To have a responsible hosting company for your blog is very important. I have been using Siteground for some more than 3 years now. They have a very good customer care service. If you have any problem, just post a ticket and your problem will be sorted out in minimum possible time.
I am pleased to let you know that I am starting a free Blogging Crash course. This is targetted for newbie bloggers or individuals who are planning to start a blog and experience the “ Earning Through Blogging “ trend. There are lots of bloggers who earn decent revenue from blogging and you could be one of them. There are lots of reason why you should join this course.
Recently I had restarted using Aweber. Aweber is a newsletter handling platform at a very nominal price depending on the number of subscribers. After adding Blog broadcast to Aweber for my blogs, I noticed considerable hike in my subscriber count. What happens is the subscriber count of the Aweber is added to Feedburner.
This is a good feature when you show the Feedburner chicklet on your blog. Getting subscribers initially is a real task, but once your have around 5000 subscribers then its grows at a higher rate. I was reading a post from Johnchow where he mentions that it took 18 months to get the initial 5000 subscribers and now he get 5000 new subscribers every month.
Twitter is the latest boom in Social Networking. I created an account on twitter some time back and just tried, but did not use for a week also. I was hearing a lot about twitter by different bloggers and how they use to increase their traffic, sales and revenue.
If you are not using twitter, then you are missing something which you should not. You might be using sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Myspace and more, but this is something which is totally different. For selling a product, you have a write a big sales page, testimonial and more, but with twitter, you can send your followers to these pages, build relation with fellow bloggers and like minded people.
Let me explain how things go different with twitter. Its very simple to create an account, but the real task is to get followers. Its very easy for popular branded bloggers or celebrities to get followers, but for normal internet user, its very difficult to get followers, but still you can get going.
I have been doing good number of posts on this blog for sometime and thought of creating an E-book of some of the most read post. I just finished the e-book and giving it free for download to my news letter subscribers. If you are interested in downloading this E-book, just subscribe to my newsletter by entering your email ID and Full name.
You will have to confirm the subscription. Once you confirm you will be given the download details.
E-books are one of the best way to let people know about your website or blog. You can even think about creating E-books and selling it with reselling rights. There are different software to create E-books which can be downloaded for free or buy with small price. E-books are usually created in PDF formats which can be read using Adobe Acrobat reader.
So don’t waste your time, just enter your email ID and Name and get your copy now. You are free to distribute it to your friends to tell them to get it downloaded here
Your feedbacks are anticipated
In affiliate marketing, sending newsletters and subscriptions are very important. There are many services which offer newsletter services. If you are planning for any new affiliate program or if you want to be in touch with your visitors, then you should surely go for a newsletter tool.
Using Feedburner for subscription is good and its free, but there are lots of limitations. You cannot send a offer letter to your subscribers. You can have a feedburner subscription box as well as a news letter subscribing form too on your blog. You might have noticed that I have recently added a new newsletter box below the Feedburner one which is of Aweber, an excellent newsletter and auto responder solution.
I just installed MaxBlogPress which is an affiliate links managing Wordpress Plugin which should be of good use to you also. You will surely be working as an affiliate for different affiliate programs or if you have a click bank account, then this is a must have plugin.
This plugin is very easy to use and the installation is like a usual wordpress plugin. Once you install this plugin, you need to go to the Manage link from your admin panel and start entering your affiliate links and connect it to relevant keywords. When ever a keyword matches with the link, the link is auto generated by this plugin. MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin has the features that you will really need like hiding the affiliate link, cloaking, stats and almost everything that you will need.
If you are planning to starting your own affiliate program, then you will need some tools for managing your affiliate. In this post, I will be explaining about the Affiliate Management software that I use for managing my affiliate program. I am suggesting this software as I have used it for more than 2 years now and I find this very useful and reliable.
I use Post Affiliate Pro, which is an excellent affiliate management tool and is a complete solution for Affiliate Managers. The software is from Quality Unit and is one of the best software available at a very affordable price. You get free updates and the product is now very stable.
And many more
You can find more information about this program at the vendor’s website
I have been running my own affiliate program for the past 3 years now. There are many gains are loss when you run your own affiliate program. It depends on you how you run the program. The losses can be converted to gains if you plan your program well. Well in my case, I had funded my affiliate program and it took some time to make money from affiliate programs. I was expecting this and it was planned.
Branding yourself - You can brand yourself when you run your own affiliate program. Just go to Google and search for HomeJob, you will get my website and I get lots of visitors from Google who search for Home Jobs. For the past 3 years I have established a brand.
Gaining confidence of affiliates - You can gain confidence of your members who have been working for your program, provided, you keep your promise, make the payments promptly
Easy to launch new programs - If you have a good number of affiliates who are working for your affiliate program, you can introduce new products and get your existing members to join the new programs. This is applicable only if your affiliates are happy with your existing affiliate programs
Responsibility - You have lots of responsibility like replying to the support request, managing your affiliates, making payments, but again part of your program
Overheads - You should plan your affiliate program well so that you can manage your overheads from the revenue generated from your affiliate program
Management - Management is a part of every business, you need to manage your program well. You may not be able to do all by yourself, you may need a technical person if you are not having any technical experience. I my case, I had to recruit moderators for moderating the work done my affiliates.
Conclusion - There are pros and cons for every business you do and it depends all on you , how you plan your program and manage it. I learnt a lot from the affiliate programs I am running and now I make good revenue from my affiliate programs and I no longer need to invest any funds to make payments to my affiliates. I have sufficient income from Advertisement and registration fees. My affiliate are happy as they get paid exactly on the payout date
My affiliate Programs
In my last post I had mentioned about starting your own affiliate program. For running an affiliate program efficiently, you need to have sufficient tools. I have been using different tools for my affiliate program which makes things automated and as the affiliate program grows, we can manage without facing much problems.
The first tool that is needed is to manage your affiliate. You can either for a custom made program or a ready made program and modify it according to your need.
Custom Made affiliate managing software
The disadvantage for a custom made tool is that you need to test, debug and its time consuming. More over it will be very costly if you are going for a custom made affiliate managing program.
Ready made affiliate managing software
There are many affiliate managing programs available online which you can test before buying it. The advantage of ready made software is that there are less chances of bugs as it will be used and tested by many. I have been using Post Affiliate Pro for my affiliate program which is very robust and the support given by the vendors are excellent.
Providing support for your affiliates is very important and you need a very efficient tool for this. I tried using Gmail for this, but the finally I switched over to Support Centre which is an excellent tool.
If you have an affiliate program, then its good to have newsletter. To manage your newsletter, you will find an option in the Affiliate Managing software, but the drawback of built-in mailing software is that when the number of subscribers are very high, you may have problem sending bulk email as there may be some restriction in your hosting package or you will have to go for a dedicated server hosting.
I would recommend a third party news letter service for this like aweber or getresponse for this. This is a paid service. You can create unlimited campaign’s and subscriber list with these News letter services
These are the basic tools that you need to manage a affiliate program. There are other topics to be discussed related to running an affiliate program like marketing your affiliate program, Payment tools, etc, which will be coming up soon, So stay tuned in.