How Do I Keep Myself Motivated with Blogging

My tips to keep myself motivated with online affiliate marketing

 

First blog to profit from my brand new motivation!

 

As said in my latest post, I got my motivation back again.  I could get motivated with my online affiliate marketing business thanks to an online pal who posted something about a class on sale. After a bit of reflexion, I purchased the class and started working right away.

I was deliberately pushing myself in some kind of "get back to work trap" since all I was doing these past weeks was procrastinating, watching movies and series, and surely, certainly, absolutely, definitely - how awul - NOT touching my blogs. Hey, it's the end of year holiday season, all my blogs are related to this season and I didn't do anything!

So I spent $55 in this course (it's currently on sale) and have to say that I don't regret it. Once I was in, I couldn't jump out. Simple. The course is really well done and understandable - made by work at home women for work at home people, clear and simple vocabulary, which anybody can understand. There is nothing complicated in this course.

Actually, I readjusted my knowledge, adapted it to today's trends and search engines desires. I'm in the process of forgetting everything HP and other platforms with strict rules but that don't generate enough traffic worth talking about tried to force me to believe. And I'm glad: it seems to work.

What the Amazon Affiliate Masterclass did for me

Or more simply put: what did I do once I watched the Amazon Affiliate Masterclass videos and asked for help in their supportive groups. This program (and a bunch of others) are run by Pajama Affiliates Robin and Lesley.

1. Watching the many videos in the program

Oh Gosh! I've been watching movies and series for so long... Then I had to watch videos once again? Well in the end, this process was more valuable and less damaging for my brain: I slowly went from stupid series to interesting and educational videos.

And boy, you learn a lot - or I should say: you learn to forget a lot if you're are a former Squid or former Hubber or both! Especially if you're a blogger whose intent is to make money with affiliate programs.

2. Reading the masterclass video transcripts

After each video I read the related transcript. The video helps getting a quick idea, it also enables you to actually SEE things; the transcripts helps those newly learned things to stick to your brain cells.

So I've read every single word written after each of the videos and thought about what I've learned and what I had to forget. 

3. Head to the Pajama Affiliates groups

When I bought the Amazon Affiliate Masterclass, I was provided a membership to mastermind groups on Facebook. This led me to join both groups and find out that they are extremely supportive, creative, generous, and smart.

Joining the groups was the step which actually brought me to work again on my blogs. After all, one can always watch videos and read stuff without having to apply what we learned. In which case I would have been wasting $55. But I didn't: the masterclass just made me join the groups. It's something I did naturally - I wasn't pushed by anything but the desire to apply what I learned.

4. Check and see how the groups could help me

I must say that in the minute after I asked for joining, I was approved and welcomed with a specific thread. When I discovered what these groups are up to, I knew that I was in the right place. 

You have to know that there are several threads created specifically to encourage members - cheering threads (not self-bragging threads), daily accountable treads, promotional threads, and... bespoke threads that members can start when they need help.

I spent the first day reading the threads and, once again, twisting my brain cells to see if the things I read could apply to my sites/blogs.

5. Ask the Affiliate Pajama members for help for my sites

 

Second blog that is getting a major overhaul - see the changes?

 

As an example, my Holly-Day.com site is a site that is holidays related. However the topics were too broad and I couldn't focus on a type of posts only. Instead, that site featured informational articles - HP-like writings - which weren't adapted to affiliate marketing, with a mix of affiliate marketing oriented posts which differ so much from the informational ones that one or the other category looked strange.

But when you plan on earning money through affiliate links, you don't write articles that won't allow you to add a single affiliate ad, don't you?

I thus asked for help on how to make my sites more focused. And boy, the huge number of replies helped me a lot in making decision! Most suggestions met my very own conviction. 

That is when I sat down in front of my computer and logged into my blogs. And started working again. 

In my next post I will tell you what I did to my blogs.

See you soon :)




Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

What Have I Been Up To?

Lost mojo, no inspiration, hard times

What have I been up to? Well, nothing really. In this case, you might object that I've been up to something. And I'd confirm that I was up to nothing at all. Not all actually, but not much. So I didn't do a lot of work these past months. 

Also when I join my partner in his country, I just don't have any will to work, not even the will to turn the laptop on and check my sites, my Facebook pages, the groups or whatever. I feel so fine without any Internet connexion (my partner has one, but I never exploit it or very rarely) and without sites to update. 

The upsetting side of online working

First thing: yes, I lost my mojo. With big G's new algorithms and changed rules, all these animal updates (panda, penguin, hummingbird... what's next? rat???) it seems more and more difficult to make blogs/sites/pages stand out.

My sites suffered from these changes. And nothing seems to please this big brother. Believe it or not, some of them get more traffic after the season than during the season. I haven't found a reason; but this means that I didn't target the wrong keywords.

After big G, there's HP. There too, there is no way to make me work at all. I fear any unfeature of my remaining pages, I just don't dare updating them at all; and leave the pages as they are. What a pity... The low payment rate isn't any incentive at all. Why would I work hard on these pages for peanuts or worse: nothing at all. I haven't reached payout yet. Oh because I still have some former Squidoo lenses without a new home, I could add them to HubPages with some work done on them to comply with their rules. But I can't do that: too much work involved for constant traffic drop and no reward.

Thus what did I do all this time? Well watching TV series and believe it or not, I watched ALL Dallas episodes! Not the 2000 series, but the 1978 one. It was boring, it looked useless, I didn't feel any kind of pleasure while catching the episodes. But I did. And am glad I did. Because it changed a lot of things.

Hard times seem to be over, I'm recovering 

 

Now hard times seem to be over; I'm willing to work, once again. I have to thank Dallas for it. There are 14 seasons to watch. One after the other the quality becomes worse, the episodes are more and more boring. And if I hate something more than all these changing rules online, it's being bored. 

So as time passed, I stopped paying attention to the series, I didn't listen any more, and was thinking. Thinking about renewing my way of working online. 

There are two problems: the sites to rethink entirely and the fact that I still travel to my partner's country; which keeps me away from Internet and my sites. Therefore, I must draw my new site design and configuration while at the same time decide on a schedule that enables me to leave without losing touch with my sites, my Facebook pages and all the groups I'm member of. Not to mention that I have to find room form me prepare all my articles before leaving and schedule their publication. This means a lot of work while I'm home. Perhaps too much work. 

Rethink my marketing practice 

 

Yesterday, I made a purchase... I profit from a flash sale and bought the Affiliate Marketing with Amazon Masterclass from Pajama Affiliates and joined the groups that go with the purchase. It was a first step in the right direction. Watching the videos and chatting in the groups helped me a lot even though I was just over there for 24 hours.

As said earlier, things online have changed a lot. What worked 8 years ago do not work at all today, unless you built a highly popular site in a very specific niche as well as a huge following (plus mailing list). My sites were once popular but the day I put al my efforts on Squidoo and worked for some too exigent clients, I lost my traffic as my sites were neglected.

There was once a way to market products while writing a bunch of stuff - historical facts, and other things people do not actually look for. These types of pages attracted different types of readers: those who were looking for information and those looking for products. You could earn from Adsense type ads and also affiliate links. 

Nowadays, things are different. If you wish to provide information, you'd rather skip the affiliate marketing steps. Some closely related products at the end of the article are fine, yet they won't make you earn a living. Instead, Adsense type ads will provide you with the money you expect to earn from your work.

Instead if you want to earn money primarily from affiliate links, you will need to focus on products, product descriptions, examples of use, product images (lots of them if you review one product), etc. Your potential buyers don't mind the actual history behind the product, the year people first used them or which artist created a statue of a woman out of garage hoses.

In the past, people could spend time on the Internet looking for something and one could build pages that woud mix history, blah-blah and products. Today they want to find what they're searching for right away. Therefore, one must narrow our niches. You can object that there's nothing new under the sun. Yet the modus operandi is different from the past years when we already used to narrow our niches.

I can see it in my sites stats. Some categories always drive traffic, some don't. Some pages with low traffic rate but lots of products do make sales; the pages with lots of content and few products do not make sales. And even though I carefully choose my keywords, I have to rethink that side of the work too. 

The other thing I must change is the way I work:

• Have a strict schedule,
• Take time to prepare my articles from A to Z so as not to have to rework them five minutes after publication,
• Posting regularly instead of posting like a fool during the season (I quickly end up tired and disgusted),
• Prepare the same amount of posts as I usually do and schedule them for publication when I leave,
• Stop wasting my time,
• Stop procrastinating.

Ok long post after a long period of silence. I'm going back to my Affiliate Marketing with Amazon Masterclass as I don't want to lose my brand new mojo and inspiration.

See you soon!

Images in this post are courtesy of Pixabay.com

 

Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

EPD Is Getting Even Better!

Easy Product Displays new features

It's been a while since I posted on this blog. To be honest, there is nothing really new worth talking about in my marketing world. HubPages is slowly sinking - at least it's how it looks. 

I moved some Hubs over to Wizzley but without any real hope for the pages to be safe, since Google's shaking the site ranks and even its existence once again. WebNuggetz is, as always, a profitable and exciting option and Whyrll is also a good one. 

Apart from that, there is nothing new under "my" sun: to be honest, I don't really enjoy working online any more.

However, Easy Product Displays, my favorite marketing tool, is improving day after day and playing with it is fun. Actually it is the only thing that succeeds in having me logging into one of my blogs or those I'm member of. 

What is EPD?

If you do not know what Easy Product Displays is, let me tell you that it's the best tool that enables you to display Amazon, CJ.com, Share a Sale, Zazzle and other affiliate products: images + descriptions + buy buttons, all in one. 

The displays we can create with this tool are amazingly beautiful. In the beginning I didn't think this could make a difference on my sites, but I quickly realized that this incredible tool produced performing displays. 

And best of all, these past weeks, some upgrades have been made to the tool. 

Easy Product Displays improvements

1. AZIN search

 
If you are like me and prepare a list of AZINs for products you wish to display in your blog posts before posting, then this feature is for you. You can now type up to 10 Amazon AZINS in the search box, separated by a comma. Then click the search button and see all the products magically appear. See the picture below. Once the list appears, all you have to do is click on "use product" button. What a time saver!

 

Here is my display, created in just a few seconds. All I have to do is copy and paste the code into my page. I can choose between so many different types of displays...

2. Switch buy buttons

The other feature I'm fond of is the ability to change each "buy" button of a display. This means that, we can now mix any merchant in our displays. 

Let's say that I want to feature Frozen costumes from different merchants: Amazon, BuyCostumes and Halloween Costumes. But I want to use the three different buttons in one single display. It was not doable before - at least not automatically. But now, it's doable and in just a few seconds. 

Here is the basic display:

Now let's have a look at the right column of our creation panel. 

As you can see there is an edit button next to each product. This "edit" feature enables you to change each button in the display. This won't change other buttons.  Here's how I changed the buttons:

There are now three different buttons, one for each merchant.

This feature is not just a time saver, it also enables you to create price comparison displays for example.

3. Large series of buttons

Loads of buttons have been added to our backoffice. This makes it so easy for us to create product displays with the right merchant's button. Once again it is a time saver as before, for many merchants, we had to write their name next to the "buy" word if we used the customized feature - what we did before having more buttons.

Only a tiny bit of the iceberg

4. Share a Sale merchants integration

Share a Sale is now integrated to the merchants automation. So from now on those who opted for the SaS subscription in EPD are able to just use the EPD search feature to add their Share a Sale products to their display.

Personally I didn't subscribe to SaS option as I'm not affiliated with many of their merchants - I'm more accustomed to CJ's merchants and don't plan on leaving their network.

As usual, you can always import your codes in order to quickly and easily replace missing, out of stock or wrong products. It's easy as a pie and saves loads of work and time.

To say the truth, I'm pleased with anything Thomas and Holley come up with. They work hard for our success and ease of work.

Try EPD for three days without spending a penny

You can give a try to Easy Product Displays for free and for three days. You will find three different options for you to start building these beautifully crafted affiliate product displays: Amazon and Zazzle, Share a Sale or the full product, which includes Amazon, Zazzle and Share a Sale.

You can also subscribe on a cheap monthly basis or a yearly one - most interesting.

Just in case you don't remember what EPD can do for you, here is an updated video, that will walk you through all the wonderful features this tool offers.









Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.