The Affiliates Guide To Cookies

April 3, 2012 by

cookie guideWhether you are an affiliate or an affiliate hopeful, you’ve most likely heard about cookies. After visiting a website, a cookie is sometimes stored on a visitor’s computer to track information about the visitor. In affiliate marketing, this is how affiliate programs track visitors who click on affiliate links. The success of clicks on these links depends upon ad copy, image placement, and also cookie length. Some people, however, have learned to abuse cookies with cookie stuffing, like with the case of Shawn Hogan who used this blackhat method to make over a million dollars a month.

Let’s break down the basics of cookies and how they apply to you as affiliate marketers.

What’s Stored in Cookies?

A multitude of information can be stored in a visitor’s cookies such as his or her IP address, visit duration, date and time of visit, your affiliate ID, and even your website name. This is the information that affiliate programs use in their analytics to help you and their companies track clicks, conversions, and calculate overall return on investment (ROI) of your affiliate marketing campaigns.

How Do These Cookies Work?

Let’s say you have a review site for the Amazon Associates program, and someone visits your site and clicks an affiliate link. A cookie will be dropped on their computer to keep track of whether they make a purchase or not through your affiliate link. If a sale is made through this link of yours, then Amazon will award you with a commission.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Websites

5 Reasons Why People Don’t Want To Follow Your Affiliate Recommendation

April 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

affilaites getting started

If you have an affiliate website or blog, you need to be able to persuade your audience to buy the product that you recommend to them. If you have a highly responsive audience, then it is good for you. It means that they will mostly follow your recommendation. But, sometimes your audience is not as responsive as you want them to be. They might feel irritated or annoyed with your recommendation. And it means that you’re losing sales. Do you want to know why people don’t want to buy the product you recommend? Here are 5 reasons why people don’t want to follow your affiliate recommendation:

1. You Are Irritating Them

Your job as an affiliate is to inform and help your audience, not to irritate them. Yet, many affiliates do their job poorly. They irritate instead of inform. The way they promote their product is so annoying that people don’t want to listen. Do you really need to promote your affiliate product in each and every article that you write? Well, that might be irritating. Is it simpler and less irritating for you to build a separate page (such as review page) to promote your affiliate product? Remember that the way you promote your affiliate product will determine how your audience will react to your promotion. So, you have to inform your audience. Don’t irritate them.

2. You Don’t Have Original Ideas In Your Website Or Blog

How can people value your recommendation if you only have duplicate content in your website? How can people listen to your “expert advice” if you don’t have any original ideas in your blog? Remember that on the net, people value your opinions and ideas. They love it when they read any new ideas that are interesting to them. If you offer your unique and original ideas to your audience in your website, you will have bigger chance to succeed with your promotion. Why? That’s because you’re different from the rest of the world.

3. The Product Doesn’t Fill Their Wants And Needs

People buy product because they want to fill certain needs and wants from that product. For instance, people who want to lose weight will buy several weight loss products such as fitness equipment, diet books, fitness plan, and so on. Now, if you promote product that doesn’t fill your audience’s wants and needs, do you think that they will be interested to buy it? The answer is no. Why? That’s because people only buy product that will fill their wants and needs. If the product can’t fill their wants and needs, suffice is to say that the product is useless for them, no matter how good it is.

4. The Product Is Too Expensive For The Quality That It Offers

When people buy the product, they also take a look at the price of the product and what they’ll get from it. For instance, they expect a $500 weight loss product to really deliver the result that it promises. Also, they expect this product to provide lots of weight loss materials that worth its price. People don’t want to get ripped off of their hard-earned money. People want maximum value for each dollar that they spend. So, when you promote a product that is illogically expensive, people might not want to buy it simply because of the price. So, you have to consider promoting high quality product at a reasonable price instead of promoting an expensive product just because the big amount of commission you’ll get.

5. You Don’t Establish Yourself As An Expert

People expect you to be an expert before recommending any product to them. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you need to become a PhD just to recommend an affiliate product. But, think of it like this. When you give valuable ideas and opinions to your audience on your website, you will naturally establish yourself as an expert. Why? That’s because you have a different point of view and it really helps your audience in some ways. The keyword is to help. If you can help your audience, then you can automatically establish yourself as an expert, and your recommendation will carry more weight. But, if you only give your audience useless materials, they won’t consider you as an expert, let alone follow your recommendation. That’s because you are not giving any value to them whatsoever.

Those are the reasons why people don’t want to follow your affiliate recommendation. So, the next time you see people avoid clicking your affiliate links, it means that you need to evaluate the way you do things. Affiliate business can only be done successfully if you can make your recommendation count.

Jake is a technology blogger passionate about SEO and IM Technologies. He occassionally contributes informative resource to Assisted Reputation, a SEO Service Company in London

Filed Under: Affiliate Noobs

5 Mind Blowing Secrets About Guest Blog Posts

April 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

If you are someone who has been guest blogging for quite a few times, then you already know that you rely on information from various online sources to write a compelling blog post. It’s completely a good thing to research online, but not everything that comes along your way is up-to-date or accurate.

Like with everything else, there are lots of misconceptions surrounding the web, blog, and guest blogging in general. Equally true is the fact that there’s also lot of mind blowing secrets that can not only improve the performance of your blog, but also your daily activities as a guest blogger.

That’s why, we thought it would be amazing to share some of the well-kept secrets, well, just like we’re feeling good, and also help clear some of the confusion you might have about guest blogging:

1. Guest blogging is a “team effort.” Surprised, aren’t you as you were always accustomed to blogging alone.

But in order to make guest blogging work, you require at least couple of people; that means, sometimes you may have to be willing to work with another person, and in some cases, with 2 or 3 other bloggers.

Most websites have a content management system where you login and submit your blog post. The site owner approves the blog post. But the key secret is that guest blogging is a team effort, and not an individual thing, anymore. That means you have to be willing to learn to work in team. In such situation, you might need to have effective communication skills to perform well.

2. You must research as a guest blogger. In other words, you cannot perform well if you aren’t willing to research when it comes to guest blogging. If you’re a beginner, then you might as well start to make a list of niche that you want to write guest blog in. After that, you will have to search for blogs in those niches. Next, you job would be to find out different types of content that attracts more views, reads, and comments. In addition to finding HOT topics, you’ll also need to make sure the content you write are similar in quality and tone to other posts on the site.

3. Keep track of all your guest blog posts. Now that you have got your name out in the blogging sphere and started networking, keep record of your guest posts as they’ll not only become handy expanding your profession, but it will give you a point of reference of your work when required. In addition, an organized record of your guest blog will keep you motivated, and look back to your posts to learn about key details like when certain posts become live and when you need to start promoting them.

4. When it comes to guest blogging, there’s no magic formula. You heard it right as there aren’t any set of tricks and magic pills that will help you create a “perfect” guest blogs or accomplish all of your goals all the time.

Yes, there are certain rules and “must-dos” you cannot break while guest blogging, but they still aren’t magic formula. You cannot just break everything to a formula. Just imagine: if there was a single magic formula for guest blogging, would not everyone use them and make the method, well, horrible and useless? Remember when it comes to guest blogging success, only continuous effort, trial and error, and hard work will help you improve your performance.  Also learning a few social media secrets will help the promotion of your content.

5. First impression is very important when it comes to guest blog posting. A “killer” title that makes a reader stop and read the content is what separates a normal blog post from an excellent blog posts. While submitting your guest blog post, make sure that it has a catchy headline that will make people want to click and read the whole content.

If you look closely, many site owners accept or reject a guest blog post on the basis of the title used in the guest blog post. You might have only single chance to make that great impression. Better make it count!

Well, there you have it. We want to hear from you. What secrets you have up your sleeve regarding guest blog posting. Share them!

Ludwing Hernandez is a social media marketing consultant and entrepreneur. Follow me at www.zinzz.com.

Filed Under: Affiliate SEO

5 Ways To Grow Your Affiliate Business Today

March 1, 2013 by

Affiliate marketing is an internet based marketing technique whereby an affiliate earns a commission for bringing in customers. Affiliate marketing is considered as one of the best ways through which an individual can make money online but can be quite challenging due to the cutthroat competition experienced in this field. As such, it is of outmost importance that an individual should come up with viable strategies to make a living through affiliate marketing the following overview on 5 ways to grow your affiliate business today might prove invaluable for individuals who might be in the affiliate marketing business.

Focus on Your Customer’s Need
Focusing on your customers’ need is the first step to growing your affiliate marketing business. Many affiliate marketers have great websites but have done the mistake of advertising products or services that are not in high demand within their niche.
To avoid making this mistake, you should carry out research on forums, article directories and websites within your niche to have the best knowledge of the trends within your niche and most importantly, understand your customer’s needs. Your affiliate marketing campaign should then be focused on these needs to get positive results in terms of sales through your affiliate links.
By giving your consumers what they want, you can greatly improve your affiliate marketing business.

Optimize Your Website
As you might already know, affiliate marketing is a traffic oriented venture meaning that, the more traffic your site gets, the higher your commissions would be. There are many techniques that can be used to increase incoming traffic to your site the most notable one being search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization or SEO makes use of various techniques to improve the ranking of a website on search engines. By having your site optimized, its visibility on search engines would be greatly improved increasing ensuring that your site is amongst the first to be listed by search engines for specific search terms. This can greatly increase your affiliate marketing commissions.

Contests
Contests are considered as one of the best tools that can help you grow your affiliate marketing business. By holding contests and posting links with details of the contest, traffic into you site can be greatly increased, increasing you chances of making sales through your affiliate link.

Link Building
According to research, most sales in affiliate programs are made though incoming links. As such, creating viable incoming links to your website, chances of making sales through your affiliate link are greatly increased.

Diversify
Growth forms an integral part of any business model. As such, it should be incorporated within your affiliate marketing business for your business to grow. The best way through which this can be achieved would be to diversify your affiliate marketing business into other niches. This can be quite easy since all you might have to replicate your existing affiliate marketing model on to another niche.

By using the above mentioned 5 ways to grow your affiliate business today, chances of successfully growing your affiliate marketing business are very high.

Featured images:

Randy D. Stephens is a native of Brooklyn N.Y. and passionate about internet marketing. He is currently self-employed in his affiliate business PureLeverage.

Filed Under: Affiliate Noobs

Interflora Vouchercode Sites Outrank Interflora

February 26, 2013 by

What happens when you are a merchant gets hit with a Google penalty?  Well the merchants affiliates end up ranking for their domain. This happend at the end of last week in the UK when Inerflora was hit with a manual penalty from Google. The interflora penalty casued the brand to lose total visibility for their brand searches.

 

interflora voucher code websites

 

 

Here you can see Vouchercodes and Monneysupermarket ranking for brand search queries. OOpps!

So what happened?  Further to their aggressive link building, they went all out for advertorials as spotted by Dave Naylor’s team:

Any good SEO Agency knows, when you’re preparing for a Seasonal Event, such as Valentines or Mothers Day (in this instance, Valentines Day), the build up begins months before the event, to ensure a good placement has been achieved with plenty of time to spare. Interflora were exceptionally aggressive throughout January, preparing for Valentines, placing we estimate 150+ Advertorials on Regional News Sites all over the UK.

 

 

This was later confirmed in a (but not directly) by Matt Cutts:

 

Filed Under: Affiliate Merchant Stuff, Affiliate Noobs, Affiliate SEO

Five simple ways to maximise your advertiser relationships

January 17, 2013 by

 

Affiliate marketing is an incredibly competitive space and it’s easy to forget that advertisers, publishers, networks and agencies are all on the same team more often than not. If the publisher generates more sales, the advertiser generates more sales and we can all sleep better at night, safe in the knowledge that our livelihoods are secure for another day.

So, with that in mind, here are five simple ways to get the most out of your affiliate managers.

Programme Applications: None of us like rejection, in any aspect of life. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about that person who laughed in your face when you asked them out in high school, or that advertiser who declined a website you’d invested time and effort into. It still hurts.

The simple way to avoid this is to keep your network profile up to date and list the website you actually intend to use for promotion. Nothing will get declined quicker than an irrelevant URL which now points to a GoDaddy page. If you’re working on a new site that’s still in stealth mode, include a message about it and list one of your existing sites as an example of your work. Each programme gets a huge number of applications daily, so this will really showcase your quality. The affiliate manager may even get in touch off the back of your application.

Read the Programme Terms: A huge amount of time and effort usually go into constructing each individual programme’s terms and conditions. These might sometimes sound unfair, or too restrictive, but are put in place to protect the advertiser’s current business objectives. If the terms include ‘no PPC’, it’s generally because they’re investing heavily in their own PPC campaigns and don’t want to compete directly with their own affiliates. Without reading the terms though, some affiliates have no idea they’ve broken them until it’s too late.

Pick Up The Phone: So you’ve been accepted onto the programme and read the terms… now what? Give your new advertiser’s affiliate manager a call. Email is great but sometimes over-enthusiastic spam filters, junk mail and a busy work schedule cause us all to miss things that we’re really interested in. I’ve accomplished more in two minute phone calls than in months of emails.

Use What You’ve Got: This is the crux of my post. If you remember nothing else, remember this one word – LEVERAGE. Do you have an email list? Can you write a blog post for the brand? Can you build out a landing page? Can you offer a premium banner placement? Are you considering dropping a competitor or even the advertiser? Only you know what promotion works best on your own sites. Affiliate Managers are always looking for new ‘opportunities’ (you’ve seen that in emails before, I’m sure of it). Why not hit them up and see if you can get a better deal for yourself in exchange for what you can offer. This is especially true for niche and smaller brands. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

Meetings: Not always possible, but a great way to solidify a partnership and you can reap the rewards for years, literally. It’s a relatively small industry in the UK. People change roles and companies frequently and so your relationships will evolve as a result of that. I still maintain some of my earliest contacts and have found them invaluable for advice and opportunities. There’s also nothing like a good old-fashioned affiliate networking event to make things happen for both sides.

Author:
Dave Tinnery is affiliate manager at Tug, a digital marketing agency based in London. Originally from Ireland, he lived in East Europe for years and then moved to UK. He loves discovering new places in the city, in particular old pubs and real music clubs.

Filed Under: Affiliate Noobs

What Is the Proper Website Architecture and How Can It Benefit to Your SEO

December 30, 2012 by

There are many factors to consider when optimizing your website for search engines, and it doesn’t stop with content or backlinks. The way you structure your site is among one of those strategies. Here is my conclusion, based on my own strategy while I was working for small business company from NYC, called Paramold. Site structure is very important to SEO. I would like to share this tips with you.

awe architecture

Why Structure Is Important to SEO

You can pass on rank to deep pages or allocate rank to more popular pages

Deep linking will also increase exposure to other pages

You can ensures visitors see pages on your site and Google indexes them

It prioritizes content

Structure helps visitors find content

Optimizing makes it easier to create sitemaps

As you can see, paying closer attention to the structure of your website gives you more control over user experience as well as SEO.

Silo Structure

The easiest way to structure a site is to use a hierarchy. While smaller sites can get away with fewer tiers, many websites need three or four to remain organized. The hierarchical, or silo, structure is commonly used for a reason, but isn’t one size fits all. Static websites like those introducing your company work well with this method.

Deciding the structure of your hierarchy depends upon your content. While you’ve done keyword research and will want to use those keywords in categories, but it’s the content and themes of your website itself that determines category development. For example, a small jewelry store may separate necklaces, rings, earrings and other accessories into individual categories that become directories on your website. Thus, when JewelryStore.com has a necklace, the URL might be similar to “http://jewelrystore.com/necklaces/24-karat-gold-chain”.

If your site is larger, you might use subcategories instead, so your reader would click “Necklaces” and then click “Gold” to view all of those necklaces. Figuring out how categories helps to create your navigation, which should also include a link to the index and “About” and “Contact Us” pages.

This method also helps visitors find relevant information. If someone wants to see all necklaces, removing the page from the URL will bring up those results. Most blog scripts organize posts by date in a similar fashion, quickly allowing your reader to find every post from November 2012 with ease.

Crosslinking

When you’re using the basic hierarchy, or silo, technique, you want to link down the silos. However, you don’t want to crosslink in general. Your pages listing gold necklaces shouldn’t contain links to silver rings or to the rings index at all. This is why crosslinking is better for shops. You can place pages in more than one category, link to similar content, promote top pages or products, show off recent comments or lure customers with links to products similar shoppers bought. Many blogs and stores use crosslinking for these reasons.

Internal Linking

As your content gets lower into the hierarchy, make sure to link it from higher up. This helps to spread linkjuice and expose your readers to relevant content. However, you might want to use the “no-follow” attribute in your links when linking to less popular content. These pages might be useful, but sculpting PageRank in this way helps to prevent dilution of the linkjuice. For example, sitemaps, TOS pages and privacy policies don’t need linkjuice.

Whichever method works best for you, use it consistently.

Citations:
Featured images:

Ben Sawyer is SEO Consultant and a professional blogger. Currently he is working with paramold.com , helping them to increase their rankings and attract more visitors to their small busness website. Here Ben shared with us his advice about website structure and why is it important to SEO.

Filed Under: Affiliate SEO

5 Amazing Design Features Of An Opt-In Box That Works

December 30, 2012 by

 

When was the last time you clicked onto a new website and were desperate to give someone your email address? It’s not something that happens very often and when someone has the ability to cause that kind of reaction in people they will be very rich indeed. Those are the people who end up having huge email lists that turn into buyers. Everyone else can still make some nice money from a website, but nothing compared to what these people are making. If you can’t beat them you will have to join them.   That means causing the same reaction in people that land on your site. You need to turn your opt-in box into a conversion machine. How do you start? The easiest way to find the secret is by studying what the successful people do right. They definitely don’t just throw something together and hope it works. Let’s have a look now and we will go through a few things they all do. Start incorporating these into the design of your opt-in box and watch your conversions skyrocket.

Let’s start with the freebie

When you want someone’s email address it’s a good idea to offer them something in return. This is usually in the form of a free gift which can be anything you like. The most important thing is that you present it in an alluring way. That means you dangle a nice picture of it inside your opt-in box so they know exactly what they’re getting. The fact that it should be something they are interested in speaks for itself

Nail the headline

Even though the picture is going to be the first thing that catches their eye you still need to have an amazing headline telling people exactly what they’re getting. It should scream out at them and make them want to read the rest of the box. Remember that everyone in the world will always want something. You have the website they are on, so you should know what they want. The headline is just a teaser to let someone know they are getting it.

Explain what it’s about

Your opt-in box should always be short and sweet just like anything else you want the majority of people to pay attention to. You have a few sentences to tell someone what they are going to be getting when they join up. You have to use benefits instead of features because people don’t really care what your product is, they only care about how it will improve their life. Tell them how it can do that and your conversion rate will increase.

What do you ask them for?

When you see most opt-in boxes there will be a space for someone to enter their name and email. This will obviously depend on what you’re niche is, but sometimes it’s better if you don’t ask them for their name. It’s because the conversion rate will decrease and you don’t need to know their name anyway. If you ask for their email address there’s a good chance you will make more money. You obviously need to test this for yourself, but that’s what most people are seeing.

Prove you are safe

Right at the bottom you also want to tell them they won’t be spammed. They still don’t know anything about you and have no idea if you’re a spammer. When people sign up to certain lists they get abused so much with different offers every day. Tell them they won’t be spammed and you can even go as far as telling them how often they should receive an email from you. They’ll know what to expect and won’t be overwhelmed by it.

George Kent is a full time seo blogger. He is of the opinion that in order to find a certified ct in seo one can browse through the local directories also.

Filed Under: Affiliate CRO

Why Amazon is My First Choice as an Affiliate Marketer?

December 11, 2012 by

amazon Xmas deals

 

When you have a product you want to sell it can be hard to get it out into the open. There are several ways you can do this but sometimes the paths are too costly to be useful. This is where the wonderful site of Amazon.com comes in. A revolutionary pioneer of sales, Amazon.com is the first site to be affiliate friendly as the focus before Amazon was to be sales friendly without much regard of the person selling it. Many things were done by mail and not a lot of sites were populated for selling things. The internet wasn’t really used all that much for buying simple things like movies as the technology we have today has not always been around. These are the reasons why Amazon is the best choice when choosing to go to a site to sell your products.

Free to use

This is simple and basic but most sites who offer the same services often ask for a membership as well. This includes dealing with the cost of paying for something you didn’t want. Plus some ask that you pay for deliveries yourself and they’ll reimburse you when the product is shipped. With hundreds if not thousands of people buying your product, this can easily get pricey. Amazon however offers all their sales services for free.

Help

Are you new to selling and have no idea what you’re doing? Do you not know how to do target advertising? Do you find the way internet advertisements work confusing? Amazon is specially built for the people who come in and have next to nothing in the way of knowing what to do in any class of what to do and whom to try to sell it to. They have guides on how to make advertisements, simple ways to purchase advertisement room on their site, and even a way to keep all of your products organized.

Promotes

Amazon will not only help you sell your product, they want you to expand. The Kindle, for instance, has a fundraiser that pays writers for letting the Kindle have specific rights to their books. This means that on top of what they get paid in sales, they also get paid a fraction of the fundraiser. This is useful for people first starting out in their types of businesses as each category has a different bonus for doing well.

Millions of users

The most important thing to remember about Amazon is that there are millions of members. This provides the widest range of audiences and consumers you could ever have. Not to mention they have the ability to sell these products internationally. Also, along with members is the fantastic review system which is vital on learning what you are doing right and what you’re doing wrong.

Simple Design

The real design of the site is intricate and a lot of people from different places around the world love it. Why? Because while it may be complex it is only complex behind the scenes. When you go to sell your product, it does everything it can to make it simple. For writers of e books it’s as simple as uploading the book and listing a price. This is important to have as not a lot of people understand numbers and acronyms that might be cross referring to different languages. This is important when trying to sell from a foreign factory to a home country.

Wide categories

The reason wide categories are important is because it separates through all the items quickly and keeps them in the right categories. It also allows for easy links to be created while they’re looking for things in that class based upon what they look at. This is important if you have a product that has a keyword that is attached to what they’re looking at because they might be looking at your product next.

Priya is an internet marketer who makes money from Amazon. She is also a blogger & she likes to write about various tips on Amazon & other affiliate programs.

Filed Under: Affiliate Noobs

5 Tips To Succeeding With Affiliate Marketing

November 16, 2012 by

Affiliate marketing allows you to sell products for someone else and make a commission. A commission is calculated based on a percentage. For example, if your commission is 10 % commission and you sell a product for $50, you get $5. An affiliate assigns you an ID which is a name of number. If a person buys from your link, you make money. A few people have been able to make a full time living with it. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn extra money online. Here are 5 tips to successful affiliate marketing.

1) One of the first 5 tips to successful affiliate marketing is product research. You will not earn much money as an affiliate unless the product owner has done extensive research and testing sales methods. An affiliate provider needs to be aware of the scope of the product as well as the intended target audience. Otherwise, it would hard for an affiliate to make money. Take a look at their sales pages since you will be using the same page. The sales page should be attractive.

2) The product should match the content of your website. A good affiliate marketer promotes products that readers of their blog or website would likely interest the readers of their website or blog. For example, a fishing website will need products related to fishing. Golfing products would generate little sales.

3) Is the affiliate program free? Some affiliate providers charge a membership fee. If this is the case, you may prefer not join it. Since the idea is to make money without spending money, you should not have to buy anything before you start promoting the affiliate provider’s products. You are helping to boost their sales. There may be a few programs worth paying to join but these are rare.

4) Join program with at least a 5% commission. Since you will be spending a great deal of time promoting products, you will want your efforts to be worth it. You do not want to spend all that time promoting when you are getting paid a pittance. A few programs are generous enough to offer more than 50% commission. Look at joining affiliate networks to find high-paying affiliates. They will keep up with all your sales and your commissions.

5) You need determination and discipline to be successful. If you want success in affiliate marketing, you must be willing to force yourself ahead. every internet marketer needs this quality. There will be days you feel like giving up, but you must stay determined. You must be disciplined. If you can make yourself work daily with all your might, you will achieve your goals faster. Laziness has no place in affiliate marketing.

These are 5 tips to successful affiliate marketing that are worth following. Affiliate marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick-scheme and it shouldn’t be treated as such. You may need to experiment with different products to find one that brings good sales. What you get out of something depends on what you put into it.

Eric Welke is a full time internet marketing.  Check out his blog at EricWelke.com for the latest advice and tutorials, as well as a review of the Empower Network.

Filed Under: Affiliate Noobs

5 Business Blogging Myths: Debunked

November 14, 2012 by

Business blogging, like many online marketing activities, is an ever-evolving entity. Format changes, presentation of content changes, and opinions change. What would have been classed as an industry standard last year could possibly be a bad move this year. There is myth, and then there is reality. Let’s examine five examples.

Myth: If it doesn’t pass Copyscape, it’s plagiarized and low quality.

Reality: Copyscape is not an advanced omnipotent being. It works in a specific way, and looks for specific            things. An exact quote, properly cited or not, is going to look like a copy and paste. Unfortunately, a really well-researched paper with a lot of cited items can look like it’s an unoriginal work. Even a long book title can become an issue. But if all of this supporting information creates high-quality content, it needs to be done and taken into account.

Copyscape on its own cannot be the be-all and end-all for determining an articles worth. Naturally, tools like Copyscape have their place – no one condones the theft of other people’s work. There is no excuse for copying and pasting someone else’s work to pass it off as your own. However, it is important to remember that whether you are checking your own work, or someone else’s, that properly cited quotes need to be taken into account.

Myth: Putting all your keywords in bold is beneficial.

Reality: Have you ever looked at a blog entry full of bolded keywords? It is unsightly, and unprofessional to say the least. And to top it off, it serves no additional benefit. Search engines are not able to find or index your site any easier, and it doesn’t help the reader understand you any better. It does, however, point out to the reader that you are more interested in getting the attention of the search engines, than engaging with them. Scatterings of bolded words throughout a blog post are just going to end up driving your readers to someone else’s blog that is easier to read and doesn’t look like a half-lit Christmas tree.

Myth: As long as you post on your blog a couple of times a month, readers will be satisfied.

Reality: You have readers for a reason; they want to read what you have to say. They are waiting for you to say something, don’t give them long periods of silence. The new estimation of blog posts needed to show a return on investment (ROI) is sitting in the area of fifty. This is a far cry from “a couple of times a month”. Speed things up, give your readers what they want to hear, and try for a couple of posts a week, minimum. You can even take it a step further and aim at posting on specific days during the week. This allows readers to know that every Monday and Thursday (for example) they can expect new content from you.

Myth: It is efficient and good business practice to bulk order blog posts from freelancers.

Reality: If we could all predict the flow and change of trends on the internet, we would all be incredibly wealthy. A one-time keyword research session will only be valid for so long. Sticking to something that was correct last month but may have changed this month, means that you are going to fall behind other’s who are systematically checking trends. Let’s say, however, that you aren’t worried about SEO and keywords, you just want straight content. Freelancers come in all different degrees of quality, and their writing style can vary immensely. The person you hire the first time might be much better than the person you hire the second, and your readers are going to wonder why after 30 posts, you are suddenly a lot harder to read and understand, or why you’re not as engaging as you once were; where did the magic go?  The list could go on and on…

Myth: Having a new author on your blog will make people think your blog is less credible.

Reality: As long as your content has value and is of high quality, they are not going to focus on how new the author is. A lot of people don’t even notice the author’s name when they’re reading a blog. New blood is not a bad thing, just choose wisely.

If you’re going to have a business blog, spend time researching current trends, and learn from other people who have been successfully doing it before you. Save yourself time and embarrassment and put the extra effort in at the start – and keep it up.Sergeo the author of this article and a serial entrepreneur has recently launched GiftIdeas.ws a handpicked gift idea maker site. 

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