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Affiliate Marketing Newbie

By on September 23, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing

Advice for the Affiliate Marketing Newbie

Are you an affiliate marketing newbie? Whether new or experienced, there are some tips of the trade that you should follow.

First of all, the lure of working from home in your pajamas with nothing but a computer is almost too much to bear. In fact, more and more people are trying their hand at affiliate marketing exactly for this reason. But in order to be successful in your efforts, you do need to spend time and at least a little bit of money. It is hard work, so be prepared.

If you are an affiliate marketing newbie, start out promoting something that you are familiar with and, even better, something that interests you. As you get more experienced, this aspect will not be quite so important — you will be able to promote things that you know nothing about or care nothing about and still be successful — but in the beginning, it helps to start with something that you will be committed to as you go through your learning curve. Keep in mind that taking this route may not end up as the best converting method or gain you the highest commissions, but it will be easier for you to build a website and to stick with what you are working on

When you do get your site up and running (and, by the way, a WordPress blog is a very fast and way to establish a reputable website), promote more than just one product in the same niche. This also gives your visitors a choice and allows you to track which products are selling more or less.

Always remember the tried and true saying: content is king. “Contents sites” are the ones that offer educational, instructional and topical content about whatever it is they are promoting. And the best of these types of sites actually make the promoted product or service seem like an afterthought. This is another reason that it is easier if you are new to affiliate marketing to start with something you are familiar with and/or interested in. While content is important, your main goal is to drive visitors to the sales of your affiliate products, so make it as easy as possible for them to get there.

Do not give up. There is a lot to learn when it comes to affiliate marketing and it takes a lot of work in the beginning. It’s also important to keep up with rules and regulations that change in the field of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing revenue can end up being passive (meaning you don’t have to do anything to earn it), but it takes a while to get to this point. Most people will take months even to make enough money to cover costs. Keeping these tips in mind when you are an affiliate marketing newbie will help you in achieving a profitable status.

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WordPress Plugins That Can Make Your Website Better

By on June 1, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Plugins That Can Make Your Website Better

If you want to make your website better these plugins can help. Plugins allow you to add features and functions to your blog without having to learn programming language. You might notice a common theme with these plugins. All of these use WP or WordPress in their WordPress plugin names.

WordPress Database Backup

No one plans for their site to crash, but sometimes it happens. With this blog plugin you can schedule regular backups of your website to be sent automatically to your email. You do not have to worry about remembering or being on vacation.

WordPress Firewall

Similar to the firewall you may have installed on your computer, this blocks suspicious parameters. This means that if it detects something suspicious happening to your WordPress website it blocks it. It also logs the interaction for you to check over later. You can also whitelist your own IPS address and your other blog writers further limiting access.

WP Optimize

You probably have noticed every time you make a change to your posts, WordPress saves a revision. After a while all those revisions grow into mountains. You also have extra information saved on various code sheets that make up your site with installing and uninstalling plugins and themes. Optimize your site with this WordPress plugin.

WordPress Mobile Edition

More and more people are checking websites on their phone. But phone browsers may not be able to read your theme. When this WordPress blog plugin detects a phone it uses a mobile friendly theme instead of your normal one. Now your readers can continue to have access to your site wherever they roam.

WordPress Stats

Many statistics plugins take setting up and then require a learning curve to understand. With WordPress Stats you visit the plugin on your dashboard. The line graph show number of visitors. The tables below show you what pages people visited, what brought them to your site and reminds you of your busiest day.

WordPress Thread Comment

Social media has gained in popularity because people like to interact. The standard WordPress comment system allows comments to flow in time order which makes it hard for people to understand when one comment is responding to another. Not with this plugin, your readers and you can comment directly. The response will be with the original comment to flow evenly and logically.

WP Super Cache

While you are getting the site working better this will come in handy as well. Most of your visitors will see a saved static file version of your site. This allows your website to run faster and will help should your site suddenly have heavy traffic.

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WordPress Plugins! How to Optimize

By on September 27, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Plugins! How to Optimize

WordPress plugins can make or break your blogging experience. Being fairly new to blogging has been a real learning experience, not so much writing articles and sending them out to all my social sites, but in trying to optimize the WordPress site so that it’s hitting on all eight cylinders, so to speak. As I read other bloggers articles I pick up bits and pieces of what they have experienced so far, and I’ve decided that having the right WordPress plugins working for you can make life a lot easier. I’ve got a list of 11 plugins, that I’m going to recommend and hopefully shorten your learning curve, and make your blogging a more enjoyable experience.

No 1. Do Follow…This removes the evil nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments. You need this to keep visitors coming back for more.

No 2. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget…Help your visitors promote your site! The widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services.

No 3. All in One SEO Pack-Pro Version…It’s setup and ready to go right out of the box. It will optimize your site for search engine rankings, plus shorten your url’s by adding a number at the end, versus having a url that winds up being a mile long.

No 4. CommentLuv….Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. It’s rewards your readers and encourages them to return and make more comments.

No 5. Commissions Automator…..This plugin is really needed but if you’re interested in making money on line, it’s helpful. It automatically post instant commission promotions to your blog, with your affiliate ID included, so when someone buys the product, you get the commission. Sweet!

No 6. FD Feedburner Plugin….Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed which then sends your blog post out across the entire internet.

No. 7. Onlywire… This is a social bookmarker that will send your blog post out to millions of sites, with only one push of the button.

No 8. PostSwapper.com Plugin…..You can swap links with other bloggers to posts that are related to yours. Build link popularity automatically and easily. Backlinks are one item that is considered when webcrawlers and search engines are looking at ranking your site.

No. 9…Scribe….This plugin quickly checks your new blog post content against SEO best practices, utilizing the Scribe Content Optimizer. You get a readability score, plus see what your keyword density is so you can add more or remove some. This tool makes a huge difference when it comes to SEO Optimization.

No. 10….Tweetmeme….This plugin simply adds a button to your blog which allows your guest to retweet your blog post out to their list of tweeter followers. Nice way to take advantage of someone Else’s list.

No 11….What Would Seth Godin Do….This plugin allows you to display a custom welcome message to a new visitor and a different custom message to a returning visitor. Pretty neat. People like to be treated special so what better way to do that.

To find more information about the plugins just do a Google search, download the plugin into a temp directory and then go to plugins in your WordPress blog, click new and upload the zip file and then install. Pretty simple process and now you have an optimized blog that should bring you hundreds of visitors thanks to your new WordPress plugins.

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7 Big Benefits to Creating Your Next Small Business Website With WordPress

By on September 7, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

7 Big Benefits to Creating Your Next Small Business Website With WordPress

Which of these choices would you prefer?

A website that requires custom programming costing $3000 or more, requires a knowledge of complex programming languages in order to make even simple changes to the content, and requires a complete redesign (again costing thousands of dollars) if you decide the look is outdated?

Or a website that is built on free software, allows you to easily update content yourself and you can select from thousands of clean, professional looking designs that can be added to the site in a matter of minutes?

No brainer, right?

Meet WordPress.

WordPress, originally used solely for blogs, has morphed into an incredibly powerful Content Management System you can use to easily and inexpensively create a very professional and functional website for your small business.

Here are 7 benefits to using WordPress for your small business’ website:

1. It costs nothing! Not one penny! WordPress is available for download at WordPress.org at no cost – you won’t even have to give up your email address. To host a WordPress site yourself, however, you will need to find a hosting company. That’s generally not free. But it’s not expensive either. For just $5 – $10 a month you can host your WordPress site at any number of quality web host providers. Many of them include Fantastico with your hosting plan which is software that lets you install WordPress in just a few clicks without even having to download the software.

2. Ease of Use. Using WordPress is really quite simple. Yes, especially for the technically-challenged among us, there will be a little bit of a learning curve. However, there’s no shortage of quality WordPress tutorials online to help you get up to speed quickly. Once you get the hang of things, adding content is a snap. It’s no more difficult than using a word processing program. And you don’t have to know how to write code or do anything vaguely technical in nature to maintain your site.

3. Themes. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of themes available for WordPress. A theme is basically a template that changes the look and feel of your WordPress site (a theme can also alter the behind-the-scenes options to make WordPress even easier to customize and use). Some of these themes are free, others you have to pay for. You can also have a custom theme designed so your site meets your exact specifications.

With themes, it’s easy to get a clean, professional looking site without paying a lot for custom design work. And if one day you decide you don’t like the look of your site – no problem. Find a theme you like better, activate it in WordPress and you instantly have a new look and feel to your site – all without having to change the blog posts or pages on your site.

4. Plugins. Plugins are software the extend the capabilities of WordPress to do pretty much anything you want. Using plugins, you can track site visits, add social bookmarking to your site, automate backups of your site, fight spam, create contact forms, improve site security and a lot more. And, with few exceptions, the plugins are absolutely free.

5. Search Engine Love. Google (and the other search engines) love WordPress. Using WordPress can give your search engine optimization efforts a big boost. And if you take advantage of some of the SEO-related plugins available for WordPress, the search engines will really think your site is the bee’s knees.

6. Technical Support. WordPress does not offer tech support for you to email or call with your questions. However, have no fear, there are still a ton of options for you if you have an issue you need addressed. You can turn to the forum on WordPress.org, which is a very active community of WordPress users who are always willing to help those having problems with the software. In addition, there are a bunch of other websites, message boards and blogs that you can turn to for advice. There are also plenty of wordPress experts for hire to assist you. Whatever issue you may encounter, help is always close at hand.

7. Control. Hosting your own WordPress website puts you in control of your web presence. Need to update your content, add new posts or pages? You can easily do it yourself. Want to update the appearance of your site? Find a new Theme, upload it, activate it and you’re done. Don’t like the hosting company you’re using? Find another and move your site – there are plenty of good hosting companies around.

So there are seven strong benefits to using WordPress for your small business’ website/blog. Without a doubt there are reasons why you may WordPress may not work for your situation and hiring a programmer to develop a custom site is the best option.

For most small business owners, however, WordPress will provide all that you need to get a professionally looking website that you, and the search engines will love. It’s a highly functional, flexible and cost-effective option that is hard to top.

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Blogging Teens

By on August 8, 2010 in

Every day, blogs are created by individuals of all ages and from all walks of life, but when it comes to blogging, teen writers are truly about the cutting edge from the movement. Since today’s teenagers are the 1st generation of individuals to have grown up utilizing the internet at just about every stage of their development, several adolescents have a seemingly innate sense of how to use web technology to express their innermost thoughts and ideas. Older writers typically experience a form of learning curve when they begin to weblog, but many young men and women discover that applying a word processor and blogging software feels much more natural and direct a mode of communication than writing in a diary ever could.

Original post by Val Alex

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