Affiliate Blogging: 5 Mistakes To Avoid
By Ethan L Pepper
Affiliate blogging sounds great you can get paid to review items and give your opinion about things you already enjoy. Most however soon notice that they aren't getting enough traffic or that the niche they enjoy doesn't lead to many sales. That's when most people begin to get frustrated and start making key mistakes that end up hurting their blogs and websites. Frustration sets in and people give up on their blogs entirely. I know because I made some of these same mistakes and have many times thought about quitting altogether. Here are some of the mistakes to avoid:
- Thinking that you can do PPC with a blog. With AdWords and Microsoft Adcenter's new restrictions on affiliates blogs it really doesn't make sense to waste time and money on PPC campaigns. Really blogs weren't designed with this purpose in mind. If you want to give PPC a try do yourself a favor and build an extremely targeted website with PHP redirects and cross your fingers that google still doesn't nail you with a low quality score.
- Filling the page up with ads. Sometimes when you're getting plenty of page views and very few ad clicks the temptation to fill up the page with various ads. Not just being content to have a few well placed ads for affiliate products you decide to add a bunch of different ad networks hoping one clicks with your audience. Guess what when I see a website with tons of ads I generally just click back on the web browser and find another. I'm sure many others do as well. When first starting out the goal is simple get people to read your blog and keep coming back. How do you do that? By giving a lot more than you take.
- Not building targeted links. Most people know that google looks at links in determining how to rank blogs and web pages in their search. So they go out and comment on a bunch of blogs and leave a link to their home page with the name of their blog. I know because this was what I was doing when started. What I didn't realize is that google looks at the surrounding text to see if it is related to your web page the more keyword related the better. And more importantly they look at the anchor text. Even if a keyword never appears on that web page if it appears enough times in related links the page will rank for that keyword.
- Participating in link exchange web sites. There are tons of sites out there claiming that they can get you traffic through a link exchange program. You enter your site and topic and find other great sites to link to and they will link to you. The problem is they hardly ever work this way often times you'll find that there are no sites that are related to yours or that the quality is just bad. Beyond that most sites will want to put your link on a page dedicated to links with no content. Guess what? Google will more than likely not even bother to index the page and give your site credit for the link. My advice don't bother with it.
- Getting involved in time sink activities. Blogging takes a lot of time as it is don't waste time on activities that aren't helping your blog grow. What do I mean? Do you really have to check your AdSense account everyday? They'll let you know when you become a millionaire don't worry. It's okay to check your Webmaster Tools account to see how you rank for certain keywords but it really doesn't need checking more than once a week. Don't even set it up Google Analytics until you're getting some decent traffic.
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