3 Critical Mistakes New Affiliate Marketers Make

Undoubtedly, affiliate marketing is the easiest and the most lucrative ways to earn money online. It doesn’t need any prior experience or a lot of capital. If you have nothing else to do, you can become an affiliate marketer and start earning money like crazy.

Before you become an affiliate, make sure you do not repeat the 3 critical mistakes new affiliate marketers make discussed below. These are the same mistakes that affiliates make over and over again.

1. The Mindset Problem

In my point of view, this is the biggest mistake that affiliates make and unfortunately, it is the least talked about issue.

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich kind of business model. If you are of the view that affiliate marketing can turn you into the third richest person on this planet in a couple months, you are at the wrong place. Period.

When I started my first affiliate blog, I thought that my life will change overnight. People will start coming in, will subscribe to my email list, will click on the links, buy the products, and I will be rich by the end of the month.

It never happened.

It only happened when I realized that it is a damn serious business model – just like any other business.

If you have this very mindset, better change it now or else you will have no other option than to quit affiliate marketing after a month due to demotivation.

Be realistic.

Change your mindset and point of view about affiliate marketing. You will make money but not right away. I mean you can make money right away but that’s a rare case.

Just change your point of view, attitude, and mindset about affiliate marketing and you will be all set.

2. Being a Salesperson

Almost all the affiliate websites that I see in my niche (my competitors) are blatantly selling the affiliate products. It seems as if they are salespersons and trying to sell the product.

I don’t do this.

You shouldn’t do this either.

As an affiliate, your job is to help people by showing them the true picture. Your job is to help them.

Don’t be a salesperson.

Don’t sell the affiliate products on your blog and websites. Don’t beg people to click on your affiliate links.

New affiliates usually have this habit of assuming that their job is to market the affiliate products and bring in as many sales as possible. While this is true, your job is to bring in sales but the way you do it makes all the difference.

You should try being helpful by telling people why they need the product, by sharing its pros and cons, and by sharing a realistic picture of the product. This is one way of doing it, and it is the right way too.

The other approach works absolutely well for short-run where you make false claims, hide product issues, present it as the best product that ever existed, and do whatever it takes to generate sales. There will be people who will believe you but once they will buy the product, they will never come back to your website.

You can decide yourself. Do you want to make one sale a person or multiple sales a person?

Affiliate marketing is more about building relationships with the customers and guiding them.

3. Too Many Products

While you can choose to promote as many affiliate products as you want, at any given instant but as a new affiliate marketer, you shouldn’t overload yourself with too many products.

The number of affiliate products has nothing to do with sales or commission. There is no association between the two. So don’t assume that promoting too many affiliate products will boost sales.

All the top affiliates promote one affiliate product at a time. They just focus on a single product at any given time.

If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, choose one affiliate product, do your homework, and focus only on that product.

Switching products too often, promoting multiple products at a time, and signing up with multiple affiliate networks will not going to help rather it will create confusion, stress, and dissatisfaction.

Choose one affiliate product, study it, and stick to it. Keep promoting it for a good number of days.

Conclusion

These are just the 3 critical mistakes new affiliate marketers make. There are many other mistakes on the list but these are the most critical ones. Avoid these mistakes to be one of the top affiliate marketers in your industry.

3 Free Traffic Generation Strategies for Your Blog

You have created your own blog, great.

Creating a WordPress blog is not the achievement rather getting people on your blog is the real achievement. If your blog doesn’t get enough visitors, you won’t make any money. The only way to make your blog work for you is to generate traffic.

Getting traffic is not easy – trust me.

But, let’s make it a bit easy today.

Here are 3 free traffic generation strategies that will help you generate decent traffic to your blog.

1. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to generate extremely targeted traffic. No, we are not talking about low-quality blogs that are part of PBNs rather we are talking about high-quality authority blogs.

free traffic generation strategies

Imagine having your guest post published on Huffington, Examiner, Buzzfeed or maybe on ABC News. Though making it to such top websites is not easy and most of the times it is not free because you will have to hire an expert author to craft a superior quality guest post that will be accepted.

Let’s talk free.

Find authority blogs in your niche having domain authorities greater than 25. Get your blog posts published on these authority blogs with a catchy author bio.

The idea is to drive traffic – not getting backlinks. Your guest post should be so well-written, detailed, and informative that readers cannot resist visiting your blog. These visitors are extremely targeted as they know what your blog is about so they are expected not to add to bounce rate.

Submitting a guest post every week on an authority blog will send thousands of targeted visitors your way for lifetime.

2. Niche Forums

We have misused forums a lot. But no matter how much we spam forums, you cannot deny their importance for traffic generation. Not only that you can drive targeted traffic to your blog from niche forums but they can help you become an authority in your niche.

You should join forums in your niche (and industry) with an intention to help others. Don’t spam the forum. Follow the rules. Don’t bother putting links to your blog. All you have to do is help people by solving their issues.

free traffic generation strategies

If you will consistently provide high value information to others, they will start recognizing you as an expert and will ultimately connect with you via your blog and social accounts. That’s how you generate traffic as well as establish yourself as an authority.

In order to help others, you must be experienced in the niche. I mean if you have a blog about smart phone screen repair but you never repaired a screen, it will get hard for you to genuinely help others.

So the rule number one is to help genuinely in the field of your expertise.

I can guarantee, this is the best way to generate massive traffic. You just have to be consistent.

3. Social Media

Traffic from social media is free but it is not easy to drive traffic to your blog from social networks like Twitter or Facebook.

Unfortunately, most of the bloggers assume that traffic from social media is the easiest and instant but when they jump into it, they realize that it is totally different.

free traffic generation strategies

People log in to their social accounts to socialize. They are not in a buying mode at that time so anything that you throw at them have a high probability of getting rejected.

There are some niches that work extremely well with social traffic such as entertainment, music, fun, gaming etc. while niches like weight loss, finance and education tend to perform badly.

All the niches that are related to ‘socializing’ work extremely well while ‘non-socializing’ niches perform poorly. Based on your niche, you can drive a lot of free traffic to your blog (or you can end up wasting your time).

This is just one school of thought.

There is, however, another school of thought that emphasizes on the fact that all niches work equally good on social networks, it is all about how you use the network.

To sum it up, you should interact with your target audience on the social network (like your Facebook page). Once you establish a relationship with your audience, you can then send them to your blog.

 

These three free traffic generation strategies work every single time provided you take them seriously and do your homework.

Top 7 WordPress Themes for Photographers

As a photographer, if you post photos on stock photo websites, you are doing a good job. I mean websites like Flickr will give you decent exposure. But you should have your own website too where you can publish pictures the way you like.

Having a website for showcasing your photographs will give a whole new life to your work. There are some overwhelming WordPress themes for photographers that are extremely user-friendly. Managing a WordPress photography theme and website is easy as well as fun.

1. Gleam

Gleam has a full-screen portfolio which makes it a perfect WordPress theme for photographers. You can upload as many photos as you want. It is a tidy theme that uses flash and Ajax smartly.

It allows you to set custom photos as background for each page. You can add text where needed but if you only upload images, it will do extremely well.

It is a responsive theme and works perfectly on all the devices. The images are resized based on the screen size of the device.

top 7 wordpress themes for photographers

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2. ePhoto

ePhoto by Elegant Themes is perhaps one of the best photography WordPress themes. If you are interested in starting a photography blog, this is the best theme. You don’t have to add a lot of text rather adding images will do the work.

If, however, you want to create a proper blog with text posts, you can do so. It is a 2-in-1 WordPress theme where you can publish image only posts as well as text and image posts.

ePhoto comes in two color styles. The background color of the theme is dark which gives a glamorous feel.

wordpress themes for photographers

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3. eGallery

This is another masterpiece from Elegant Themes. eGallery uses JavaScript to make your website look professional and appealing. It comes in three color schemes.

The visitors can read the excerpt of the image (or the post) by clicking on a small arrow on the picture. This allows them to preview the post without opening it. It is really a reader-friendly theme with lots of features.

It is a great theme for photographers who wish to publish posts and want to write text for instance, travel bloggers who tend to post stories and description of places they have visited.

wordpress themes for photographers

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4. Envisioned

If you only want to publish images on your photography website, Envisioned is the right theme to go for. It is a responsive WordPress themes that comes in five different color schemes. You can create a whole lot of layouts.

The images at the homepage are displayed in a gallery. The gallery style can be changed. The images are not posted as blog posts. If you wish to add blog posts with images, you should use theme’s blog for that.

wordpress theme for photographers

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5. DeepFocus

It is professional theme that has a blog as well as photo gallery. If you are a professional photographer with a massive image collection and want to start a large blog, DeepFocus WordPress theme is for you.

It comes in five color schemes. It has a clean, professional and traditional design. It is a photography WordPress theme more suited to high-level photographers and agencies.

wordpress theme for photographers

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6. Feather

An elegant and light colored theme. Though it has six color styles to choose from but all of them are light colors which adhere to the theme’s focus.

It has an image gallery that will let you showcase your photographs. It also lets you create a blog where you can publish images.

Feather is a theme that’s more suited to photographers who want to focus on images as well as blogging.

Themes for Photographers

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7. Sky

Sky uses Ajax to load content at the homepage. Ajax does a good job of maintaining rather increasing the loading speed of your website.

It is simple yet refreshing WordPress theme that doesn’t allow visitors to scroll too much as the content and images are well-managed. Sky by Elegant Themes is perfect for amateur photographers who do not have a massive collection of photographs. The theme will cover the lack of photographs being uploaded.

Theme for Photographers

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Conclusion

These were the top 7 WordPress themes for photographers that will help you show your art work to the world. Depending on your taste, purpose and type of photographs you have, choose the theme that you think will best represent you and your work.

Top 7 WordPress Themes for Business Sites

Starting an online business was never so easy. All you have to do is come up with an idea, buy a domain name, sign up for hosting, choose a WordPress theme for business site and you are on the track.

Here is a list of top 7 WordPress themes for business sites. These themes are handpicked and are sure to help you in your online venture.

1. Foxy

It is a responsive WordPress theme for businesses. It can be used as an ecommerce store, a business blog or a services websites. The theme itself is quite flexible and can be used in many different ways.

Foxy has five basic color schemes, responsive design, well-structured layout and sleek design. You can custom-design pages with its template pages. This feature lets you create almost any type of pages for your business ranging from contact to about us to portfolio and more.

wordpress themes for business sites

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2. Divi

Divi is the most professional and versatile theme for businesses. It is developed by Elegant Themes with a purpose to provide businesses with all the features and flexibility that they need.

The best thing about Divi is its page builder which is a drag-and-drop builder for creating pages with extreme ease. You can build a page from scratch or choose a pre-made layout and personalize it.

There are a lot of features that this theme has such as responsive design, security, slider, 32 languages with RTL support, up to 46 modules for the builder, smart split testing feature and much more.

divi theme for businesses

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3. Nova

For small businesses, there is nothing better than Nova WordPress theme. It is a simple theme which focuses on the homepage. If you have recently started your business and don’t have much to share with the world, Nova will help you cover these shortcomings by putting everything right at the homepage.

It has a featured slider that helps you showcase your business to the target audience. It is responsive theme which comes in six different color styles.

nova wordpress theme for business sites

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4. LeanBiz

Need a clean, professional and simplistic theme for your business website? LeanBiz happens to be a decent choice.

It is a perfect theme for small internet businesses that want to keep things simple yet professional. The slider at the homepage is really a powerful one that comes with multiple variations. The theme has four unique color variations.

wordpress themes for business sites

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5. MyProduct

If you have products and services that you want to either promote or sell through your business website, MyProduct by Elegant Themes is the most appropriate theme to go for.

It is a professional theme which emphasizes on selling products online. You can put the product price, its features, testimonials and other details right on the homepage. Yes, you can use homepage as a sales page to sell one or more products.

The theme is extremely rich in terms of features, design and page templates. Personalizing it is exceptionally easy. Besides, it has a business blog too that will give a corporate-level look to your website.

wordpress themes for business websites

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6. eBusiness

eBusiness is a WordPress theme for business blogs. Those who are running a business blog and need a decent and flexible theme, they should choose eBusiness by Elegant Themes.

It comes in six color schemes. All the color schemes are on the bright side making it a lively theme. You can customize the theme and choose the blog style that you want ranging from a business blog to normal blog style.

With its three different skins, responsive design, and professional page templates, eBusiness has a lot to offer every business blog.

ebusiness theme

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7. 13Floor

This is one of my favorite themes of all times. If you want to grab the attention of the visitors by offering them everything right on the homepage, 13Floor happens to be the best WordPress theme. Visitors don’t have to scroll down to see what your business is about.

At the homepage, it displays a collection of pages in a slider. The slider runs automatically showing details of every page one by one. If you want to create full-width pages, you can do so easily.

13Floor can be personalized in any way as per need.

13floor business theme

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Conclusion

Which of these 7 WordPress themes for business sites will you choose for your business? If you ask me, I’d go for 13Floor. I just love it.

Over to you now….