In the last post, I talked about how to drive traffic to your affiliate programs, touching some important points such advertising and building links. Promoting an affiliate programs is different than driving traffic to them, and it’s something misunderstood by many people in Internet.

Some weeks ago, I signed up to Market Leverage and promoted it in my blog by writing a little review about that program. What you can find there, in the review’s post, is a reflection of how to promote your affiliate programs.

If you want to be recognized and create an authority on Internet, you need to Be Honest with your readers. Many people lie in the blogosphere, even more when they are promoting a service or product. They do that with the purpose to convince the people who read their blogs about something that is not true. By catching them as referrals, they will earn money from their sales and from each activity the referrals make in the affiliate network.

Now, I will tell you why you SHOULD NOT to do that. At the first instance, you will earn more money with all those deceived referrals, the problem isn’t that, who don’t like to earn money? The problem starts when you are going to promote another affiliate program, in the future. What do you think will happen with all those people who signed up under your link in the past? Obviously, if they were deceived they will not trust in you anymore. Surely, they will sign up to the program referred by you, but through another blogger who inspire them more trust.

To be successful promoting an affiliate program you need to be transparent, telling to the people what they will find in the program, the most important features of the program, how much they will earn… All those kind of things, and if there is a catch, tell them. For example, many people get angry when they expect something for free and suddenly they need to pay a quote to receive the information.

By being honest at time of promoting an affiliate program could give you more chances to multiply your earnings in a future. Then, when you suggest to your readers to sign up to an affiliate program, surely they will do it under your name and this way, you will get many commissions from them.

As you may know, the success of the affiliate programs resides in the traffic you drive to them. I have seem websites with several affiliate links but they have not success because their webmasters don’t know how to drive traffic to those pages. So the key to be successful in this business, is to drive traffic to your links!

There are many techniques which you can do it, besides to crossing your fingers, let’s study some of them:

• Advertising: This is the first thing you can imagine when you talk about promoting. By buying advertising you can drive a lot of persons to your landing page, giving you high probabilities to catch some of them and earn money. You can advertise with programs like Adwords of Google, Blogads, StumbleUpon or another network like Bidvertiser, which gives you $20 in clicks for free.
• Building Links: If you are a blogger and you want to promote your affiliate programs, you should start checking your past posts looking for those ones where you talk, or just refer/mention something related to affiliate marketing. When you find those posts, you need to optimize them to be potential landing pages. You need to build links into your posts pointing to your affiliate programs, but in this case you need to advertise the post itself. But wait, just build the links only if your post is related to it!
• Placing Banners: Well this is part of advertising, but I want to mention something very important. Some of those affiliate programs provides several banners which you can use to promote them. When you are going to place a 125×125 banner on your blog for example, you should study which one is the most impressive and catchy to the eyes. This way you have more chances to attract new affiliates… Remember to use just 1 banner, placing 3 or 4 banners won’t give you more affiliates, instead you could be scaring them, it’s suspicious when someone place several banners of the same type.

Well guys, as you see, to make money with affiliate programs, you need to invest some money on this. Once you are established in this business, it will pay itself so don’t worry about that. Just be sure to promote it in the right way, avoid spamming and drive traffic to your landing page and you will start making money online .

Once you have written a post, either on your own blog or on another one, you could want to know its effectiveness to apply the same strategy in the future posts. Normally, we study past posts to learn how the implemented keywords has influenced in its effectiveness.

What is Effectiveness for you?

I’m talking about effectiveness but I didn’t mention its meaning. I consider that a post was effective, when it brings me the bigger number of traffic, attract the bigger quatity of subscribers or when it gives me a sale. Sometimes you can write a post with a good title and great content, but if it brings you just a little number of readers, you can’t consider it as effective. In these cases, you could try to promote it, this way you could explode its potential.

Beside that, there are another factors which can help you to recognize an effective post:

• Inbound Links: The inbound/incoming links, also known as links pointing to your post, can be a good indicative of how effective was your post. The more inbound links you get, the more effective it was. This means that your post shook the blogosphere and it is being commented in many blogs. Intead, if you didn’t get any inbound links, you know what it means…
• Comments: I think this is one of the best factors which help you to recognize when your post was or not effective. The more comments you get, the more effective it was. This is obvious, if you get several comments it’s because your post rocks! Surely it is very controversial or interesting.
• Votes: The votes a post can get in the social media networks certainly helps you to recognize if the post was good or bad. If you visit the front page of Digg for example, you can see articles with 500 votes or more, and a post is not there for nothing! Surely it is very informative and catchy.

These 3 elements, combined with the other ones mentioned in the first parragraph can help you a lot to recognize the effectiveness of a post. Some time ago, I invited a blogger to read one of my posts, and minutes later he bought an 125×125 ad on my blog. What happened there? He really liked the content and he decided to buy me a spot, so that was my proof to recognize the potential of that post.

What next?

Once you have recognized an effetive post, you need to do two things. The first one, promote it! It could be a good way to attract new subscribers, helping you to impose your authority on a niche. Advertising on StumbleUpon could be a good idea, because it’s relatively cheap and it can bring you a lot of traffic.

The second thing you should do, is to optimize it to be a good landing page, where the people can visit, get stuck and subscribe to your blog .

Have you written a guest post? Well, I have written some but I will be writing more this month, because of the Blogging Idol Contest. So in this days, while I was writing some guest posts, I noticed that there are some factors you need to consider when you are going to write a post in another blog motivating me to write this post.

I will give you a little example. Here at Mr. Javo dot Com, I write with my own style, I know what the people will like and what not. But the audience which I write for in my blog, will be not the same in another blog for obvious reasons. So, the first thing you need to do is Meet The Audience. You need to see in which kind of posts of the other blog receives the more quantity of comments. If you see that the other blog receives more comments in “How To” posts, you should think on writing a “How To” post! But wait, I’m not telling you that you need to copy the other blogger, if so, the guest post would be “more of the same”. You need to conserve your style and this way you will be attract the attention of the readers.

The other thing you need to consider, is to Maintain The Quality. If you ask me for a guest post, I would like to see some of your posts and certificate the quality of them. If your writing is enough good, I will be glad to have a post written by you in my blog. I will be expecting a post of the same quality than the others I read before… If you write something poor, or may be you write about a topic covered by me before, probably I will reject your post.

In addition, if the blogger is giving you an opportunity to write in his blog, you should Deliver The Post Ready to be Published. Before deliver your post to the blogger, you should check it several times, looking for grammar errors. Also, if you are registered in the blog and you can write the post directly through the panel, I recommend you to preview the post to be sure that it looks good, without imperfections between the paragraphs or in the images. This way, the other blogger just needs to read and approve the post, saving his time of centering the images, for example.

The readers will be wondered when they visit a blog and find a guest post over there. If you want to catch them as subscribers, you need to make them feel that your post Worth Reading. In this case, you need to make the title catchy and this way you will have all those people reading your guest post and visiting your blog, getting many of them as subscribers.

And the last and more important thing is to Be Yourself. It’s a guest post! You need to offer what you have in the other blog, so have fun and let it flow. Write with your own style, with your same attitude and try to give your best!.