My wife, Emma, has become an expert affiliate marketer without even knowing (or trying). I just got off the phone with her and once again, she convinced me to do something that I normally wouldn’t do.  I realized that if I can just learn what she already does so well, I can make a ton of money online.

Here are 7 things that makes her great at affiliate marketing.  If you are looking for ways to improve your tactics, then this article is for you.

1. Be an Expert - One of the main reasons why I listen to my wife is because of her expertise in the area.  She is amazing at cooking, and when she recommends using a certain tool or an ingredient, I listen.  In affiliate marketing, showing your expertise is important to get visitors to listen to your advice and buy that product you are pitching.  Without the perceived expertise in that area, no one will ever buy a product you recommend because you have no credibility.
2. Call to Immediate Action - I see the “call to action” advice everywhere, but not many people actually advises for immediate action.  I know that I tend to forget things when I don’t do it right away, so getting the reader to buy or submit their email address immediately is very important.  If they wait too long, it might be some other site’s cookie that gets the credit when your pitch actually made the sale!
3. Reminders - It normally takes a few reminders for someone to take action.  My wife would talk to me over the phone, email me and sometimes follow up with another call just to make sure I followed through on my promise.  In order to get visitors to take action, setup different places to remind people about the product you are pitching.  Write about the product you would like to pitch, then follow it up with a banner ad and perhaps another article telling your readers your experience with the product.
4. Show Confidence - My wife is extremely confident and it shows because when she speaks, people listen.  Show it in your tone when you write about the product you are recommending.  The last thing you want is to sound like you aren’t really sure whether they should buy or not.
5. Build Trust Way Before You Need to Call for Action - People buy a product from a trusted source, especially when its done online because there are too many scams out there.  Build that trust with your articles regularly and your readers will naturally follow your advice on products you pitch.  Otherwise, you will have to rely on an amazing one time pitch to accomplish the same task.  It’s the difference between a cold call and telling your friend about a new product.
6. Write Your Article For Your Readers - My wife will never try to convince me to buy a wallet because she knows I’m just not interested!  If your readers come to your blog because they love food, then don’t try to pitch a digital camera.  Focus your affiliate marketing on products and services that serve the needs of your readers.
7. Show By Example - Once your build trust, then letting your readers know about your experience and how you use the product is a great selling tool.  Write a review, talk about what you like and dislike about it and your readers will be intrigued and want more.
8. Don’t be Pushy - Give your readers every reason to take action but at the end of the day, let them decide.  There will be lots of people who just aren’t interested so don’t try to push them into making a decision!  Let them know how great the product is but if they choose to miss out, then let them be.  The worst thing you can do is be pushy and turn the readers off.  I know my wife would never push me too hard and us being happily married is a testimonial of that!

Thanks Emma!  I think all of us will become better affiliate marketers by following what you do so well!

One of the secrets I accidentally found was that I write much better if I turn off the internet when I write blog articles.  They turn out more complete, better structured and flow much better.

I used to write all my blog articles through the wordpress editor (which is a great editor btw), but while traveling for business one day, I decided to start writing on the plane.  Even though it gets noisy at times and sometimes your neighbor likes to look at what you are typing, I find that I’m much better able to concentrate and get into a groove while I type away on my keyboard.

Why is That?

Curious about why that is, I spend some time thinking about it and here are some reasons that I came up with.

Distractions
With instant messaging, skype, emails and twitterfeed all turned on, it is very hard to concentrate with so many little things popping up on the desktop.  When I was on the plane, none of these would bother me because I didn’t have access to the internet.

Alternatives
When I’m on the plane, I open Microsoft Word and that’s the only thing on the screen.  Since I’m extremely bored and there’s nothing else to do, I end up typing on the screen and not trying to compare writing blog articles with something else that I could be doing during the same time.

There is No Rush
When I’m on a 5 hour plane ride, I’m stuck in the chair for a long time.  Unless there is a TV in front of me, there is really not much to do.  When I start writing on my article, there is absolutely no sense of rush.  I know I have a ton of time to finish the article so I take my time to gather my thoughts and just write.  I noticed that taking my time ends up making me more efficient and produces a better article in a shorter amount of time!

Try It

Since I’m not always on the plane, I started to turn off my internet connection while I write. For those that get many phone calls, I would even turn off your cell phone. This way, you can enjoy writing your article without interruption and I’m sure the quality (and quantity) of your articles will increase dramatically! All you need to do is try it and you will realize the difference!

As mentioned last month, I will be focusing on affiliate marketing much more and so far so good because I was able to pull in about $600 with the first full month! My goal is $1,000 this month and $2,500 by year end!

I started with Market Leverage and also began to push some products with Rocket Profit. I highly recommend joining those two networks because there’s definitely money to be made! Affiliate marketing is definitely the future of my income so I will keep everyone updated on my efforts on this front.

Blog Income

• Market Leverage - $513.60
• Rocket Profit - $82.20
• Private Ads - $1670.20
• Text Link Ads - $1006.30
• Link Worth - $475.00
• Adsense - $307.55
• Ebay Network Partners - $8.85
• Blog Consulting - $280.05
• Total - $4343.75

I was extremely surprised that I blew by the $4,000 mark by quite a bit. It goes to show that as long as you work hard and just keep plugging away in the online world, good things happen!!

The other day while searching for a blog theme, I noticed that Google was giving suggested search terms and also the number of results that Google has indexed for a particular keyword.  For a closer look, see below.

As you can see from the example above, Google will give you relevant and popular search terms that are close to the keyword you are typing.  (Notice the incredible 328,000 results from a misspelled term)

As an affiliate marketer and a blogger who builds their business around the internet, this is an amazingly useful tool since I can try to target popular search terms that do not have many results within Google.

I’m quite excited to see this and I can already foresee that it will become an important part of my marketing efforts.

As with Google, this might be a trial and not all areas of the world will get this feature.  Have you seen this feature implemented yet in your area?  What do you think?

Whether it’s getting on the front page of Digg, receiving a bunch of thumbs up on Stumbleupon or getting a sudden blessing from Google, we’ve all grown addicted to that sudden surge in traffic.  It’s addicting, it’s exciting and it’s something we just want more of.

A reader asked me about social media and Google the other day, so let’s talk about these two today.

Social Media
Since readers will seldom be the first to submit an article into the social media networks, those who are just starting out might need to submit their own articles in hopes that it will get picked up by the main stream as people continue to vote up the post.

Something I’ve found is that the person who submits the article can be the difference between front page stardom and zero traffic boredom. In order for your content to be successful in social media networks, heavy participation is very important. This means submitting articles from other sites that interest you, commenting on the posts within the social media sites, adding friends to your network and in general embracing all activities within the network.

Once you participate, your articles will have a much better chance of gaining that traffic love you were seeking.

Google
It is possible to gain a huge surge in Google traffic. The advantage of this is that unlike front page Digg traffic that lasts 1-2 days, the Google surge can last months. The trick is to write about news that is related to your blog that is very hot with lots of new sudden searches. Since no one else has articles written around those keywords, there is a much better chance that your article will gain traction.

As an example, my friend wrote an article on the economic stimulus check when the United States government was handing them out, and instead of getting 500 visitors a day, his traffic jumped to getting 250,000 unique visitors a month. (As of this writing, he is still enjoying 150,000+ visitors a month after a few months)

Side Note: Although Google webmaster tool is supposed to tell you when the Google bots last crawled your site, I find that the date is wrong. Whenever I write a time sensitive post, Google always seems to be able to find it right away while checking the webmaster tools will often give you a day that’s a day (or more) old.

Do you want an instant increase in traffic?  For some of you, it’s as easy as changing the web host!  Last week, I finally made the leap to a Media Temple from my previous shared hosting plan. The results were surprising to say the least.

I compared data from the Monday to Friday before the switch to the Monday to Friday after the switch and the results speaks for itself.  The reason why I used Monday to Friday is because I want:

1. to compare the same number of days
2. to chose business days as I get the bulk of the traffic on those days and the larger the sample, the more accurate stats tend to be

What the Numbers Tell You

Switching to a better hosting company absolutely increases traffic (or at least sets you up for it). Here’s why it works.

Visits and Pageviews Increased
After I changed to a new host, the responsiveness of my sites were much improved.  In fact, even my wife, whom know nothing about hosting and the like, told me that the sites seem to load much faster after I changed to Media Temple.  I was capturing the impatient visitors that would otherwise click somewhere else.  I knew before I switched that this was possible but I never knew that it would be to this extent.  As you can see, I gained 15.38% more visitors!  I’m so happy with changing that I’m kicking myself for not doing it earlier!!

Average Time on Site
The new visitors actually spend 5 less seconds after I switched.  In general, this may seem like it’s a bad thing but I actually think readers are spending less time on the site because they aren’t spending time waiting for pages to load!

Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures visitors who leave the site without going to another page.  This is another important metric because visitors who visit more than one page are much more likely to become a reader/subscriber of the blog.  As you can see, when pages load quicker, less people tend to just get fed up and leave.

What the Numbers Don’t Tell You

Aside from the actual statistics, here’s why switching to a better host is great.

Branding
The importance of branding is undeniable as stated before. Do you want your readers to feel that your site is slow and sluggish or do you want them to see that your site is snappy and quick? Just ask yourself. Which site would you rather visit when you are browsing?

Reader Retention
I know that when I go to a site that’s slow, I get fed up easily when every action (click on a new page, comment etc) take 1-2 seconds to load. I can perhaps tolerate it a couple times if I am already familiar with that site, but I will just stop going there eventually if it’s a constant struggle to read the articles.

Time is Money
I found that after I changed hosting companies, writing an article and overall site maintenance take less time! This is perhaps one of the most crucial and least talked about benefit of having a quick loading blog. It might be half a second here and a few seconds there, but they definitely add up! Instead of waiting for that plugin to install or the post page to load, I’m being productive!

Dump Your Inexpensive Shared Hosting

I used to pay $6.95 per month for my shared hosting and I thought I was happy. Now I’m paying $50 per month and I’m much happier. I’m so satisfied that I believe changing my host to Media Temple is one of the top 30 best decisions I’ve made for my blog. If you are at least semi-serious about your blog, change to a better host!

If you check every performance metric of your blog more than 10 times a day, you are just like me, wasting so much of your precious time.

With the advance in server and bandwidth technology over the years, statistics reporting have become much more instantaneous.  I use sitemeter to track stats on one of my blogs and the results are live!  In most measures, this is a great thing but what ends up happening is that I keep logging on and checking to see how the blog is doing, how many visitors there were and where these people were being referred from.  At times, I log on 5-6 times an hour and it is absolutely the worst best time waster (well, at least right behind twitter)!

As I think back, I should spend more time updating my blog and doing something productive for my blog instead of checking those statistics that does nothing but make me even more impatient about my traffic growth.

So starting from today, let’s stop checking your, my, and our stats!

Start Small
Completely kill our addiction right off the bat is very hard, so let’s start small by not checking one full day this week.  In the second week, increase it to two days and finally gradually increase the days so that you are only checking your statistics once a week.

What you can do instead of checking your stats
Here’s a bunch of things you can do to improve your blog instead of wasting your time checking stats:

• Write Content
• Read other people’s blogs and learn from them
• Keep yourself updated on your niche
• Update your Blog Design
• Add new features
• Write down ideas for future blog posts
• Write More Content
• Comment on other blogs
• Network with your fellow bloggers

Does this sound familiar?
Did any of you check your stats constantly but were able to stop yourself from doing so?  What made you change?  We’d love to hear about your experience!

As we continue down the path of our blogging journey, we will have the chance to meet many other bloggers that share similar interests. Whether it’s a blogger asking for a link exchange, someone emailing you to blog about his/her killer article or a commentator leaving you an interesting and insightful comment, these are opportunities for us to interact with them.

Most people tend to ignore many of the comments and emails that come through as they convince themselves that there is no time to respond, but not taking advantage of these events is a big mistake!

The reason is simple - referral traffic! When you start chatting with other bloggers, they will slowly become familiar to your blog and brand. This reminds them to come visit your blog and sooner or later, they will start visiting your blog on a regular basis and link to your articles. These links are the best ways of obtaining traffic because:

1. They are targeted
2. They are permanent
3. They are free

The power of referral traffic can best be explained with an example so take a look at the Google Analytics screen shot of MoneyNing.com during the last month.

If you look closely, I received a little over 10,000 visitors during the last 30 days from other sites around the world.  This is a decent number but what’s more important is the statistics of these visitors.

1. Average Time on Site - A quick look shows us that each visitor from referral traffic on average spends 1 minute and 44 seconds on my site.  This is 28 seconds more than the site average!  When a visitor spends more time reading, they are more likely to subscribe to the blog, comment on the article and become a long term reader!
2. Bounce Rate - Out of everyone that comes to my site from other pages, only 57.24% (compared with 73.16% for all traffic) leaves without going to another page.  If a visitor clicks on another page, it probably means that they find your site interesting!
3. Pages per Visit - We know that the more pages a person visitrs, the more engaged they are with our site.  Referral traffic during the last month was 1.82 pages per visitor vs 1.58 pages per visitor on average!

As it clearly shows in the example above, referral traffic is one of the better traffic source for our blogs!  So if increasing traffic is one of your priorities, I suggest taking every chance you have to network with fellow bloggers.  As you get to know people, they will help promote your brand for you!

This is the second time I’ve outgrown my hosting company and if you are seeing this post, you are coming through to the new hosting company.  It took a while to decide the direction I wanted to take after suffering from constant performance issues with my old shared hosting so I decided to move to Media Temple because of  the combination of a good upgrade path, reputation, affordability, testimonials from people I trust.

The move was relatively smooth (actually much better than I thought as I had all sorts of problem doing it the first time) and the site was up and running within a short period of time.  In any case, if you see anything out of the ordinary, remember to give me a shout through the contact page.

In theory, we all know that blogging for our passion is the way to go but in reality, the choice between money and passion is very tough to make.  Before I was born, my dad chose to change his profession because of $500 HKD (about $50 USD) a month in salary.  When I first heard about this, I was extremely surprised because he made such an important decision for not that much money, but I realized later in life that my family was having a really tough time making ends meet back then that every penny counted.  My dad didn’t make the choice because he wanted more money, he felt like he had to.

Everyone who blogs will tell you that blogging is hard work.  At the end of the day, we want something to show for it.  We want something to tell us that all our hard work was worth it, and that the time we spent is not wasted.  Some people want readership, some people want fame and most people want money.

Choosing a niche that’s profitable versus choosing a niche that you are passionate about is a question that we talk about often.  Normally, I try not to give advice with definitive answers because every situation is different but let me tell you this - blog about your passion!

You Have to be Content to Write Content
The main reason why you should write about a topic you are passionate about is because of satisfaction.  Blogging is hard work and if you aren’t passionate about the subject, then forget about it.  If you are enthusiastic about what you write about, it will show in the articles and that quite frankly is attractive.

Another benefit is that you will naturally want to dig deep into everything that’s related to something you love and the knowledge you gain will reflect on the posts that you will write about.

Think about Money and You will Likely Give Up at the Beginning
Everyone can write about any topic for a few short months but only the most passionate ones can write about the same topic day in and day out for extended periods of time.  If you pick a niche only because of the potential money you can make, it’s very hard to keep up at the beginning when no one seems to be reading your posts.

You Better Believe that Everyone Sees the Same Opportunities
When a niche seems very profitable, many people will start trying to write about it.  In a crowded niche, it’s very hard to distinguish yourself from the pack so gaining readership is extremely hard unless you have very good content.  If you aren’t passionate or knowledgeable about the subject, then chances are your blog will stay unknown.

Every Niche can be Profitable
The wonderful thing about blogging and the web in general is its widespread reach.  As narrow as you think your interests are, there are tons of other people that share the same interests.  Once you build a following, a blog on any niche can be profitable.

Blog about what you love, and people who share that love will follow you!

Final Thoughts
Not enough can ever be said about picking a niche that you are passionate about.  I see way too many people trying to write about something that they know nothing about, thinking that they will become rich because others do it.  A blog deserves and demands you to be passionate!  So respect its desires and feed it with your energy!