Blogging for a Living Level 2: How to Monetize Your Blog and Generate [Free] Traffic

1. What You Will Learn in Level 2: Hello, everybody. My name's Theo MacArthur and welcome to blogging for a living level to which is all about generating traffic. Andi monetization. So earning an income from your block. So this short lesson is going to cover what you will learn in this course, first of all, briefly about myself. For those of you who don't know on for those of you who didn't watch Level one, which is all about building your blog's from scratch. I have 20 plus years experience off building blog's websites on online marketing. I've been teaching others to do what I do. Since 2015 on to date, over 86,000 students have enrolled in my courses. Andi, specifically in my blogging courses, over 11.5 1000 students on overall students rate my courses of 4.7 out of five. Okay, so that's enough about me. Let's get on with finding out what you're going to be learning in this course. So the first thing we're going to be looking at is installing tracking on getting your blog's ready for traffic. So tracking lets you know where your traffic is coming from, so that you can spend more time on those particular traffic sources. Unless time on sources that are not getting results for you, you're going to learn about the best places to share your block posts on. You're going to learn how to create a Facebook page for business on building audience on Facebook. To generate traffic to your blawg, you'll learn about getting traffic from Twitter Andi, other places that you may know even have thought about. Plus, we're going to cover getting traffic from Pinterest, doing it the right way and getting traffic from forums. Because this could be a great source off traffic as well as learning about three traffic generation from multiple effective sources, you're going to learn how to make your own really amazing images for social media. Andi. You're going to learn about monetization best practices because those are right in a wrong way. To do this, you're going to learn about the different options. So which one is best for you? Because there are several options that you can use even when you don't have your own products to sell. For example, there's making money as an Amazon affiliate, which is a very popular way to generate an income from a website or block. You will discover the advantages off selling or promoting digital products as an affiliate , and you'll also learn about sailing tangible products. As an affiliate, you're going to learn how to create and customize banners. So I'm talking about the banner ads that you put on your block. Sometimes these air provided by the affiliate Marketing program Sometimes they are no. But sometimes is good to have your own unique banners. I'm going to show you how to do that. A completely free and easy way on mawr. So at the end, off level to which is this course, you'll be driving traffic to your blogged from multiple sources on Do you will know how to effectively monetize your blawg. Okay, I'll see you in a minute. 2. Prepare Your Blog for Traffic: her low. Everybody all right, let's take a look up. Preparing your blog's for traffic. There are certain things that you need to do before you start to proactively send people to your block. First of all, check your links, so check for any broken links or links that go to the wrong place. This includes not just your posts, but on your pages, sidebars, voter or anywhere else on your block. So, for example, this link that I have here going to the artist PB website. That's a Lincoln opposed, but you may have links elsewhere as well on your block, so just click on each link check to make sure it is working, and it is going to the right place on, if necessary, fix any broken or incorrect links. Next, make sure that you have a least two static pages in addition to your home page, which is your main block page on In addition to the pages that are required, like terms and conditions on contact us etcetera. No, on this new blawg, I have got to start it pages. In addition to my home page on my legal pages are my get in touch page and you want to have a very least six posts. Ideally, you should have more than six. Ideally, you should have at least 10 posts. Andi, preferably at least two categories now the blogged that I've created for this course, it's about British wildlife. But if all of my posts were about the same thing, Andi, they were all in the same category. So, for example, if I had six posts all about frogs in the category frogs, that's not going to be a very interesting. So, preferably at least two categories. Onda plenty off interesting and eye catching images because first impressions do matter on . Most people are very visual. So when they go to a website, their eyes are scanning the page it news to look attractive and interesting on the best way we can do that is through the use of images. Make sure that your required legal pages are in place. That's your privacy policy on your terms and conditions in the footer, and you've got a contact ours or getting touch page in a prominent place. So perhaps in the main navigation menu you could put it again in the Footer. But make sure that it is in a place where people could easily see it. Andi half share buttons on your posts and pages. Otherwise you could be missing out on a lot of traffic. When people come to your blawg. Andi, they read something where they see something they like. You want them to be able to share that with others. All right now, your block should look attractive, that's for sure, because, as I mentioned, first impressions do matter, but it doesn't need to be perfect. Invite act. If you're going to wait until your block is perfect, you're probably going to wait forever because we never get things perfects. The blawg is a work in progress is an ongoing work in progress, so we're constantly improving and developing it. But it's never going to be actually perfect, because perfection doesn't really exist. And finally make sure that you do create a busy home page for your blogged. This is pretty important because if your home page is busy is interesting. Lots of things for people to look at when the arrive on your block, especially for the first time. There's much, much more chance off that visitor staying on your blog's looking around, clicking on links, clicking on images, clicking through to read posts much, much more chance off that. If your home page is busy, just go and have a look at some of the most popular on board the most visited blocks on websites on the Internet. What you're going to see with most of them is that they do have busy home pages. They have lots of things that people can do, lots of things that people can look at. So that's important. All right, now, in the next blessing, we're going to instill tracking. Tracking is really important to have. Before you start to actively send traffic to your block, I'll see you there. 3. Installing Tracking Part 1: All right. Now, in this lesson on the next one, we are going to install tracking. There's two parts to installing tracking. First of all, we install analytics on. Then we connect our website to the Google search console. Now, we should be doing this before we're sending any traffic to the block on a little later on , we'll have a look at some of the features in the tracking dashboard so that you can understand how important it is on how beneficial it is to you. Now, before we start, I want to say something here. This is ah, black spot for making errors. Andi. Ah, lot of students do make errors here. The problem is, once an error has been made, it's virtually impossible for me to help for me to troubleshoot because in order to do so, I would need to be able to lock into your WordPress account, log into your tracking account on, find out exactly what's going wrong. So here's the deal. Follow what I do exactly very, very carefully, or you can have the whole set up done over on Fiverr for just $5. So in the pdf handout that goes with this lesson. I'm going to give you instructions on how to get this done over on Fiverr. So it's one of the other. You follow very carefully what I'm doing here in these lessons, or go to Fiverr and get somebody else to set the whole thing up for you. All right, now, here's the U R L to go to analytics dot google dot com on When you get here, you will be prompted to either sign in to your existing Google account unless you are already signed in. If you're already signed in, then you will get the page to create an analytics account. Or, if you don't have a Google account already, you can create an account right from here. But you do need to have a Google account, and you need to stay signed into that Google account throughout the process. In these lessons on, I think this is one of the reasons why so many errors happen, because if you are not signed in to the same Google account for both steps of the process, it's not going to work, all right, so once you've either signed into your existing Google account or created a new one. You then be presented with the Google Analytics dashboard? No, my dashboard already has a number off websites and blog's associated with it. But you coming along here for the first time, you'll be prompted to add your first property. So when you add a property, this is what you do. I am going to click on, create new property. But just to stress again with a brand new analytics account with no properties, property just means website. If you have this brand new account with no properties, you're going to be prompted to create your 1st 1 So just follow the instructions on screen . But ultimately what you're looking for is create property on your getting to a page like this. This is the page that you want to be on new property. Creating a new property will provide you with a tracking I d. What would you like to track its website on now? Give your website a name. This is not your ul. We do that down here. You're just going to give it a name for reference here in your analytics account. Ah, now I enter the website. You are l double check it because if you have any mistake, it all any type. Oh, it's not going to work. Select an industry category, I suppose. For this I'm going to select pets and animals Onda for reporting time zone. So this would be your time zone. I'm going to change this. I'm going to choose United Kingdom because this website is directed towards on audience in the UK All right, get tracking. I d. Here is the tracking I d. Right here. No, to make this easier. Do onto the block. We're going to use a plug in that allows us just a copy and paste this script into a box. All right, let's go back. Going to pluck ins at New in the search box here type header and footer scripts. There are lots off them, but I always like to use a plug in that's been recently updated. So this one here last updated two weeks ago. I'm going to go ahead and you stole that Activate on on the plucking page for headroom for two scripts going to settings on. Here's the Head section here, and this is where we want to paste this Google Analytics code. Let's copy and paste this whole thing right into here, save changes now that should work on to test it. To make sure that it is working. We can use our free extension for Chrome called the Google Talk assistant. Now, to get that and install it into your chrome browser, just go to Google on Search for Google Talk assistant on Do you want to get toothy Extension page, The Google Extension Page. Now I already have it installed, so I only have the option here to remove it, but you will have the option to add it. So go ahead and at the extension to your chrome browser, I Once you've done that, you'll have the little icon up here on your browser. All right, let's go back to the block on to test it, open it up, click on the icon, select enable and then refresh the page on. There we go. You should have two. You should have the global site tug on the Google analytics talk as well on that tells you that you've added the code correctly, so that is step one off the process. The next step is to connect with a Google search console. I will do that in the next lesson. I'll see you in a moment 4. Installing Tracking Part 2: Okay, here we are on step two. Now, before you begin this, if you have an under construction plug in, activated when you're blawg, you need to deactivate it first. So right here I have under construction, but I've just deactivated it. So make sure you do that, or this won't work. No. The u r l you need to go to this time is search dot google dot com forward slash search hyphen. Consul, forward slash Welcome. Andi, you need to choose. You are all prefects, not domain. So here you're going to enter. U u R l No. Before you continue, make sure that you are still signed in to the Google account that you used when you set up analytics and installed analytics in the last lesson. If you are not, this is not going toe work. Okay? So just double check. Make sure you've got your avatar up here. You're signed into your Google account. All right, Continue ownership. Auto verified verification method. Google analytics. Now, this would know have worked if I was no still signed into the Google account that I used in the last lesson. It also would not have worked if my under construction. Plug in Waas enabled, and that's why I disabled it first. All right, Now it stays here to stay verified, blah, blah, blah. But we don't need to do that, because when we installed analytics, we used a plug in. So that means that even when we have theme updates and that kind of thing, it's not going to delete the code or anything like that. So we shouldn't have any problems staying verified. All right, now we're going to go to the property on under the menu here. We're going to select site maps on the purpose of adding a site. Mint is it helps Google to index all the pages and the content on our blawg on its very easy. To do this head back to your WordPress dashboard, go to your Yost s your plug, ain, general features make sure all of these air tuggle toe own. So you want everything on, but the one we're interested in is site maps. Click on the little question. Must be total toe on. See the XML site map. Click the link. So here it is. On the bit we need is the bit that comes directly after the domain on, then the forward slash So it's site map underscored index dot xml. Copy that. Go back to your search Consul dashboard. Andi under at a new site map. You simply paste that part, so make sure you don't take the whole u R L because, as you see, it's already in here. You just need site map. Underscore index dot XML submit site map submitted successfully. Got it. And you should have here status success. Now, I just want to show you a quick troubleshooting tip. If you click on, get the XML site map on instead of this page coming up, you get an error page. Troubleshooting tip is go to settings. Perma links don't change anything. Just go ahead and click. Save. Once you've done that, head back over to S E O on general features, but XML site maps open the question Mark. See the external site map. If you still have an issue hit, purge cash. So purge your cash on. Do it again. Now, there is absolutely no reason why your site map shouldn't come up. So let me go back to what I said at the very beginning off these lessons if you have any problems with this, if it goes wrong, you're not able to verify your block with search console. Anything goes wrong, you'll have to head over to Fiverr on that. Are people there who they will troubleshoot anything that's gone wrong on then? Finished a set up for you for just $5. Okay, Now, in the final lesson on setting up tracking, I'm going to show you a really great plug in that you can install that lets you see all your Google Analytics data right from within your WordPress dashboard, which is really a lot easier. So I'll see you there in a minute. 5. Installing Tracking Part 3: we are now going to add a plug in called Monster Insights That's going to our lie was to look at Google Analytics data a right from inside the WordPress dashboard instead of having to go to our Google Analytics account separately. So go to plug ins and Agnew Andi in the keyword box. Search for Monster Insights Google Analytics Dashboard Plugging for WordPress by Monster Insights. Install now Onda activate. Welcome to monster insights. Let's get you set up Which category describes your website. In this case, it's a blawg save and continue no license key needed because we're using the free version. Connect monster insights. Choose your Google account to continue. No, this is the Google account that you used when you set up analytics. Click on alive. Pick a profile. Do it for wildlife dot co dot UK. That's correct. Complete connection. Okay, recommended settings were going to leave it as it is saving. Continue. We're not going to upgrade to pro save and continue All set up. Finish set up on exit Wizard on now. We've just got the page here that confirms the profile. This is our Google analytics. I d number here. We're not using the pro version, so we don't need any license key usage tracking. It's a good idea to put this on because this does help the plug in to improve. So by toggling this toe all we are allowing data to go back to the plugging developers, and then they can identify any bugs or glitches in the plug it on. Each time they do an update, they can fix those bugs, so it's good to contribute to that. Okay, And now, under insights on the menu, Quicken reports on this is where you're going to be able to see data when you start to get traffic to your website. So let's have a quick run through what everything you can see here. First of all, this is going to give you your new versus returning visitors. You're going to get the top 10 countries that your visitors are coming from Top 10 referrals. That means the U. R L. So wherever they came from, whether that's Google, Google search or Facebook or some other page. So you're going to be able to see where they came from before they landed on your website, and then you can see your top posts and pages, so you're going to know which pages and posts are getting the most traffic. All right. Now, as time goes on and you start to get more traffic, you might want to upgrade to the paid version of the plug in so you can see a lot more data . And that's the one dime side really off using, Ah, plugging that shows you your data inside WordPress. Instead of going to analytics, you're not going to see as much data unless you upgrade to the paid version. But to begin with, it's going to be enough. This is going to be enough just knowing which websites. So in other words, which traffic sources that your visitors we're coming from that's a really big one, knowing which pages people have clicked through from whether that's a Facebook page are forum or Pinterest or wherever it is. Andi, knowing what your top posts and pages are, knowing where you're getting the most interest because once you know that you can create more posts similar to that. All right now, along with this lesson, there's another PDF download, and I'm going to give you some links where you can go and learn a lot more about Google analytics on Google Search. Consul, what you can do with it, but what I recommend er's in the beginning, it's not going to be to relevant to you. We need it installed from the beginning so we can start to gather data. But to start off with, you're not going to have very much traffic. So the data that you see isn't really going to tell you a lot. So I don't really recommend that you spend time going through those links at the moment. But later on, maybe in a few months time when you're starting to build up traffic, it could be a good idea to go and learn more about Google analytics and searched Consul tracking. Okay, so you in a minute. 6. Two Popular Places to Share Blog Posts: Hello, everybody. I'm going to show you two really great places to share your block posts. Now, the first is medium. Go along to medium dot com. Andi. First of all, you need to register for an account, which is very easy because you could use your existing Google account. You'll be given an option to do that just to click the button. Andi, sign up with your existing Google account so you could use the same Google account that you used earlier to install tracking on Once you are inside in order to import a post directly from your block, just click on your avatar on a quick on stories. Import a story on right here. You just enter the U. R L off the block post and you can edit it afterwards. So you're given the chance to do that on If you want to create a new post directly here on medium, as opposed to sharing one from your block, you can do so by clicking on new story and you're just going to write a story here, put the title on then the body in here, which is very similar to creating a post in WordPress Before you do any of that, though, I recommend that you have a look through the post here on medium. Just take a look at the titles. Click through on some of them. Let's click on this one. As you see, this one's got images in the actual post. It's a long posters. Well, it's quite a long post. Now you can look and see how many collapse posters had. This has had 100 and 12,000 collapse, so a lot of people like this post on you can do that for a few different posts. But scrolling on down, it's going to give you an idea off the type of titles on content that is doing well here on media Onley share good post here on medium. Otherwise, it's a waste of time. Don't share a really short post of just 400 words. Share posts off around 6 to 700 words to 1000 words. Even longer posts, but don't share really short posts. That's just my advice. No medium gets, ah, lot off traffic. Let's take a look at these statistics here. It is in fact, number 2 to 7 global rank, and that is out off the millions. Hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet, so medium is ranked. Number 2 to 7 is ranked very, very high. It's getting a lot of traffic, so here we can see that in the last six months it's hard, 225 million visits. So that's a lot of visits. All right, that's medium on another one I want to show you Here is tribe er that tribe ER is great for sharing your block posts and then getting your bloke post shared again on social media on there is a free plan. So let's go ahead to the pricing here, which I think it's down at the bottom. Pricing. Choose a plan to get started. Three. Now you are only allowed what they call one tribe on 30 members per tribe. But if you have a tribe off just 30 members, even who are really enjoying what you're posting and finding interesting, those 30 members could be sharing those posts, so this can still do really well. You can have three social profiles connected. You can have 100 items, so 100 posts in the queue. You could only have one block connected. That's OK, and you could import 14 posts a week. So even the free plan is worth having. If you find try but really, Gord, at some point in the future, you could update to the light plan, but definitely get started off with the free plan. OK, and you can read all about it by going through these links here. And he thought they do have their own block where you can get even more information, blogged Andi. There's also a help desk, so spend a little bit of time fully understanding exactly what's going on here on tribal on on medium and then start using both of these platforms because you can use them both for free to share some of your blood posts and start getting some exposure. And that, of course, means traffic coming back to your blawg. I'll see you in a minute 7. Twitter Traffic and Free Tools: all right. The next place that you definitely want to be forgetting traffic back to your block is Twitter. Now, Twitter doesn't really need much explaining because everybody knows what Twitter is. But what you might not know is that there are some really good free tools that you can use to make your life a lot easier on to make things more effective for you. So the first tool that I'm going to show you here is hoot suite there. Who, sweets going toe allow you to schedule your post in advance on the reason you want to schedule post in advance is because that a life span of a tweet is on Lee. A few minutes is about eight minutes. It's pointless, only tweeting once a week. You really need to tweet several times a day. Now, what the free plan allowed you to do here is schedule up to 30 tweets in advance. So let's just scroll down here, take a look. Scheduled messages. 30. So that will be 30 tweets if you're just going to use this for Twitter. So what you could do is create 30 messages in advance and have been scheduled to go out at four or five a day, and that's going to give you about a week's worth of tweets, which means that you only need Teoh do this once a week, as opposed to remembering to tweet multiple times a day. So what to tweet about? If you need to tweet several times a day, you won't have enough block post to tweet. You should definitely tweet your block posts. Every new block post that comes out. You should tweet it. But what about the rest of the tweets? Well, what you can do is you can curate related and highly relevant information from around the Internet on Tweet That on you could also retweet Retweeting is really easy. Andi is a good way to get enough tweets going out on to find tweets to Retweet. You need to start following other related Twitter accounts on. Once you start following the related Twitter accounts, your Twitter feed is going to start filling out with lots of tweets that you can retweet. Another tip to give you here is tweets with images get much, much more attention, and they got a lot more retweets, so wherever possible, your tweet should have an image on what we see now is that the majority of tweets do have images. Okay, Now, the other tool that I want to show you is tweet deck. Now, this tool is like an organization tool for your Twitter account on what's really great about it is you can. Well, first of all, you can tweet right from here. Add images or videos. Schedule the tweet so you could even schedule from here. Andi, you can add different columns. So this is the home feed here for this old Twitter account that we really didn't do anything with. But I'm just using it to show you here. This is where your notifications and your messages are trending tweets. But you can also add other columns so you can add ah, column to show your followers on a column to show your schedule. Tweets. All right, so this is a really good tool. You can do everything from here as opposed to doing it from the main Twitter dashboard. It will save you a lot of time, make things easier. You can even see your activity from here so you can have a column for activity as well. So that's tweet deck dot com. Andi Just a tip here for food. Sweet. When you go to the main hoot suite dot com site, it is really hard to find the free plan. They keep it hidden, so you want to go directly to this link instead. That's on here. Hoot suite dot com. Forward slash plans Forward, side free. All right, so that's Twitter on did to free tools that you can use that are other free tools around. But most of the tools now like this that we can use for Twitter are paid. But these air to tools that still have a free plan on hopefully the free plan will be available for quite a while into the future. Okay, so you in the next lesson. 8. Two More Busy Places to Share Your Blog Content: in this lecture, we're going to look at another two great high traffic places to share your content. Thought to share your block posts so that you can get traffic back to your blawg on the 1st 1 is scooped dot i t. Now the great thing about scoop is that it's not just a place where you can share content of your own from your blawg, but you can also get a lot of content from scoop for your blog's so you can find lots of content on here that is related to your blawg, which helps you. You don't have to write all your own posts because you can find content from around the Internet on. This is a great place to get good, high quality content, but right now we're looking at sharing your content on scoop. Now the first thing to note is that they do have paid ponds, but the free plan is absolutely OK. Now when you sign up, you can sign up either with Facebook or Twitter, or you can just click here to say I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account on that will allow you to sign up just with your regular details. Now I have an account, so I'm just going to go ahead and log in now. The first thing to do is to tell. Scoop it what your interest is. You don't need to pick one of these floor. You can actually type something in the box here, Andi. Now scoop. It is going to suggest some topics to follow so you can go ahead and you can click on Follow some of these topics here so you can scroll through on DSI what is relevant because this is an automatic thing. So some of them may be relevant and maybe not relevant. But once you've done that, you want to go to your dashboard, Andi, create a topic. Now, once you've created a topic that's going to create a page for you on scoop it now here, where it says, give us a few key words. Just enter some words or phrases that are highly relevant to the topic off your blawg on. Leave this box UnTech because you don't want your topic to be hidden, you want it to be public and then just go ahead and create a topic and you're given the option to install the toolbar on which would be on your browser on. I don't really want to do that, but that's up to you. All right, so now I've got the message. Congrats. Your topic is up, and we get this little tutorial. Just have to click through until we get rid of it. All right? Now, make sure thought when you do sign up when you register that you upload a profile picture at the same time. If not, you can always add it afterwards. Now I can do two things I can look through content to see if there's any content I would like to share on my own. Blawg. So that gives me extra content. Maybe I'm too busy to write post one week, so I just want to share some content instead. On the other thing, of course, is that now I can create something here that's going to be shared your own scoop. It's going to be posted here on scoop it, and I start off by entering my link, and that's usually going to be my block link. So this copia linked to a particular post a particular page. But in this case, I'm just going to enter the main domain of my block. Andi, when I hover my mouse off this little icon hear it say, is that I can publish 10 scoops today, so I have the ability to do that with the free account. Now, if I was going to upgrade to a paid account, I could have an unlimited amount of scoops that I could publish every day. But there's no need to do that. And now I have the option to connect my blawg, but thus for paid members only. So you need to upgrade to paid membership. So you don't need to do that because they're still going to be a link here on this scoop. You can see here. I could out some tax down here to help people find my scoops or people who are interested in fiction. Share your insight. Now you've got to write something here so you could paste, copy and paste a post from your block. Now make sure it's formatted. I have lost the formatting here as I'm copying and pasting in, so I would need to go through this on just reformat it the way it's supposed to be and then once I'm happy with it, I can just click publish now, this is not the entire post. So if I was actually publishing this now, rather than just doing a demonstration for the purpose of this lecture, I would add the whole post. I've just added a bit of it here to show you how it works, and then you just go ahead and click. Publish. Now, there are other things you could do to scoop it. So I encourage you to go through the tutorials here. So just click the drop down menu and click on help. Also the product tour. Now they do quite frequently try and get you to upgrade, but you don't need to upgrade. You're going to be sharing your content in many, many places. So you don't want to put too much focus on one place because every place where you're sharing content has a limited potential. So it's a case of getting your content out as many places as possible. Now we're going to take a look at four ins on forums can be a really great source of high quality traffic to your blawg, and in fact, some website owners and block owners use forums as their main traffic source. Sometimes they're only traffic source. But in order to do that, you would need to spend a lot of time on the forums. I don't necessarily recommend you do that, but they can be a great additional source of traffic and definitely not to be ignored. Now, to find forums in your knees, just go to Google and type your niche in with the word forum afterwards. And normally, any forums worth interacting with will come upon the first page of the search results. But you may need to try a couple of different things, So let me just show you what I mean. I've started off with Fiction Forum on this one comes up at the top. So I'm going to go ahead and open that one up on it hasn't brought me straight into the forum. So I'm gonna go here and click forums. No, What I can see here straight away is that this forum is barely being used. It's not active at all. There are not many members here. Andi. It looks like no one's been posting here for the last 23 years, so there wouldn't be much point in registering for a forum like this. What we're looking for is active forums with a lot of members. I'm going to try book for him instead. Sometimes we need to try a couple of things to find what we're looking for. So now I'm seeing lots more forums. This is more like it. Andi, I opened up a few of these forums, so let me just show you how to decide if this is gonna be the right forum for you to join. Because it's probably better to join just one forum. So try and pick out the best the most active for. And but there are other things to consider its well. So this is book talk dot Organ. I'm going to click on enter forums. Okay. So I can see that this is an active forum. We've got lots of topics. Lots of posts. Let's see if we can find out anywhere on this page. How many users are on this forum? Well, it's telling me there are 27 users online right now. Most uses online ever was 184. There's no bod, Aunt. He we are total members. 5503 So 5.5 1000 members it's OK, but I can probably find something better. So here's another one. I opened up straight away. I'm seeing something that don't like celebrating 10 years 2000 and 4 to 2040. But this is 2060 so clearly that's not been updated. But what I'm seeing down here is a lot of topics on a lot of replies on a lot of them. A very recent today, today, today, 28th of October 27th of October. So what I'm seeing here is a bit of a mixture, some of the sections or, for example, this section here is not getting a lot of activity. We've got the last post here looks to be April 2016 which is several months ago, so it's a bit of a mixture. We've got some sections with a lot of activity going on on some sections with no activity going on. So what, once trying to find out the number of members and here we are, total members just under 3000. Okay, that one's not Doc would. So let's try one more now, this one here is looking promising at the moment. We got a lot of activity going on again. A lot of threads, a lot of replies on right here. I can see that there are 19,000 members, active members, 9 to 4. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but in any case, what you want to do is check out several forums in your niche. Try and pick the warn that has a big membership. Andi has lots of activity going on. So you're looking at the dates the recent dates as well. You're looking at the number of threads, the number of posts. But you're also looking at the dates as well. The dates of the last post. That's really important. No, once you find a forum, are you short list? You make a short list of forums that would be beneficial to you to join. Go ahead and join those forums. And I'm saying four runs poor oral, even though a couple of minutes ago I said you will probably only want to join one because it's a good idea to join two or three to begin with and then decide which one is going to be the best so decide which one is going to give you the most benefit, and then you can simply just dropped the other two on Focus on one, almost always the way it works in forums is that when you first join, you are not able to post any links or have a link in your signature. A signature is something that shows up at the bottom of every single post you make or every reply you make. Two opposed to comment on the forum. So normally you need to make a certain number of posts before you can have a signature. Or you can have a signature with a link in it. Each forum has its own rules for that, but normally the minimum will be five. And sometimes it's a bit more than that now. There are also some forums that don't allow signatures at all. So I fought him like that wouldn't be a lot of use to you. Sometimes it's difficult to know until you actually join, because even though you may look at the posts and you may look through a lot of posts on the forum, most forum users don't use a signature because they're not actually advertising anything. They haven't got their own website, so you can't always know just by looking at posts before you join, so you may need to join a few on. Then you can narrow that down to one. Now. Here are a couple of really important tips. Festival. You should not advertise in a post that you may leave the advertising to the signature. So the signature that's going to be automatically shown with every post you make or every reply you make to somebody else's post. So don't actually write a post advertising something that's not what forums are. Four. And it will just get you banned. Some forums do have advertising sections on this forum house worn, so you may be able to go ahead and put an ad in there as well. But that won't be as effective as you interacting on the forum, making helpful posts being helpful by answering questions on threads in the forum. This will get you a lot more traffic back to your blawg than just simply throwing a nod in the classified ads section off the Forum on. Be sure to read the rules and the guidelines for each four of their usually pretty similar , but some of them have stricter rules and guidelines and others. So right year, it say's frequently asked questions and frequently uttered warnings on nights since related to our rules and guidelines ignored at your own risk. So do read up on the guidelines for each foreign that you joined before you start posting in them. And once you find a forum that's working well, so you have a signature. Come showing up at the end of your posts on threads, and the end of your replies to other people's questions and posts on threads won't start starts to show up with a link in it. You will start to get traffic back to your website. It works very, very well. All right, so go ahead on find 23 active forums to join on. Then you can narrow it down to one and just concentrate on the warn. There's no need to spend lows of time in a forum. Just even an hour a week could do a lot for you because you could make one post on answer two or three other posts on threads on that forum. In that one hour a week on that alone can get you a lot of exposure on you Start to build up your credibility. That's the one thing that you need to remember. When you first start posting on a forum, you will get some traffic starting to come in. But the longer you're on that forum, in the more credibility buildup, the more traffic you're going to get to your block. 9. Using Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your Blog: Hello, everybody. Now one great place to get traffic is Pinterest on in a moment. I'm going to create a brand new Pinterest account here. But first of all, I want to point out a few things. I'm sure everybody knows what Pinterest is, but just to clarify, it's an image sharing platform. So unlike Facebook, where we share posts on Pinterest, we share images. Now 70% of Pinterest users are women. This is significant because women spend more online than men. Men do buy things online, but women are the main spenders when it comes to on line shopping. Now you have a block, you don't have a store. But you are going to be monetizing that blawg. We're coming to that soon in this part of the course. Now the life of a pain is around 1600 times longer than the life of a Facebook post. When a Facebook post appears on your news feed, it doesn't take long before that post has disappeared from the news feed, and we don't tend to scroll away down. We tend to look at what their at the time, but pins stick around for a lot longer. Traffic from Pinterest is very high quality, the buyer intent. So when somebody comes to your website or your blawg from Pinterest, the intent to buy if there is something there for sale is higher than it is coming from other social platforms. For example, Facebook, YouTube, etcetera pins can also go vital. Andi. Because Pinterest users tend to be in the upper household income bracket, they do tend to spend more as well, so they purchase higher priced items. All right, I'm going to go ahead and create a new account. So when you create a new account, you go through a quick wizard on. That helps Pinterest to show you the pens that you would be interested in. Now. This is important because if we are seeing pens that are related to the topic of our block , we can reap in those pens on. That can help us to fill up our boards, which will be doing in a moment on you can add the browser button. I recommend you do that. I'm not going to do it in this case because I'm using an incognito browser at the moment, all right, and here's where we tell them what we are interested in. So I'm going to look for topics that are related to my block. Okay, on. We can also download the app for Android or IOS. No. You also have an option here with Pinterest off getting business account on. That means. But if you wanted to do any paid ads in the future, you could do that on. Did you also get access to Pinterest analytics? So you can see which pins are working the best. But to start building your account, which is what you need to do, you need to first of all, creates and boards. So we click on our own name here. Select boards. Could he ate aboard. Now what I recommend you do is that you try to create 7 to 10 boards, so something between seven and 10 boards to get started with, and you should categorize those boards as sub topics off the topic off your block. So in this case, I'm going to use some of my categories to create boards on before I add anything to the board. I'm going to create some or on what you can do with your boards is you can give them creative names on. It's actually a good idea to do that. So with this board here amphibians instead of just calling it, um, fibula ins, I could call it a NFIB unions in the UK What is your board about? Let's give it a brief description on Let's give it a category. I'm safe. No, I'm just going to do the same thing now for another few boards are pause the video for a moment on. Then we'll be right back. All right, now that we've got some boards on different topics in the niche so different topics that we're covering on our block, we can start to populate these with pains on. The first thing you can do is pin from your own blawg. So we've got our social sharing buttons on the posts. I'm going to go ahead on pin this one. Choose a pin to save. Now do the board. As long as you're locked into your Pinterest account, you won't have to relocate. You just click the Pinterest button here on your post on this is the board. Let's go ahead and refresh on. There we go. We have our first pain. No, this pain if we just open it up. You can see here it's automatically linked to the block. If somebody clicks on here, they're going to go a right to that post. So you want to do that with all of your posts? Choose the board on. Just go back to the boards here. On there. We have it. No, to begin with, you're not going to have a lot of stuff to share from your blog's so we can re pain some other pins. Let's just go ahead on and quick on this board. Andi, find some ideas now. You have to be careful. Make sure they are relevant because this particular block is about wildlife in the UK Andi , Perhaps some of these pins are about birds in other countries, not the UK. No, this bird here is our British bird. So let's just check it out. Click the save button. Choose aboard Spirits in your garden saved two birds in your garden. So that's the second way to start. Populating your boards on The third way is to pin from around the Internet. So pin from other websites. Let's just do one. Okay, now here's Wong the I campaign and they do have a pin button. Of course, if you have the Pinterest pin browser button installed, it doesn't even matter if there's no Pinterest sharing button on the actual post or page. But in this case, there is all right, so the boards are slowly starting to fill up. How many pains do you want on each board to get started? Probably around 6 to 10 pins on each board. So you're looking at 7 to 10 boards, 6 to 10 pins on each board to get started. But it's an ongoing process, so you need to keep updating your boards. You need to keep adding new pins, So every time you had some new content to your block, pin it. Andi. Make a habit as well, off re penning on pinning some other relevant and interesting stuff from around the Internet. Now what can you do to start building your followers? Other than pinning, pinning is the main way to build your followers because they will start to build slowly. But they will start to build when you're adding new content regularly. But what else can you do to build your followers? Well, you could start following other accounts right now I am just following for So let's find a fume. Or And you can do this every day, every day you can follow four or five other accounts on gradually, your followers will build. Okay, so you're getting the idea. Just build your boards. Keep pinning. It only takes a few minutes a day to do this. Andi, Every day, follow a few more related accounts until you feel you've followed enough on. Your followers are starting to irregularly build up. But as mentioned earlier, pins can go viral if you have a really interesting pain. And don't forget, this is very image focused. It is an image website, so your images should be good on the more interesting and more eye catching your images are , the more attention they will get. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Backlinks and What are They?: I wanted to make this lecture just to clear something up because a lot of people have heard of back links. Have heard of battling King Andi. Think that this is some sort of way to get more traffic to your website and to get your website ranking in Google so that you can get more traffic from the search engines. So let's just clear this up. First of all, what exactly is a back ling? Well, a link to your log or your website from another place on the Internet. So from anywhere, a tall Facebook, anything. Any website, YouTube, another blawg, another website anywhere on the Internet, That is what we call a back links. So a link coming from another place to your website now back links are built naturally, Andi, everything we've been doing here as far as places to share our content, setting up a Twitter account posting on forums. Everything that we've been doing is building back lings to our block because every time you share a block post on another website and you include a link in that post going back to your blawg that's a back link. Every time somebody clicks a share button on your block and shares some of your content on Facebook on Twitter, on Pinterest. Every time that happens, there's a back link being created to your blawg, so back links happen naturally on. They should build naturally and over time, natural back Ling's will improve your rankings and Google. So they're going to improve your search engine rankings because it's a signal to Google that your blawg is popular is becoming more popular. So the more natural back links that you get over time mawr. This helps you to rank on Google. So the more this helps your block pages of your block post to rank on Google. It's only one factor when it comes to ranking other factors we covered in Level one when we were creating posts and pages, we were using best S CEO practices or best search engine optimization practices, and that is actually more important than anything but back wings are also important. Now, back linking is a form of black hat search engine optimization, and this is something you should stay well away from now. A few years ago, back linking was, ah, way to fool Google on the other search engines into thinking that your website is much more popular than it actually is. So you could build hundreds or thousands off random back lings from places on the Internet from pages on the Internet that would even in no way related to the knee, show the subject of your blogger, your website, and that would in fact manipulate Google into thinking that your website was more popular and therefore that would increase your rankings. So it's a type of black car S CEO. But that was quite a few years ago, and even then it was only a very short term strategy because it would only work short term . However, even now, you can buy thousands off fake back links. So these are links. They do come from somewhere. But they're not in any way related to your website on their mainly generated using bots. So robots, so they're not even manually created. Google is now far too smart for any of this kind of stuff. So while it may have worked as a short term strategy several years ago, now it most definitely doesn't not work. But no, only does it not work. It's much worse than that it will actually get your blawg penalized so your blood will be penalized by the search engines penalized by Google on This is a big thing, folks. If your website is penalized by Google, you have a problem. If that you might as well start all over again, you might as well write off that website and start all over again. It's very difficult to recover from something like that. 11. Facebook Part 1 Creating a Page for Business: OK, now let's look at how we use Facebook to drive traffic to our blogged. Now, sometimes students say to me that they don't like Facebook. They'd rather not use Facebook on. Do we need it? Well, the truth is that there is no bigger traffic source on by not using it. You really are doing yourself a disservice. You're not going to be able to connect with all the people that you would be able to connect with. I e the audience. The people who want to read your block want to come to your block on will ultimately be many of the people who helped you to make money from your block by purchasing either directly from your block if you're selling your own products or by clicking through to affiliate offers on purchasing affiliate products. So by not using Facebook, you were really limiting yourself. All right now, the first thing to do is to create a page. You can't do anything unless you have a page associated with your block. So on the menu, click on Create. Now, the page you want to get to is this page here. Creator Page. If your Facebook account happens to look different to mine, and that's possible. It also looks different on different devices. I'm one desktop. If you're on mobile, it's going to look different. He's just got to look around until you find what you need on what you're looking for is create a page is going to be business or brand as opposed to community or public figure. Probably You need to think about this, but in most cases is going to be business or brand. So click on Get started on Give your page a name. Normally, this is going to be the name of your block at a category to describe your page. Now very often, you're going to need to choose blogger because there's not always a category here that's going to be relevant to the topic of your block. So I'm just going to go ahead on and choose blogger. Continue. All right, Uploaded profile Picture. This is normally going to be your logo. Now it's possible that my logo isn't going to be big enough. Facebook hasn't give me a notice or a message to say that it's too small, but I might have to make it bigger. Go to Camber on, just create a bigger one. Otherwise, it might be a bit pixelated, but let's see. Upload a cover photo. I'm going to use the header image from the block. All right, Well, it looks like I've uploaded the wrong logo here because this is the warn that I originally created that had a watermark on it. So I'll change that in a moment on. For some reason, the cover has no uploaded. I'm going to try that again. Okay, It's working now, all right, I'm going to leave it like that at the moment. At some point, it's a good idea to create on image cover image for your Facebook page that is just unique just for your Facebook page. But to get started, you can just use any image that you have already. So in this case, I'm using my header image from the block on. The next thing to do is to add a short description to let people know what your pages about . On the limit. Here is 255 characters. Make sure nothing's cut off. Save Eddie Page info. Phone number. My page doesn't have a phone number website here. You can enter your block. Email. My page doesn't have an email. You can enter your email here if you want to. So the email that you've set up for your block, but on Facebook, people normally just send messages. They don't normally use the email address. UnTech How Street address on gender You don't have to put anything here You can leave is unspecified. It's not even relevant to my blawg. It may be relevant to your blogging is a personal block, but you don't need to put anything in there. Privacy policy Now here's where you could end to the link to the privacy policy on your block. Now let's make sure we save all the changes. Okay, now the next thing to do is to go to Settings Page Visibility Page published. If you ever want unpublished, you could do that. Click on Edit, visit a post anyone can publish to the page, I recommend. Yes, you leave it, as is news, feed, audience and visibility for posts. The ability to now the audience for news feed on limit visibility on your post is turned off on a recommend that you do Leave it off. You don't really want to limit that post. Sharing two stories is on. People can contact my page privately. I recommend you leave that because if you edit this and change it, people won't be able to send messages via Facebook talking ability. Only people who manage my page contact photos posted on it yet. Leave that. As is. I recommend others talking this page. People on other pages contact my page. Yes. Page location for effects. Yes, Country restrictions. Now, do you want to limit your page so that only people from certain countries converge? You it, You may want to do this. It really does depend. If your blawg is of the nature that it is really Onley relevant to people in a certain country, you may want to do this. My blawg is really only relevant to people in the UK. So in this case, I could a limit visibility to just the UK. I'm not going to do it because I am not in the UK on. If I do that, I won't be able to view my own page. But I'm sure you get the point age restrictions if you have any age restrictions. If your page is not suitable for below 13 or below eighteen's. You can do that. They're change it page moderation. Do you want to block any words from your page? So if you want to block obscenities, you would type the words in here. There's also a profanity filter. If you turn that on, it will block certain words. But there are some issues with that, because there are certain words that have more than one meaning on one of the meetings as profane. But the other is not. So just be careful. If you want to turn that on, just be aware of that. All right. Now this one and this one, I recommend you just leave those posts in multiple languages. No, the ability to write posted multiple languages is turned off by default. But if you want people to be able to make posts in other languages, you have to turn that on on. Def is turned on. You can also have automatic translation comment ranking. Most recent comments are shown on my page by default. That would be the correct way to do things on everything else here just fine. If you want to delete your page, you can just delete it right here. Okay. Under messaging set up how people message your page. Now, the general settings, just the regular default settings are usually perfectly OK. But if you want to change anything, such as use the return key to send messages. I never like to have that on, because usually I used in return key to create space, so I'd end up sending messages before I was ready to send them. But anyway, you have some options here, and you have the response assistant. That can be pretty good. You can set up automated responses for when people send you messages. All right, on page info. We've been through that already. Now there's nothing else here that I really need to show you. If you want to know more, you can click on each of these taps on check them out. Okay. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to add some content to the page. So I'll see you there. 12. Facebook Part 2 Building Out the Page with Content: all right. Now, you might want to delete certain posts or hide certain post from your timeline. Because every time you update something like update your profile picture or your cover image, it comes up on the timeline. Do it for wildlife. Updated their profile picture because I just change this so you can hide thes hide from timeline. You don't dilly the because if you delete them, you also delete the image from your kind on. You don't want to do that. Hide. All right, now, toe, add some content here. The first thing and the most obvious thing is share your posts. So let's go over to the block on. Let's share this one Facebook share share on a page. You manage. Here's the page. You can say something about it here if you want to, or just post it as it is post to Facebook. Aunt here is on the time line. Now you don't only want to share posts from your block. You should also create some post directly on Facebook. So right some post directly here on the page on what I advise is that you mix it up so you write some post directly on the page. You share the post from your blawg on. Do you share posts from other related pages on even share articles from other places around the Internet. So mix it all up, but you must create some post directly on your page. This is pretty important now. In the next lesson, we're going to start looking a building the audience for your page because there's no point having a page, no matter how good it is. If you don't have any audience, you will just without doing anything, start to get a few likes and followers on your page. But it would be very, very slow, so you want to do something to kick it off. But before you do that, how much content should you have on your page? You do need to have a decent amount of content on your page before you start to do anything at all. To build an audience on, I recommend a minimum off. 15 to 20 posts are used to say 10 but now it's a 15 to 20 on us mentioned. That should be a mixture off posts from your own block. Articles share from around the Internet video share from YouTube. Andi Post shared from other related pages. On One more thing you can do here is at a button. Which button do you want people to see? It can either be contact you or learn more. I'm going to say learn more. Watch video or learn more. Learn more. Next. Where would you like this button to send people website at the website. Here. Your block Double. Check it on. Safe finish. Okay. Now, when anybody clicks on that button, they're going to go to your block. We could test the button on. There we go. OK, let's move on to the next lesson. 13. Facebook Part 3 Building an Audience: Okay. Now, once you have your page populated with enough content, you can start to build on audience. So are following for your page. There are a few things you can do here, but if you want to build up some initial likes and followers, you could a run a likes ad. This is purely optional, but I'm going to show you how to do it. Anyway, what you are looking for is the create add option. Now you confined not in a number of places, so you can find it here. 38 AD. You can often find it up here on the menu ad on. Sometimes you can find it here as well. In this case, I've got money jobs, but you might have create ads or advertiser page or advertise on Facebook anyhow, is the create ads that you're looking for? I'm just going to go here. Click on add No, for me. I go straight to the US manager for you. As first time doing this, you'll probably get something going on saying setting up your ads account or whatever, but ultimately you're going to get to this page. What we want is engagement on. We won't Page Likes. This is actually the cheapest type of Facebook ad to run campaign name. I'm just going to call it likes that, or first like that as a beginner. It's a good idea to start off with just one ad set on, in which case we won't be using any A B split testing or campaign budget optimization. Continue a name for the outset. Now the best way to do this is to put the country, and in this case, it's UK, and they you could either decide to advertise just to Maine, just to women or to everybody on. You can decide to advertise to a certain age group now to begin with for a like side, I recommend you keep it broad on. Do you want to think about on approximate A very approximate age group for your audience? No, for my type of blawg, I'm looking really at people over the age of 25 because under the age of 25 I don't think there would be a lot of interest. There be some interest, but I'm talking about the typical audience on. I'm going to go 25 to 50. I'm not going to make it gender specific or anything like that. So I'm just going to leave it like that UK 25 to 50. And that tells me I'm targeting the U. K on I'm targeting age Group 25 to 50 on. Now you select the page that's going to be associated with the art. We're going to create a new audience. People who live in this location. I don't want Ireland. I want United Kingdom delete Ireland. Now, right away, my audience size has gone away up to 36 million. But it won't be that many because I'm going to add interests. You'll see that in a moment I need to define my age group Here is Well, I said 25 to 50. Probably we could go 25 to 55 55 so I'll just change this up here. That's just the name of the outset for my own reference, Okay, and now we can do a bit more detailed targeting our demographics, interest or behaviors. I'm going to choose a wildlife on. That's all I'm going to add. So it's just a like side, so we don't need to do any kind of detail targeting just putting in one interest there just to notto it down a bit to target people who are interested in wildlife. So I now have potential reach of two million people saying here that my estimated daily page lights is 61 2276 But that depends on the budget that's been put in down here. Facebook has pre entered a budget daily budget off 25. I'm don't want that much. Nothing like that. So I'm going to put a daily budget in off 11. No cost controls option. This is really difficult to even put anything in there at all before you've run any ads because you have no idea what to put in there. I don't know what to put in there because I haven't run this like south before. Haven't run anything to this page before, so I wouldn't know Andi. It's best just to leave that alone, at least to start off with. No for my daily budget of 11 euro, it's saying that I will get an estimated 37 164 page likes in my past experience. You tend to get more towards the higher end, so I would expect to be gay. At least 100 likes for that 100 lights per day, depending on how many likes you want. You can just run it for a couple of days, get a couple of 100 lights, maybe 300 likes on. I want to say one thing here. There are certain countries that are more expensive than others for running ads. Even like sods. One of the most expensive countries is the United Kingdom. So you may find that your costs are lower than this. All right, we have a choice. We can run continuously starting today or recon set a start and end date on. Do you may feel more comfortable setting a start and end dates, so let's do that start date May 10th. Thus today End date. May 12 at the same time. So for this campaign, this lights campaign, I'm not going to spend more than 22 euro on continue. Okay? And now we're going to create the actual art. So we named the campaign we named the ad set. We need to name the Ada's well, so I'm just naming at UK. Underscore 25 to 50. Underscore wildlife because I think interest on. I'm just going to say underscore one, just in case I happened to run. Another likes ad after this one format, single image or video image on to maximize our delivery, use an image that contains little or no overlay text. Now you can use some texts but don't use a lot. All right, on the size recommended is one away toe by 1080 I'm going to choose an image. I'm not going to use this image here. Get rid of that. I'm going to upload an image, just one of the images that I have on my block on crop image. That's all right that will do for a no for the text of the ARD. Facebook has just pulled what I entered on the page in the page info. I could either leave this or change it to something else, but I think this is OK for the ad. So whatever you've entered for the page info, that's what's going to be in here. But you can change it if you wish to. Now here's the ad preview. This is the mobile news feed, so let's take a look at it on the desktop newsfeed. Now you may be wondering what this is here. My tracking pixel. Well, I have a tracking pixel installed on some of my blog's and websites, but it's no installed on. Do it for wildlife. Don't code at UK, so it's not actually going to work. But this is my tracking pixel. Now. What I'm going to do is along with this blessing as a download, I'm going to give you links to learn about tracking pixels on how to install one on your block. It's really handy if you are going to in the future. Run paid outs on Facebook Not likes us because likes us are designed to get traffic to your Facebook page, not to your block, but if you later start to run, paid ounce on Facebook. Going to your block, you will want the tracking pixel installed. All right, no, up here I have this. A little warning. That's because my scheduling is now in the past because it's about five minutes on from the time I actually set the beginning off the scheduled add. So let's go back and change that. This start date is in the past. Well, it's not really in the past, because that is the time now. But anyway, let's have it starting tomato unless have it ending on a Monday so that I still two days. All right? No, I'm not going to click confirm because I have a payment method set up here in my Facebook account. So if I click confirm my ad is going to go live or it's going to go into review on it will go live very shortly after that, usually within 15 minutes, because I'm an existing advertiser. Now, what will happen with you when you click? Confirm you'll be asked to set up a payment method. Or maybe you'll be asked to set the payment method up before I don't know, because I've had this account for such a long time, so I don't know when you'll be asked to add the payment method. Anyhow, what happens when your ad is ready on? Do you click? Confirm and let's assume that you've got your payment method set up your ass is going to be reviewed before it goes live. This can take anything from a few minutes to a few hours. Now, sometimes you're odd will go alive almost instantly, but probably not with a brand new account that's not likely to happen within you. Okay, but often my ads do go life instantly. It doesn't mean to say they're not going to be reviewed, because there may be reviewed afterwards. If there was anything wrong with them afterwards, they will be disapproved. If you haven't out disapproved, you need to take a look and see. You know, what am I doing wrong Now, along with this lesson, I'm going to give you know only information about Facebook pixel. But I'm going to give you links to go to Facebook Blueprint, which is Facebook's own official training for paid advertising. And it's free, and that's the best place to start. But for running a simple like side, you don't really need any training. The only thing that you do need to do is to look at Facebook's ad policies. So I'm going to give you a link to that as well, because there are some things are no allowed to be advertised on Facebook. All right, now, what else can you do besides running a like sad? Well, let's go back to the page. One thing you can do is that you can find some similar pages related pages on like them. Now. You don't want to go liking too many pages at once because Facebook thinks that strange. But for brand new pages, you do get a bit more leeway, so you can like five pages or so within the 1st 2 or three days after that. Just be careful and don't like more than two or three pages a week just to be on the safe side. Because if Facebook thinks that your activity is unusual strange, you could even get your page closed down. Okay, now, in order to Sirte for pages and we want to find popular pages, you need to go about your personal account so you can't really do it from your page, and then you can go ahead and type in the search box. Once you get the results up, what you want is pages, and you want to find pages that have a lot of likes. So that's the first thing to look for. We don't want pages with just 300 lights. 51 lives, 26 likes, but here's one with 6.7000 likes so that will do but opening up first. Don't just go clicking, because if you click, like from here, you're going to be liking it as yourself instead of us. Your page on. We don't want to do that. It's opening up. Let's have a quick scroll down and make sure that this page is active. Because if the ad men's off the page or not active and they're not posting, there's not really any point in liking it posted yesterday. So that's fine toe like as your page on a note as yourself like as your page likes, will show up on your pages timeline, which paid you want to alike British Wildlife Center as select your page, Do it for wildlife. Submit. Okay, now, another thing you could do is you can comment on the pages that you have liked so active pages that are busy. Let's scroll down here and see how much activity this page is getting. Quite a bit. Not a huge amount, but some 12 comments. 44 shares. You see it's getting shares. That's good. Six comments. 30 shares. All right, so something like this. 23 comments 35 shares, but it's two weeks old, so we want something newer. What you can do is you can comment, but you need to make sure that you're commenting as your page are know as yourself. How do we do that? Drop down Otto. Here. Select page. Ah, now we can see. I will be commenting us my page on. The great thing about that is that anyone sees your comment. All they have to do is calling on the profile picture and they'll go through to your page. So if you're going to start posting interesting comments, helpful comments on other people's posts, even creating your own posts, but don't blatantly advertise on other people's pages because that is absolutely the wrong thing to do. So so we've got three things here. We've got running a like side of paid lights out optional because it's gonna cost a little bit. But not much. We've got liking other pages on another way. To get ideas for pages to alike is to look at the related pages on the pages you've already liked. So here we've got BBC Wildlife magazine on that score, 83,000 likes, so I would want to like that. But remember you got to go to the page. Andi, select up here like is your page. Don't just click the like button or you're just going to like it as yourself on weaken. Go here. We can like this page, but we can also related pages. We've got Mawr, BBC Spring Watch That's got a lot of likes, like over half a 1,000,000. So that's a really good 12 on. That's how you start to find the right kind of pages to like and follow. No, I bet this one has a lot of interaction. Yeah, it does. 51 comments and 396 shares for that 503 comments for days. 100 91 comment is 425 1.3 K shares. So you can comment on posts like this have, AH, law off comments and shares because that's going to get you visibility. People clicking through to your page on more likes 14. Monetization Best Practices: All right. Welcome, everybody. No, This is where the fun begins, the monetization. And this is the bit that we will we'll wait for this is the bit that we can't wait to do. But you have to understand about best practices. Otherwise, you could do more harm than good. When you start to monetize your bloke Firstly, Onley advertised quality products. Your block will then get a good reputation. You will build loyal followers on People will want to share your content so they want to share it on social media. Now, with some of the monetization options that I'm going to be showing you, it is easy to get tempted with higher commission rates, poor quality products. So choose what you advertise on your blawg carefully so that your only advertising quality stuff don't over promote. Otherwise, your website is going to start looking very spammy. I think about it. This Put yourself in the place off your website visitor, you don't go to a website to look out ads. Nobody ever goes to a website to look a ads unless you're going to a classified ads website or something like that. But you don't go to a blawg toe. Look at the ads. Nobody does. So we need outs on there because we need to monetize, but we don't want to overdo it. Don't use every content area so every widget area as an opportunity to advertise something . You, some of the widget areas for content that not an out so don't have banners in every single possible place on your website. Otherwise, it's going to look spammy and don't use every post is an opportunity toe. Advertise something so I don't have the links going to affiliate products or advertising something in every single post. Make sure that plenty of your posts are information post only, and they don't advertise anything and they don't have a link going to something to buy. It's okay to do this in some posts, but certainly not in all of them, because if every single one of your post has been created with the purpose of selling something in that post, people are just going to stop reading your post. They're just going to stop coming to your blawg, so simply put yourself in the place off your blog's visitors. Put yourself in their shoes. They're coming to your blawg for information on if they happen to buy something. Well, they're they're great, but you don't want it forced in their face so that all they see everywhere they go on your block is by something. Buy something, buy something. All right, so we've got to try and get a balance because we've got to advertise, and we've got to make money, but we don't want to overdo it. 15. Monetization Options: Okay, let's take a lock of the different monetization options were going to be covering here in this section. Now there's no right or wrong way to do this. All of the options that we're going to cover their there are all viable options is going to depend on what suits you, what you like the best. So what, you feel that you like the best on what you feel suits your blob. Andi, you yourself. Now the first option we're going to be covering is the simplest option. It's Google AdSense. There are advantages on disadvantages to Google AdSense, so we'll go into that in detail in the lesson. The next option is Amazon affiliate or Amazon associate. Again, there are advantages on there are some disadvantages, but you don't need to stick to just one monetization method. As you will see, you could integrate more than one or multiple different monetization options on your block . We're then going to cover in detail digital product affiliate networks and how to promote digital products, how to choose the right ones, which networks to use so which networks to sign up for how to choose the best products to promote on where to get the material that you need so banners and that kind of thing for the products that you want to advertise on your bloke. We are also going to cover tangible product affiliate networks again, advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages off selling on promoting tangible products from your blawg. If the higher conversions are disadvantages, lower commissions were going to go into all that. And we're going to be looking at the best physical products or tangible product affiliate networks that you can register with aunt. Promote products from those networks on your block. And finally, we're going to look at another way to find affiliate products to promote on Often this way can be better because you tend to get higher commission rates. So we're going to look at exactly how to do that. Where to find independent partners. So vendors of merchants who have their own affiliate programs 16. Google Adsense: welcome everybody. Now, this is the first option for monetization that we're going to look out and I'm going to explain to you the advantages and disadvantages. This is Google AdSense, and you've probably heard of it. Now, the way Google absence works is that you choose certain places on your website where you want ads to appear. You also choose the type of ads that you want to appear that could be text ads. It could be display outs like this. This would be a display out. It would be a banner. This would be a Bonner as well. On Google will analyze your website. Andi will show the most what they feel is the most relevant. Ads on those ads will also be targeted to each individual visitor based on cookies. So cookies, as I'm sure you know, this is a way off tracking your movements around the Internet. So tracking which websites you visited. This is how Google gets to know what you're interested in. Andi, You know, basically, if you go to say, for example, Amazon on, you're looking at a particular product, so a particular type of product and then later on that day or the next day you see that product or a similar product to that being advertised on a website. So the cookies have tracked the fact that you were on Amazon and you were looking at a particular product, and now you are being shown ads for that product or a product in that category. Something related the next day the following day. Ah, week later, even the same day. So most of what we do is tracked on the Internet now, whether you like that or not, for people like us who make a living online, this is to our advantage. So at sense will show relevant ads or what they believe are relevant ads to your visitors. So these air Bonner aunt's okay, Andi some examples off banners now one of the big advantages off Google. Our sense is that the banners that are shown are displayed on your website. There will always be high quality because the standards Google standards are very, very high. So the advertisers who create these banners thes banners must be high quality. So you've no worry about having ah, poor quality or a really horrible looking banner. Well, you may think it's horrible but it would be high quality, so it may not be to your taste, but it would still be a high quality, high resolution image that would be displayed on your website. No, not all ads are image out. Some of them are what we call tech stance on. Do you will have seen these on websites or not as much these days as they used to be? Because it used to be that nearly all the ads that you saw on websites were like this. When I first started out using AdSense, I didn't have any banner ads. It'll the only adds I had on my website were images like this on. I always have them along the side here, like this is Well, no, personally. Now I feel that they look a little bit spammy. Andi, I would never use them. Now. The Onley absense outs that I would ever use now would be image outs like this. But there are also video wads as well, so there are number different routes that you can choose from. But my personal preference is not to have any of thes techstars on my website. But if you do decide to have them, you can choose how many display. So if you only wanted one, you could have 123 however many you want to display on where they display. Another advantage of our sense is that you get paid every time somebody clicks on and out. That doesn't have to be a sale. It's not about that. It's a boat. Whenever a visitor clicks on a one of the ads on your website, you get paid. The disadvantage is the amount you get paid is very small, so you need to have a lot off clicks on those odds before you can actually get paid because there are thresholds on its round, about $100. So here are the thresholds here. So if we look at the top one here, United States, once you hit $10 in earnings, absense will send through the mail to your address. A verification pin. So that's what happens when you hit $10 in earnings. Also, when you hit $10 in earnings, you should have by then entered your form of payment. So how you are getting paid, how they're going to pay you on? Then when you hit $100 you will get paid. That's the threshold. So once you earn $100 you'll get paid. But you need to own another $100 before you get paid again. Now, because of the nature off the way it works. With this very small amount, you get paid every time somebody clicks on one of your ads. It could take a while to accrue $100 on, but I wouldn't advise using AdSense and AdSense alone to monetize your site. This is one of the reasons is not the only reason, but we're going to be looking at a number of other monetization techniques as well. Here in this course, this is a good monetization technique, but perhaps only have one AdSense ads on your Web site, as opposed to using all of them for AdSense on cancellation. By the way, this just means that if you cancel your account, if you have less than $10 in it, I believe they don't pay you. If you have more than $10 they will send it to you, send you the balance that sport. I think that means, but there's probably no reason why you would counsel your account anyway, All right. So the biggest advantage of our sense is that it's so easy. You simply sign up for an account, you choose the type of art you want on. Then you're able to get some codes that you go and you put into the widgets in your website . So wherever you want those ads to appear on your website, and it really is that simple because Google take care of the rest. The ads are constantly changing in rotating, so there's nothing else you need to do. And that's the beauty of AdSense. All right, so let's now look at the next monetization method. 17. Amazon Associate Program: Hello again, everybody. Now this next monetization option should be high. On your list is the Amazon affiliate program known as Amazon Associates. Now the reason they should be so high on your list is that the conversions are very high. Now I earn some of my first affiliate commissions as an Amazon associate. What's so good about it is that when somebody clicks on, add on your website and they get redirected toe Amazon. If they make a purchase, you get paid a percentage of that purchase no matter what they buy, so they don't need to buy. The actual item for the RV clicked on from your blog's they made by that. But they made by something else entirely even something in a completely different category on Amazon on I've seen this happening many, many times. I've seen visitors click on an ad go through to Amazon not by that actual item, not the actual product, but by several other items. Some high priced items a swell on end up ordering hundreds of dollars worth off items from Amazon, and you get paid a percentage off that transaction. Whatever itches, whether that transaction is $20 or $1000. You're going to get paid a percentage of that now, although the percentages that you get paid per transaction are quite low because Amazon is a known entity has a lot of credibility. The conversions are high. They can be as high as one in three, so it could be as high as one in three. People that click on a not on your website and go through to Amazon actually make a purchase that is very high, but these are the kind of conversion rate so you can get as an Amazon associate. Now the commission's you are paid are called advertising fees. They've always called them advertising fees, and it can be a bit confusing. But in advertising fees, actually what you get paid, that's your commission. No. Some categories have their own individual fixed commission rate of 4% 2% 5% whatever but the majority of products that fall into the general categories. For example, home and garden kitchen pets, baby, all this kind of thing. You're going to get paid a percentage based on the volume of transactions, so based on your number of transactions in any month, so when you first get started on your block is quite new. You and you don't have a lot of traffic yet. Then it's very likely you'll only be getting paid 4%. So somebody buy something for $50. You're only going to make $2 on that. But that goes up, you see. So as soon as you've sold seven products, you're going to get pay 6%. Then it goes right up on the highest you can get. Paid is 8.5% Now. You need to be doing a lot of volume for that. That's not to say it can't be done. Many people do do it. Once you have an established blawg on, you've got a lot of traffic coming into it than these kind of figures are possible. So let's just take a look at what you would be earning on average if there are 100 items a month being purchased through visitors on your blawg clicking on your Amazon associate ad. So ads for products on Amazon on going to Amazon and making a purchase. Let's just say there are 100 items a month being sold through your block unless just say the average item price is $30 so that's $3000 worth off transactions going through your Amazon associate account per month on, you're going to get paid 6.5% of that, so you're going to get paid almost $200 a month. Now that's just a very rough guy, because I'm just taking $30. Ask the average price of an item anyhow. That's an extra couple of $100 a month that you wouldn't otherwise have, and you're not really doing very much for it. Once you sign up for your account is an Amazon associate. You'll be able to choose different types off products to advertise on your website different categories, and you can really find tune it quite well on really targeted to your blawg audience. So to the type of visitors that are coming to your blawg, and you also have lots of different tools that you can use us well. So lots of different tools that you can use to display these ads in the widgets in the widget content areas on your block, and there is also no the bounty program. So if somebody when they go to Amazon from your blog's if rather than just made purchases. They also sign up for something, so that could be like an Amazon credit card or wedding services or what? I have retails because Amazon has lots of different services known as well. So if they sign up for something like that, you also get paid a one time, usually a one time commission, for that. So I do recommend that you keep Amazon near the top of your list of choices for monetization options. All right, let's go on on. Look at the next option for making money on your blawg. 18. Digital Product Networks: Welcome back. Now in this lecture, we're going to look at digital product affiliate networks, so we're going to look at the top ones. There are many of them out there, but you do need to be a little bit careful on. I would recommend you stick with the top ones. The choices here are so large anyway that you're bound to be able to find plenty options and planted choices for what you need. No, the leader, as Faras Digital Product affiliate networks is concerned, is click bank. In fact, Click Bank also includes some physical products now as well. But for the main part is still, it is digital products there. When you come along to the Click Bank website, click on Affiliate Marketplace on, you'll be redirected to this more old fashioned looking website. But this is where we can get all the information that we need now in the menu. Here on the left, you can see all the categories on each category has its own sub categories. ID. Like to show you how to find the important data to so that you can decide whether or not a product is a good fit for your block audience on Be if it's something you want to promote, because is it going to pay you enough? Are there any tools available? So, for example, are there ready made banners available, that kind of thing. So let's just go ahead and click here under Green Products will just choose alternative energy on you should leave the search results sorted by popularity on right here. Average sale price. This is not your commission. This is the actual sales price. But what you can see here is that the commission is 75% which is pretty good now. Commissions are high, usually on digital products. For obvious reasons, there are no very well. There are overheads for the overheads of very low for the vendor for the seller, so commissions paid out can be very high. 75% is usually the highest you'll find, but it's not uncommon to see a 75% payout. Now this figure here 18.11 This is what we call the gravity on. This is something to pay attention to. The gravity tells us how many other affiliates have sold one of these products over the last week. So one at least, so maybe they could have sold 100. But it's the number of affiliates. So we know that 18 other affiliates have sold at least one off this product D I Y home energy system over the last week or so. No for this category, which is alternative energy, a gravity of 18.11%. So gravity of 18 is OK. There are some categories where you would like to see a gravity of over 50. I'll demonstrate that in a moment, but because this particular category, we're not really seeing any gravity's above that. So it's not a product that has a mass market place, which means that we're not going to see a high gravity. But if this is a product that is suitable for your blogger audience, so if this has got something to do with the subject of your blawg, then that's still good. Now this top one here, what we can see is we can see that there is an affiliate page. You want to go to the affiliate page to see what kind of tools might be available for you If you decide that you wanted to promote this product on your blawg. Now this is a video, but I just click to stop it playing. No. Over here you have some conversion rates and that kind of thing. You can't take too much notice of these conversion rates because it depends on the source off the conversion. So by that I mean, if you have a banner on your blogged advertising this product, it is not going to You're not going to get $2. For example, e p. C. That's earnings per click, not $2 e p c ward refer to, For example, if you had built up an email list over time off people who have expressed an interest in buying products in the green energy niche and you sent an email to that list with a link in an email to click through to the products the sales page. Then you might end up earning $2 per click, but you will not earn that from a banner on your website. All right, so these figures are always a little bit misleading. Nevertheless, the refund rate does apply because that doesn't matter which source the person bought the product. From that, a refund rate is going to apply so below 2% refund rate, which is excellent. We know this is a high quality product. Now you can make up to $148 per sale because there are what we call up cells on this product. And if we go back to the marketplace page, I'll show you where you can see that this little arrow here that means there is an up sell , so that means you could potentially make up $248.50 per sale on this. What we're looking for here are some Bonner's and that kind of thing. There aren't any on this page, but I can almost guarantee that this vendor this seller will have banners and tools. So if you decided you wanted to promote this product, you wanted to have a banner for this product on your blawg, you would need to probably sign up with the vendor onto their email list. Sign up below to receive free affiliate resources, e mails, banners, ads, alternative sales pages, images on a free training video. So there you go. So they've got all of these tools and resources, and I thought they Ward because this particular product here has bean on Click Bank for quite a while. It's a very popular product now, I said I wanted to show you something else regarding the gravity because, you know, we already decided that this gravity here of 18 with good for this particular category, which is green products. However, if we were going to sell in, for example, health and fitness on Let's see diets and weight loss always really, really popular on we've got much higher gravity's here. Gravity of 85 gravity of 240 ead gravity of 112 because many more affiliates are promoting these kind of products over on above promoting green energy products because this is a much , much bigger niche. It doesn't mean to say this is a better fit for you, or that you would make more money advertising these products on your website because it depends what you're blawg is about, but with a very popular high volume niche like weight loss, you would look for a gravity of over 50. Okay, so hope that helps you. And this is just a rough guide, by the way. So a gravity of over 50 for the very high volume popular categories on lower gravity's for the smaller, more specialized niches. So if you decide that you want to promote some of the click bank digital products on your block, you can just go ahead and create an account. It literally takes about three minutes to set up an account on. There is no approval procedure. You are instantly approved now. Another popular digital product network is pay dot com pay dot com is not in the same league as Click Bank, but it is still a good network, and it has been around for a long time. It's an established and trusted network just the same. So once you sign up for an account with pay dot com on again, it's an instant thing. There's no approval process. You could log in and click on promote products, and then you would choose from marketplace on. From there, you can choose products that the sellers and the vendors here on pei dot com, they don't tend to have many tools available so you won't find as many sellers here and vendors. Here you have ready made banners and everything ready for you to use to place on your website. All right. There is also this widget thing here. I really advise you against it. Let me see if I can show you why, right? What this widget does is you can choose a category on the which it will show the top recommended products in that category. And you can just, like, put a code on your website, and this widget will display. First. Thing is, you could only choose between these cats. Agrees. It's very broad. So, for example, the block that I set up a za training tool for this course is all about fiction. Now that would have to fall into fun and entertainment. But what kind of ads will be displayed on the widget on my website here? Because I don't get to choose which ones there could be anything that could be to do with anything to do with thunder and entertainment. I'm not all relevant to my audience. That's the first reason on the second reason is these witches They are so 19 nineties. Folks do not port this on your block. They just look terrible. So for those two reasons, don't use the widget. Forget about the widget. But you can still promote products from the marketplace by selective individual products on Dhere, the categories. But each category has lots and lots of sub categories as well. Okay, so that's pay dot com on Click Bank. On between these two, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of digital products to choose from, and you shouldn't need to go looking for any other digital product networks. So in the next lecture, we're going to look at networks that allow you to be an affiliate for physical products off a real tangible products. 19. Tangible Product Networks : all right. Now, in this lecture, we're going to look at the best affiliate networks. If you want to sell tangible products on, I advise that you do so tangible products. So even if you're selling digital products, you should always sell some tangible products as well. Now, even though commissions are substantially lower on tangible product, so physical products, the conversions air higher, so it is easier to get sales off tangible products. Now we've already looked at Amazon, so Amazon is obviously one of the big ones. But this network here, this is share a sale now share a sale, have been around for more than 15 years. It's a very trusted network, and you are able to promote products from all kinds of well known merchants. So you've got that credibility factor there as well, which helps to increase conversions and get you more sales. There are also many tools that you can make Use office well for displaying ads on your block so you would go up here on you were joined as an affiliate. If you want to before that, you can take a look around at some of the different merchants that are using share a sale to link up with people like US publishers or affiliates to promote their products on our websites. And if we just take a look at home and garden here, for example, you can see some of the featured merchants here on that one there look average order value of $250. So that means the average person who purchases from this website spends $250 you can earn up to 20% commission on that, which is excellent. And if we just take a look at tools available, you can see that there are banners and text links. Product links. You can also promote coupons and deals. Andi some off the merchants will even have videos that you can play on your blog's if you wish to do so, Jerry Sale pays monthly on its on the 20th of each month, so you're gonna get paid every month for the commission's that you've earned the month previous to that. Okay, so that share a sale for selling tangible products. Physical products aside from Amazon, this should definitely be one that you sign up for. So sign up here as an affiliate. Now, if you are in the health or the beauty Nietzsche tall, your blog's about that. You might want to take a look at market health. Market Health has been arrived for more than 10 years. I don't know exactly how long, but around about the middle, off to thousands around about 2005 I created to Blog's based arrived the products here on the mark in the Market Health Affiliate network. So it was two different niches. Now I sold those blocks. Later on, I sold those blocks 18 months later, both of those blog's made me money, but one of them was very successful very, very quickly. Now, although all the products in market health are physical, tangible products, they don't do any digital products. I've never seen any anyway. The commissions are pretty high, so you can get paid as much as 50% commission on a sale. Now, for example, one of the products I was promoting on my blawg it was $180 product and I was getting paid $90 a sale. Now I was averaging about 12 sales a month, all that one product alone so you can do very well with this affiliate network. If you are in this niche, which is health and beauty now, another great network is the recruiting network. This is not just physical products. It's digital products as well. On the fact this is the network that you, to me uses, and I arm registered with Riku turn specifically to use the U to me affiliate network there . There's a huge amount of offers inside. The way it works, though, is that you need to be accepted for an individual offer. So once you sign up with Rakuten, then you choose offers that you want to promote and you need to be accepted for those individual offers but providing your blocky set up. There's really no reason why you wouldn't be approved now with a lot of these networks when you register. First of all, when you're registering, you will be asked how many monthly visitors you have? No, its publisher sign up because we are publishers. We publish advertisers, banners or abs on our website. So we're publishers. So let me show you here, and I can give you a tip for how to do this. So is part of the sign up form. You're asked for some information about your website or your blawg I'm Part of that is how maney unique visitors a month on how many page views a month. If you're blawg, it's new. Then you may have less than 500 a month. Just put less than 500. But if you're on the verge of if you know that you're getting to 500. So if you're upset 300 you know it's increasing, then you go ahead and click on the 500 to 5000 because you know you're going to be there very, very soon. Page views per month. That's similar by the way you get this information from your tracking. So through Google analytics and Web master tools. That's telling you how many unique visitors on how many page views that you get so you can get that information there. But what if you have only just installed tracking? What if you didn't have tracking you still before you're going to have to just look at the figures, perhaps for the last week on. Then just try and estimate what you're getting per month, but because you're expected toe have some traffic coming to your website when you sign up for these affiliate networks, that's why it is a good idea not to monetize immediately. So start the traffic coming in, even if it's only a trickle of traffic. Get the traffic coming in before you actually start to monetize. Or it let me show you a couple of networks that are geared towards Europe. Because if you are in Europe, if your website your block audience is in, for example, the UK So if you're targeting a new audience in the UK, you don't want to put offers for physical products tangible products on your website from the United States. So this network Here's an ox dot com. This is focused towards Europe, and they have over 4000. Appetite is thoughts. No. 4000 offers its 4000 advertisers. Some of the advertisers have multiple offers, obviously, so there are thousands and thousands of office in here. Andan other reputable European network is focused on Europe is trade doubler trade. Dubler is not as big as Zan Ox. I think they have around 2000 maybe 2.5 1000 maybe even 3000 advertisers. But it's still a good network, so you could be that you want to sign up for both to give yourself more options. Share sale. They do have international offices well, so share a cell is not just the US, so you still want to go ahead and sign up and, you know, as an affiliate here on share a sale as well. Just give yourself a many options as possible so that you have a bigger choice, and it gives you a better chance of finding exactly what you want to promote. All right, we just covered networks that sell tangible products. But that is not the only way. Do be an affiliate for other people's products. Andi. There's another way that actually gives you a higher rate off commission on. We're going to cover that now in the next lecture. 20. Another Option Often Overlooked: All right, everybody, welcome back. Now I'm going to show you another way to find affiliate products to promote on your blawg on often. By doing this, you can cut out the network, which means that you get higher commission rates for a sale that's made so it is worth while doing this. Now, to demonstrate how it works, I picked five niches just off the top of my head on. I typed them into the Google search bar with the word affiliate program after it. Now, the results I get will be different. That the results you get because Google show me results relevant for where I'm searching from, which is Ireland. So this was a top result for musical instruments Affiliate program on its gear for music, don't I E Now, what is telling me here is that they run their program through 1/3 party. On one of those options is Trade Dubler Now, we looked at that in the last lecture, so we thought these guys are using a network on did, in order to use their affiliate program, promote their products. You apply through the network. So in this case, it doesn't really make a lot of difference. Next, I tried Furniture Affiliate program on the top result here, which is a love furniture dot e. On here is their affiliate program to sign up for Andi. It saves you earn 3% commission for every purchase. Now, 3% is not very high, but it's furniture. So therefore, the average purchase price, the average transaction price is going to be fairly high, so it's still worth it on. The next niche that I tried was Gulf Gulf affiliate programs on I clicked on the top result again. Gulf now dot i e. On. With this affiliate program, you get paid per round booked on that goes up to $2 per rhyme booked depending on how many rounds are booked. So that's kind of interesting if your blawg is about golf on the next teacher tried was pet Products Pet Products affiliate program and I clicked on this one here. This is the top result because this is a sponsored ads. So I clicked on this one here petco dot com on right here is their affiliate program own up to 10% For each sale you send to us. We carry unique and hard to find pet supply, so that would be pretty good. So you can simply click on join now on the last new show I typed into Google was Menswear affiliate program on this affiliate program here. This is most Bross are very, very well known company on. They have affiliate programs for Australia, Ireland on the UK Now, as I say when you take this into Google, you get different results because you'll get results more relevant to you to the country you are in when you're searching on Google. Free to join in high commissions, high conversion rates, regular discount codes on regularly updated banners. So you know this is pretty good if you're block audience, if this is the type of thing that would suit your blog's audience. Okay, so that's really just ah, quick demonstration to show you how you don't necessarily need to use the networks. Using the networks can be quicker because you can access hundreds or thousands even of offers very quickly. But at the same time, not all merchants so no, all advertisers use the networks. A lot of them have their own affiliate program. Now, one thing I advise you not to do is if I'm Merchant, so if you come across a product that you would really like to sell us an affiliate. But that particular merchant does no have an affiliate program. I would not advise you to contact them and ask them if they will pay you a commission for selling their products as an affiliate because there'll be no tracking in place or anything like that. And you just don't know if it's going to work out properly if you're going to get paid if they're going to keep track of things. So I wouldn't advise you to do that. But this pull anti planting merchants out there who do have affiliate program, so you should be able to find some really good offers to promote on your blawg, no matter what niece you're in, no matter what subject your blawg is about 21. Creating Banners for your Blog: Welcome back. Now in this lecture, we're going to look at how to get some banners or create banners for your blawg if you are using a merchant. So if you are using Seller, a vendor who doesn't have banners or the bonus that they are providing, you just don't like them, right? This does happen now. The easiest way to do this is to just head over to Fiverr. That's five or dot com on in the search bar, type in banner, out design or just Bonner design. Now, one of the things that fiver really excels for its really good for is any kind of design work. There are thousands of designers on here that are so talented, and it will cost you will $5 to have Obama created. So it's just have a look through it, sorted by average customer review. So we know that the most popular ones are at the top, and now all of these are four banners you can filter here if you want to, but I just clicked on some of these. I clicked on this one and a couple of other ones on here. We can find out how long we need toe. Wait. So this one has 24 orders in the queue, and you need to wait six days on average. But that's usually okay. They have over 5000 reviews. And look, it's a five star, so they're doing really well. It's good quality. You can look at some of the examples off their work right here on. You can see right away that they do have really good quality work. Now you can. Usually they have an option yet extra fast delivery. But look, guys, that's expensive. It's $20. That's 18 euro. That's $20 to have it delivered extra fast. So if you are in a really big hurry, you could always do that. But I don't recommend it. Just call for the normal What they say here. Now, this is six days, but then all six days, this is another one here. This is only three days on average. Again, this has over 5000 reviews on obviously really good reviews that we've got full five stars there. So look at this one here. This is an excellent banner. They've got some really great stuff. So many really good designers here on Fiverr on one more here. I took a look out on this. In fact, they don't have a time frame up here because down here, it takes or one day. So if you're ordering just one banner the basic package one Bonner, one design, and it just takes one day. So this one's very quick. Andi. They have a less reviews. But still, you know, almost 1000 refuse and five stars again. No. The thing you do have to do here is you have to be very clear with your instructions. So you can't just leave it up to the fiver seller. They're not psychic. They don't know what you want. So you do need to get in some pretty clear instructions. Andi, you know, don't expect them to go and look at your website and decide what kind of design would fate . They're only getting paid $5. They're not getting paid to do that. So you need to give them. Tell them what colors you want on your banner. You need to tell them what text you want on your banner. What kind of image you want on your banner? You need to be a specific as you possibly can. Now a lot of them include revisions. So a lot of them will say that they will, you know, do one or two revisions for you, but they don't all say that. So they don't all offer revisions, but I lost them. Do offer revisions. All right, now, that's fiver. If you want to create your own banner, you have a number of options now. Can ver is very popular. It's free, but it is a little bit limited because you're limited to their templates. So however many templates are available, which I think it's around 100. That's what you're limited to. 100 sounds a lot, but you might not find what you want. The color schemes might be wrong. You just might not be able to find what you want. They have some photos images in there that you can use on the bonus when you're using the banner creator. But again, you might not find what you want. If that's the case, you can use ah website called picks Obey. I'm going to put all this by the way into a pdf with this lecture. So I'm going to put these all these you are Els and things that you need into a Pdf Now picks. Obey is a website where you can get lots of great free images. Andi, you can upload some of those while you're creating your banner to use those in your banner creation. So that's another option. But it is a limited option. Now. Another free option is gimp. Now, gimp is like the free version of photo shop, but it obviously isn't as gorgeous photo shop, but it's still really good image creation and image editing software. There is obviously a learning curve to do this. Now this is the dime side. If you don't want to spend time learning this, then you have to use something like Fiverr or, you know, try Converse, even get something to come out looking good there. If no and fiver would be your your choice, you don't want to be wasting a lot of time learning how to do something. If this is all brand new to do, it would take you a while for certain. Do you create just one batter until you get the hang of it Now the one I used before I have Photoshopped, so it's a few years back now I used paint dot net again. There's a learning curve to go with pain dot net, But I think that learning curve might be just a little bit less than the learning curve with gimp. So you might want to take a look of pain dot net. And if you want to download that, you download it here. Not here. These air ads for something else. You download it right here from this link here. So it's, ah, program that, as I say, you do need to learn. If you don't want to spend any time learning anything at all, then use fiver for any bonus that you need created. But with most of the things you're going to promote on your website, you're going to have banners which are going to be good enough on. This is just for if you have something that you want to promote, there's no banner or the banners are just you don't like them. They just don't fit in a tall with your website. Perhaps that does happen sometimes, So these are your options 22. Linking Banners to an Affiliate Product: All right. So you've got your banner from fiver or you've made when yourself Maybe using can ver or gim poor one of the other free image editing an image creating software programs. How do you now link that banner to the affiliate product you want to promote? Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to upload the bomber to your WordPress blawg. So just log in on go over to Media Onda, add new. I'm just upload the images you would normally do. Click on here to get the U. R l for the image. You just stop loaded on pace out onto a note, part of text file, and you will also need your affiliate link. So the link that you have got from the merchant or the affiliate network that is coded to you I means that you will be credited for the sale when somebody clicks on your banner ad and then subsequently makes a purchase. So right here I have just taken a link from Amazon. That's not an affiliate link. That is just a link I've taken from Amazon just to use to show you how we do this now, the key is this little bit of coach down here on. I'm going to give you this on a pdf file. But all we do is we take the You are Elvis. The affiliate links. So this is our affiliate Link on. We enter that between the 1st 2 sets of parenthesis and then take the U. R l for the banner image. We just stopped loaded. Enter that between the 2nd 2 sets of parenthesis. I'm last of all. We want to give our image some alternative text, some all text for people who are not able to load the image upon their device or for people who are visually impaired on did. They are using text to speak software. So right here between the last two sets of parentheses, we can enter a description on this is a Amazon gift card. Right now this year. Now this the code that we're going to put into a content areas or widget on our website wherever we want this banner to appear. So I'm gonna go ahead to the customized section off my theme here. I'm going to open up the widgets. Andi, I think I'll just put this Bonner in the right side bar, so I already got a few, which it's in there already. I went to art warn. I'm just going to add a text widget. That's how we do this. I'm gonna move up at the top for now, just to make it easier to see nothing in the title on in the content, I'm going to paste the code. So this is the code here that we created when I click, save and publish. And now I'm gonna go to my blogger. I'll need to refresh it. I'm not gonna take a look for this. Bonner on here. It's his is live. Click on it on. There we go. We've been redirected to the link I put in, which is Amazon gift registry. So that's it is very simple. Andi, I'll give you that bit of code on a pdf along with a couple of examples as well. So I'm just gonna go ahead now and I'm going to remove this, But I'll just remove this widget click save again. Okay, so that's how you add a banner on That's how you link it to the affiliate product page using your affiliate link on just to clarify when you're using banners that are provided by the merchant so provided by the seller on Duran affiliate for that merchant, not cellar the bonus that you're provided with they will include the codes so you'll be getting the code. So you want me to create a code the way that I've just showed you how to do it. This is only for if you create some, banish yourself or you have banners created somewhere else, for example, over a fiver. 23. Customizing Banners: Hello, everybody. I wanted to make this extra lecture to show you how to customise banners and images on your blawg to make them fit in with the theme so they look well like this. If you notice how I've managed to get these old uniforms, they're all lined up. Same with these here now. They weren't like thought when I uploaded the images. First of all, the images were the right size is exactly so. Therefore, they were kind of all over the place and they weren't matching up. This one was not over and longer. And this one was wider on the same with this bomb. This one was too narrow. So how I did this is really quite simple. I'm in the theme customization area off my where Press out mean dashboard. Now, this particular theme here is called Qala Mac. It's the theme that I use in the level one course where I teach students how to build a blogger from the ground up. This is the theme. I use color markets free theme on within the customization area off the theme. If we just go to widgets on defy, choose the witches area that contains thes two images here, which is the front page area beside the slider. Just open it up here Now, this code here, This is just the code that we used in the last lecture when we were looking at linking images what we were looking at, adding banners on linking them through to a destination place so that could be Andi would often be do an affiliate product page. But you may just want to link to another page or a post on your own block. It really doesn't matter. It's the exact same code. Now this looks like a lot of code because there are, too Boehner's or two images here in this widget on. In fact, this top one is linked to oppose, so it goes to opposed, and this bottom one has not yet been linked to anywhere. If I let me show you this one down here because that's going to be easier, because there's a lot of code in this one. So this is the front page content top section. Let's open this one up. Okay, now, this is easier for you to see. Now I am creating this particular lecture in ah, lower screen resolution, then I normally would when I'm showing something like this, because it's important that you can see the entire screen. So if you're on a mobile device, you might have to enlarge this so you can see exactly what I'm doing it about. Maybe I'll just bring up her note pad as well. In a minute. Just still, you can see really well. So this code here relates to this particular image or banner here, whether it's an image of whether it's a banner linking to somewhere, it's irrelevant for this. I'm just going to show you how to get the sizing right. So all matches on the page. So if we take a look at the code, let me bring up a note part. And I'll just take this code here. No, this is the coaches pasted onto a note part. Hopefully, this is helping you to see it better, but right here, you'll see that's an extra bitch in the code with equals 799 Now that's pixels. If I change this number here, that's going to change the size off this image. So let's do that and see what happens. Let's change it from 799 to 500. And look what's happened. The image is now completely the wrong size. Now, in order to get it the right side service the wrong size to begin with, To get it the right size, you have to experiment a bit. So I had to experiment a little bit with number that I put in here. So this number here, I had to experiment a little bit with it in order to get the sizing right. So, really, all you need to do is at this little bit of code here, and you add it before the old text before the alternative text on, just by adding with vehicles and then entering a number here that showed resize the actual image. Now, if it doesn't resize the image so if that doesn't work, if nothing happens when you just enter with equals and then a number on don't forget to put the parentheses in. Then you may need to enter the height as well. And you just do that like this. So all I've done now is I've added with equals on then height equals Now this is pixels, but you don't need to enter that you just enter the number on the parentheses, but you must have the equal Sinus well, So don't forget that it doesn't really matter if there's a space after or before the equal sign in HTML. That is irrelevant as long as you don't miss out any off the parts of the actual coding itself. So if by entering with equals parentheses and then the number and then close parentheses, if that doesn't change the size off the image, then try entering the height as well. Now, with this theme and with a lot of themes just by entering the Web, that resize is the image or the banner Andi. It keeps the perspective, so it keeps the dimension perspective. But if your theme doesn't do that, then simply also add the height Andi experiment until you get it exactly the way you want it on the page. I'm just going to change this back to what it was before, which was 799 The page just automatically refreshes, and now you can see the image has gone back to what it was before, and it now matches and fits in with the rest of the page. Now, when you've made a change. Every time you make a change, don't forget to hit, save, unpublished and then you can come out of the customization area on that, is it, folks? It's really very simple to customize the images on your page, but if you don't know how to do, it could be a bit frustrating. You think you've got to resize the images and keep changing the size of the images before you upload them. You don't need to do that. You can do that all in the customization area on get them looking just the way you want them to look on the page.