Affiliate Marketing and Blogging Mistakes

Making mistakes on or in your posts can have a negative effect on your Affiliate Marketing site. So, in today's post, I am going to go over just a few that should be avoided.


Inconsistency

Inconsistency doesn't translate well to your readers. Being inconsistent says something  negative about you and your business. Your  readers (current and future) look forward to reading your posts on Affiliate Marketing. That is, if you can show them that you are reliable and can be counted on to provide them with what they are looking for on a regular basis. Therefore, how often you post to your blog is important since they rely on you to consistently post valuable information.

So, suppose you want or intend to publish a post to your Affiliate Marketing blog every other day or maybe just twice a week. The duration of when you post is fine, just as long as you are consistent. Being consistent sets the pattern that your subscribers will get used to and will expect.


Content
It's important to keep your blog content relative to your niche. Lack of appropriate content gives your readers a reason not  to return. Remember they come to your Affiliate Marketing site because they are interested in information related to your niche. So stick to topics that are easily identifiable to your niche.  Provide content that is interesting and informative on the subject they are interested.


DONT DO Free Hosting!!
Affiliate Marketing is a business. So, you should really host your business on its own domain through a paid hosting plan like GoDaddy, BlueHost or HostZilla. See free hosting is fine, but I believe its more appropriate for a personal blog or website. Appearance is important in business, so you want to appear as professional as possible to your subscribers/readers.

One thing you should do is host your blog on your own domain by purchasing a name that's related to your Affiliate Marketing business. If you already have an existing site, you can create a sub domain from your existing site (businessname.com/blog). The first will cost you for the domain name and hosting unless you already have hosting that allows multiple domains to be hosted. The second typically will cost you nothing at all.

Here are some tips for finding/choosing a domain name for your Affiliate Marketing website. Find a name that is related to your business name. If your business name is too long, you can try using the first letters of each word. Make sure your blog domain name is easy to remember and keep it as short as possible. Always try to get a .com extension since it is the most widely recognized. Just try to make it short and sweet!I wrote a post about setting up a domain (Registering Your Domain Name) that provides valuable information on this subject.


Search Engine Optimizing (SEO)

Optimizing the posts and/or articles on your Affiliate Marketing blog is extremely important. It helps people find your site and/or articles. You can do keyword optimizing by making sure that your title has a keyword related to your article or post. Your article or post should be keyword rich as well. I have written several posts on SEO, that will provide all the information you need on this subject. Just click on SEO in the category cloud.

No Marketing For Your Blog.
Believe it or not, this is a common mistake for beginners. Regardless of whether you have a business blog and/or a personal blog, you want to market your blog(s) to drive traffic and eventually followers  There are a lot of ways to market your Affiliate Marketing blog. This  includes social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc), article marketing, commenting on related blogs, backlinks, social bookmarking, etc.

As stated earlier in this post, Affiliate Marketing is a business, therefore it stands to reason, the more readers and/or followers, the better chance your business has of being successful. So, avoid the mistakes noted above.

Thats it for now, until the next post....

Guest Blogging,

For anyone who is just starting out in Affiliate Marketing and/or blogging, it is important to understand that guest blogging is becoming more and more popular. Posting guest blog posts on other popular blogs is great way to get targeted visitors to your site. Its fast and best of all, its free. In this post, I am going to expand on the some of the many benefits.

*Guest blogging helps improve your exposure- Think about this, a blog owner has an established blog that they put a lot of effort into. Most likely they have an established a good following, or audience through all their hard work. You come along and do a guest blog post for the blog owner. Your guest post results in you and your Affiliate Marketing blog being exposed to the established audience.  This can have quite the positive effect on the traffic to your site.

Note- if you have created a brand for yourself, put your brand on your guest post. This will help it become more recognized, since more eyes will be seeing it.

*Guest blogging increases the traffic to your Affiliate Marketing site- This benefit follows right along with the benefit above. Traffic that is the result of guest blogging, is better than any other, especially paid traffic. See if a blog owner allows you to do a guest post, you can almost consider it to be an endorsement by that blog owner. So, when write a post on their blog and its within your niche, then the traffic that is directed to your site is considered to be qualified or is already targeted.  Basically, they will have been directed to your site by the endorsement of their favorite bloggers, rather than by advertising. Which is so much more beneficial.

*Guest blogging provides high quality backlinks- I have done a few posts (Links, Traffic and SEO, PageRank, What Is It & How To Improve It, Google’s Latest Update & Your Rankings) now about backlinks where I discussed how important they are and how they improve SEO along with PageRank. So, guest blogging is another great way to get high quality backlinks. See, your SEO  and Pagerank will most definitely improve since it’s exactly what the search engines are looking for in terms of linking.

*Guest blogging provides long term backlinks- In addition to high the quality backlinks noted above, guest blogging also results in long-term links. See the links on your guest blog post are pretty much permanent. This is because most blog owners keep their posts available for the life of their blog.

*Guest blogging can increase your social media followers- Almost all bloggers have sharing options on their blogs. So, if you write a guest post on their blog and it gets shared, just imagine where that can lead. 

I have only covered just a few of the many benefits of guest blogging above. So, go find a blog (or several) that is within your niche. See if you can provide a guest post (or several) for the bog owner. If the owner allows it, write a great post on their blog site. Then you can see all the benefits it has for your Affiliate Marketing site.
…