Work At Home Mom - Affiliate Marketing

The Value of Partnerships and Your Site

by Shannon on May 11, 2012

I’ve known Adam Riemer for a number of years now. He likes to introduce me as the “smartest woman he knows” and that definitely wins him brownie points. Here is a guest post from him:

It isn’t enough to rely on one or two channels like SEO or PPC for your traffic. When an algorithm changes your rankings can drop and if more people enter into your niche, your PPC costs could rise. That is why it is important to think about partnerships.

Partnerships could be anything from related sites or other ecommerce sites with similar products to yours. You can use them in numerous ways to not only help to build your traffic, but also have a reliable source of revenue if your main channels end up no longer being able to work for you. Here are a few types of partnerships, why you may want to
use them and also one thing to watch for.

Guest Blogging – Building partnerships with guest bloggers is great because you not only gain exposure to their audience, but it also helps to build your brand and trust for your site with their readers. If you allow people to guest blog for you, you could also get them to tweet out and share their posts with their fans which helps to drive new people to your
site or blog. These are great partnerships to have because if you ever need traffic coming in, you could always reach out to them and ask for another guest post.

Cross promotional emails – Finding sites and stores that have newsletters and emails lists and are closely related to you and can be good for your audience or customers is great for your site. Not only can you work out deals to cross promote to each other’s customer base, but you can build trust in your store for them because they are getting the email
from a store they already shop with. This can not only give you a boost in sales, but it can help to get you extra exposure if they forward the email to friends or other family members.

When you find partners that you want to work with, before you risk your brand, you’ll want to check for the types of complaints that you can find online. If they provide poor customer service or their products don’t work, you probably don’t want to send your customers there. Not only could they have a bad experience, but if they do, they may no longer trust you or your store. This could also damage future partnerships and cross promotions since your customers no longer trust your recommendations.

Partnerships are an awesome way to boost sales and help to build a customer or reader base for free. They build your brand and trust and can also be a reliable source of traffic. As long as you are careful with who you partner with and make sure they provide the same levels of support as you do, you should be good to go with them as a partner.

About the author.

Adam is an online marketer with over 10 years of experience. He helps companies with everything from SEO to Affiliate Management and full site optimization.

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The Hard Choice to Miss Affiliate Conferences

by Shannon on May 7, 2012

Next week are two conferences that I am really sad that I am missing. Life however has other plans for me right now. It was very timely that I got this guest post from my friend Tricia Meyer talking about her decision not to attend and why.

Some people look to poets and philosophers for quotes. I find myself returning to Ursula in “The Little Mermaid” when she said “Life’s full of tough choices, isn’t it?” For me this year one of the toughest choices that I have had to make for my business is whether to attend certain conferences. I’ve always struggled in the past with Linkshare Symposium and Commission Junction University, but Affiliate Summit and ShareASale ThinkTank attendance were a given.

Not so this spring. Although I have no doubt that both Affiliate Summit Central and ThinkTank in Austin are going to be terrific events, I had to do a lot of thinking about whether it was the right time for me to attend. Having already attended Affiliate Summit in January and planning on attending the Google Summit in July and Affiliate Summit in August (plus my Affiliate Marketers Give Back walk in October), this was an incredibly hard decision for me.

On the one hand, I know that the conferences are a great networking opportunity. Because they are back to back, I would only need to pay for one flight to attend both. I could find a way to come up with the money if I really wanted to. I’d get to meet up with my friends, network and make new friends, learn what is new in the affiliate marketing industry, and look for new ways to grow my business.

At the same time, May is a huge month for my family. My husband and I are running a half marathon with friends. My daughter has her first middle school varsity cross country meet. My 30-something-th birthday. End of year staff appreciation at the kids’ school. Band try-outs. Preparing for our annual family Disney trip. Mother’s Day. A trip with the in-laws to watch the Indy 500. Opening the pool for our family and friends. It’s just so much!

In the end, I decided to stay home. I’m sure that I will be sad about it when I see all of the Tweets and Facebook posts and blog follow-ups about sessions. I’ll have to work extra hard to keep up with business opportunities at home to make up for those that I am missing. But this month my family needs me, and I need them. Touch choices, but ones that I am lucky to be making.

Tricia Meyer is a mom, blogger, and affiliate marketer who recently has been spending her time writing wine club reviews. You can follow her on Twitter @sunshinetricia.

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Google Alerts Tips and Tricks

by Shannon on March 22, 2012

At Affiliate Summit West 2012 I sat in on Vinny O’Hare’s session on 25 Ways to Improve Your Website. One of the tips he gave was using Google Alerts. He touched on it so very briefly though and I thought it was a great topic to expand on, so I asked him to write a guest post about it. Here it is:

Google Alerts is a cool tool that is free and can really help you find links to your site and other interesting things about the niche you are in. There are several items you can keep track of for your website and to track your competition. Lets talk about a few ways you can use them to help with your website. You can set alerts up for many things, I consider it another set of eyes when it comes to my sites.

When setting up an alert you have a choice of searching Everything, News, Blogs, Real Time, Video, Discussions and Books. I usually leave this set to everything unless I am expecting breaking news for a product in my niche. Second setting is how frequent you want to get these alerts. Your choices are As it happens, once a day, once a week. 99% of the time I have it set for as it happens. This way it is in my email box and I can always choose when to read it. You can also have it set up as an rss feed. I stick with emails as I was never a really big rss fan.

First Google alert you should have set up for is for your name. This is to see who is talking about you and can also act as a reputation management tool. In Google alerts set up a new alert with “Your Name” in quotes and have the alert set up for “as it happens”. You will get an alert for every site that is mentioning your name. Set up a separate alert using your middle initial also. If you want you can also set this up with your websites name, I find that a little too much but many people set this up also..

Second Google Alert I recommend is “link:Yourwebsite.com” replace the yourwebsite.com with your actual website url. You will get alerts whenever Google finds someone is linking to you. You can also use this on an individual post if you plan on getting a lot of links to it and you want to see who links to that certain post.

My favorite set up for Google alerts is for keyword research which also works well for finding possible link partners. What you do is put your keyword (example “blue widgets”) in quotes and have it emailed daily. You don’t want this set to as it happens because you will get flooded with emails. You will be amazed at the results for the keywords mentioned. You will see what your competition is trying to rank for and possible discover a new angle that you weren’t thinking about. You may be surprised at the results and it may even change the keywords you are trying to rank for.

I use Google alerts to check for people copying my content. From time to time I will set up a Google alert for two or three sentences in my first or second paragraph of my sites blog post. If you take the paragraph and put it in quotes you will see who has borrowed that content. You also want these set up to as it happens so you can do something about it. When this happens to me I waste no time in contacting the website that copied me and if they don’t take down the copy I contact their host. Odds are you will never get a Google Alert for this but if it does happen you will know about it way in advance.

Another cool alert is site:yourwebsite.com I use this to see how long it takes Google to include my new post into the search index. Usually when I make a post I get an email the next day letting me know it has been included. If you run a forum and you have it being indexed you can what post are being written by other people instead of checking “New post” constantly to make sure there is no spammy stuff going on. You can also set up a Google alert to make sure you haven’t been hacked. Since most spammers are selling things like viagra or porn you can see what is going on before it is too late. set up the “Site:yourwebsite.com +viagra,porn,russian mail order brides”.

If you run a local site you can set up an alert for your towns name and put that in quotes and you will see everyone that either lives in your town or mentions your town. This is a good way to find Twitter followers for your local business. You can also put your (“town +keyword”) and get everyone that mentions your niche in your town. I don’t use this much and it could be adjusted to your niche, state, etc.

You can set up an alert with your competitors name and comment wherever he puts a blog post or a press release. He will be baffled how you are keeping up with him. I won’t tell him, it can be our little secret. You can also set up the site:yourcompetitorsurl.com and see what pages they are getting indexed. You can then find out who is linking to that post and approach them for a backlink.

You can set up an alert for finding guest posting opportunities. You can set up a (“keyword + guest post”) or (“keyword + write for us”) and you will find some good places to get exposure to your site. After you set up a few Google alerts you will find different ways to tweak them and you may get some new ideas or see some other keywords you should be following.

Vinny O’Hare is the founder of Vincent O’Hare Consulting, an internet marketing service that provides information on running successful affiliate programs.

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5 Super Bowl Commercials 2012 and What You Can Learn From Them

by Shannon on February 6, 2012

I am not much of a football fan, except for my Michigan State Spartans, so when the Super Bowl rolls around I usually don’t even know who the teams are that are playing. I do however enjoy watching the game mainly for the commercials.

Companies spend a fortune on advertising during the Big Game because so many people are tuned in. There is a bit of pressure on them to create really unique and memorable commercials, basically a best of the best that they can do.

Everyone always creates a list of the best commercials, but I thought I would do something a little different. I want to talk about 5 commercials that stood out for me and what you can learn from them.

Here they are:

Clint Eastwood Chrysler Commercial

I’m a Detroiter and last year’s commercial with Eminem really hit the heart of my city. So the pressure was on Chrysler to create an equally moving commercial. This year they centered their message on the whole country with their “it’s halftime America” message. Things have been rough, but we are seeing glimpses of positive change here in Detroit. The commercial focused on hope and was sprinkled with images of Chrysler cars. The cars were not the focus.

Takeaway: Your central message doesn’t always have to be about the product.

Budweiser Clydesdales Prohibition Commercial

I usually love the Clydesdales commercials. They are almost always awesome, whether they are funny or moving. This year was a really miss for me though. This year tried to be a serious one. They were trying to show how Budweiser is always there for the big moments in life, such as when Prohibition ended. Prohibition? Really? I get that people were probably very happy to have legal alcohol available to them again, but this commercial didn’t give me the warm fuzzies that Clydesdales commercials usually do.

Takeaway: You can’t coast on an image that is well loved by people, the message should really mean something.

The Dog Strikes Back Volkswagon Beetle Commercial

This very humorous commercial was about a dog that longs for the ability to chase after a VW Beetle, but needs to get into to shape to do so. I loved the part where he had to ignore all the food that the baby was dropping on the floor around him. It was also a commercial in a commercial though, ending in a Tatooine Cantina with the bar patrons discussing which commercial was better, the dog or the Star Wars kid from last year. One patron claims the dog was better and Vader shows up to Force choke him until he apologizes. Very funny.

Takeaway: Star Wars still sells! Plus it was relatable because most of us have been in that “get in shape, loose weight” place.

GoDaddy Body Paint Commercial

I can’t embed this commercial and I am kind of glad that I can’t. Sex always sells is a timeless advertising message. Really though, these risque go to our website to see more type of commercials are just getting old and worn. They are also one of the big reasons I am moving all of my domains away from them and to Namecheap.

Takeaway: Know your audience. I’m not sure of any statistics that show exactly how the viewship of the Super Bowl breaks down between men and women, and the break down between men and women domain owners. I do know they are not all men and there is probably a significant percentage of women for both.

Doritos Man’s Best Friend Commercial

While this commercial probably didn’t win any cat lovers, it was a pretty funny look at a dog bribing his owner to keep quiet with some Doritos. This commercial was created for a contest run by Doritos by a freelance graphic designer.

Takeaway: User created content can be the key to having your product, blog or website stand out.

I know there were a few other standout (both good and bad) Super Bowl commercials this year. Share one of yours in the comments below and what your takeaway was.

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Best 6 Tools for Working From Home

by Shannon on February 3, 2012

Any kind of job or business requires tools to help you complete your work. Working from home is no exception to that. Over the years I have discovered a number of tools that are a must have for my business. I would love to share them with you.

Here are my best 6 tools for working from home:

Wunderlist. I have struggled for some time trying to find just the right to do list that works across my computer and my smartphone. Plus find one that I will actually use. I have a couple installed on my phone right now and this is definitely my favorite. I also love very much that it is free. And you can share your task list with your spouse or an employee/contractor if needed. I use this every day.
WordPress. Back in the day I used to code websites from scratch and with the help of Frontpage. My how things have changed. Now every single site I build is on the WordPress platform. While it does have its quirks, I love the simplicity of use in the backend and the ability to customize it with various plugins and custom themes like Thesis. And so many people are using it, that if there is something I don’t know how to do with it, I just Google it and there is most likely a tutorial.
Internet Connection. It is hard to remember back but there was a time when there wasn’t the internet. I remember computer modems in which you had to place a phone handset into. And I’m not really that old. Anyway having the internet available all the time has really been a key in allowing people to work from home. Whether I am at home using the wireless internet or on the road and using mobile broadband, allows me to work when I want to.
Backup Buddy. I used to use a free plugin to send a backup of my WordPress database to my email once a week, but I always worried about it being unreliable. Then it stopped working on one of my key sites. I had heard so many good things about this plugin but I was hesitant to pay for it when there was something free. Free is not so good when it doesn’t work though. I love this plugin because I can set it up to do an automatic backup of either the whole site or just the database and have it sent to Amazon S3, Dropbox, my email, FTP, or Rackspace Cloudfiles.
Namecheap. I used to register all of my domains with GoDaddy, but they just slowly chipped away at me until I was fed up. Now this is my domain registrar of choice. They really do cost less plus they have a whole lot less upsells during the checkout process. That’s a win in my book.
Hostgator. All of my websites need someplace to call home and this is the webhost for me. I love that they have an online chat feature for support issues, as well as phone and email support. While they are not perfect, the pros have outweighed the cons so far.