Whether 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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The internet has revolutionised the way in which we do business, and entrepreneurs ignore its power at their peril. Where once potential clients may have turned to the local telephone directory to seek out a supplier, in the modern world they are more likely to use their laptop, tablet or smartphone to search online

So what does this mean for your business? The bottom line is that to succeed in the today’s marketplace, businesses must be internet savvy – allowing customers to interact and conduct business online.

Creating a Website

The first step to creating a credible online presence is a great website. While it is possible for anyone to put together a website, today’s internet users are a discerning bunch, so you may wish to employ a professional to build your site to create right impression.

In much the same way that those who do not feel confident in dealing with the day to day payroll issues for their company might choose to employ a PAYE company to deal with this area of their business, entrepreneurs who are not well versed in disciplines such as SEO and PPC may wish to delegate responsibility for their online operations to a professional website creation service.

Website creators will work with business owners on all aspects of their site. Areas you should pay attention to include:

• Website Design: Customers want professional looking sites that accurately reflect the identity of the brand. Choose clean lines and fonts to make the page easy on the eye – visitors will often bounce (leave the site without reading further) if confronted with a messy or distracting landing page.
• Ease of Navigation: Customers should be able to find what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible.
• Security: If you intend to conduct transactions online potential customers will need to have confidence in the security of your site.
• Search Engine Optimization or SEO: Generating traffic through search engine queries is hugely important, so your site should be optimised to give it the highest possible search engine ranking.

 

Driving Traffic to Your Website

Once your website is up and running the next challenge is to drive traffic to it. Generating page views is not just a popularity contest; it is about gaining exposure from your brand. Business owners should be proactive in attempting to bring in visitors. Means that you may wish to consider include:

• Social Media Marketing: Use sites like Twitter and Facebook to engage potential clients and direct them to your site.
• Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is a system that allows online businesses to use other websites and web users to drive traffic to their site on a commission basis. Affiliate marketing costs less than traditional static advertising as you will only pay for leads generated.  Affiliates are given a unique code linking into your website which they can then place on their own pages or send out to their own contacts in a range of ways – from a traditional boxed advertisement to an anchored text link within a relevant article to a direct mail shot suggesting they may be interested in your products or services. If customers go on to purchase goods or services the affiliate that sent the customer to your site will receive a predetermined reward for generating the lead.

 

 

 

Starting a new business or personal blog is a big decision in the sense that you need to devote lots of time to publishing your blog posts regularly and marketing it at every opportunity. So naturally you would like to optimize your blog to maximize the effect of your effort as much as possible.

While writing this article I am assuming that you are using WordPress as your blog publishing platform and if you are not, I advise you start using it. It is one of the best, in fact THE best blog publishing software available, and on top of that it is free.  By WordPress I mean wordpress.org and not WordPress.com the free hosted limited platform.

With that out of the way, listed below are the 15 most important things you can do, or steps you can take in order to create a killer personal or business blog, especially when you are running it on WordPress.

1. Decide whether you’re going to have your URL with www or without it

If you don’t decide this at the outset the search engine crawlers might end up thinking that you are publishing duplicate content over multiple sites because Google considers http://example.com and http://www.example.com as two separate sites. So you must either direct all the traffic to example.com or www.example.com.

There are two ways you can do this. One way is to use your web host interface. Almost every web host these days allows you to select what sort of URL you want to have for your blog or website.

In case that is not possible WordPress also gives you this opportunity. Simply go to “General Settings” (once you are logged into the dashboard scroll down to the Settings section and then click General). You can change the WordPress address (URL) field to decide whether you want your blog to be with www or without www.

2. Enable people to subscribe to your blog

Ideally people should come to your blog regularly to check out what you are publishing but then unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world. You need to have a way to notify people every time you publish something new. You can do so by encouraging people to

• Subscribe to your RSS feeds
• Subscribe to your e-mail updates

Feedburner.com allows you to do both. Set up your RSS feed link over there and it will generate a customized link for you that you can publish on your blog somewhere prominently.

Feedburner.com also allows you to send e-mail updates to your visitors. Log into your Feedburner account and it will give you the source code for a form that you can copy/paste on the sidebar of your blog. Every time you publish a new blog post an update is sent to your subscribers.

3. Create a favicon for your blog.

This is a small icon you can see when you visit the link in the link location bar. This helps you in branding and it also helps your regular visitors: when they bookmark or save your link they can immediately recognize it by the favicon.

You can easily create a favicon. You can use an image editor or you can also use one of the many online tools that are freely available on the Internet. For example you can go to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ and create a favicon for yourself.

Once you have created your favicon you have to upload it into the /blog_path/wp-content/themes/your_theme folder. Once you have uploaded the favicon file it automatically begins to appear when your blog is visited.

4. Generate SEO friendly URLs

You can do this by changing the permalinks structure in WordPress. By default WordPress publishes your blog posts as http://example.com/?p=45. This sort of URL seems quite cryptic and hence it is not search engine friendly. Your URL should also have your primary keywords. For instance, a good URL is http://example.com/the-name-of-your-blog-post/

You can change the permalinks structure by going to Settings and then Permalinks. In order to create URLs of the sorts mentioned above click on Custom Structure and then enter “/%postname%/” (without quotation marks).

5. Set up a contact form

Although most of the visitors on your blog will be communicating to you through the comments section (you have the comments section enabled, right?), there must be some direct way of contacting you. This can be achieved by having a contact form somewhere on your blog. WordPress has many good plug-ins that allow you to automatically publish a contact form and get the details e-mailed to you whenever somebody submits the form. We reccommed contact form 7.

6. Have an “About Me” page

Most of the people immediately check out the about me page when they arrive at your blog for the first time. They want to know who is behind the blog and what the person does. Of course you can have a small profile on the sidebar of your blog but it is preferred for a professional blog to have a dedicated page where you can talk about yourself or your business.

7. Have a unique theme

There are thousands of themes available for your WordPress blog and since most of these themes are free almost everybody is using them. In order to be successful your blog needs to stand out and you can do this by having a unique theme. You can either purchase a premium theme and install it or you can tweak an existing free theme so that it looks completely different from other themes. You can find hundreds of tutorials on the Internet that tell you how to customize WordPress themes. If you are comfortable with PHP then it would be an added bonus because WordPress is written in PHP.

It is also important that your theme is SEO friendly.  The best optimized theme on the market is Thesis, but Headway is also good and has a visual editor…great for non coders like me!

8. Set up Google analytics

Google analytics is a free and excellent service from, yes, you guessed it right, Google. It has a premium version but for the blog the free version would do. Create an account using your existing Google account and add your WordPress blog link over there. Once you have added your blog it will give you a JavaScript code that you need to paste on to every page or blog post you want to track. Ideally you should paste this code into footer.php so that every single blog post and page of your blog can be tracked.

Google analytics gives you good information like how many hits you’re getting, what are the highest performing keywords, what are your most visited blog posts, and other demographic data. By carefully studying Google analytics you can make continuous changes to your blog.

9. Change the default admin username

In fact this must be the first thing you should do once you have set up your WordPress blog. The current version of WordPress also lets you change the admin name (previously it used to be just “admin”) so that hackers can find it a bit more difficult to hack into your blog and cause trouble for you.

The latest version of WordPress lets you decide your password when you are setting up the blog for the first time. So even if you have done that you must make it a regular practice to change your password every second month.

10. Schedule automatic database backup

WordPress uses MySQL to manage your content and there are many plug-ins you can install to create automatic backups. These plug-ins routinely take your database backups and either save them on the server (where you are hosting your WordPress blog), download them onto your local machine, or, best, e-mail them to you.

11. Install the All-In-One-SEO pack

WordPress is highly search engine friendly but since there is so much competition nothing is enough when it comes to search engine optimizing your blog and getting an advantage over your competitors. This is where the All-In-One-SEO pack plug-in can help you. It enables you to add details like title, description and keywords to your blog posts, things that are missing in the standard WordPress version. If you don’t install this add-on the title of your blog post is taken as the page title and the first few words of your post are taken as the description.

But why do you need to enter the title separately? There is a difference between the blog post title and the page title. The blog post title is the text you see that is highlighted above the blog post content. The page title is the text that appears on the top of your browser window and this is the text that is considered by the search engines while ranking your individual blog posts. Sometimes, in order to make your blog post titles more attractive and compelling you cannot use the right keywords. So you can have whatever blog post title you want to have but then enter a search engine optimized page title using the All-In-One-SEO pack.

With some premium themes as mentioned above, you will not need SEO plugins they have a lot of built in features.  But if you ever get stuck, contact a WordPress SEO consultant to help you tidy up your blog and get it ranking.

12. Create a custom 404 error page

No matter how diligently you maintain your blog some people end up at links that don’t exist on your blog. For instance instead of typing http://example.com/blog-post-name they may end up typing http://example.com/blog-post-namee (notice the extra e). Although it is not your mistake they might think that something is wrong with your blog and leave without exploring other pages. If you have a custom 404 error page you can at least tell them that somehow they have landed on a nonexistent page and then present them with other options.

It is very easy to create a 404 error page in WordPress. Normally when you use a pre-existing theme this page already exists but in case it is not you need to create a 404.php file and upload it into your current theme directory.

13. Enter your ping list

The ping list is the list of websites that WordPress pings whenever you publish a new blog post. A “ping” is simply a software-generated message that is sent to other servers whenever some change occurs on your blog. The information sent via this ping is then used by those websites to notify their users that you have published something new.

Normally you don’t have to do anything because WordPress by default enters the most-used pings on its own.

14. Create an archives page

This is a page where almost all of your blog posts can be accessed with just a couple of mouse clicks. You can create an archives page by categories, by years and by months.

15. Write your first blog post

Well, once you have started your new WordPress blog this is among the first things you must do in order to have a good start. Write a nice blog post introducing yourself and the theme of your blog. Welcome your visitors. This is a blog post that is going to be accessed again and again for a very long time so be careful what you write and how you write.

So all the best, follow these 15 steps and you have got yourself a high-performance blog ready to roll.