Why Amazon Affiliates is the Best Affiliate Program Out There

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Affiliate marketing is a great way to make a buck or two (or much more!) online. It is easy to sign up for, easy to manage, the payout rates are pretty good, and you could start making some serious dough within a couple of months of setting up an affiliate marketing website. Bottom-line: affiliate marketing is lucrative, and can be a great secondary (or primary) source of income for you.

Here are several reasons why I prefer Amazon’s affiliate program, and why you should certainly stick with Amazon Affiliates when looking at starting your own affiliate marketing business:

 

1. Amazon is a trusted name: Millions of people trust Amazon to shop online. In fact according to Nielsen Research, Amazon is the most trusted brand in the world (more so than eBay) and everyone in the world trusts Amazon with their online buying. Their affiliate program is no different, and is just as good, reliable and dependable as well, making it easy for affiliates to earn money. For instance a visitor browsing through your blog is much likelier to go through with a purchase when he/she looks at Amazon links.

 

2. Large inventory: Amazon has a LARGE (and I do mean that in every sense of the word!) inventory. You’ll find just about anything and everything under the sun at Amazon, and a quick look at their website will prove just that: they stock electronics such as laptops, tablets, computers and smartphones; home accessories such as televisions and household electronics; entertainment stuff such as movies and music; gardening and outdoor stuff, sports items, and what not. Look for anything using the Amazon search bar and chances are that you’ll find it on Amazon. What this means for the affiliate is that you can choose from a really large selection of affiliate products to promote on your blog! No other affiliate program puts this big an inventory at the disposal of an affiliate!

 

3. Potential to earn a lot: Since Amazon carries a lot of different items, and is the most trusted brand in the world, this gives you, the affiliate, the chance to make quite a lot of money very easily. All you have to do is promote Amazon products on your blog, attract targeted traffic, and you could be rolling in dough. You can choose to promote a specific category or type of product on your blog (for instance if you have a blog on photography, you could promote cameras and accessories as an affiliate), or choose from a multiple number of products and product categories. And since commissions are percentage based, even a single sale could earn you hundreds!

 

4. Easy to sign-up for: It takes less than a couple of minutes to sign-up for an Amazon Affiliates account, and you could be on your way to becoming a super affiliate! In addition, combine your Amazon Affiliates account with a WordPress blog, which will give you access to a large assortment of plugins, widgets and tools to build and set-up a proper affiliate website and easily integrate your affiliate account with it. Third-party tools also allow you to run your affiliate business pretty much on auto-pilot, which means you won’t need to micromanage your affiliate business.

 

5. Good payouts and commissions: You can read details about Amazon’s compensation for its affiliate partners on this link, which explains their fees and commissions structure in detail. In a nutshell, the commissions are pretty good, and depend on the volume of things you sell – the more you sell, the higher the commission. For instance you start off with a 4% commission on every product that you sell, and the percentage increases with an increase with the number of products you ship – which could go up to 8.5%!

 

6. A choice of payment methods to choose from: Amazon makes it very easy for affiliates to receive their payments, allowing them to choose from many different payment methods. Payments are made on a monthly basis, either through (a) a check, (b) in the form of an Amazon.com Gift Certificate or (c) a direct-deposit in your bank account. Affiliates can choose any one of these methods, whichever is the most convenient to them. Details can be seen here.

 

7. Amazon provides outstanding support to affiliates: Anyone who’s ever used Amazon would have positive things to say about the shopping experience. Pretty much the same holds true for the support offered to their affiliates. The truth is that Amazon wants to sell stuff, and a percentage of this happens through the efforts of their affiliates – which is why they provide stellar support to their affiliates. Affiliates can even request a call and have someone from Amazon’s support call them up to solve any problems or answer any of their questions!

Guidelines for Accepting Guest Posts On Your Blog

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We’ve seen this happen way too many times in the past, and we could see it coming once again: due to the widespread and blatant abuse of guest posting, Google has announced (rightly so) that it will be penalizing websites posting garbage junk, irrelevant or downright spammy guest posts, and those abusing this particular method to put junk content on the internet/SERPs, and putting spammy backlinks using this method.

Like I said, its not like we didn’t see this coming, did we. Last year, Google brought down the hammer on article directories as part of its Penguin update, as these article directories were being misused to earn backlinks and manipulate the search engine rankings.

If I were to guess, I think Google will start penalizing websites abusing the nguest posting mechanism as part of the major algorithm upodate that is to be introduced this year (Google Parrot? Google Piranha? Your guess is as good as mine here!).

It is important to note that this doesn’t mean that you should stop accepting guest posts on your blog. Guest posting, when done the right way, has a ton of advantages and can be quite a beneficial activity and should actually be promoted rather than stopped. But only if it is done the right way (aka. white hat guest blogging).

Here are 5 guidelines that you should immediately introduce on your blog if you accept gust posts:

 

1. Make sure that the content that goes on your blog is relevant to your blog, and will be useful to your readers. Implement the same content writing best-practices that you usually follow when writing the content yourself. For instance the article submitted by a guest blogger should be unique, detailed and relevant to the blog and the people who visit that blog. It needs to be interesting, well-researched and well-thought-out. The article needs to be free of common spelling and grammar errors. It should show that the guest blogger spent time writing the article. Above all, it needs to be a unique article and not spun (a lot of guest bloggers tend to do this!).

 

2. Only hire guest writers with a proven track record, instead of opening your blog up for everyone to send guest posts in. Remember that since it’s your blog, you still need to be the main writer on it and not take a back seat as far as creating content is concerned. A big advantage of carefully selecting and shortlisting who you allow on your blog means that you control what kind of content goes up on your blog, as well as its quality. You’ll probably find plenty of good guest writers in your niche, who regularly contribute to a bunch of websites. Having said that, if a relatively new guest-blogger approaches you, who has good credentials, and impresses you with his writing, he might be worth a shot!

 

3. Keep a check on the outgoing links in a guest post. Make sure the links aren’t spam or unnatural backlinks, and don’t point towards spammy or suspicious sources. Google’s latest algorithm update, Google Panda, takes this very seriously, and penalizes websites with suspicious outgoing links. In addition, you should also limit the number of times authors put outgoing links in the article itself, and where those links point to. A couple of useful links that well and truly benefit your readers are just fine. Moreover, all promotional links should go into the author bio window, which, once again, shouldn’t have more than a couple of links (one to their Facebook profile and another one to their website, for instance).

 

4. Speaking of author bios, it is essential to put an author bio section at the beginning or end of your article (or both), that lets people know a little bit about the person who contributed the article, and provides the contributor with an opportunity to tell a little bit about himself, what he does, and of course put in a few links so that people can connect with him/her. This adds authenticity to the guest post, as people know that it was written by a real person. Author bios can easily be added using one of the many free plugins available on the WordPress website.

 

Over To You

What are some of the guidelines you ask guest bloggers to follow on your blog? Leave your comment in the comments section below.

8 Great Reasons to Blog When You’re Unemployed

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Are you unemployed and looking for work? If so, have you considered starting blogging? Because if you haven’t, you should definitely look into it.

There are tons of advantages associated with blogging, regardless of whether you’re employed, unemployed, or even a student. However as you will find out, it can be a particularly fruitful experience when you’re unemployed.

Blogging has really taken off in the last decade or so, especially in the last few years. More and more people have started to blog on the many free and self-hosted platforms, such as WordPress, BlogSpot, Blog.com, Tumblr, and some have turned to micro-blogging websites such as Twitter as well.

The truth is that there are tons of advantages associated with blogging, which is why I strongly recommend that everyone, especially the unemployed, give it a go!

You don’t need any sort of a degree or qualification in order to blog. Heck, you don’t even need to make any investment at all in order to get your brand-spanking new blog up and running. And if you’ve been laid-off from work and are looking for a job, you won’t have trouble finding the time to do it either.

There are tons of advantages associated with blogging, as we’ll soon see:

 

1. Expand your horizons

Starting a blog, writing for a blog on a regular basis and doing everything that is involved in writing for a blog (reading, research, etc.) can be very beneficial. You can learn a lot of new stuff, within and outside your field. You meet, connect with and speak with new people, learn new things, develop new interests, find new hobbies, and expand your horizons!

 

2. Kill some time

Blogging allows you to keep a good routine, despite the fact that you aren’t waking up at 8 and going to work at 9 anymore. If you take your blogging seriously, you could keep a healthy routine and spend your time productively, rather than wasting it away. It will allow you to keep yourself busy, occupied and mentally active. Besides, looking for a new job takes a couple of hours each day, right? Spend the rest of your productively and turn to blogging!

 

3. Earn money

Blogs and website can be a great way to earn money and ear your livelihood in the absence of a day-job or a steady source of income. There are a thousand-and-one ways to legitimately monetize a blog and earn money online, and it might be worthwhile to look into some of them. The most popular options available at your disposal here are putting ads on your website (Google AdSense), promoting affiliate products on your blog (affiliate marketing) and/or selling a product or a service on your blog.  Speaking of which…

 

4. Turn it into a business or a profitable venture

If you do decide to go with the latter, and especially if your product/service is unique and appealing-enough and has a large amount of clientele or potential customers who are willing to pay money to you for it, you could turn it all into a business in itself, maybe even start your own company, rent an office space and hire people to work for you!

 

5. Sell your blog/business down the road for big money

Or you could always sell your blog for a load of cash if it goes big, and invest the money somewhere, or work on another project. Often times, if a blog goes big and if it was based on a unique idea, individuals, investors and corporations might approach you in order to buy it from you, and I’ve personally seen this happen with a lot of blogs out there.

 

6. Establish your online portfolio

One of the great things about having a blog is that with the help of a bit of optimization (or SEO, to be precise), you can get it to rank well for certain keywords and allow yourself to get more visibility online, as well as establish an online portfolio of yourself and market it on the internet. Think of your personal blog as your online resume; create a good ‘About Me’ page for yourself, so that potential visitors can know more about you and your qualifications. HR execs, employment managers, and talent hunters often look online when there is a vacancy in their organization. In addition, these people will also look you up on the internet when you send in your resume in an organization. If you have an online portfolio, not only will they be able to know more about you easily, they will also only know what you want them to know (since you control your own SEO), and they will probably think of you as tech-savvy. Think about it.

 

7. Use the blog to get noticed and land a job

This is in continuation of the last point. Talent hunters and recruitment managers will use Google to look for suitable candidates to fill in vacant positions in their organizations. With the help of a personal blog, for instance, that is optimized for keywords relevant to you (such as your name, and other details), these people will be able to find you easily, and the fact that you have your own blog, and control your own SEO and what information goes online about you will leave a positive impression on them, immediately boosting your chances of getting hired or landing your dream job.

 

8. Connect with other people in your industry or niche

Blogging provides you with a fantastic opportunity to connect and network with other like-minded individuals and bloggers out there, build connections, and speak with and share thoughts and ideas with professionals in your niche/industry. Like photography? Start a blog on photography, build your authority, do guest posts on other authority blogs, and invite others for guest posts on your blog. Add these people on their Facebook, Twitter and G+ pages where you’ll be able to interact and communicate with them.

 

Conclusion

So there you have it; 8 Solid reasons why you should blog if you’re unemployed (or even if you aren’t!). Got something to add? Feel free to leave a comment below!