Getting started with Affiliate Marketing and your WordPress website
WordPress is after many years one of the most popular platform for designing and developing websites. It has shown itself worthy especially when it comes down to developing affiliate blogs. If you want to reliably earn money online, affiliate marketing is the best way for that. It is a proficient method for bringing revenue into the bloggers’ wallets.
However, making an original, converting product is a challenging and difficult process, and on the other hand, it is much easier and more profitable to sell a product instead of making it. This article brings together the basic guide to Affiliate marketing and WordPress in order to make a great website that will sell products from various niches.
The Pros of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing site takes the time to start blooming and generating revenues. But, once it starts it will be your main source of income and while it will not only generate traffic but also improve your site’s SEO. Good quality and a great command of technical SEO generate great quality leads and make your brand, your product (in case you have one) reach out. The great influence of your brand supports the selling of other products that are not part of your affiliate program.
The more popular your program becomes around the affiliates the more marketing costs will turn into the costs of managing your affiliate program. With a steady and smoothly running program, there will be a lot of marketers that are reaching out towards you, and most likely they will commit to promoting your product and/or brand.
The Cons of Affiliate Marketing
Like you’ve seen in the subheading above, affiliate marketing with all of these advantages should give you all the reasons to start your affiliate site today but, this is not any near an easy task. While nearly WordPress user might think that this is a great choice for him or her, there still are things that you should be cautious about.
Starting and designing a WordPress site is genuinely easy, even running it is somewhat easy. But what is the key to making it successful? Not every WordPress site is successful from simple reason because it needs some technical knowledge after all. You will feel that you started very swiftly and painlessly but after a while, you’re going to figure out that there’s a long road to take before the site becomes successful. You can’t start earning in a day, at the start no affiliate site will gather you enough money for the living or even a decent stack of money. Without the benefits listed above, this indeed looks like a spooky decision.
Yes, Affiliate Sites are great, and they offer a lot of advantages. It indeed sounds great to generate sales selling other people’s products and brands but, you should all take into the consideration that it takes the time to grow, a lot of cherishing and dedication. Even the biggest affiliate brands started out small and had a long path to develop enough to be called successful.
This is not to scare you but, more likely to encourage you to be more cautious and careful. Moreover, perform some in-depth analytic research that will help you improve the understanding of this matter.
Making an Affiliate Marketing Website
# Step 1 Choose your product(s)
It is essential and of utmost importance to find a product that people need, a product that converts.
There are many products available in the world, but you need to find the one selling for, which will meet the demands of all your affiliates and be necessary for potential customers. There are affiliates that have their own product but they invested a lot of time and hard work for getting it. Promoting an inferior product can end up badly for you, which means losing the trust of your affiliates and that is the dead end.
Moreover, the poor product will result in customers requesting refunds, which results in a lot of headache in money transfers. Choose your product smart, and you won’t have to deal with these headaches. Poor management of affiliate site either leads to losing money, affiliates or customers. Losing all three can be much, much worse.
#Step 2 The Right Affiliate Program Saves the Day
After you’ve found your dream product and niche, now it’s time to choose the right affiliate program.
Whether you will use a platform or a plugin there are advantages and disadvantages. If you choose a platform, the affiliate program will be stored outside the WordPress folder but, going along with a plugin means that either product and affiliate program is run by the WordPress admin.
#3 Recruit Affiliate or advertise your website on social media networks and other websites
After you’ve created your website, it is important that people hear about you. If you already own a product, you will need to find an independent method that will bring sales upon your product(s).
You can promote your product easily, through social media marketing, email marketing and a suitable banner ad that will be eye-catching and will resonate with your potential customers and clients. Sending e-mails, making blog posts such as reviews of the product can reach out for more affiliates and generate trusted partners in your favor.
#4 Optimize your Website
There are various tools that can support you in tracking, managing your audience and provide general optimization to your affiliate program. This can cost depending on how much of an audience you want to generate. Even if it is more expensive and time-consuming, the right optimization and maintenance can help you maintain the excellence in your affiliate program and make it grow.
Conclusion
This brings our general guide to the end. There are a large selection of themes and plugins that will make your website look more vibrant and eye-catching to the potential clients. Using the right method, and implementing the WordPress platform with the sufficient amount of plugins can greatly enhance the quality of the product or convince the potential buyer to use your affiliate link to buy the product. Like mentioned before, it is a long and challenging task but, with the right time invested, persistence and hard work it can succeed. Have you ever tried affiliate marketing? How did it work out for you?
3 easy ways to add reviews to your WordPress website
Reviews have become an important factor in the world of e-commerce, and as such, they are important elements in modern life. People use reviews to express their opinion about various things, from products such as books, makeup, and sports equipment to the movies, cinemas, and restaurants. Reviews are also used in affiliate marketing where writers will review products and earn commissions if a visitor purchases the reviewed product.
Various surveys have been published regarding the reviewing and even 90% of the participants admitted that the vast majority of their buying decisions are based on the reviews left on the product sites. At the same, another survey has reported that people prefer trusting online reviews far more than a personal recommendation. [3]
With so many reviews available on the internet, you can easily make a lot of money if you can make the right use of them. Amazon can thank its amazing reviewing system that boosts the sales, as the customers can easily trust the verified reviews. Also, bloggers in-depth rely on reviews when they’re out of writing ideas.
In order to make your reviews look genuinely nice and professional, you will have to make them look functional. If your website runs on WordPress, there are five very useful WordPress reviewer plugins that can make your product and/or product review look very useful and helpful, enough to make someone purchase the product, and this article makes a compelling list of plugins and describes their most important features in the process.
#1 WordPress Reviewer Plugin
This amazing reviewing plugin designed by EvoG is available on CodeCanyon for $25. Reviewer has an amazing design, followed with a sleek and user-friendly interface that is very intuitive in the process. It comes with a great variety of features that allow you to present your review as accurate as possible. The contemporary reviews are split into seven parts. This includes overall rating, user rating, a thumbnail, pros and cons and the summary of your review.
Just like most of the other plugins, the Reviewer is fully customizable. It comes with a user-friendly, handy rating system and offers an unlimited selection of colors. Reviewer also sports nine templates and, each one of them has a unique style and layout and additionally, customizable accordingly.
This is not the end of the Reviewer’s features. The Reviewer allows you to compare tables without a sweat. You can easily put review scores side by side allowing your readers to more thoroughly approach the given reviews. The plugin as well can take its pride in a large high functioning community. While the user reviews can be left through the comments, they’re also enabled to share their opinions through three options: Overall rating, criterion-by-criterion or either a star or slider rating function. There are also seven fully customizable widgets that make the sidebars very functional while making navigation between the reviews piece of cake.
#WP Review Pro
WP Review Pro belongs to one of the top-rated reviewing plugins. You can easily get it on MyThemeShop for just $29. The price also includes proficient support for one year. If you’re looking for a way to make your reviews professional and as if they have some kind of attitude, this is the right plugin for you. The plugin includes great CSS animations that easily grab attention from the audience.
WP Review Pro offers customizable reviews that feel soft to the eye and allow the user to choose among the unlimited selection of colors, size of the boxes for reviewing and numbers of criteria.
There are various review systems available through the WP Review Pro: stars, points, circles or percentages. WP Review Pro enhances the navigation with additional tabbed review widget which is of great help to those who are not completely friendly with using computers. Moreover, readers can easily express their opinion through a single-click rating. Some people prefer leaving a professional and analytic review which includes more details and they can do that via the comments that are placed at the bottom of the post.
Rich snippets help the search engines enhance optimization. And in order to more boost the SEO, the plugin is agile and running lighting fast. To those who would like to perform a detailed plugin testing, there’s a free trial version but it doesn’t come in its full power.
#3 Taqyeem
Taqyem can be bought for just $17 from CodeCanyon. Together with the plugin, you get six months support. The plugin has a dark and light theme included. Additionally, both themes can be customized with an unlimited choice of colors. Along with this feature, you can customize the typing with 600 and more Google fonts. Also, you can choose between two sizes of summary boxes: full and half-width. You can choose between three review systems: star, percentages, and points, while the readers are also able to leave user ratings.
There are also an additional three widgets that make this plugin very functional. The best, recent and random reviews. In order to make your plugin more functional, the developers have released two extensions.
- Taqyeem Button Addon that costs $6 which adds buttons to your review box allowing you to choose any color that you like and roughly 500 icons. This addon appeals to the affiliate sites owners.
- Taqyeem Predefined Criteria Addon which allows you to re-use the criteria you regularly use without wasting your time. It can be found for $7.
#4 WP Product Review Lite
This review plugin will help everyone with a tight budget or people who have just started their business and need a reliable plugin that will introduce them to the system. Despite being free, this plugin has a lot to offer.
Aside from fantastic looking review boxes, the plugin contains a rating out of 10, pros and cons, thumbnail image and two affiliate links. Reviews can be fully customized with an offered choice of typography, positioning, and selection of colors. Ratings can depend on color. For instance, green color serves the good-quality review while the orange and red represent the lower quality of the review.
Aside from the free version, the plugin offers a couple of really useful add-ons but that means spending more money than you’d normally spend on a paid plugin.
Summary
All the review plugins we have listed allow you to create a unique, stylish review box that includes a significant rating system, pros and cons schema markup for rich snippets. They are very useful in the ever-growing world of e-commerce where the product and marketplace matter the most. Which plugin do you use? Which one is your favorite?
