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Thursday, 28 July 2016
What is Affiliate Marketing
Whenever I publish my income report or share how I earn money with my blog, I often use the term “affiliate marketing”. Bloggers and internet marketers who have been into online marketing for years are familiar with affiliate marketing, and with the fact that it is the most lucrative way to earn money online.
In this article, I will share the basics of affiliate marketing and all the details you need to know in order to make money
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing wherein you refer someone to any online product and when that person buys the product based on your recommendation, you receive a commission. This commission varies from $1 to $10000, depending on what product you are promoting.
This commission varies from $1 to $10000, depending on what product you are promoting.
The most common question I hear is related to how companies track the record of who is sending the traffic and making the sales. The simple answer involves a tracking URL, which is a unique link given to you by the affiliate company or product company.
This URL is used to keep track of all the traffic and sales you are making via your website or other promotional techniques. Many old-fashioned affiliate programs allow a buyer to add the email or referral details in an effort to account for affiliate sales, but this is certainly not the best way to track progress.
6 must-have features of any affiliate program:
So, in simple words:
Many online companies who sell products such as shoes, web-hosting space or any service, offer an affiliate program. You can simply sign up for the program and get your unique tracking link. Now, whenever you are writing about the product, you can simply use this special tracking affiliate link to recommend the company’s site, and if your readers buy anything, you will get a commission.
Every affiliate program has a set TOS. For example, many of them offer a 60-day cookie period, which means that if a visitor uses your special affiliate link to land on the sales page of the site and instead of buying today, he buys at some point within the next 60 days, you will be entitled to the sales commission.
Following are some of the common terms associated with affiliate marketing:
Affiliates: Publishers like you and me who are using affiliate program links to promote and make sales.
Affiliate marketplace: There are many marketplaces like Shareasale, CJ and Clickbank, which work as central databases for affiliate programs in different niches.
Affiliate software: Software used by companies to create an affiliate program for their product, for example: iDevaffiliate.
Affiliate link: Special tracking link offered by your affiliate program to track the progress of your affiliate promotion.
Affiliate ID: Similar to the affiliate link, but many affiliate programs offer a unique ID which you can add to any page of the product site.
Payment mode: Different affiliate programs offer different methods of payment. For example: check, wire transfer, Paypal and many more.
Affiliate Manager/OPM: Many companies have dedicated affiliate managers to help publishers to earn more by giving them optimization tips.
Commission percentage/amount: The amount or percentage you will be receiving in affiliate income from every sale.
2-tier affiliate marketing: This is a great way of making money from an affiliate program. With this method you recommend that others join affiliate programs, and you receive a commission when a sub-affiliate makes a sale, (similar to MLM or multi-level marketing.) This income is popularly known as sub-affiliate commission.
Landing pages: A unique product sales or demo page used for the purpose of increasing sales. Most of the programs that you will be promoting have many landing pages, and you can run A/B test
what is akismet on WordPress.con
Akismet is an advanced hosted anti-spam service aimed at thwarting the underbelly of the web. It efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. To fight the latest and dirtiest tactics embraced by the world's most proficient spammers, it learns and evolves every single second of every single day. Because you have better things to do.
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LEARN MORE
Get started in 3 simple steps
1. SIGN UP
Sign up for an Akismet plan that best suits your needs.
2. ACTIVATE
Use your API key to activate your Akismet plugin or module.
3. RELAX
Rest easy knowing that Akismet is protecting your site from spam.
AWESOME, LET'S KILL SOME SPAM!Akismet filters out your comment spam for you, so you can focus on more important things.
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WHY AKISMET?
We hate spam as much as you do
We all hate spam. It’s annoying. It hurts your site’s credibility. Filtering it manually is confusing and time-consuming. Time spent dealing with spam is time stolen from the business of your site.
Slaying spam since 2005
To date we have kept pieces of spam off the web, with an average of about 7.5 million per hour. That means we're stopping almost twice as much spam as there are people in Los Angeles every single hour.
Matt Wilcox @MattWilcox
Akismet has protected my WordPress site from 250 Spam comments! Amazing, given not a single post had a comment form on it (until today).
We've got connections
As a proud member of the WordPress community since 2005 our service is integrated into top WordPress plugins such as Jetpack and Contact Form 7. If you’re a developer, implementing Akismet through our API couldn’t be easier.
Help us make the web better
We want to keep spam off of the web and you can help us do it. Our affordably priced personal and business options allow us to provide free spam protection for over 3 million users.
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All about seo on WordPress.com
Wordpress get a lot of questions about SEO here on WordPress.com, and no wonder — you work hard on your site and want to get the word out! SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO recommendations are intended to help your site rank higher and more accurately in search engines, like Google. Say you write a blog about sailboats. When someone Googles “sailboats,” how many pages of results do they have to scroll through before they see a link to your blog? The goal behind having good SEO is to increase your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking.
On the busy internet, it can be tough to make your “sailboat” stand out from all the others.
Ideally, you want your link to be on the first page of results. The best ways to accomplish this are:
consistently publish useful, original posts about sailboats; and
promote your blog in intelligent ways to people who are looking for information about your topic.
The more traffic your blog receives for sailboat-related searches, the higher it will climb in Google’s results. No mystery to that, right? But if you look around the internet, you’ll find dubious advice about how to increase your blog’s SERP ranking. Some of the suggestions you’ll find are just extra busywork, but some can actually end up hurting you with Google.
Common myths about SEO
Myth: I need a plugin for SEO.
Fact: WordPress.com has great SEO right out of the box — you don’t have to do anything extra. In fact, WordPress takes care of 80-90 percent of the mechanics of SEO for you, according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. All of our themes are optimized for search engines, which means they are designed to make it easy for the Googlebot (and other search engines) to crawl through them and discover all the content.
Myth: I need to regularly submit Sitemaps to Google so it knows I’m blogging regularly.
Fact: Every WordPress.com blog has an XML Sitemap. To view your Sitemap, type yourblogname.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml in your browser’s address bar. What you see there is code, so it’s not meant to be easily readable by us. For the Googlebot, however, it’s a “what’s hot” guide to the latest and greatest on your site. WordPress.com also automatically sends notifications to Google every time you publish or update a post or page. This is similar to how your subscribers get email updates. Every time you post, you’re telling Google, “Hey! Check this out.”
Here’s how this blog’s XML Sitemap looks in Chrome.
Myth: The more tags and categories I use for a post, the better it is for Google.
Fact: Using a bunch of tags and categories that have little to do with your posts won’t increase your site’s visibility. Actually, Google doesn’t rely on tags or categories — it can tell what your post is about from its content (or it should be able to), as Matt Cutts explains here. Plus, any post on WordPress.com with too many categories and tags will be excluded from the Reader Topics pages. It’s best to use only a few, carefully selected categories and tags for each post — those that are most relevant to what the post is about. Likewise, avoid overly broad tags: “catamaran” is a better tag than “boat.”
Myth: Creating several identical sites about sailboats and making frequent use of sailboat-related terminology in my posts will help me get a lot of sailboat-related traffic.
Fact: Google frowns on duplicate content, and if you have multiple identical sites, your search ranking will suffer for it. Also, while it’s a good idea to use accurate keywords in your posts and post titles, going overboard with so-called “keyword stuffing” will hurt your SERP rank. Strive for clear, natural-sounding writing that reads like it was intended for human ears, not search engine crawlers.
SEO DOs and DON’Ts
Do:
Regularly publish original content.
Use a few precise categories and tags.
Write for human ears.
Build your traffic in smart, organic ways.
Choose simple, meaningful post slugs.
Create a descriptive tagline.
Include keywords se
what is Plugins on WordPress.com
Plugins on WordPress.com
On WordPress.com, we include the most popular plugin functionality within our sites automatically.
Built-in plugin functionality includes (but is not limited to) the following:
WordPress.com stats (our version of Google Analytics)
Essential SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Security scanning
Advanced galleries (tiled, mosaic, slideshows, and more)
Social Media (add social media buttons to your posts and pages)
Form builder (contact forms)
Extended Customizer
Extended Widgets (Flickr, Eventbrite, Google Calendar, Twitter, and more)
Akismet (advanced anti-spam security)
Backup & Export (24/7 backup of your entire site)
Importer
Extended Shortcodes (video, audio, and more)
Infinite scroll
Related posts
Email subscriptions (follow button)
Advanced Commenting (comment likes, user mentions, notifications, and more)
Markdown
Likes (for Posts)
Embeds (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more)
Premium Plan Upgrades:
Custom Design (custom fonts, CSS editor, and more)
Video Uploading
No Advertising
Business Plan Upgrades:
Google Analytics
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Plugin Requests
If there is a plugin that you feel is a must-have and would benefit users on WordPress.com, then please let us know in the ideas forum! Tell us what plugin you want, where it can be downloaded and most importantly, why you think it should be included on WordPress.com. All of the feedback is read, and we’re collecting the most numerous requests for implementation.
Amazing social media features of WordPress A to z guide
This guide provides instructions for how to connect your WordPress.com site to various social networking services. Once connected to a service, you can share your posts with that service automatically.
To connect your site to your social networks, go to My Site → Sharing in your dashboard. You’ll see various services in the Publicize section: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Path, and Eventbrite. To connect to a service, click the Connect button and follow the prompts.
Need more information or having trouble with connecting to a particular service? Read on.
Using Publicize
Once you’ve approved a connection to any of these services, you’ll see a Publicize section in the Publish box on your post writing screen each time you write a new post.
When you publish your post as usual, you’ll see it show up on the services you’ve enabled. If you want to opt out of any of the Publicize services for a specific post, uncheck the boxes next to the Publicize connections you’d like to disable.
You can also customize the message that introduces your post on your services:
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Setting up Publicize
To set up Publicize on your WordPress.com site, go to My Site → Sharing in your dashboard.
In the Publicize section, you’ll see a list of services to which you can share your posts. Click Connect next to the service you’d like to enable.
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Facebook Profiles & Pages
Watch the video below for a quick overview of how it works, and read below for more examples and settings.
On the My Site → Sharing page, click the Connect button next to Facebook. A message will ask you to authorize the connection between your WordPress.com site and your Facebook account, providing access to your public profile and friend list.
Click the “Okay” button, and Facebook will then ask you to allow WordPress.com to post publicly on your behalf. Click the “Okay” button to allow this, too.
Finally, you’ll be prompted to allow WordPress.com to manage your pages. Click “Okay” for this as well.
You’ll be taken back to your dashboard and will see a success message. Here, you can choose if you’d like to publicize to your profile or one of your pages.
After clicking Connect, you can make this connection available to all users of the site. This means that when another user creates a post, it will also publicize to this Facebook profile or page.
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Google+ Profiles and Pages
On the My Site → Sharing page, click the Connect button next to Google+. You’ll be taken to Google where you’ll be asked to approve your selected connection between your WordPress.com site and your Google+ account. Click Allow.
On the next screen, you’ll see a message asking you to confirm the account you’d like to authorize. Click Connect.
You’ll see a message indicating you’ve successfully connected. In the dialog box, you have the option to connect to a different account. You can also check the box to make this connection available to all site admins. This means that when another user creates a post, it will also publicize to this Google+ profile or page.
Changing who can see your publicized posts on Google+
By default, Google+ sets the visibility of your posts to “Only You”. You can change this setting by following these steps:
Go to the Manage Apps page in Google+.
Beside WordPress, click on Edit.
From the dropdown menu, choose whether you’d like to share your posts to specific circles, a community that you manage or the public.
Click on Save to finish.
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On the My Site → Sharing page, click the Connect button next to Twitter. You’ll be taken to Twitter where you’ll be asked to approve the connection between your WordPress.com site and your Twitter account. Click Authorize app.
After, confirm the account you’d like to authorize, then click Connect.
You’ll see a message indicating you’ve successfully connected. In the dialog box, you have the option to connect
what is WordPress.org
WordPress is a publishing platform that makes it easy for anyone to publish online, and proudly powers millions of websites. It comes in two flavors: the fully hosted WordPress.com, and the self-hosted version, whose software is available for free at WordPress.org.
WordPress.com
Focus on your beautiful content, and let us handle the rest. WordPress.org
Get your hands dirty, and host your website yourself.
Premium hosting, security, and backups are included. You can even upgrade to a custom domain, like YourGroovyDomain.com. You’ll need to find a host, and perform backups and maintenance yourself. We offer VaultPress for security and backups.
Choose from hundreds of beautiful themes. Make it your own with Custom Design. Install custom themes. Build your own with PHP and CSS.
Integrate your site with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networks. Install a plugin, like Jetpack, to enable sharing functionality on your site.
Popular features like sharing, stats, comments, and polls are included. There’s no need to install plugins. Install plugins to extend your site’s functionality.
Personal support and the WordPress.com forums are always available. Visit the WordPress.org support forums for assistance.
You must register for an account on WordPress.com and abide by our Terms of Service. No registration with WordPress.org is required.
WordPress is a community-driven project that’s developed by and for people like you. Many thousands of people from around the world contribute to the project, and many millions of websites are powered by it — 25% of the web, in all. From large company websites to personal blogs, and everything in between, everyone can publish with WordPress.
There are two ways to get started with WordPress. You can host a WordPress installation on your own server, or you can host your site here at WordPress.com and let us handle the technical bits.
Hosting your own WordPress site can be fun and rewarding, but it also requires some technical knowledge and places more responsibility on you, the publisher. You can download the WordPress software for free at http://wordpress.org, but it must be installed on a web server before it will work. You will need to research and install your own themes and plugins. Many hosting providers offer a one-click installation of WordPress — here are a few examples. There are also many web development agencies that specialize in building WordPress sites.
WordPress.com is different. Here at WordPress.com, you don’t have to download software, pay for hosting, or manage a web server. You can instead focus on creating wonderful content, and let us handle the rest!
WordPress.com is a great choice for bloggers, photographers, artists, plumbers, doctors, restaurateurs — almost anyone. However, techies that prefer to maintain full control over their code, should consider hosting their own WordPress installation. We provide a large number of themes and built-in plugin functionality so you won’t need to upload your own.
Publishing your website is always free here at WordPress.com, and premium upgrades are available to help you supercharge your site. These upgrades let you use a custom domain (like YourGroovyDomain.com), extensively customize the appearance of your site, upload HD video, and lots more.
WordPress.com is a commercial enterprise owned by Automattic, a company started by the founding developer of WordPress and staffed by full-time developers, designers, and support engineers. Automatticians (employees of Automattic) regularly contribute back to the WordPress software so that the entire community can benefit.
