I had not done a lot on that site since last December because I was stalled with what I wanted to do with it.
When you are blogging, especially to make money, there are certain aspects of your site you want to keep in check. Working on my website made me think of a few things that are essential to your site and you need to check up on periodically.
You should do a periodic checkup of the following:
- Images
- Links
- Affiliate Partners
- Products
- Affiliate Disclosures
Images
Images are something that makes a website look nice and professional. Images add personality, depth, and interest. There is nothing like going to a website that has just pages and pages of words with no visual aesthetics. Boring!
While revamping my site, I noticed I had not added images to some of my posts. I had gotten ahead of myself when posting and building that site and forgot to go back and add images to them. Guilty of being boring, yes, I know!
I remedied that yesterday. I worked on getting images added and edited some of my posts as well to make them read better and look better too.
Make sure you do not put too many images in a post also. Images, banners, and links can all become overwhelming. I have been to websites where I could not even concentrate on what the writer was trying to say because there were too many images and links. I end up leaving the site altogether.
There are others I have been to that do not have any images and those are not interesting.
You will want to make sure you have at least 1-2 images. Find the right balance for each post.
Links
This is one of the most essential of those things you want to check on your site. Make sure your links are working. You cannot put a link in your post and just leave and forget about it. Especially if you are blogging to make money. Links are your lifeblood.
Check your links and make sure they are being directed to the correct place. I have put links on a site and checked it only to find out it was not working. Sometimes a link can be copied wrong, or it is being entered in the wrong place, or you can copy too much of the code. I have had this happen.
Links can be broken too. Do not just assume because you put a link to a product or another website that it will always work. Things happen, and links can be disturbed.
Affiliate Partners
If you are blogging to make money you have likely signed up with an affiliate program or two. And there are thousands.
There are specific affiliate marketing networks such as Commission Junction, Share-a-Sale, Flex Offers, and Click Bank who oversee hundreds of affiliate programs.
When you go through an affiliate marketing network, you apply to an affiliate program individually. The network keeps up with the statistics, the commission, and so on. They also keep up with what affiliate marketing program is active, inactive, or even closed.
You should check your affiliate program activity periodically. Businesses have their ups and downs too. The affiliate marketing network keeps the affiliates informed as to when a business is low on funds, suspended, inactive, or has closed.
If you have a few affiliate programs that you are signed up with you are most likely promoting their products and have links on your site.
You need to check periodically to make sure they are still active and still in business. If they have closed their affiliate program or are inactive you are wasting valuable space on your site.
Promoting products and having links on your site is a valuable service to the company and may net you a commission. Make it count.
Products
As with the affiliate programs above, you want to do a periodic checkup on the products you are sharing. The last thing you want to do is have listings or affiliate links on your site that go nowhere.
This was one of the lessons I learned just because I was new at this. My website bookbastions.com was a fully built site when I purchased it. The designer had over 90 links on the site.
After I purchased the site, I began checking on some affiliate links and product links that were being shared. There were product links to nowhere. The product may have been available at one time, but it no longer was.
I began to redesign the site and remove a lot of the links to make the site more of what I wanted it to be. I wanted to offer value to my readers.
I did not want people to visit my site and be sent directly to another site just to make a purchase. That is a “bridge page.” The whole site was designed with lots of links and products that were shared.
Make sure to do a periodic checkup on the products you share so that the valuable space on your site is not being wasted, much like the affiliate links.
Disclosures
As an affiliate you must have affiliate disclosures on your site to inform your visitors that you may make a small commission on any products, they may purchase through your affiliate links.
You should have a link to your disclosures from your navigation menu. This can be at the top, bottom, or sidebar.
But there are certain affiliate programs that require you to have another disclosure closer to any links you may have. Your visitors should not have to go looking for the disclosure. Amazon is one of these affiliate programs.
They require you to have disclosures within the eyesight of any link to the Amazon store. This is not a huge deal but is sometimes forgotten. Amazon is extremely strict in its policy and you will receive a reminder from them to ensure your compliance.
Take time to go through and make sure you have properly cited your affiliate disclosures and go back to check them. You may make changes along the way to some of your links and you want to make sure the disclosure is still there.
The last thing you want to do is get booted from an affiliate program because of non-compliance.
These are just a few things that I found essential to blogging as an affiliate marketer. It is important to stay on top of these things so that you can be successful in your pursuits as an affiliate.
Happy Blogging!
Pamela
You are right, if you want to make money from your site there is a list of things that you have to keep in check not just only focusing on the content and keywords. Thanks for sharing the essentials list. Links that are not broken are the most important, or else no one can use your affiliate links and you will not get paid. I use the broken link plugins on my site and it works great.
Oh thanks, Nuttanee. What broken link plug-ins do you use? I have not installed one on my sites yet. I wanted to wait until I compare a few. I have several sites but I don’t have a lot of affiliate links on them because I don’t want them to get too bogged down. I want people to visit my sites because I offer good information and I am of the belief that my sites will be blessed when I help people.
Great input Pamela,
Especially the link and images part, I never knew how important they are until I started posting my blog posts with them. Engagement will really increase when there are images to attract and links between your pages, on the other hand, will definitely help boost our page traffic. I was blogging for months without adding them, boy did I miss a lot! 😀
Thank you, Riaz. There are a lot of things in blogging that is a good learning experience. Sometimes we learn the hard way. There are things that I have had to learn and now I enjoy sharing with others.