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Showing posts with label How To. Show all posts
Showing posts with label How To. Show all posts

How Can I Find If My Website Has Been Hacked?:

Running a website is hard work, and as hackers get increasingly more innovative, it just keeps getting harder. It takes some serious diligence to make sure your website doesn’t fall prey to hackers, and honestly, it takes a keen eye to even notice it’s happened.

If your site or blog is compromised, it can absolutely destroy your reader base in no time. You’ll be facing major damage to your site and what’s likely to be irreparable damage to your followers. Don’t let it happen to you. While it definitely happens to the best of us, there are some precautions you can take, along with some routine maintenance steps, to ensure that you hackers don’t commandeer your website.

Keep An Eye Out for Spikes in Activity

As nice as it is to see that viewer ticker creep up, if you notice a sudden dramatic spike in a page’s popularity, there’s a chance that something could be up. The same goes for spam. If you notice an increasing amount of spammy commentary on your posts, chances are there are forces conspiring against you.

Also, pay attention where you traffic is coming from. Sudden surges in activity from unusual parts of the world (for instance, countries with different native languages) is a good indication that something is going on. Pay attention to your analytics, and use locally relevant posts as a benchmark for standards in international traffic.

Use a Scanning Program

If you’re not confident in your ability to spot hackers in your site, website checking software exists for this exact purpose. These programs will run scans of your site for you and, in many cases, even redirect spam for you. Expect to shell out some cash for the service, but ultimately, the peace of mind is well worth the price tag.

Take Advantage of Google Webmaster

If you’d rather spare the cash and skimp on the scanning program, you can always use Google Webmaster Tools instead. It’s a completely free service and performs scanning services similar to the paid versions. However, Google’s toolset lacks the discretion of a paid scanning service. Keep in mind that this service will display a warning message to your site visitors if a threat is detected, sending up some potential red flags and scaring off viewers.

Take a Closer Look at Your Files

This measure is a bit technical, but if you’re familiar at all with coding, it’s a great way to get a look at what’s going on with your site, without employing any services to do it. More often than not, hackers go after your media, .php, and .htaccess files, so keep an eye on those so you notice changes in them when they occur.

Also, be sure to keep your coding as decluttered as possible. The more you have on your site, the easier it is for hackers to hide malicious links and scripts within your codes, without you being any the wiser. This is definitely a case where less is more, particularly if you manage your own site. Keep it simple.

An Ounce of Prevention

If you’re at all serious about running your website efficiently, you need to take the security of it very seriously and perform routine maintenance and checks now, rather than have to deal with messy cleanup and hacks later down the line.

Always, always, ALWAYS keep your plugins and software up to date, running the latest versions of anything you use on your site. The longer something is available, the longer hackers have to exploit weaknesses in the code. Developers try to stay abreast of that by improving upon the security of the plugins, so make sure to keep your site up to date to avoid falling prey to past versions’ weaknesses.

Get Familiar with Your Site

One of the smartest things you can do to protect your site though is to simply familiarize yourself with it. No matter how short you are on time, always make routine checks a priority, and take a tour of your pages on a regular basis. This way, any major changes will stand out to you, and you’ll have something to compare suspicious activity to.

That being said, if you’re not already charting analytics, now might be a good time to start. Keep records of visitor activity so that sudden surges in certain parts of your site won’t go unnoticed. Measuring performance is great, but these tools are excellent for spotting anomalous or suspicious activity.

Practice Basic Internet Security

More than anything though, the basics of account security are where hackproofing your site starts. It all begins with secure login information, so make sure you use a unique password and change it regularly. If you have a hard time remembering passwords, consider using a password manager to help securely log you in and even generate random passkeys.

Only download themes and plugins from reputable sources. Look for developers who are well known, and when in doubt, spend the money on a safe product, rather than risk your security to save a few bucks.

Also, while it is convenient to manage your site on the go, be extremely cautious about using public networks for this kind of activity. So many passwords are stolen by this form of data interception, and you won’t know it’s happened until it’s too late.

If you absolutely can’t live without using public hotspots, at least take some sensible precautions. Check out your device’s security settings, and make sure that Network Discovery is turned off, as well as device and file sharing. Take it to the next level and encrypt your web traffic with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) too, that way your login information is always private.

It may seem like a daunting prospect to keep an active website free from hackers and spam, but ultimately it just comes down to diligence and awareness. Practice sensible management techniques, be cautious about public network use and always patrol your site for suspicious changes to coding.

5 Essential First Steps How to Start a Blog:

5 Essential First Steps How to Start a Blog:
5 Essential First Steps How to Start a Blog. 
How To Start A Blog
This question has become rather common recently and is one that I find a little tricky to answer in a way that can be most helpful to those asking. I usually respond with “What do you want to blog about?” at which point an awkward pause usually follows. When this happens I know that it would be unhelpful of me to go through the click-by-click specifics of starting a blog. Instead, I take a step back and delve into the essential steps based on the foundation you build before starting a blog.
You can’t get to where you want to be if you don’t know where you are going, can you? Think of these steps as an informal business plan which will provide your blog journey with some direction. When I first had the idea of starting a blog, I would write in my journal every chance I got. I wrote down dreams and ideas, set my goals, made plans, took notes and made ‘to-do’ lists containing things to research. You could do this on your own too, or better yet, use this blog post and infographic that I have created to help get you started. If you are thinking of starting your own blog, I would encourage you to read through this post with a pen and paper handy so that you can explore your own answers. Remember that some of the answers may change over time as you develop your blog and find your unique voice. Others will remain constant and keep you on track when you start getting pulled in a million different directions in the blog world.
Establish your vision
What is your blog about? If you cannot answer that question in under 3 sentences then you probably need to work on understanding your vision for your blog. When thinking about your vision, think about the bigger picture. Having an understanding of your own dream and purpose is crucial to keeping you motivated and keeping your blog on track with a sense of togetherness. You can then align all of your blog actions, big or small, with your vision, making your product a complete package instead of a jumble of different pieces that will just confuse the audience. I am sure that my Instagram page was confusing to the audience at first and that is because I didn't have my thoughts together as a complete package. I had my vision but I hadn't aligned it with my actions properly to create a complete package - please learn from my mistakes!
Try not to overcomplicate it, just think from the heart. The vision for my blog, as written in my personal journal when I was going through my own brainstorming process, was to inspire others to see the beauty of the world around them by documenting my own journey and travels. My dream was, and still is, to inspire. Now think about yours…
Establish your goals
The vision serves as the bigger picture of where you want to take your blog, the dream. Now you need to break that dream down into smaller, achievable goals which will become the framework you can build off to achieve your vision. Achievable is the key word to remember when setting your goals. For example, “Create a successful blog” is not a useful goal to set because it is far too subjective to measure. At what point is it successful? For this to be a useful goal in your strategy, break it down into something that is specific and achievable. If we were going to fix up the goal I used as a bad example, we could change it to whatever success means for you, so perhaps “x amount of subscribers” or “create x blog posts per week” or “write a sponsored blog post” – something specific that we can measure.
Establish your budget
How much money are you able to spend on your blog? Keep in mind that this number may change as you move along, but you do need to have a benchmark budget to begin with to direct how you set up your blog. In terms of the set up costs, there are a few options available to you that you would need to research before getting started. You can either spend money and purchase your domain or use one of the free blog sites to create a page for yourself within their website. There are even a lot of extra design and feature options available to you so it is very easy to get carried away
Establish your time commitment
How much time are you able to commit to this blog? For some it is a full time job, some it is a part time job and for others it is simply a ‘here and there’ hobby. It is important to set a boundary of your time investment to keep a balance between your other commitments in life - work life balance is needed in the blog world too! ‘I will just check this’ and ‘I will just check that’ starts snowballing and before you know it, you've forgotten to feed your kids! ok so maybe a little dramatic and I hope none of you forget to feed your kids, but you get the idea that it is easy to get carried away and burnout. This is where having an understanding of your own time commitment comes in.
Read
I would strongly urge you to read. A lot. When I first had the idea of starting a blog, I read as much as I could about blogging. I would print articles from Pinterest and read them, highlighting the key areas and making notes all over them soaking up as much information as I could. I knew nothing about blogging and this helped me greatly! It gave me a wide variety of information everywhere from the technical aspects on setting up the website to the business aspects of marketing the blog. Reading should be a continuous habit as a blogger so that you can always develop your knowledge and skills, so don’t limit that one to the set up phase.
So there is your blog homework for the week. I would recommend going through the infographic on my website and writing out your own answers to get you started. I guarantee that taking the time to go through this first will help to develop your future blog and create a higher quality product!

How to Build Your Blog’s Audience with Long Form Evergreen Content:

There’s some great ideas in his answer that in essence are similar to what I've written and spoken about previously on:
·         identifying who you are trying to reach
·         asking where those readers are gathering and/or focusing their attention
·         and then trying to work out how to build a presence in those places
But one of the other key messages in Tim’s podcast that really stood out to me was this statement that he made:
There is so much wisdom in this statement and I’d highly recommend bloggers ponder two parts of it.
Long Form Content
There has definitely been a trend over the last few years for many bloggers to move toward shorter form content. I’m not sure if this has been the result of the short for nature of social media, an assumption that people’s attention spans are short, the pressure to publish more posts or something else – but I've heard it taught from the stage at conferences and have definitely noticed more and more bloggers creating shorter posts in recent years.
My experience has been similar to Tim’s. I've noticed that it’s my longer and more in-depth posts that tend to get the most shares, the most links and the most traffic – both when they’re launched and over their long tail life.
There are definitely exceptions but today as I look through the top 10 most read posts here on over the last 12 months the shortest one is 714 words and the longest is over 7000. Their average is 2491.
I’m not arguing that every post needs to be longer form – it takes a lot of effort to create and there is a definitely place for shorter content – but the effort you put into longer posts can be a great investment to make into your blogging.
Evergreen Content
Note for those not familiar with the term ‘Evergreen Content’Evergreen posts are ones that don’t lose their relevancy over time. You write them today and they will be as helpful to readers in a few months (or even years) time.
I know that not every blog topic/niche naturally lends itself to the creation of evergreen content (for example ‘news’ and ‘reviews’ sites can sometimes struggle with it) but most blogs should be able to find a way to create at least some content that doesn't date quickly.
Of course part of the reason for this is that it’s the main focus of what I do – but we do cover ‘newsy’ type posts from time to time on DPS and apart from a spike in traffic shortly after it is published it rarely ever gets more than a trickle of traffic ever again.
To illustrate the case for Evergreen Content

Let me give you a couple of case studies. Here’s how a time sensitive post announcing the launch of the New Adobe Light room that we published on DPS recently performed in terms of traffic.
You can see the initial burst of traffic as it went live and as our readers excitedly gobbled up the hot news (and it was fairly significant news in the photography niche).
But in the month after it’s had little traffic and I suspect will never see more than a handful of visitors coming to it in a given day again.

The post had its own little spike in traffic in the first days (although I had hardly any readers at that point) but to this day it continues to get traffic (for example yesterday it had over 1100 visitors).
The beauty of evergreen content is that it not only gets the same initial spike of traffic to it when you publish but it also is much more likely to be searched for and found in search engines in the years to come.
The other benefit of the evergreen content is that you (and others) are able to keep sharing it on social for years to come also! It is this evergreen content that I've built my whole social media workflow around.
Take a look at this daily traffic graph of the same post on ISO where you’ll see some bigger daily spikes periodically on the days I retire it on social media.


Note: worth noting here is that this example is not what I’d consider to be ‘long form content’. It’s around 700 words in length which isn't short – but it shows you that there’s a place for ‘mid-sized’ form content too.
The most compelling case for investing time into Evergreen Content…
As I look at the two examples of posts I've just shows you what strikes me most is the investment that was put into those two posts was similar.
From memory I probably spent an hour or two writing the post on ISO. I’m not sure how long the author who wrote the Light room announcement post spent on it but looking at it he put at least that much time into researching and writing it.


How to Make Money with Your Blog;

How to Make Money with Your Blog;
You want to make money, right? Of course you do. Everyone wants and needs to make money. So you started a blog since you've heard its an easy way to make cash, but you're not quite sure how to actually make money doing it. Or maybe you already have a blog and you€™re exploring ways to monetize it.
No matter which group you âre in, making money with a blog whether its a hobby blog or a business blog is possible. Its not a get rich quick ordeal, but if you do it right, you could make enough to support your family and more. Lets dive in and see how you can make a profit with your blog.

Monetize with CPC or CPM Ads

One of the most common ways bloggers make money is through placing ads on their site. There are two popular types of ads:
  • CPC/PPC Ads: Cost per click (also called pay per click) ads are usually banners that you place in your content or sidebar. Each time a reader clicks on the ad, you're paid for that click.
  • CPM Ads: CPM Ads, or cost per 1,000 impressions,” are ads that pay you a fixed amount of money based on how many people view your ad.
Perhaps the most popular network for placing these types of ads is Google AdSense. With this program, you don’t need to be in direct contact with advertisers; you simply place the banner on your site, Google chooses ads relevant to your content, and your viewers click on the ads. There are countless similar programs available if you find that AdSense doesnt work for you, such as Chitika, Infolinks, and Media.net.

Sell Private Ads

Working with advertising networks isn't your only option when it comes to selling ads. If you end up with enough traffic, advertisers may come directly to you and ask you to place their ad on your site. You can also contact advertisers yourself. The biggest difference from the above mentioned option is that there  no middle man, which means you can set your own ad rates.
Selling private ads can come in the form of banners, buttons, or links. You can even make money writing sponsorship posts where you write about or give a review of an advertiserproduct or service. Another option is to write an underwritten post or series, which is where you can write about any topic, but the advertiser pays for a Brought to you by mention in the content.
The ways you make money with this can vary. For instance, you might charge a one-time fee for a link within a post. If you're hosting banner ads, you might charge your partner monthly.
Bonus tip: To maximize your income, you can also choose to sell sponsorship space in your newsletters, pod casts, and videos.

Include Affiliate Links in Your Content

Affiliate marketing is also another great tool for monetizing your blog. Here how affiliate marketing works:
  1. An advertiser has a product he wants to sell. He agrees to give you a commission from each sale if the buyer is coming from your site.
  2. He gives you a unique link that tracks your affiliate code. That way, he knows when a buyer used your link to make a purchase.
  3. You include your affiliate link on your site. You can do this directly in the content or through banner ads. If a reader clicks on your unique link and buys the product you've recommended, you earn a percentage of what s/he purchased.
You can utilize affiliate marketing through ad networks like Amazon Associates, or you can create private partnerships with advertisers and businesses with an affiliate program.

Sell Digital Products

If you rather not advertise other peoples products on your site, or if you're looking for another stream of income, consider selling digital products. This can include items like:
  • eBooks
  • Online courses/workshops
  • Images, video, or music people can use in their own content
  • Apps, plugins, or themes
Just remember that if you're going to choose one of these avenues that you make it relevant and useful to your readers. A lot of bloggers make the mistake of assuming they're developing a product their readers need; listen to your readers first, and then create a digital product that will meet their needs.

Use it as a Content Marketing Tool for Your Business

It also possible to sell physical products on your blog and to make money that way. Instead of thinking of it as making money from your blog, however, think of your blog as a content marketing tool that will drive visitors to your business website.
The possibilities are practically endless when it comes to developing a business blog. You could sell hand-made products, books, manufactured products, and so much more. Or you might already have a business and decide to start a blog to convert loyal customers.
Lets say, for example, that you refurbish and resell used smartphones out of your home. You could use a blog to attract visitors to your website where you list your current phones for sale. Your blog might cover topics about DIY refurbishing. On one level, it seems counter intuitive because you want people to buy your phones, but it also helps you build a brand and gain recognition. Social media guru Jay Baer explains the concept on Copyblogger:
I was at a conference a few years ago, and this is where I first sort of started thinking about this concept, and their founder, Robert Johnson, was speaking…
He said, Well our best customers are the people that think they can fix it themselves.
But eventually you are going to get out of your depth either on that project on a project down the road, at which point who are you going to call? Are you going to call somebody randomly that you discovered on Google or are you going to call the guys who you just watched their logo in the corner of a 14-minute instructional video?
This concept can also be applied to services in all types of industries. For instance, if you offered electronic repair services as opposed to physical products, you could still use the same blogging concept to increase brand awareness and convert more clients.

Sell Memberships

Another option to make money is to sell memberships to exclusive corners of your website. For instance, a career blog might charge $10 per month for users to gain access to their job board. A start up business blog might sell memberships to their forums where people can get personalized advice about their business.
The key here is that your exclusive membership has to be more valuable than something your visitors can find for free somewhere else, so be sure you're developing something of value and worth the price.

Use it to Build Your Credibility

Blogging to build credibility can lead to many money-making opportunities. For instance, lets say you start a blog in the finance industry. People start reading your content, and your blog becomes very popular. You're now a recognized figure in the finance industry.
Once you have that authority, people might approach you to co-author a book on debt management, or you could charge to speak at conferences or to run employee financial training days.
This certainly isnt a direct form of making money blogging, but it has worked for many well-known bloggers, and it can work for you, too. If you're looking for a direct revenue stream, popular blogs have sold for 4-7 figures (sometimes more) by selling their branding and content.

Bonus Tips

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that making money blogging is not possible by putting your site up and letting it sit there. The you build it, they will come mentality doesn't work here, so be sure you're willing to put in the time. Most bloggers don see a spike of income for several months (sometimes years) after starting their blog. Before you dive too deep into blogging, remember these little bits of advice:
Create Quality Content
You're not going to make any money from your blog if people dont read it. After all, your readers are the ones who are going to make you money, whether they re clicking on your ads or buying your products. Always put your readers first.
Dont Spend Your Time Exclusively on Your Blog
Developing a successful blog has a lot to do with building relationships. That can include relationships with sponsors, affiliate partners, or simply other bloggers who will direct traffic to your blog. Be sure some of your time is spent on forums and other blogs (or whatever works for you) to build these relationships and your blog.
Dont Be Afraid to Experiment
Not all of these tips and avenues of income are going to work for you. Dont be afraid to tweak your methods to see what works best for you and your readers.

You Can Use Google Analytics To Power Your Marketing Efforts Ways:

Google Analytics is the world’s most popular web analytics application, used by almost every other webmaster. According to SimilarTech, almost 61% of the top 1 million websites (Alexa rankings) use Google Analytics.

However, most webmasters don’t use Google Analytics to its full potential. Studies indicate that almost 80% of ecommerce retailers use Google Analytics incorrectly. Viewing daily traffic stats, page views and traffic sources is a very basic way of using Google Analytics.
As a webmaster, you can use it in a much more advanced manner and derive extremely useful insights that can be used to fine tune your traffic strategy and marketing campaigns.
In this post, I’ll discuss a few ways you can use the information generated by Google Analytics to improve your website’s content, fine tune your SEO structure and generate more traffic.

1) Increase Organic Traffic with SEO Queries and Landing Page Reports

One of the main objectives of tracking your website analytics is to identify loopholes and find ways to attract more traffic. In Google Analytics, you can do this monitoring the SEO queries and Landing Page reports.
But you first need to integrate your Google Analytics account with yourGoogle Webmaster Tools account. Once both these tools are integrated, you can see the top performing SEO queries for your website that are getting the highest impressions on search engines.
Here’s what you should do.
  • Use the SEO report within Google Analytics to see keyword ranking, clicks and impressions for your website.
  • Sort the keyword list by the number of impressions, and look for the highest impression keywords.
  • These are keywords for which you are already ranking well on Google search. You just need to improve the click through rate (CTR) for these keywords to increase your traffic.
To improve the CTR of these high impression keywords,
  • Keep your page and post titles around 55 characters, and meta descriptions around 156 characters.
  • Understand the context in which people search your high impression keywords, and then create content that is useful for those people. Create your content with the user’s intentions in mind and focus on benefit driven copy.

2) Increase Traffic With Keyword Report

To increase your website’s traffic by using the right keywords in your content, you can use the keyword report in Google Analytics. To access this report, go to Traffic Sources à Keyword Report.
Here’s you can find the top keywords that are driving traffic to your blog. If you focus on just the top 10 keywords bringing in the highest traffic, here’s how you can use them.
  • Use them as alternate tags in the images on your website.
  • Also use these keywords in the titles of the images on your website.
  • Use the same high traffic keyword in your page title and description.
  • Make these keywords a part of the anchor text of your internal website links. But make sure your keyword based anchors include other natural words as well. For example, instead of using the keyword “WordPress Themes” as anchor text, use “Here are some of the best WordPress Themes” as anchor text. This seems more natural.
Create more blog content using your high traffic keywords.

3) Drive More Traffic Using Referrals Report

Your website traffic can mainly be divided into three categories – organic search traffic, referral traffic and direct traffic.
To maximize your referral traffic, you can use the Traffic SourceàReferral report.
Find out the top websites that are sending traffic your way. Usually, your referrers fall in one or more of the following categories. Here’s what you can do with each one of them.
  • Communities and Niche Forums: To maximize your traffic from communities and forums like Quora, Triberr, Reddit and other niche specific groups, you should spend more time replying to different discussion threads. Try helping people with your answers and focus on creating value. At the same time, share your own content wherever relevant.
  • Blogs and Websites: If a blog sends you a lot of traffic, focus on building a relationship with its owner and explore more cross promotional opportunities. Link back to such blogs in your content, and regularly comment on their posts. Also, try contributing a few guest posts to such blogs.
  • Social Media: Identify the social network that sends the most traffic your way. Identify the post structure that is working the best for you. Increase your posting frequency and replicate your successful posts for more traffic and engagement.
To improve the conversion rate of your referral traffic, you can create specific landing pages or customized messages for different referral sources. You can use tools like Hello Bar to do this.

4) Improve Blog Engagement Using the Content Overview Report

People visit your blog or website because of its content. If your content resolves their problems, answers their questions and helps them in any way, they’ll keep returning for more.
So it’s important to identify the content that is actually attracting the highest traffic. For this you can use the Content Overview Report in Google Analytics. Use it to find out your top performing content and identify trends from it.
Have a good look at the posts that are attracting the highest traffic. Identify any improvement areas and try to make them more comprehensive. At the same time, create new blog content that complements your popular content.
This will help you increase your reader engagement and the average user time on site.

5) Use the User Flow Report to Increase Conversions

One of the major objectives of attracting traffic to your website is to convert them into leads or subscribers. This conversion rate is even more important than your traffic numbers. To make sure that your traffic has a high conversion rate, you can use the Users Flow report in Google Analytics.
Here’s what you should do.
  • Open the users flow report in Google Analytics.
  • Narrow the report by traffic, source, location, device etc.
  • To identify conversion loopholes, highlight traffic to a specific conversion page.
  • Analyze the average user drop off point in the funnel from landing to conversion.
Once you’ve identified the weak link in your conversion funnel, you can improve conversions by doing the following
  • Set up in page surveys at the high drop off points using tools like Qualaroo to find out why users are dropping off your website.
  • Based on the feedback, set up A/B tests to address their objections.
  • Identify other high drop off points in your conversion funnel and repeat the above steps on them to bring improvements.

6) Optimize Mobile User Experience

Traffic from mobile and smartphone users is increasing exponentially. You cannot ignore mobile users when creating a traffic strategy. To find out the mobile experience of your website, use the mobile report in Google Analytics.
The two factors you should focus on are bounce rate and time on site. If the bounce rate is high, you might need to make adjustments to your design and content. Also identify the devices that have the highest bounce rate to get a better understanding of the reasons behind the high bounce rate.
To start, make sure you’re using a responsive website design that adjusts according to the dimensions of the user’s device. Also try to identify where and why users are dropping off in your funnel. Run A/B tests to see what remedies work the best for you.

7) Use Audience Reports to Personalize Your Message

If you run an e-commerce store or sell products on your website, you can boost your conversion rates significantly by providing personalized user experiences. For this, you can use the audience reports in Google Analytics.
Using this report, try to identify content preferences of different audience segments on your website. You will most likely have multiple audience groups that are interested in specific content on your site.
Create personalized messages and experiences for such visitors and show them the products and services that they prefer. This is highly effective since almost 60% of ecommerce shoppers say they prefer purchasing from customized stores.

Wrapping It Up

Google Analytics is a highly advanced web analytics tool that can be used to derive extremely valuable insights from your website traffic. By using the different reports and statistics available in Google Analytics, you can identify the loopholes in your website design, content or structure, and make the necessary adjustments. If you know how to use this tool the right way, it can play a key role in helping you develop the right online marketing strategies for your website.

How Bloggers Can Make Money Affiture Network?

As bloggers, one of the most important statistics for our blog is how much we are earning per visitor. While it’s great to have a site that gets a lot of traffic, if you are blogging to make money, tracking your visitor stats will only get you so far.
With a blog you have a lot of options for how to monetize your traffic, such as Google Adsense, paid placement advertising and affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is quickly becoming one of the biggest sources of revenue for sites and blogs of all sizes, simply because you get paid every time a user takes a specific action on your site (and usually don’t need to buy anything). If you are focusing on niche specific sites, then you should definitely be looking at affiliate marketing as one of the best ways to monetize your sites.

How Bloggers Can Make Money with Affiture Network

Affiture is an affiliate network that is focused on providing affiliates, site owners and bloggers with high quality offers that can be promoted through various traffic methods. Affiture is also a division of CPX Interactive, a success online media company with over a decade of experience.
In the world of online marketing, it seems like many ad networks come and go with time. However, it’s important to note that CPX Interactive is a company that has been around for over 10 years now and one that I had used to monetize many of my sites in the past. This means you are not only working with a company that has experience, but one that also has the necessary connections and funding to stand the test of time and know what it takes to create success in this industry.

Affiliate Offers Found within Affiture

With so many different ad networks already out there, it’s important to know what offers are running on each of them. With a solid collection of over 500+ different offers, there is no doubt that you will find at least a handful of quality offers to may convert well with your existing blog audience.
The majority of offers on Affiture are mobile pin submits, freebies, dating, downloads and gaming, along with a selection of exclusive offers that are only found within their network. The commission rates will vary based on the offers selected and can range anywhere from under a dollar to over $200 per lead.
You can see an updated chart of the highest converting offers on the network right now below.

After finding an offer that looks like it might convert well with your audience, you can decide how you would like to promote it (based off the offer restrictions). Each offer allows for a different means of promotion, but Affiture has you covered on these many different methods… such as on-site placement (text links), email, search, video, banners, newsletters, incentived (and non), co-registration.
Find an offer. View it’s advertising terms. Promote it and make money.

How Affiture Sends Out Payments

Affiture sends out payments to affiliates on a Net15 basis when the minimum payment of $50 is earned. Bi-Monthly Net 15 payments are available to any affiliate that earns over $1,000 monthly. Weekly payments are sent out to affiliates earning in excess of $1,000 per week.
Payments are sent out through Paypal, check, ACH and wire transfer (depending on monthly earnings).

How to Win a Apple Watch from Affiture

There is a lot of buzz and anticipation for the new Apple Watch, and if you don’t want to wait in long lines or pay a few hundred dollars to get one of your own, Affiture has a great opportunity for you!
Affiture is giving away ten (10) Apple Watches to their top performing publishers between the promotion period of April 1st through June 30th.
If you already have a high traffic blog or ad campaigns running elsewhere, why not test your traffic with some of the offers from Affiture and see if you can get your hands on a free Apple Watch in the process?

How to Join Affiture Affiliate Network
There are many affiliate networks out there for you to choose from, but not many of them are backed by a well known name like CPX Interaction. For this reason alone, it should be worth your time to fill out an application on their site and register to become an affiliate. Once approved, you can login and start promoting offers through your site or existing traffic sources.
In addition to gaining access their 500+ affiliate offers, you will also be in the running for their Apple Watch giveaway.
After registering with Affiture, you will get an email from their team on your approval and also be setup with an affiliate manager. Be sure to take advantage of your affiliate manager, by asking them about the best offers on the network. how to promote them and if there is any room for a payout increase with volume.

How to Improve Better CTR in Organic Search Results?

Website and blog traffic is dependent on organic search results in a number of ways. Sometimes, even if a domain is ranking high on search results, searchers don’t click on it. It is a troubling situation. As such, the task of the webmaster will be to improve CTR in organic search results.

The article discusses CTR and how to improve CTR in organic search results.

What is CTR?

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a method of measuring the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns such as email blasts or paid product promotion through Google AdWords. A higher CTR implies effective marketing campaign.
A page may receive thousands of impressions but just few clicks, which is not a good scenario. Efforts should always be made to improve CTR in organic search results.

How to Improve CTR in Organic Search Results?

Here are 7 ways.

1) Promotion and Branding

In the recent days, offsite promotion is mostly preferred over onsite promotion. This accelerates more users to click on the links of the various websites. It helps to maximise affiliate marketing revenue.
Branding and promotion are important concepts of improving CTR. Appropriate SERP position increases the visibility by giving the website in first three ranks.

2) Title and Meta Tags

The web page that you are creating should contain title tags which are able to portray the idea in one shot. User should be able to get what they want from just one click.
Meta tags are the two lined descriptions which gives information of the product or services. A good and attractive title or Meta tag containing the said keyword will automatically improve CTR in organic search results.

3) Cautious Selection of Keywords

User can browse and research a variety of keywords to get their desired search results. So, the actual idea should be used in keywords.
Selection of keywords should be in such a way that with one click the website appears to them.

4) Being Responsive Towards Feedback and Reviews

Ratings, reviews, likes and feedback are crucial aspects in online marketing.
  • Feedback- Being responsive to various customer feedback not only boosts the business but also increase the number of clicks for the site. Users like to get a clear-cut idea about all the facts and figures. Proper answering of the queries helps in public relationship which is essential in marketing. It enhances the business and also helps to improve CTR in organic search results.
  • Reviews- A user has to click on to the web portal to write a review. So, these clicks are counted by Google.
  • Ratings- The ratings of the users from 3 to 5 are equally responsible in the process of online promotion.
  • Likes- When more users like the webpage, CTR improves to a certain level. This in turn boosts up the organic search results.

5) Site Optimization

If your website needs images, screenshots or other links, do not hesitate in adding it. This is called internal linking. The user might click on these links for information so each and every detailing becomes necessary.
Videos, tagging, captions and links provide a detailing of the product or service which is searched by a user all the time. This is called site optimization.

6) Having Authority

The word “copyrights” should be present in the footer to imply the legality of the website.  Implementation of rules and following those rules makes you genuine towards marketing.
Customers search for genuine products/services which can only be possible if there is a trademark of the company. This ensures more chances of consecutive clicks on the web portal.

7) Analysis of CTR Results

When it comes to drawing the attention of customers then CTR results matters most importantly. Keeping a check on the percentage of the results, whether it is increasing or decreasing, should be done.
A general percentage of clicks are 0.2% out of 1000 clicks. If the percentage does not make even up to 0.2%, then revising and updating the contents of the page makes the job effective.