Reference and Update to
Trying the wordpress affiliate plugin

At the start of January I installed the WordPress Affiliate Plugin. I just wanted to update you on how it went for me.

I installed it on this blog but this is not a high traffic blog and it is a very busy blog with a lot of competing links  and I honestly didn’t expect it to perform well here. I was right. In the last month I have had only two click throughs to product pages.

I also installed it on two other blogs with a more specific niche focus, higher traffic and smaller post lengths. The results were only marginally above disappointing. In the month I received 6 click throughs from one blog and 22 from the other. No sales.

I also found that odd results occasionally appeared, (but not often I must stress, overall it is very well targeted). A completely unrelated product occurring for keywords which should have confined the results to a specific niche topic. The example that stood out was for a World of Warcraft site where it unexpectedly displayed a product on prostate health.  Maybe the plugin thought it wasn’t good for gamers to sit too long in front of their computers!

So with a total of 30 clicks in a month it might take over 3 months to get one sale. On the other hand – it is a completely “set and forget” plugin and with other niches perhaps it will have better results.

The truth is that any simple advertising like this is not going to make big sales for you. I truly believe that only a passionate advocate will do that.

Conviction leads to Conversion

If you don’t know what I mean by that then read the post  at the link above.

It is not that we don’t know this, it’s just that we get tired and lazy and sometimes we don’t have any enthusiasm left to spare.

If I have learned one thing over the last few years, even though I still struggle to get this right, it is that one well written page that is promoted well about a product that you believe in and speak honestly and enthusiastically about will do more for your sales than 2 years worth of pasted PLR blog posts, or automatically generated content, advertising links and banners.

If you have a blog you want to make money with, concentrate on those pillar posts Starek talks of, that you haven’t got around to yet. Concentrate on getting lots of links to those. Promote a product that you believe in and have a passion for. Help people to understand why its so good that you use it.

The rest of your blog is filler. Of interest to some people, benefits by keeping the blog fresh, offers personality and background and may inspire trust and build your relationship with readers, but please, think again about that phrase.

Conviction leads to Conversion

If you are not convinced that a product is truly excellent, if you wont stand out on a limb and say its so fantastic you can’t live without it, then can you honestly wonder why people think “whatever” and click away.

As to the wordpress affiliate plugin, its a simple automated advertising solution which may bring you in a few sales a year just like Adsense ads can add to your income on a small scale.

Do I think its worth buying? For me I think it was, because I have a lot of blogs I can use it on and it does direct that “click away” to a potential income source. For “one blog” owners or bloggers with low traffic I don’t think it would be worth it.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Affiliate sales are attributed because the affiliate link drops a cookie into the browser of the person who clicks the link. Most affiliate programs offer a transparent link that for people who are affiliate savvy can be “got around”.

Image via Wikipedia

When you spend hours carefully working on a review this can be disappointing.

How often it happens is debated, probably rarely in non marketing niches but in the marketing niche it may be very high.

The cookie that earns you a commission is in the link. Some people who find your article may remove the cookie before clicking it and go to the site without it, and others may even change the cookie to their own cookie so they make a commission.

Also some urls are overlong and others are obviously affiliate links and this can also cause problems.

Plugin Link Cloaks Using A Redirect

The solution to this is to “cloak” the link with a redirect. This is easy enough to do for a normal site but for a CMS such as WordPress in php, the normal solution creates conflicts and this is better handled using a plugin.

The Go code plugin is a link cloak plugin for WordPress that is both basic and easy to use. It simply exchanges an affiliate url for an url that displays your domain name, the word /go/ and a chosen word to describe the product. It can also be used for overlong “normal” url redirects where you want your urls “branded” with your own site name.

For example my normal affiliate url for the WordPress affiliate plugin is transformed by the WordPress link cloak plugin and becomes

http://www.richnicheblogging.com/monetize/go/wp-cb-plugin/

As you can see, my site name is long and my site blog is in a subfolder (monetize) , so this doesn’t gain me much benefit for shortening an url!

But if your blog is in the site root it will.

The wordpress link cloak plugin has hidden the destination site url so people must click it to discover the site it goes to and at no time is my “cookie” visible so people can change it.

Simple and effective link cloaking for WordPress blogs.

The link cloak plugin is free and you can get it from the WordPress Plugin Directory, with installation and troubleshooting info,  at

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gocodes/

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• How to Manage and track your affiliate programs (web-workathome.com)

Popularity: 20% [?]

If you are an amazon affiliate you will probably be aware that the javascript code for amazon books can sometimes just disappear from a saved post or just won’t display unless it’s top of the post.

This amazon affiliate plugin for WordPress does help, but I don’t recommend it unless you are prepared to try a few different settings for it. It doesn’t seem to like all themes equally and I have especial problems when I set it to show the image at the top of the post. That said if you don’t mind a bit of too and fro-ing to get it set so it displays properly, this is a very helpful amazon affiliate plugin for displaying a product in a WordPress post.

Copy and paste the link text into notepad and look in the code for a 10 digit number prefixed by asin  for example – “&asins=0321395387″. The number only is what you need to input in the plugin to display the book. The plugin gives its options under the post editor or you can create drafts for several products at a time if you choose.

You can get the free plugin and full instructions at

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/amazon-product-in-a-post-plugin/

and see it working below where I have asked it to display a highly recommended book on learning about blogging for offline businesses.

The book description is from Amazon.

“Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog.

Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.”

If you enjoy recommended amazon books in posts by doing book reviews, this may help you to speed up the process a little.

See larger image Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business (Paperback) By (author) DL Byron, Steve Broback List Price: $26.99 USD New From: $8.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock

Popularity: 6% [?]

The All in One Seo Plugin

All in One Seo Pack

Seo is a core principle of RNB training so that you can get free search traffic and there’s not much point in doing the keyword research if you can’t place the results in the right spots on your blog. So this plugin is considered to be an important addition and we recommend it’s use.The advice from the plugins page is quoted below.

Meta Titles
The text that you see in your browser’s window bar (at the top of internet explorer or firefox) is the most important thing that doesn’t appear to be on your page! You may not have realized it was even there at all.

Make sure these titles are getting rewritten and relate to your post titles which always come next, before anything else. You can leave a few words in here from your blog title if you want to do some branding but don’t overstuff the title.

If your post titles don’t contain your most precious phrases you want to rank for then tweak them. Leave the post titles as it is (for the people) but change this meta title.

Meta Descriptions
Once your pages rank in search engines your description makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not.

It is these meta descriptions, that some people have mourned for dead and moved on from, that can decide your site’s fate. If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated. The preferred source for your post description is your post excerpt. Especially use this when you want to tweak your description.You can find this under the input box for the post on the write page.

Meta Keywords
All in One SEO Pack can generate keywords in three ways.

It can use your categories ( the original way of tagging posts in wordpress). It can use Ultimate Tag Warrior if you have been using this excellent plugin. Or, starting with WordPress 2.3, it can use it’s built-in tagging system.

Using your categories is optional (meaning you have to tell it to), the rest is auto-detected and, if it’s there – it’s used, so be careful what you are tagging with! WP 2.3.x tags are now the preferred keyword source. If you have updated, the new tagging system can import in old Ultimate Tag Warrior Data.

Duplicate Content
Shout Hallelulyah and do the chicken dance! You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive-, category- and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content ( or can’t get your head around “noindex”, “nofollow” etc and where to put it)

I particularly liked the following quote from the plugin page.

“That was about the 20% of effort needed by you to achieve 80% of results with on-page factors. Of course you also need incoming links, no plugin can do this for you in a safe manner”"

Note: Quote marked “descriptions” are taken from the page at the link under the title.

Popularity: 16% [?]