Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner
UPDATE: A new (2019) version of this article about WordPress plugins is available.
Below is a list of my most frequently used WordPress plugins, along with descriptions of how I use them and links to examples in some cases.
The name of each plugin is linked to its download page (each link opens a new window).
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Yanik Silver shares how – in only a few short months – he achieved the ultimate Internet “fantasy” of making a lot of money from a simple (almost primitive) web site that runs itself virtually on complete autopilot.
In only a few short months I achieved the ultimate Internet “fantasy” of making a lot of money from a simple (almost primitive) web site that runs itself virtually on complete autopilot. Starting from scratch I banked over $51,351.94 my first 6 1/2 months online, just working part- time out of the corner of my living room.
Now today at age 31, I've gone on to earn over 7-figures.
How did I go from a standing start to banking mega profits?
To do that, what I think you really need are these inner secrets to mega internet success. This has nothing to do with search engines, pay-per-clicks. It doesn't have anything to do with any of the tactical stuff. It's all a lot of stuff that goes on in your head.
One of my biggest mentors is Earl Nightingale. He passed away several years ago but you need to get everything he recorded at Nightingale.com. He has a program called “Lead The Field” and “The Strangest Secret.” Just listen to that thing over and over again. He talks about cheerful expectancy.
There's a big difference between having expectancy versus hoping or wishing something is going to occur. When you have that cheerful expectancy, you know it's going to occur. And that doesn't just come from being “Pollyannaish” or having rose-colored glasses.
It comes from having knowledge. And you get that knowledge from studying in your field whatever it is. It could be Internet marketing or it could be neurology. That means reading, studying and buying everything and absolutely immersing yourself in it.
I learned from Earl Nightingale that if you want to be an expert, you spend an hour a day reading on whatever subject that you're interested in, that you want to be an expert on. So I said, “Well, what would happen if I read for three hours a day?”
I just started learning as much as I possibly could, and that knowledge gives you the confidence to know that you have that positive expectancy. Your expectations determine your results.
You don't need to do 100 things a day. Just get that one proactive thing a day. So each little brick builds a big wall for you. Trust me it's easy to be overwhelmed with hundreds of tasks. You're like, “Oh, we need to do e-zine ads and free-for-alls and pay-per-click search engines, and I need to do all this other stuff.” Ahhhhhhhhhhh!
But just relax and do one task a day.
Your action will create more and more and more action for you. You simply need to make a commitment to do one proactive thing a day no matter what. Even if you're dead tired and worked a 14-hour day – come home and mail one letter or send out one joint venture proposal. I'm telling you – just these little tiny proactive things will have an immense impact.
Most everyone has heard of the '80/20 rule' or the Pareto Principle. It says that 20% of your actions produce 80% of your results, and the other way around. 80% of your work only creates 20% of your results.
So go back and look where your successes came from, and I know that they're from a tiny little group of actions. So if you just get that one proactive thing a day (from the 20% group) that is going to propel you further, that's going to bring you to where you want to be.
Make it a point to focus on those “20% activities”. In Stephen Covey's famous work “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” he calls these activities “important but not urgent”.
One of my Apprentices, Peter Woodhead, from the UK is a perfect example of simply doing one proactive thing a day. A lot of Apprentices bolted out of the gate during our one year program but Peter was an Internet newbie and he also had a full time job so he was a bit slower getting started. However, he took my advice and simply managed to do one proactive thing every single day. No matter how big or how small. It could be writing one autoresponder message or it might have been writing 50 headlines. No matter the day – Peter was moving ahead. And not surprisingly his project was completed before many of the other Apprentices were finished.
This is such a big point. A lot of people have so many problems with decision. That's because they don't like it because it cuts off other options. But frankly that's exactly what you want. You want to cut off other options.
One of our top apprentices, Cindy Kappler, WebAdMagic.com, had no other option but to succeed because she quit her job. Now I'm not encouraging you to do that if you still have a real job but it does prove if you cut off your options, you're much more motivated. Successful people make decisions quickly.
There's a magic of attraction when you make your decision. However, when you're hemming and hawing, you don't experience this magic. I don't want to get into too much woo-woo or metaphysical or spiritual stuff.
But there's this magic of attraction. I can't even explain it. When you set your mind up that you're going to do this, all of a sudden, at the next dinner party you're attending you meet somebody that can help you get to where you want to go. Is that luck or is that something else?
I don't think it's luck.
It's like once the decision is made your mind is tuned into the solution and all kinds of ‘freaky' coincidences and occurrences happen.
And that brings me to another important point about decisions – fail quickly. Don't be afraid of failure. A lot of people are so afraid of screwing up, or making a mistake that they are forever frozen. Who the hell cares? Screw up quickly! I screw up all the time. And you want to fail quickly.
That's the great part about the Internet. You want to go out there and find out if your dumb idea is going to work right away. You can do it in days instead of months. Sometimes hours and if it doesn't work, you move on. You say, “Next!”
Look, I know a lot of people who are working on their products for the last two, three, four years. Get the damned thing out! You just make it better as you go along.
InstantSalesLetters.com, our first product was not where it is now. We've added a ton of stuff to it and made it better. But I just wanted to see if the thing was going to sell.
It wasn't complete and utter rubbish, as my British friends say, but it was enough that it made the point. It found out if there was a marketplace for it. So find out.
Some people like to go around at dinner parties and so on and say, “I'm writing a book. I've been writing a book for five years. I'm an author.”
Uh huh…
I can show you 6 different ways to have your book done in days. It's a cop-out and complete B.S. Bottom line – make the decision to get the product out there. See what happens and fail quickly.
Now get out there and do it!
(c) Surefire Marketing, Inc. Yanik Silver is recognized as the leading expert on creating automatic, moneymaking websites…and he still doesn't know how to put up a website.
He is the author, co-author or creator of several best-selling online marketing books and tools, including his quickest and easiest way to create a product to sell – Public Domain Riches
Yanik's latest ‘baby' is Maverick Business Adventures and the Maverick Business Insider. Visit the site to see which ‘rules' he used to achieve financial independence and become a millionaire before turning 31.
Today's guest post is by Jeffrey Wood and deals with a topic few of us even bother to consider – but is essential to achieving maximum productivity from the work we do. Read it and enjoy ~ Ros
This often is in reference to things like being organized before you start, setting up your work area, figuring out ways to not rely on brute strength, etc.
For Internet Marketers “Working smarter not harder” is sometimes used for outsourcing certain tasks or doing your research before entering a market or by using existing tools instead of reinventing the wheel.
Today though I'm looking at it in a different sense.
I'm talking about working with your natural biorhythms instead of against them. Sounds kinda like some whacky new age thing, doesn't it?
Here's what I mean: I am a night owl by nature and over the years this has been reaffirmed every day off I've ever had. I like staying up late, but not all night and I like sleeping in, but not all day.
In fact, swing shift would be the ideal working hours for me if it wasn't for one teeny tiny issue…I hate working those hours.
I once had over a month off due to an injury. “Aha”, I thought to myself, “I'll have so much time to work on my internet business.” I daydreamed of all the things I'd get done. Yeah right, didn't happen.
During the daytime, the time most people think they'd be the most productive were actually the LEAST productive hours for me. I'd be (and still am) distracted by e-mail, noise, snack attacks, Twitter and just about everything else you can imagine. I just couldn't focus for very long.
Oh sure, most of it was related to work, there's always a blog post from an expert to read, a resource they mention to check out, the occasional news headline that the Great Plague was caused by flying monkeys, etc. There's nothing like being Productively Unproductive.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, “Well, all you had to do was to not turn on your e-mail, Twitter, or those other things until you got your blog post written or a message added to your autoresponder, or whatever else you had to do.”
Great in theory, but that didn't matter, I still couldn't focus. The daytime is the perfect time for me to check Twitter, check e-mails, make phone calls and things, but it's horrible for just about everything else.
I work better and am more focused, either in the early morning or late night. Here it is at 5:30 am and I am very focused, very undistracted, very productive, but in a couple of hours that will change.
This is what I mean when I say work smarter not harder by working with your body instead of against it. I know the times I am most productive at certain tasks, so even though I have all day and could have (would have loved to) sleep in, I got up at 5am so I could be focused and productive doing the things I need to do to add content to my sites.
Now if you only have 5pm to 6:15pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays to work on your internet business, then you don't have a choice, you MUST figure out how to work very focused during those times. Use Tuesday to prepare and Thursday to execute the plan OR divide up the time however you need to.
But when you do have the time on a day off or vacation or whatever, work with your body whenever you can. I can happily spend 10 hours planted on my rear end on the computer working, but I still know when I'm going to be able to work at my best at certain tasks.
Figure out when you are at your best and work with it. The time you spend on a task may be cut down, but you may find ironically that your productivity goes up.
And that my friend, is one way to work smarter not harder and now I must go, for the Twitter, it calls to me.
To sweeten the pot, affiliates could win an XBox or a collection of cool videos that included “Dumb and Dumber”. (Oh goodie!)
Oh… and the email addressed me a ‘dude',Ă‚Â as have so many others that I've received in the past year or so.
If you don't see the humor in that, let me share something with you — I am a woman fast approaching the big 5-0H.
If you have, you might recall the ‘what planet are you from?' look she gave you.
That's because we hear the word “dude” according to its original meaning (and official definition as per the Oxford English Dictionary) – an American slang term which refers to men – despite the fact that Wikipedia states that the word “dude” has evolved to become more unisex.
Or, are you thinking “go with the flow, dude”?
I could, but your unisex argument completely fails with the ‘grow a pair' remark and toys for boys prizes — and having seen “Dumb and Dumber” once is more than sufficient.
I know that the vast majority of affiliates on your JV partner list are young men like yourself. You want to motivate them to promote for you and challenging them in a manly way really gets their juices flowing… especially the drool over the prospect of winning a toy with which to play.
If that's the case, consider this…
The market in which you play is HUGE, appealing to all regardless of race, creed, color, age or gender. By encouraging sales by a specific demographic who might take your tack and appeal to the same demographic, you might be limiting availability of your product to a smaller, less affluent market.
When you exclude one or more Super Affiliates with wider audiences, you could be tossing 10% or more of your possible revenues. Ten percent of 50K will get you a BOSE(R) Lifestyle Home Entertainment System or all the Xbox goodies your little heart desires. And 10% of half a mill is what — a downpayment on a house?
Take tips from the copywriting giants, such as Dan Kennedy, Yanik Silver and Joe Vitale — guys who know how to make each reader feel like the email copy was written just for them.
Or check out this great little ebook “Confessions of a Copywriter” by Lenny Eng and endorsed by Joe Vitale. One of Lenny's points is that “Nothing increases conversions like your offer”… and when you send a JV invite, you're making an OFFER.
I was out playing in my garden one afternoon when the realization suddenly hit me that I was way behind on writing & queuing up new content for one of my affiliate sites.
Two hours later (while I was still pulling Lombardy poplar suckers), the image of checks in the mailbox finally caused me to drag my butt away from the garden and into my office.
After spending the next 2 hours skimming/deleting emails, and perusing a few dozen websites – I had to wonder where my self-discipline had run off too.
Fortunately, allĂ‚Â I had to do to muster the reserves was to re-read an article by one of my long-time mentors, Brian Tracy. I include it here just in case you find yourself a little short on self-discipline — and if that doesn't quite do the trick, you can avail yourself of Brian's ‘The Miracle of Self-Discipline course on CD or MP3.
Self-Discipline for Success
by Brian Tracy
There is one special quality that you can develop that will guarantee you greater success, accomplishment and happiness in life. Of a thousand principles for success developed over the ages, this one quality or practice will do more to assure that you accomplish wonderful things with your life than anything else. This quality is so important that, if you don't develop it to a high degree, it is impossible for you to ever achieve what you are truly capable of achieving.
The quality that I am talking about is the quality of self-discipline. It is a habit, a practice, a philosophy and a way of living. All successful men and women are highly disciplined in the important work that they do. All unsuccessful men and women are undisciplined and unable to control their behaviors and their appetites. And when you develop the same levels of high, personal discipline possessed by the most successful people in our society, you will very soon begin to achieve the same results that they do.
All great success in life is preceded by long, sustained periods of focused effort on a single goal, the most important goal, with the determination to stay with it until it is complete. Throughout history, we find that every man or woman who achieved anything lasting and worthwhile, had engaged in long, often unappreciated hours, weeks, months and even years of concentrated, disciplined work, in a particular direction.
Fortunately, the quality of self-discipline is something that you can learn by continuous practice, over and over, until you master it. Once you have mastered the ability to delay gratification, the ability to discipline yourself to keep your attention focused on the most important task in front of you, there is virtually no goal that you cannot accomplish and no task that you cannot complete.
Successful people engage in activities that are goal-achieving. Unsuccessful people engage in activities that are tension-reliving. Successful people discipline themselves to have dinner before dessert. Unsuccessful people prefer to have dessert most of the time.
Successful people plan their work, and work their plan. They take the time to think through their responsibilities before they begin. They make clear decisions which they then implement immediately. They get a lot more done in a shorter period of time than the average person. And it all has to do with their disciplines.
Perhaps the most important benefit of self-discipline is the personal benefit that you receive. Every act of self-discipline increases your self-esteem. It gives you a feeling of personal power and accomplishment. Each time you discipline yourself to persist in the face of distractions, diversions, and disappointments, you feel better about yourself. As you continue to discipline yourself, you achieve more and more in life. As you achieve more things, you feel more like a winner. Your self-confidence goes up. You feel happier about yourself. You get more done and you have more energy. You earn the respect and esteem of the people around you. You get more rapid promotions and are paid more money. You live in a nicer house, drive a nicer car, and wear nicer clothes. You get a natural high from the thrill of achievement. And the more things that you achieve as the result of employing your personal habits of effectiveness and productivity, the more eager you are to achieve even higher and better tasks. Your life gets onto an upward spiral of success and happiness. You feel great about yourself most of the time.
Every act of self-discipline strengthens every other discipline in your life. Every weakness of self-discipline weakens your other disciplines as well. When you make a habit of disciplining yourself in little things, like flossing your teeth every night, you'll soon become able to discipline yourself to accomplish even larger things, like working long, long hours to bring a major task to completion.
Your entire life is an on-going battle between the forces of doing what is right and necessary on the one hand and doing what is fun and easy on the other hand. It is a battle between the forces of discipline and the forces of ease or expediency. And when you develop the strength of character that gives you complete self-mastery, self-control and self-discipline, you feel wonderful about yourself. You develop a deep inner sense of strength and confidence. You replace positive thinking with positive knowing. You reach the point inside where you absolutely know that you can do whatever it takes to achieve any goal that you can set for yourself.
Self-discipline is its own reward. Not only does it pay off in terms of greater self-esteem and a more positive mental attitude, but it pays off throughout your life in terms of the goals that you achieve and the success that you attain in everything you do.
Self-discipline is a skill and a habit that can be learned by practice. Every time you practice a little self-discipline, you become stronger and stronger. Bit by bit, you become more capable of even greater disciplines. As you become a totally self-disciplined individual, your entire future opens up in front of you like a broad highway. Everything becomes possible for you and your future becomes unlimited.
Accomplish more in a month than most people accomplish in a year. Take complete control of your life.
Learn how to apply Self-Discipline to: Goal Setting; Time Management; Health Habits; Relationships; Sales; Business Operations; Physical Fitness; Personal Development; Negotiating; Communications; Character Development; and many other areas.
Get more done today! Check out Brian Tracy's “Miracle of Self-Discipline”.
Did you find this post informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question or suggestion, please post it below!
Cheers,
I'll be speaking at Affiliate Summit West at the Rio in Las Vegas in a session with Jeremy Palmer, called “Video: Biggest Affiliate Marketing Opportunity Since Google“.
The session will take place on Sunday, January 17 at 3:00 PM (15:00). You can see this presentation with a Gold Pass… you don't need a Platinum Pass.
Jeremy and I are both excited to present together again and to help you discover the secrets of affiliate video promotion. You'll learn how to increase your traffic and conversions by leveraging some of the most popular video sites.
Sign up now to attend Affiliate Summit, taking place January 17 – 19 at the Rio in Las Vegas. Early bird rates end on October 19th. (The price of a Gold Pass increases by $270 on October 20th, so don't wait to register!)
I've often been asked the question “What would you do (differently) if you were starting your affiliate marketing business over from scratch today?”
In thinking about the answer, I realize that there isn't much I'd change about my approach to doing business on the Internet, i.e. I would still seek out high-quality products to promote as an affiliate, write honest product reviews and build a subscriber list to enhance relationships with my site visitors.
Those age-old business strategies have proven over and over again to build trust and credibility with potential customers — which in turn increases conversion rates, sales and your bottom line.
As such, I would also continue to build sites around a specific topic filled with valuable content and an array of product options from which my visitors can choose, rather than a mini-site focused on a single product.
I'd still choose to work with topics in which I'm truly interested that have large groups of people with obvious problems (large target markets) that can be solved by products available online through affiliate programs.
Instead of dating, I'd opt instead for a smaller niche within that market that serves a geographic region or caters to a specific group or ethnicity such as Russian women (mail order brides), black singles or disabled singles.
Although the reason for that is in small part due to increased competition and pay per click advertising prices, the main factor is that there are now so many more forums and social media sites catering to more narrowly focused topics – from which you can get free traffic.
For instance, if my topic was German Shepherds, I'd find out where German Shepherd lovers hang out online and start building relationships with those people by leaving helpful tips and comments on related forums, blogs, groups and social networks. Each comment would be linked back to my site. To find those people I would add terms like “forums, groups, meetup, club” to my Google search for “German Shepherd”.
I would use Facebook and Twitter accounts to deliver my messages (blog posts, articles, product reviews)Ă‚Â to a wider audience, using services such as TwitterFeed.
Based on my avid interest, I would likely have a supply of photographs to upload to a Flickr account specifically dedicated to the topic.
Each photo would be tagged with the term “German Shepherd” and relevant descriptors such as “puppy” or “training” and photo descriptions would also be linked to specific information on my site. Both tagging and linked descriptions are good methods to generate free traffic.
Site building is now SO much easier.
All my sites are currently WordPress blogs and that's what I'd choose to start any new site — the main reason for which is again the ability to generate free search engine traffic in a way that just wasn't possible prior to blog technology.
With all the free traffic that can be generated through blogging and social media marketing, I would be much less likely to try and ‘jump-start' the traffic flow with pay per click advertising. I would still use PPC to market the site, but would wait for initial traffic to access conversions and make modifications prior to investing in paid advertising.
Too, rather than hunt and pick through free themes, I'd buy a WordPress theme to give the blog a professional look from the outset. Using a professional theme saves time. More importantly, those affiliate managers who might be reviewing your site prior to approving your affiliate application are going to have a much better first impression of your site. Of course, I'd also use stock photography outlets to improve the look of the site even more.
Lastly, I would be more amenable to buying a PLR (private label rights) article pack to build my core articles and outsourcing substantial rewrites of those articles. That way I'd have more time to concentrate on writing reviews for those products that are intended best to serve my customers' needs.
In summary therefore, the biggest changes I would make if I was starting my affiliate business today would be to outsource design and writing tasks in order to spend more time on social media marketing in the pursuit of free traffic and enhanced relationships with potential customers.
Want to learn more about how to become an affiliate marketer? Join my multi-media affiliate training program, Affiliate Blogger PRO. You'll get written and video tutorials, site reviews and connect with me (Ros) and other members on our Community Forums when you have questions.
