Blogging for Newbies: Basic Tips – CJ Affiliate Links

Background.  If you’ve just discovered this site, we’ve been building a couple of websites from scratch as a tutorial for mom and pop businesses and other Internet newcomers.  Elaine and Laura, the site owners who own the examples, have never had a website or blog before.  They are truly newbies. We’ve added optimized blogs to both sites that are sucking in a great deal of search engine activity.  There is a step-by-step guide on installing a Wordpress blog and optimizing it that was posted in January.  You can access it by clicking the “blogging” tag in the tags menu in the right hand column or just clicking the link above.  You’ll see the best (and free) optimized Wordpress blog software online, how to FTP your blogging code, how to set up your mySQL database and how to adjust templates.  If you’re installing a Wordpress blog, I highly recommend that you use Jeff Johnson’s free SEO blog software — and update it using the plugins that I recommended in the blog installation tutorials.

Adding Products to a Blog Article.

Our brand new bloggers aren’t sure yet how to add affiliate links to their blog posts.  This is an important concern because to make money on the Internet, they each need to monetize their sites beyond Adsense by displaying and reviewing products for sale.

Commission Junction Affiliate Links.

Today, we’ll do a basic example using Commission Junction, which is an affiliate manager that is free to join.  Remember — this is basic stuff.  I fully understand that you can use data feeds and other affiliate marketing methods, which I do  on my own sites.  We’re working with the basics at this point.

Elaine writes some great articles at her site, Antiquing with Deco Diva.  I’ve been learning things as I help her out.  She has a wonderful ability to hone in on the human interest angle of antiques and collectibles.  She recently wrote about the country’s longest yard sale, which stretches over 600 miles long.  Here’s a snapshot of the article before we added products.  It was a paragraph that was an interesting read but not monetized other than Adsense.

Find a Relevant Product; Break Up the Article So It’s Easier to Digest.

At the end of the original article, Elaine talks about some of the cool stuff she purchased at the event.  One of many “finds” that Elaine discovered was Betty Boop memorabilia.  I thought this would make a fun affiliate program to promote.

I chopped up Elaine’s article so it was a bit faster to read, added in some bolded titles since web visitors want to read quickly, and then worked in a paragraph about Betty Boop at the end of the article.  In my rewrite, the keyword, Betty Boop, is bolded as a title so it has some weight in the search engines.

NOTE:  If you are working along with this tutorial, you might want to have multiple tabs or windows of your browser open so you can easily switch back and forth between CJ, Google and your blog’s dashboard.

Run a Product Search and Join the Relevant Programs.

In order to monetize the article, the first thing I did was to log into CJ and searched for Betty Boop.  A number of products came up, so I had Elaine join up as an affiliate of the company that sells Betty Boop products.  Some companies will approve you right away after you agree to their terms and conditions; others will manually review your website and make a decision.  Fortunately, the company selling Betty Boop figures had an automatic approval process.  As you can see from the screen shot below, the Betty Boop items are reasonably priced, which is nice to know in terms of writing the new content about the product.

Find Relevant Google Keywords.

To determine which Betty Boop merchandise should be advertised on Elaine’s blog and to figure out what words to use to describe those products, I then visited Google and searched for Betty Boop.  As you will see in the screen shot below, there are some green buttons called “View Keywords” that appear in the advertised search results.  This came from the free software I wrote about last week called PPC Web Spy, which will cut your keyword research time in half … maybe more.  While there is an upgraded version available, the basic software is free and will help you out quite a bit.

I clicked the “View Keywords” on one of the advertisers and was able to see at a glance what keywords were being used in Adwords (if you are monetizing your site with Adsense, it will give you an idea of how much you might get paid per click).

I decided to fine tune this a bit more and used the software to suggest more keywords for the phrase, Betty Boop.

The software directed me to Google’s external keyword tool (discussed here) which saved a whole bunch of time in having to find the right Google tool to use.

In the screen shot below, I toggled the results that Google delivered so I could see the lowest volume of searches to the highest.  The term “Betty Boop” had over 670,000 searches a month.  This is a bit too competitive for Elaine’s brand new site, so I chose “Betty Boop figures” which has 480 searches a month and also worked in the word “gifts,” since “Betty Boop gift” has 320 searche a month.

With the keyword, “Betty Boop figure” in mind, I chose the CJ product called “Betty Boop 18-Inch Action Figure.”

How to Copy and Paste the Affiliate Code Into Your Blog.

You’ll see that it’s easy to get copy and paste linking codes for your CJ products.  All I did was click the link, “Get HTML.”

After clicking the “Get HTML” link, a pop-up window appeared.  I made sure the right website appeared in the tracking code, and clicked all of the parameters (including the hide tracking code, which doesn’t show in the screen shot below).  Be sure to click the “Update Link Code” button after you have checked all of the options that you want.

For first timers not familiar with HTML coding, you want to get the code that is immediately below the “Image URL” code.  More advanced users might want to break up their affiliate posts, but for the beginner, go with the first block of code.  All you have to do is click the button that reads, “Highlight/Copy Code” and everything will be copied into your computer’s clipboard.

Next, go back to your blog and paste the code into your article where you want it to appear.  When pasting in code, be sure to be in the “HTML” mode instead of the “Visual Mode.”

I added another product to Elaine’s post, and then decided to wrap up her article with a general review of the company that is selling the Betty Boop memorabilia.  If you are looking for linking codes, chose the “By Relationship” option in CJ to get a list of all of the advertisers who have approved your site as an affiliate.

Company, Not Product-Specific, Codes.

You will do a lot better by promoting and talking about specific products in your blog.  However, there are instances where you might want to promote the company as well.  We did that in Elaine’s post.  As a general rule of thumb, however, just pasting in a bunch of company banners without writing about the company and why it’s worth visiting is not going to do you much good.

Select the advertiser for general link codes.  You can get banners, as shown below.  All you need to do is click the “Get HTML” like you did for the products above and you’ll have everything you need to insert a banner into your blog post.

Most advertisers have text link options as well, as shown in the screen shot below.  Again, click the “Get HTML” that will be on the right hand side of the screen and copy/paste the code.

I added two products, plus a general review of the advertiser who is selling the Betty Boop products.  Here’s a partial shot of the revised article.

You can see the full rewrite that incorporates the CJ products here.  Because we’re using Jeff Johnson’s free SEO blog software on Elaine’s site, all of the good Betty Boop keywords automatically show up in her tags and will be picked up by the search engines.

Conclusion.

In summary, if you want to promote CJ affiliate products in your blog:

• Log into your CJ account.
• Search for products — there’s a search at the top of the page.
• If you are not an active affiliate for a store carrying the product that you want to sell, join the company.  You might have to wait before posting product links until the company approves you as an affiliate.
• Click the “Get HTML” link next to the product that you want to promote.
• Copy and paste the HTML code for your product into your blog.  Just click the “HIGHLIGHT CODE” button for the code that appears after the image code.
• When copying code into your blog post, make sure that you are in the “HTML” mode, not the “Visual” mode.
• Be creative!  As you can see from the example, even though the article was about a long yard sale, we were able to logically work “Betty Boop” into the article.
• Always preview your post before publishing to make sure everything is working right.

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