Make Your Download Portal Different with a Blog

Affiliate Marketing Published date: October 30, 2007 Make Your Download Portal Different with a Blog Differentiation – Content – Blog Cristian Dorobantescu, Affiliate Network Coordinator, Avangate B.V. Affiliate Marketing, Published date: October 30, 2007 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: a. b. c. 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 © 2007 Avangate B.V. www.avangate.com page 1 Affiliate Marketing Published date: October 30, 2007 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 © 2007 Avangate B.V. www.avangate.com page 2 Affiliate Marketing Published date: October 30, 2007 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. © 2007 Avangate B.V. www.avangate.com page 3 Affiliate Marketing Published date: October 30, 2007 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: How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs Blogging Tips for Beginners 113 Must Read Blogging Tips *** Sign up now for the Avangate Digest Newsletter and receive our Internet marketing tips, shareware industry tools, techniques and resources as soon as they're released. E-mail this to a friend *** Copyright © 2007 www.avangate.com all rights reserved. This article was written by Cristian Dorobantescu, Affiliate Network Coordinator at Avangate B.V. The author has in depth knowledge of internet marketing services and website analysis applied to the software industry and ecommerce development. 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. *** About Avangate B.V. Avangate B.V. provides solutions for electronic software distribution and reseller management, assisting software companies worldwide in successfully selling their products online and at the same time efficiently managing a distribution network. The company’s offer includes an eCommerce platform incorporating an easy to use and secure online payment system plus software marketing services and additional marketing and sales tools such as an affiliate network, © 2007 Avangate B.V. www.avangate.com page 4 Affiliate Marketing Published date: October 30, 2007 automated cross selling options, software promotion management, real time reporting, 24/7 shopper support, and the myAvangate reseller management program specifically designed for software sales. More information can be found on the corporate website, at www.avangate.com Avangate B.V. Van Heuven Goedhartlaan 937, 1181 LD Amstelveen, The Netherlands Tel: +31 208908080 Fax: +31 202031309 Web: www.avangate.com Email: info@avangate.com .member of GECAD Group, delivering innovative IT solutions Worldwide since 1992 © 2007 Avangate B.V. www.avangate.com page 5