Build an Audience for Your Blog

First, in order to make good money with ads, your blog needs an audience. Advertisers will be less likely to work with you if your website is brand new and has no significant traffic (which means no potential customers).

So the first step is honing your blog idea, audience, creating consistent content, and sharing it. Here are some resources to help you grow an audience from scratch:

• How to Start a Blog in a Day
• How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content for Your Blog in a Day

Building your audience is painstaking and takes a long time, but it pays off. To start off on the right foot, you should have an audience in mind, a topic that’s as specific as possible (remember it’s important to be in a niche that isn’t too saturated with other blog content), and publish regularly at the best quality you can.

The more traffic and loyalty you can muster, the better your ads will perform and the more you’ll make.

Find Advertising Options that Work with Your Content

Even if you don’t have an audience yet, there are some options such as Google AdSense that will let you start hosting ads right away. Just don’t expect them to perform very well without any users.

Regardless, there are 3 basic avenues you can go down for advertising:

• Affiliate marketing networks
• Creating relationships with individual companies
• Blog advertising platforms like AdSense

Affiliate Marketing Networks

What is affiliate marketing? It’s basically when a blogger references, reviews, or promotes a product for another company, and shares in the profits if a sale is made from their referral.

So in this scenario, you’re part of an affiliate program for a company and they provide you with ads and trackable links that you can host on your website or integrate into your content. Ideally, these products are directly related to your content and interest your audience. When one of your readers clicks the link or ad, the affiliate marketing network tracks that interaction and logs that it was a referral from your site. When the purchase is made, you get paid a commission.

The affiliate marketing network provides the technology and the interface for affiliates and companies to find each other and create advertising strategies. Many networks offer a variety of link building tools and advertising widgets.

For example, AvantLink, an affiliate marketing network, offers a custom link builder tool plus a WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate many advertising features into your website.

Each affiliate network has different requirements for publishers, and a different set of advertisers to work with. You can find out a lot by signing up and searching for products related to your content. Here are some great affiliate networks to try:

• AvantLink
• CJAffiliate
• Impact Radius
• Pepperjam

Go Directly to Companies You’d Like to Work With

Another option is to reach out to companies you’d like to work with directly. Just search the company’s name with affiliate program in Google. Here’s an example of an affiliate program page on the Cotopaxi website.

Use Blog-specific Advertising Tools

Just like Google’s AdSense, there are many blog-specific advertising tools available for serving ads or adding affiliate links to your website that are separate from the big affiliate networks.

Here’s a list of options:

• Crispad
• Blogads
• Amazon Associates

Especially if you’re starting out with product reviews on items you’ve purchased, Amazon Associates is a great starting point. You can review anything you buy on Amazon and get paid a commission on products you help sell with a referral.

Placing Advertisements On Your Website—The Technical Part

With WordPress, placing advertisements is about as easy as it gets. You can place image and text ads anywhere on your website that features widgets, such as a sidebar, header, or footer area. You can also place ads directly into your WordPress blog posts or pages pretty easily.

Placing Ads with Widgets

Just about any affiliate ad you’ll find will give you an html snippet that you can copy and paste right into your site. Here’s an example from AdSense.

Here is the AdSense code snippet you’ll copy to implement the ad. Either copy and paste it into a notepad or keep this page open and navigate to your WordPress dashboard. You can add widgets by going to Appearance > Customize.

Next, select Widgets from the sidebar menu.

From the widgets menu, you can choose the area of your website where you’d like the ad to display. Then simply scroll down until you find the Custom HTML widget. You’ll paste your code into this widget, and your ad should preview to the right. When you’re done, click Save and Publish and you’re good to go.

Placing Ads or Links in a WordPress Post or Page

Now, you can also embed most ads into your WordPress posts and pages. When in the post or page editor, you can switch the editor from visual to text to paste in raw html.

The same method works for custom links or image ads. This enables you to add in referrals to products and deals when it’s most relevant, as well as serving more generic ads in your blog’s sidebar.

If you run into issues with placing ads, our WP Live WordPress experts can help walk you through it, and teach you any WordPress tips and tricks you want to learn. Check it out here.

1. How-to Articles

The latest tech devices are always popular purchases, during the holidays and beyond. One way to capture affiliate commissions for these often expensive items, such as the iPhone X or Amazon Echo, is by providing helpful information about their use.

As a resource for new owners, a how-to guide is an opportunity to upsell accessories and related items. Your guide may also convince someone to buy a new iPhone or Amazon Echo after the holidays, providing you with an even bigger affiliate commission.

2. Popular Item Lists

Lists of popular or themed gift ideas are often successful during the holidays and can work for you as an affiliate marketer after the holidays. Shoppers will be interested to see what they may have missed during the busier shopping season, and your list can point them to the holidays’ most popular gifts. Themed product lists make discovery even easier for potential customers. You can center product lists around interests, such as music or food, age groups, or a variety of other categories.

3. Post-Holiday Contests

Consumers may be tired of all the advertisements they’ve been bombarded with during the holidays. They may also be looking to save money after the biggest spending season of the—but you can still capture their attention with a contest. A giveaway or competition on your website or social media represents the opportunity to win something for your website visitors—and provides you with the opportunity to upsell some products.

4. New Year’s Motivations

The next big sales emphasis in early 2018 will be products related to New Year’s resolutions. Many people establish goals to change their lives as the year begins, whether they want to be more healthy, advance their career or spend more time with loved ones. Thinking about the motivations your audience will have to make changes in 2018 will help you identify the right products that will lead to affiliate sales.

There are plenty of opportunities to make affiliate commissions after the holidays. With how-to guides, lists of popular items and other strategies, you can continue to make a profit as an affiliate marketer heading into the new year.

Content is King

Writing quality, relatable content about the products and services that you are marketing is easily the most effective way to make money online. By quality, I mean well-written, authentic, researched material. And by relatable, I mean writing and promoting products and services that your audience cares about.

For example, if you are a food blogger, promote cookware. Avoid reviewing things like the new iPhone X, for example, so that it’s clear to your audience where your authority is.

Reviewing a product or service will give your readers the insights they need to make a purchase. Imagine the questions someone might have about a product, and answer them with clear and concise descriptions and explanations.

An issue I run into often managing MOJO Marketplace affiliates is “I am a fashion blogger, how do I write quality and relatable content to promote websites?”

This is about knowing your audience, and finding everything that might be useful for them.

Now, being focused on a particular niche doesn’t mean you can’t help people in other ways. I run into this problem a lot at MOJO, as we help people build websites, and offer commissions to affiliates promoting our products and tools to their audience.

Let’s say you’re a fashion blogger. There is most likely a portion of your audience that wants to build a blog as well; who wants to be just like you. So, in the case of MOJO, I suggest that people write a simple “how to” article about their experience creating a website, and give some advice about how they can reach that goal using MOJO’s products and services.

In other words, there are a ton of ways you can increase your affiliate footprint online, so long as you’re open to the opportunities.

Newsletters Keep Your Readers Up to Date

When blogging or managing a website, collecting emails from visitors is imperative to building a loyal audience and distributing content.

Sending newsletter emails to your audience about new content, updates, or promotions is a great way to keep them coming back for more. Using tools like OptinMonster makes collecting email subscribers very easy.

Newsletters are another content avenue for putting the product or service you are trying to promote in front of the right audience. They also serve as reminders, and people save emails to reference in the future.

Some newsletter formats that are effective:

• Product roundups. This could be a link to a single article rounding up products that are relevant to both your audience, and to each other.
• Announcements for big promotions or product releases.
• Content roundups. Package a week’s worth of content or a suite of related articles to send your audience back to the blog. Giving these some kind of theme often boosts engagement.

Social Media Expands Your Audience

Using social media to promote your content or products is a huge part of managing your blog or website. It actively puts your content in front of users rather than waiting for them to reach your site the old way.

It also puts your blog or website in front of people who normally would not see it and allows people to share your content or products effectively.

You can also reach different audiences and run content tests through advertising on social media.

Much like using Newsletters, Social Media is a great way to put the product or service you are promoting in front of your reader base. Using the reviews you have written, or writing status updates about products or services will drive a lot of traffic.

The credibility and trust that you build with followers across platforms will help you see a boost in conversions.

Exclusivity Breeds Value

Offering products and services with exclusive deals only available on your website is a great way to drive traffic and convert at a higher level. Advertisers are usually happy to give you an exclusive offer, so don’t be afraid to ask. (They know it works).

Check out this MOJO Marketplace exclusive offer on one of our top affiliate’s sites:

This is the ages-old incentive to buy: the deal.

Featuring exclusive deals also helps create the perception of your site as an authority. When you partner with brands that are well-liked by your audience, and you can demonstrate that you have a deep connection to those brands, it works magic.

Even If the advertiser won’t give you an exclusive offer, they’ll probably settle for monthly or seasonal coupons, which you can still spin to your advantage.

To do this effectively, you will need to make sure that you are keeping up on your advertisers coupon offerings through the affiliate network you’re using.

Technology Puts More Tools in Your Bag

Even when advertising technology has come so far, you still see a ton of banner ads all over the internet, used in the most traditional fashion.

How many times have you seen an ad in a sidebar?

Most of the time, these ads aren’t relevant to the content on that page, because they’re just running one ad sitewide.

But there are a ton of plugins available that allow you to experiment with creative ways of placing ads. We all know that pop-ups can be annoying, but they also demand your readers’ attention and can provide useful discounts or info.

Having a pop-up with a coupon code or link to an article that relates to the content on the page you choose to serve the ad on is a better way to serve a less irritating and more useful ad. You can easily create better popups using the OptinMonster  WordPress plugin.

As an affiliate it is very important to try all the techniques available to you. This will help you understand better what your audience responds to, and in turn, enables you to convert at a higher rate and earn more money with your advertisers. Try these five techniques and experiment with your audience. If you have any questions or additional ways to make effective affiliate promotions, share your knowledge in the comments below!

A Full-time Team Backing Your Project 100% of the Way

WP Live Helps You Succeed All the Way

We know that building a website isn’t always easy and can be very time consuming, so we have WordPress Experts on-demand to assist and teach you how to do it right, yourself. We coach you through a proven plan for building, launching, and growing websites, which we call The Journey.

WP Live Experts are available through on-demand live chat, as well as phone support, so you can get questions answered and solve problems as they come up.

Plus, the WP Live team isn’t in the business of just fixing things for you. Sure we will fix little issues, but we’re primarily dedicated to teaching you how to fix them. The goal is to turn you into a WordPress expert by guiding you to achieve your personal goals, step by step.

The WP Live Journey Gives You a Plan You Can Follow Through With

With WP Live, we walk you through what we call the WP Live Journey, which is a proven four-phase process for building your own website. The four phases are Build, Launch, Grow, and Maintain. Each contains key building blocks that teach you how to run a successful WordPress website, as you work. Here’s a more detailed outline of what our WP Live experts have created for you.

• Build – We help you figure out the goal of your website, choose the right WordPress theme for the job,  and help you find great plugins and tools that will help you achieve your goal, and walk you through designing your site to look the way you want and best fits your goal.

 

• Launch – In this phase, we help you check everything off your list for an initial public launch. We’ll help you make sure your website is fully functioning, help you with site security, make sure that your images are the correct size and format, and test any plugin features to make sure they work properly.

 

• Growth – After your launch, the work isn’t over! We’ll teach you to optimize your site and content for search engines (SEO), ensure you line up keywords that are relevant to your goal or business, and help your website rank in searches for the most critical keywords, as well as setting up analytics and tracking so you can measure performance and improve your site with real data.

 

• Maintenance – As time goes on, we’ll help you and teach you how to keep your site up and running, with plugin updates, continual security checkups, and ongoing SEO analysis and improvement.

 

We know that everyone has a different goal for their website, and different ways of working. The Journey is designed to account for those variables while still giving you a solid plan and tools to be successful. The Journey isn’t a requirement, but it ensures that our users have covered every base in order to build their online presence and build the best website possible.

What Does WP Live Cost?

WP Live is priced according to your needs as a WordPress user, and your budget. We’ve designed our pricing to ensure there’s something for everyone–from a total beginner to an experienced user.

You can start with expedited email support ticketing and 50% off a MOJO Marketplace product once a month (a great value when you’re building multiple sites, or want to try multiple themes).

These packages can be purchased with a 6 month or 12-month commitment for a lower price (12-month pricing shown above), or you can stay flexible and pay month-to-month.

For more info on pricing, click here.

What MOJO Third Party Services Mean for You

You can now hire out work for your business or blog for a ton of difference services such as writing, design, web development, video, and marketing to help you focus on what’s important.

And if you have some of these skills yourself and want to offer your freelance services, be sure to sign up!

You can list your services on our marketplace and help our five million plus customers finish their projects and maintain their businesses and websites. You name the price and set the schedule.

For more information, and to add a service, click here.

Now, if you work as an affiliate for MOJO promoting our products or WP Live, you can also add services to the list! If you aren’t an affiliate, learn more about our affiliate program and sign up–it’s free and easy, and can help you monetize your website.

Here are some ways you can promote professional services on MOJO Marketplace.

Earn Money Promoting Services as a MOJO Marketplace Affiliate

If you promote services with MOJO Marketplace, you can make 40%-70% on every service you sell, and earn 30% promoting items and themes.

Themes, templates, and plugins are easy to promote as an affiliate. They can easily be sold with a banner or an ad. But selling services takes a little more work because a user requires more context than an ad to understand the value of each service.

Services are also more of a niche market, and they have a more specific audience.

So let’s explore how to add that context, and ways to promote services effectively.

How to Provide the Right Context for Services

The best way to promote services is through authentic, quality content. Lining up relevant context with your audience is no easy task. But it always pays off in more ways than one.

Connecting with your audience by providing content that’s useful and relevant will help drive more traffic to your site. And it will bring that traffic back as you release new content. Finally, when you connect the products or services you promote to that content, you create customers.

And that’s the number one way to monetize your site.

For example, if you talk about designing logos on your website, you can promote MOJO services as a resource for logo design. This will make your promotion seem less salesy and actually provide something useful for your readers.

And it’s a win-win because you gain more trust and value for your site, earn some extra cash, and we gain new customers!

Interested in giving it a shot? Here are seven ideas for promoting services on your website.

7 Ways to Promote MOJO Services with Quality Content

These strategies will help you build readership on your website, promote your content, and make more affiliate sales.

1. Item and Service Reviews

Reviews are super effective when it comes to selling a service. People want to see what success others have had, and an example of the final outcome. You can create a review by trying one of our services and document your experience.

Think about it from the perspective of your audience–what are they looking for and what is the most important thing to know? Describe your service and how it was valuable to you (only if it was, of course).

Then, you can link to the service on your blog or social media post, using your affiliate link, and if your readers purchase a service, you’ll get paid!

2. In-depth Guides

Guides are huge for driving organic search traffic to your site and help establish your thought leadership. They are also a great place to provide useful resources.

So, if you create guides to show your users how to build websites, email campaigns, advertisements, logos, etc. then you’re in a good place to make affiliate income promoting MOJO products and services.

Give your audience a quality, step-by-step guide that helps them accomplish their goals, and they will follow your advice and buy products you suggest. If you truly help people find better services to complete their projects, they’ll keep returning for you advice, and you’ll keep earning money on the continued sales.

3. Resources Pages

Resources pages are fairly common on blogs or website that feature a lot of educational content. Blogging is very popular, and if you’re doing it well, people will look to you to help them get started. Including a list of useful resources to get help creating a website, marketing campaign, or creative project can generate revenue simply by being there.

Help people be successful like you, and cash in on the commissions. Just list any useful resources that are relevant with your affiliate link, and describe what they’re for and why they’re valuable.

4. Marketing Promotions

Another way to drive traffic to your site, and convert your visitors into customers, is through MOJO’s monthly promotions.

These are big opportunities to earn extra affiliate money. Offering your audience discounts on services provides extra incentive to purchase, and increases conversion rates.

Create a campaign around an offer through your blog, email, social media, podcast, or other outlet, and direct your audience to use a coupon code to save on MOJO products and services. This is a sure fire way to get more traffic, and it helps us spread the word about good deals.

5. Email

You can help your readers stay motivated by offering ideas and products through your email list.

With our diverse library of products and services, there’s something for everyone, across whatever stage of the project they’re in.

Try sending product suggestions and coupon codes to your subscribers on a regular basis, whether daily, weekly, or monthly, through email. As long as the products remain relevant to your content, and are useful, you can see a lot of conversion straight from the inbox.

All you need is your affiliate link to the service you’re providing and a simple email marketing tool, like Constant Contact.

6. Social Media

In addition to sharing your articles and resources on social media, you can also plug in some cool services and products.

Short product review videos or posts are very effective. Or even just a simple mention of a useful tool, service, or promotion can go a long way. This helps your fans find added value in your social media content, beyond entertainment or information.

This strategy has a low barrier to entry, and can be a great way to see some steady affiliate commissions.

How to Generate Affiliate Links and Promo Codes

So how, exactly, do you set up these affiliate links?

When you sign up for the MOJO Marketplace Affiliate Program, you get access to CJ.com’s deep linking tool. Here’s how to access and use it once you’re signed up.

Creating Affiliate Links

1. In your CJ.com account dashboard, go to the Links dropdown, and select Link Tools.

2. Next, drag the CJ Deep Link button into your toolbar in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari as shown below.

3. Now, head to MOJO Marketplace and browse for products or services you’d like to promote, and click the CJ Deep Link button in your bookmarks toolbar to generate your affiliate link for that product or service.

4. Next, copy the custom link you just created. Paste this link into all the places you’re going to promote this particular product or service, whether it’s a blog post, resources page, email, or social media post. This link will ensure that interaction is tracked and you get credit for referrals when sales are made.

Accessing MOJO Marketplace Promo Codes

We offer promo codes on a monthly basis, and we keep them in our Affiliate Program Folder, which houses all the assets you’ll need to run banner ads, as well.

1. First, head to mojo.live/affiliateprogram and look for the file with coupon code in the name.

2. Run a monthly promotion across your marketing channels and your website to drive more sales. Coupons are an awesome way to provide value to your readers, and adds an air of exclusivity to your content when you can provide them.

We’re excited about our expanding catalogue of products and services, and we want to help our customers get the most out of their websites and businesses. So if you think you can help us reach more people who need our help and services, please sign up to be an affiliate today, and reach out to me!