Affiliate Marketing

Languages:

English

Русский

Chinese (soon)

Sign-up

Make Your Download Portal Different with a Blog

Published on: October 30, 2007

Differentiation - Content - Blog

Most download portals nowadays are built and updated by automatic content feeders - the so-called PAD files. Sure, importing 20-30k products automatically is a good way to start a download portal, but then again, most download portals look and work the same, just because of that.

If you did that (if you have an automated site based on PAD kit), you might be asking yourself why you don't have enough traffic, why you keep a low conversion rate and why you don't make any money as an affiliate from this process.

I've already written a nice article on How to Make your Download Portal a Successful Affiliate Business but if you don't want to read it, I can summarize it in few words:

differentiation is the key to success
the key to differentiation is content
blogs build content

Content is KING for affiliate marketing. But why content really matters?

Well, let's think a little how a visitor gets to your download portal:

he knows about your portal
he googles for something like let's say "DVD burner"

Let' see about: How can people get to know about your portal?
They must have something interesting and useful enough to bookmark or remember on your site. And that is content. If your site is just a product database from the PAD feeds - it's not going to work.

Now about: Google loves content.
You can probably make Google work for you if you have enough content about "DVD burner" in a way that is better than the vendor description and all the other sites with dull automatic content.

Build your content with a blog

If you are now convinced that you can make your affiliate download portal convert if you have good fresh content, adding a blog might just help a lot. If content is the king for affiliate marketing, then blogs do a pretty good job on building it. By the way, I'm talking about "business blogs" that are related to the software industry in one way or another. Let's see some of the advantages of having a business blog:

People always like to know who is behind a site. It might just be me, but I still really like getting in a real and personal contact with the person that is selling me something. When you walk in a brick and mortar store, you will look at the clerk's face. Is he looking good? Is he looking honest? Is he going to steal my money and sell me crap? In the Internet days, blogs can just put "a clerk face" in front of your affiliate site. And I will always choose a "good clerk face" against a "faceless site".

Bloggers (or at least the good ones) are opinion makers. Because of their "personal touch", blogs have a great influence on the readers and if a blogger I like tells me that the "x" product is better - I will look no further and I might just buy it.

Blogs are good at pre-selling. Affiliate Marketing is about pre-selling. Not much to add here - a blog might be the good-looking clerk that sells for you because he puts you in contact with your site visitors.

Build trust and readership through valuable content. If you're good at selling your affiliate products, visitors will feel that. And if you are to prove your expertise, there is no better way to build the readers' trust than through valuable content on your blog. Also, having a blog with good content will really increase your chances to sell to other bloggers that happen to visit your site. Because they trust other bloggers.

If you are still not convinced about the value that a blog might bring to your download portal, the good news is that blogs can be a good revenue source on their own:

They have their own special mechanisms to build traffic. You can actually promote your blog with a different set of specific tools: blogger communities, social networking, directory submission, etc.

You can monetize your blog in many ways. So, if it doesn't help your download portal sales, then there are plenty of options to convert the traffic into revenue: paid reviews, paid links, Google adSense and many others.

What you should know before adding a blog to your download portal?

Business blogging can be done in more ways. You can write one as a CEO (or whatever), you can put your entire team to blog or even outsource it. I'm not a big fan of blog outsourcing, because it looses the personal touch and charisma, but still some blogs are outsourced.

Blogs - just like anything else in affiliate marketing - take time. It's not an easy task; you need good English skills, good writing and the ability to write useful content.

Blog daily or at least 2-3 times per week or don't write at all. Let's say you have your newspaper delivered to your door each morning. What's going to happen if you have it delivered each couple of days or never? Same with the blogs.

Choose your blogging platform carefully. If it really works for you and it grows, it's an absolute waste to change platforms. If you need to change, you might not have proper export/import features. You might lose Google raking and visitors due to different URL composition methods. You might lose content, comments or registered users.

Blogs need a personal touch. If you don't feel like "exposing yourself to the World" and write your own opinion on things, it might not work for you.

Noticed that the most common words when talking about blogs are: good blog, valuable content, expertise, good anything? Because blogs have to be good to really matter.

As a final note, blogging can be started quite easily. And just to make sure, I'm going to point you to the most valuable resource for blogging: Darren Rowse Problogger. I'm adding below some of the articles you should read on Problogger:

Sign up now for the Avangate Digest Newsletter to keep in touch with the latest trends in the software industry, to find out what the top software people say and recommend, and to get access to resources about shareware industry tools and techniques.

E-mail this to a friend Print this page Download as PDF

If you liked this article, please subscribe to our
Articles & Interviews RSS Feed

You can also bookmark and share this article:

This article may be reproduced in a website, e-zine, CD-ROM, book, magazine, etc. so long as the above information is included in full, including the link back to this website. Please e-mail at articles@avangate.com , before using the article.

View Related Articles