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Affiliate Marketing Website

By on August 29, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing

How to Increase Traffic to Your Affiliate Marketing Website

Having an affiliate marketing website will do you little good if it is not well-ranked in the search engines. If you are well-ranked, on the other hand, your site will come up when someone does a search for the types of products and or services you are offering, or information that is relevant to that. There are many ways that you can increase your site’s rankings. Here are just a few of them.

First of all, you should try to add new content to your website or blog on a regular basis. A good rule of thumb is to do this about 2 times a week. If you’re stuck about what to write about, do a product review, or take an article that you’ve written and break it up into more detailed points. You can also do an article about a video that is relevant, or an e-book that you’ve read.

Next, an easy way to get your website indexed is to submit it to directories. Many directories are free and some charge you to submit your site but they offer greater visibility. There are thousands of directories to choose from. Try to add your site to 10 to 20 directories a month, or you can hire a person or a service to do it for you for not too much investment.

Article directories are another great asset of affiliate marketers. While it does take some time to write articles and submit them to the directories, it is completely free and very effective. There are two schools of thoughts on this. Some say that you can submit your article to the top three directories, and others say it works better to submit them to hundreds of directories. If you do choose to submit them to many directories, you might want to consider investing in some article submission software.

Making use of forums are another way that you can establish both credibility and links to your site. Try to stay active in at least one forum by asking genuine questions and answering what you can. If you can keep up with it, try to contribute at least one comment per day. This will definitely generate links to your affiliate marketing website. Use the same principle to post comments on highly ranked blogs. If possible, comment on blogs that are ranked higher than your website or blog is.

Use socialmarker to bookmark your site on some of the social bookmarking sites. Do not bookmark your site on all the sites at one time or in one day. Instead, do it in a randome fashion. Bookmark your site with one social website on one day, along with some other sites, and maybe the next day bookmark your site twice along with some other sites, and maybe skip a day of bookmarking your site.

These are just some ways to get your affiliate marketing website ranked to get more traffic.

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10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

By on October 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

As a general rule of thumb most errors you’ll encounter with your WordPress blog are the result of excessive or incompatible plugins. While many find the selection of essential plugins a conundrum I believe in testing each plugin one-by-one with the latest version of WordPress so I can isolate the problem to determine the cause of the slow load times, call function errors or php memory limit warnings. The most valuable tool I can tell you when it comes to plugins is that when possible look for existing code that can accomplish the same result.

Of course there are certain plugins that even I use in my WordPress Blogs. I’ve compiled a list below of the top 10 plugins that I use on a daily basis that I believe will help any tech blog:

* AdSense Now – There are many ad insertion plugins for WordPress, but if your tech blog is using AdSense – this is the plugin I recommend. It allows you to insert your ad blocks aligned left, center or middle in 3 sections of a post. It also gives you the option to suppress ads on pages, category pages, tag pages, archives and more.

* Audio Player – Being able to insert mp3 clips or podcasts into your blog can be a problem. Audio Player is a plugin that makes this process simple – simply create a music folder on your site via FTP and then upload mp3 tracks to the directory. You can insert the built-in audio player into any of your posts or pages with a simple line of code – painless, simple and easy.

* Facebook Sharecount – It’s no secret that social networking sites like Facebook are effective ways to create a fanbase, but being able to harness that power relies on an easy way to share your great content. Facebook Sharecount will make it easy for visitors share your posts and monitor your content.

* Foliopress Descriptions – Once your tech blog has hundreds or even thousands of posts you will need a way to mass edit your descriptions. While the importance of meta descriptions is debated, I still believe that a hand written summary should be written for each post. Foliopress Descriptions supports post excerpt, These and All In One Seo meta description fields.

* Google XML Sitemaps – If you’ve read my previous post on how to get indexed by Google and Yahoo you know that having a sitemap is essential. This plugin auto generates your sitemap in a nice and neat XML file and let’s search engines understand the content on your tech blog. After installing and activating the plugin Google XML Sitemaps will take care of the rest.

* NextGEN Gallery – Managing your images and photo galleries can be a pain, but NextGen Gallery makes this simple. With features like auto resizing, watermarks, thumbnail creation as well as gallery effects – NextGEN Gallery is a must have plugin.

* Star Rating for Reviews – When you run a tech blog sooner or later you will start receiving products for review. Creating a solid review is as much about content as it is about presentation. Star Rating for Reviews allows you to create ratings for the products you review or even rate different aspects of the product and averages the ratings to determine a final score. The possibilities are limitless with the plugin – a must have for anyone looking to review tech.

* TweetMeme Retween Button – If you look at the posts on TechBlogStartup you’ll notice a yellow Retweet button aligned to the right. The power of Twitter is growing by the day so making it easy for your reader to ReTweet great content can prove very valuable. If you’ve installed Google Analytics like I explained in my previous post here, then you will be able to monitor just how many visitors enter your post through Twitter. If you are wondering why I haven’t included ShareThis it’s because I manually insert the code instead of using a WordPress Plugin.

* WP Super Cache – If you’ve heard of Digg then odds are you’ve heard of the Digg Effect where an article on a website becomes so popular so quickly that the flood of traffic to the website causes the server to crash. Since WordPress blogs are built on SQL Databases they are highly susceptible to this condition, but installing WP Super Cache can almost eliminate this threat. The plugin builds a cache of your posts and creates a static html page so that the server load is reduced and your site can handle more visitors. If your tech blog is brand spanking new I would install the plugin but not activate it until I started to see spikes in traffic or one of my articles was picked up by a major tech blog like Engadget or Gizmodo.

* All in One SEO – Search Engine Optimization is a key ingredient to driving organic traffic to your tech blog. Writting great content is key, but after you have created that content you need to make sure that it targets keywords and includes some basic optimization to ensure it is search engine friendly. All in One SEO does this job very well. If you are using the WordPress theme I use (Thesis) then you will not need this plugin, but for pretty much every other WordPressTheme I recommend installing it right away so that you can start writing your custom meta descriptions

All of the plugins I’ve mentioned above can be downloaded manually and then uploaded via FTP to your blog or you can add them from within your WordPress Dashboard – personally I prefer the latter. If you are wondering why certain plugins are not listed on my top 10 list – I just don’t find them essential to a tech blog. You will notice that I do somethings with TechBlogStartup that many people use Plugins or Widgets to do – eg. the top 6 articles aligned horizontally at the top of the site or the Recent Posts section in the side bar. For tech blogs that receive a large volume of traffic, limiting the plugins helps reduce the SQL memory load and if you’ve ever had a website crash you know just how important this is. Do you have some WordPress plugins on your tech blog that you think we should know about? Go ahead and drop your own list or links to the plugins in the comments section below so we can check them out.

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