.

If you dabble in some affiliate marketing or want to learn more about it, check out Bumpzee’s communities to read the blog entries and interact with other bloggers by commenting, asking questions or bumping their entries.

If you own a blog that’s partly related to affiliate marketing, submit it and you’ll get to share your blog entries with a community of like-minded affiliate and internet marketers.

You’ll probably learn a lot through the interaction so give a Bumpzee a run if you’re interested in affiliate marketing.

Six Powerful Blog Strategies that will Rapidly Increase Your Affiliate Referrals

Six Key Strategies to Boost your Affiliate Referrals

Here are a collection of six points which anyone can use to increase their number of referrals for any affiliate program or website. These points apply across various industries and emphasize on long-term over short-term referral gains.

Note that they mainly apply to blogs, though they could easily be applied to other general websites.

1. Early Search Result Listings are Essential - Get Ranked Fast.

Being one of the first few people to write about a specific website or affiliate scheme will allow you to easily get ranked within the top 10 for most search engines. This is because there is very little competition for the specific term or keyphrase.

Another benefit of getting listed early is that people will usually do a search for a specific website because they need more details about it. You should aim to fill that information need because they’ll very likely sign up through your link if there are no other or very little sources available.

2. Project Authenticity, Personality and Objectivity through Your Blog

Visitors who arrive your blog looking for specific information do not need another sales pitch. They’ve very likely been pre-sold, meaning that they’ve been persuaded to some extent by the website or business in question.

What they want is personal recommendations. Strive for objectivity and honesty when you are writing your review about the specific product. This means giving both good and bad points about a specific product.

3. Strive for Content Depth, Breadth and Uniqueness

Always try to surpass the other blogger that writes about the same topic by coming up with a review of far greater depth and detail. Explore questions which have not been addressed and link to sources which the other bloggers have missed.

Being unique and meticulous makes you a reference point and authority on the topic. This builds incoming links which will eventually help you rank well in the long run.

Put yourself in the potential linker’s shoe. Would you rather send your reader to a short blog post with only 100 words on a product/website or you prefer to send them to a well-written 1000 word article which thoroughly examines the subject in question?

4. Optimize your Blog Post for Search Traffic

Writing with search engines in mind can make the whole article feel stunted and so I’ve never emphasized on stuffing keywords or phrases in specific sections of content. Don’t do it. It’s a waste of time and may degrade the overall quality of your post.

Demonstrating a personality that others can relate too is far more important when you are planning to increase affiliate referrals.

The only place where its absolutely essential to include your keyword or phrase is within the title of your blog post. Adjusting your post-slug and permalink to include the keyword structure is also helpful and can help to reduce the length of the URL as a whole.

However, pleasing the reader or potential referral is of utmost importance. Always try to target niche phrases that fit nicely within your article and if you really want to, buy or get others to include keyword links to your article.

5. Use Trackbacks Effectively to Generate Exposure

Don’t just come across a specific item and write about it as if you were the one discovering it. By referencing the original news breaker, a relevant link to your post will be listed beneath their original article in the form of a trackback.

This is a great way to get very targeted traffic because readers might need more information on the specific website/program. If your article is good enough, the blogger in question might even update the original post and include a link to it.

6. Leech Traffic from Relevant Blogs

This is a method that I have used for a while. Say you’ve just written a great article on a specific website or program and included your affiliate links. The next step is to promote your article through relevant niche blogs.

How do you do this? Use Google Alerts to set up notifications when bloggers write a post about the specific topic in question. This sends an automated email to your inbox every day or once a week.

You can then visit specific blogs and leave a relevant comment while discreetly mentioning your review. This is a great way to acquire potential referrals who are commitment-phobic and need more information.

Depending on the traffic level for each blog, you’ll tend to get a few visitors who will be interested enough to visit your website. Just remember to deeplink to the specific post and not your blog homepage.

This method also has the benefit of allowing you to easily stay in touch with the latest news concerning the specific program, which allows you to update your blog or website accordingly.

Another way to do this is to hang out at social websites like Digg or Reddit and visit blogs that are very likely to hit the homepage. Leaving an interesting comment will induce visitors to your blog. This is far less targeted than using Google Alerts but can lead to greater traffic flow.

Key Point Summary - A Checklist to Follow

• Write a blog post after you sign up for an affiliate program. Pick keywords or keyphrases that are likely to receive more search volume.
• Check if you are making a personal recommendation and come across as authentic/objective.
• Is your review detailed and unique enough? Does it cover new ground or offer new perspectives?
• Optimize your Blog post. Are the keywords in the title?
• Remember to use references and send trackbacks.
• Keep track of articles from other bloggers on the same topic. Have you set up a Google Alert or found a way to keep up with news on a specific topic?

How to Use Blog Traffic Exchanges to Make Money with Affiliate Programs

The key to making money through affiliate programs or other forms of advertising is traffic, which is simply the sheer number of visitors who arrive at your blog daily.

In terms of affiliate marketing, the more visitors you have, the more opportunities or capacity you will have to recommend or successively promote any products, services or websites.

There are many different ways to market your blog and gain more visitors which will eventually allow you to make money through blog-based affiliate marketing.The use of blog traffic exchanges is one method you should consider.

How do Blog Traffic Exchanges Work?

Blog Traffic Exchanges are simply websites which operate on a reciprocal viewing ratio, whereby you’ll manually surf and visit various blogs in the network, in return for other users to visit your blog.

For example, by logging into a blog traffic exchange and visiting one blog in their network, you would earn one credit which means that you’ll get one visit in return from another blogger who is using the same traffic network.

This is the most basic principle of all blog traffic exchanges, although some exchange networks will allow you to buy credits which will translate to visitor traffic from other users.

What are the requirements to use a Blog Traffic Exchange?

The most basic prerequisite is that you will need to own a blog. Registration for these blog traffic exchanges are usually free and all you’ll need to do is to submit your blog and start surfing to accumulate traffic credits, which will ensure that other users surf and visit your blog as well.

Do I really need to use a Blog Traffic Exchange?

These exchanges are very useful for new blogs who need to get more exposure but established blogs with strong organic traffic from search engines, probably do not need to use them.

Note however, that this post is less about getting traffic or exposure to your blog and more about how to make money through the targeted monetization of blog traffic exchange visitors.

As such, it could apply for both new and more established blogs as long as the blogger in question is looking for a way to make money off their blog through affiliate programs.

Types of Blog traffic exchanges

1. Blog Explosion

2. BlogMad

3. Blog Soldiers

4. Blog Advance

Benefits of Using Blog Traffic Exchanges

• Free exposure for new blogs. New blogs usually have very little referral or search traffic and the focus is on getting people to know your blog actually exists. Blog Traffic exchanges can perform this function and may even help to increase your initial reader base before organic traffic from search engines starts to kick in.
• Building long-term referral traffic. Traffic exchange visitors are all bloggers and are the people you want to attract when you are trying to build a much bigger readership. The more bloggers you have reading your blog, the more potential for incoming links and future referral traffic.

Disadvantages and Limitations of Blog Traffic Exchanges

Here are some points to take note of, if you are interested in using blog traffic exchanges for your blog.

• Negative Effects on Publisher Accounts with ad networks

  
  
• Visitor Traffic is Poorly Targeted

  Blog traffic exchanges are similar to StumbleUpon in that you’ll never really know what to expect. For some exchanges like Blog Explosion, you can choose to surf blogs only in a specific field.
  

  Unlike search traffic, visitors coming through traffic exchanges do not require or seek specific information so anything you offer could be hit or miss.
  

• Limited Market Scope

  The traffic that you are trying to monetize is actually limited only to the users of each Traffic Exchange. This means that after consistently using each exchange for a while, the quality of the traffic as it relates to affiliate programs might decrease.

  One can only hope that by then, you would have build up a strong enough audience base which you can tap for future monetization efforts.

• Manual Surfing is Time-consuming

  Unless you buy traffic credits, you’ll have to manually surf other blogs through the traffic exchanges in return for other bloggers to visit your website. This can be a time consuming process and can also distract you from other tasks at hand.

How to Use Traffic Exchanges to Make Money from your Blog

• Your blog should have unique content and should not just be a feed scrapper blog which reposts articles and links. Spam and copyright issues are of some concern to blog traffic exchange networks.
• The blog must not be a sales letter or website in disguise. Referring to blogs whereby every single article sells a product or contains various affiliate links. Bloggers and exchange network admins can usually identify these sites as spam, not to mention that it might negatively impact the trust level of a new visitor.
• Blogs with cookie-cutter templates will not work as well as blogs that have unique and well designed themes. This is a simple fact because you only have less than 30 seconds before the visitor clicks through to the next blog. The design must magnetize and capture the blogger’s attention.
• The first blog post on the blog should not use excerpts or the more tag. The blog post should be displayed in full so there is less risk that the visitor will ignore it. Other non-monetized posts without affiliate links should be excerpted.

Six Steps to Easily Monetize Blog Traffic Exchange Visitors

The emphasis here for both new and established blogs is to ONLY start using blog traffic exchanges immediately after one has publish an article that promotes a specific affiliate program or website.

This is because your blog post (with affiliate links) will be right at top in your homepage and this is where most visitors will direct their attention.

Traffic exchanges are time consuming and if you have not written a post which promotes an affiliate program or product, no reason to waste your time on them because the monetization potential is just not there.

Remember, don’t use these exchanges everyday for every single new post you write. Only use them extensively after you write a post which contains affiliate/referral links that will allow you to make money through personal recommendations.

The emphasis is on getting visitor to read your post, click through on the links and proceed to either sign up for the recommended website or make a quick purchase.

Here are the six steps you should take:

1. Write a great post or review about a specific affiliate product or website. Offer an authentic opinion which provides both pros and cons of the program. Do NOT aggressively sell the product. Write naturally in a conversational style.
2. Remove all other advertising networks on your site. It helps to build a little credibility while centralizing focus on the article. You can always put them back up after you’ve done a few rounds of traffic trades.
3. Dress up your sidebars and the area after your post by prominently displaying buttons, banners or text links which either lead to a review page on your blog about the affiliate product or an affiliate landing page or original product website through your referral link. This is another net to catch visitors who don’t click through within the article itself.
4. Start to surf the blog traffic exchanges. Open up two or more exchange websites in separate tabs and start manually surfing. If you don’t mind spending money, an alternative would be to purchase some traffic credits.
5. Monitor the number of click throughs through basic stats programs like Google Analytics or MyBlogLog. Also check to see the number of signups or purchases through the affiliate center for the programs you’ve promoted.
6. Repeat the entire process if there is an acceptable number of conversions. A minimum of 5% conversion ratio, i.e. five new signups or purchases per 100 visitors over two days would be considered an appropriate standard.

How Pre-sell Pages can Easily Increase Conversions for Your Affiliate Links

Making money from a website often entails the use of proverbial income generators like product sales, affiliate programs and on-site advertising.

All of these monetization methods rely on inducing the visitor to perform a specific action such as clicking on an ad or an affiliate link, purchasing a product or subscribing to a newsletter.

Your success in getting the visitor to act the way you want often depends on the visual structure (design/ad placement) of your website and the type of content preceding or surrounding the product or promotion.

The success of affiliate programs are especially susceptible to the influence of well written copy and the power of personal recommendations. Nothing is more effective when you want get others to act upon your affiliate link.

Why Direct Affiliate Links do Not Work Sometimes

Direct affiliate links are links which point directly to an external website, of which you are the affiliate. These links send traffic away from your website and the effectiveness of getting a visitor to convert on it depends a lot on the host website.

If the website in question has a poor landing page or is weakly designed, you’ve just lost a potential referral. I’ve seen many websites which are simply not designed effectively enough to accommodate an incoming visitor’s initial interest.

Sending them directly to these types of external webpages is akin to affiliate suicide and I highly recommend that you create a well written presell page on your own website for greater conversion rates and overall success.

An Example of an Integrated Pre-Sell Page that Works

Brian Clark from Copyblogger has used two presell pages which are well integrated on a sitewide level on his blog. If you take a look at the left sidebar under the ‘Resources’ section, you would notice two text links. One for Midphase Web Hosting and the other for Glyphius Copywriting software.

These two webpages each promote a specific product. The Midphase Web Hosting page is created using an individual page format whereas the Glyphius copywriting software is converted from a blog post in which Brian reviewed the software thoroughly.

As would you expect, both of them feature great copy and are good examples to follow if you are planning to create your own presell page. The Midphase piece is short and utilizes a scannable list format while the Glyphius article features a more detailed review, which carefully avoids over selling.

Benefits of Creating a Dedicated Presell Page

The benefits of developing a pre-sell page dedicated entirely to the product or website you are promoting are many. Here are just some of the most important advantages:

• Attracts Search Engine Traffic. Creating a pre-sell page means that you’ve have a keyword relevant webpage that will show up on the search engines. If optimized well, this webpage will bring you some extra search engine visitors who might be searching for information on the topic.
• Leverages Existing Visitor Trust. The use of a personal voice in affiliate promotions is one of the main things often overlooked. If your overall website is well designed and genuinely offers useful content, it will invite trust from visitors. Creating a presell page and offering your thoughts on the product instead of blindly linking out to an external site capitalizes on the trust you’ve already gained.
• Makes it Easier for Off-Site Promotions. A presell page on your website makes it easier for future promotions. Using affiliate links on forums, blogs or other public websites makes you look like a spammer. Instead, you can drop a link to your webpage which clearly explains the product or program in question. You’ll also be driving traffic to your website instead of purely sending visitors to the affiliate website. This allows you to gain new blog readers, customers and list subscribers.
• Can be Used as Future Reference Points. When you are creating content for your website, you can insert a link to your pre-sell page and use it as a reference point. For example, if you’re writing an article about web hosting, you might like to drop a link to your pitch page, instead of linking directly to the host.

How to Create a Pre-Sell Page on Your Website

Creating a presell page on your website is a rather simple process and involves several steps that can be easily accomplished by anyone. They simply involve developing a webpage with your copy and promoting it visibly on your website.

1. Create a new webpage and include your pitch and recommendation concerning the product. You can also use an existing blog post as well although I would suggest using a separate Page.
2. Make the new webpage visible by linking to it through a graphic banner or text link. Be sure to make this link highly visible either sitewide or on a special ‘recommendations’ page.

Seven PreSell Page Guidelines to Follow

The effectiveness of your sell page depends on several factors and strong, enticing copy is by far the most important rule you’ll need to observe. Here are some guidelines you can use to create a great sell page.

1. Do not oversell. Try to provide a balanced perspective on the product. Projecting objectivity and honesty is usually the best approach.
2. No redundant hyperlinks. Don’t link to other articles on your website or other external websites. The only links you should include are your affiliate links. You don’t want visitors to get distracted and go elsewhere.
3. Use multiple affiliate links. Try to use the same affiliate link multiple times within the pre-sell page. A good start would be to use it at both the start and the end of your article. Vary the anchor text as well so they don’t look repetitive.
4. Try cloaking affiliate links. Cloaking your affiliate link is likely to improve your click through rate although a lot also depends on your overall site look/feel and its reputation in the niche. If you’re undecided, try going with the regular affiliate link for a period of time and then cloak it for a similar period to measure click through rates.
5. Keep it short. A pitch page should not be too long. Visitors usually click away if its too heavy to consume within a few minutes.
6. Focus on Usability. Write for scannability, use subheadings and bold specific keywords or phrases to help increase the visual impact of your copy.
7. Offer Benefits. It’s very important to make sure that the visitor understands how the affiliate program benefits him or her. If you would like to provide an additional incentive for signing up under your affiliate link, be sure to include it as well.