Web publishers such as news media outlets, bloggers and affiliate marketers, all need a way of partnering up with advertisers and track commissions due to them.

As a publisher, you are usually working with either of the following:

• Affiliate networks
• In-house affiliate programs

In this article, I will list several reasons why you should always try to partner up with advertisers through an affiliate network and not through in-house affiliate programs.

Before we start, to make sure everyone is on the same page, let’s define what’s an affiliate network and what’s an in-house affiliate program.

Let’s start with a diagram of how affiliate marketing works.

The diagram should be pretty self-explanatory. Note that publishers are also referred to as partners or affiliates. Advertisers are also known as merchants.

Here’s an even simpler way of looking at it.

Or perhaps you can relate more to this next diagram which lists the typical personas involved in an affiliate marketing transaction.

What is an affiliate network?

Affiliate networks congregate many advertisers under one platform and simplify things for both the advertisers and the publishers. They use their reach to link the two parties and propose partnerships both ways. They also handle all transaction tracking and billing, as well as other essentials such as reporting.

As a publisher, you have one platform that you can login at any time, and you will see all the commissions generated from all the advertisers you have partnered with.

[Read more…]

EPC – Earning per Click
The acronym EPC stands for average earnings per 100 clicks. EPC is the ultimate test to tell how well an affiliate merchant campaign is performing. Just because a campaign pays a high commission doesn’t mean it is a preferred program. A campaign with a lower-paying commission but a higher EPC will actually be more appealing to affiliates. This is because the affiliate will earn money on average for each click they can generate even at a lower commission rate.

EPM – Earnings per Thousand
The acronym EPM stands for average earnings per 1,000 impressions. An impression is each single instance that the ad is viewed. The acronym is derived from the fact that “M” is the Roman numeral for 1,000. Affiliate networks use both EPC and EPM in publisher performance reports.

Looking for a new theme for your WordPress website or getting started with WordPress? There are thousands of themes out there and your website creation journey can get stalled right there as you search and search for the right theme, possibly making some bad choices.

I’ve been in the WP space for more than ten years now so I’ve seen it all.

Here’s what I consider the best themes for 2020:

• Astra
• GeneratePress
• OceanWP

I would pair these with a page builder, and the number one choice right now is Elementor.

If you can’t decide between the three themes above, consider the following:

• OceanWP has the most design options and flexibility, although the others come close.
• Astra and GeneratePress focus more on being lightweight and speed optimized.
• Astra has integrations that the others don’t yet offer, for example, LifterLMS and LearnDash.
• GeneratePress has the best public support forum so if you’re a beginner building your first site this could be an important consideration.

In the end, you won’t go wrong with any of those three themes.

Learning how to build themes

If you’re interested in WordPress theme development, Chris Coyier has an excellent resource post on the topic.

When searching for articles about investment and making money, you will surely come across many bloggers who publish their monthly income reports or also post net worth reports.

I would recommend that you don’t pay too much attention to those numbers. I personally don’t care much about them.

While I’m not saying that they’re lying or manipulating their numbers in order to persuade people to do what they are saying and obtain the same results, I think that business and investing involves a plethora of decisions that are extremely based on each individual’s character and aptitudes.

Consider a few things:

• They might not include the value of their homes in their net worth.
• You don’t know if they received large inheritances or have considerable family wealth to fall upon.
• They might be manipulating their figures.
• Many are posting anonymously, so we don’t know anything about them really.

There are many other considerations I could come up with, but this is a quick post that I want to get out there.

There are now a ton of blogs about investing and personal finance in Europe, and many of them shouldn’t be trusted as a source of advice for your investment journey. Most of them are just distractions from the real research you should be doing.

See also: Why you shouldn’t ask for financial advice online

You want to learn about the type of investment you want to enter by getting to know the industry very very well and then trying things out bit by bit until you get a sense of whether it is a good fit for you.

As we’ve seen in previous decades with other related niches, much of personal finance and investment bloggers’ income comes from affiliate commissions from the platforms they recommend and not from the actual investments they make. That doesn’t make sense in my opinion.

There is no point listening to someone whose investments are making him a couple hundred euro a month at max, because he would definitely not have enough experience to be considered a reliable source of knowledge.

Be realistic; why would anybody go to such great lengths to share their financial journey just to help you make more money for yourself? Most are trying to sell you something. Very few genuinely like to write about their journeys in different areas of life just because it makes them feel better or it helps them clear their minds. Try to find those kinds of people as they are a much better source of information.

Typically I try to look for the following traits in the bloggers I follow:

• They write about several topics coherently for many years.
• They don’t hide behind the veil of anonymity.
• They are verifiably successful in their careers.
• They speak about both good and bad experiences.

That’s my little rant for today. I hope it helps you focus on the right information, as one of the biggest barriers separating you from genuine wealth and success is the overload of information you can find on social media and the web nowadays.

I’ll also say that if someone publishes their income or net worth reports it doesn’t mean I won’t follow their blog, but it won’t be my reason for doing so, and it certainly won’t be the reason why I decide to invest in something or not.

On the other hand, I consider journaling in a private or public fashion to be very helpful to keep track of your thoughts and decisions over time. I have also been thinking of starting to publicize my monthly thoughts on my portfolio’s performance, without focusing too much on the numbers. What is really important in these monthly reports is to observe the decision making criteria of the investors, and get some insider tips on how each platform is doing.

Be very choosy in what you read and whom you trust. Always try out things yourself in small doses before you go all in. Diversify and keep expanding your knowledge every day.

Do you agree with my point of view? Let me know in the comments section.

Other thoughts on the same subject

I’m not the only one who dislikes income reports, although I’m also seeing a trend of bloggers who first become famous using income reports, then suddenly say that they are not helpful and that they won’t publish them anymore, a typical bait-and-switch tactic as far as I’m concerned, but I digress.

Here are some other articles on the subject that might interest you:

• The danger of reading blogger income reports
• Why you’ll never see an income report from me

Today I’ve decided to make a commitment of learning Pay-per-click (PPC) for as long as it takes to start making decent money. I’ve got a few ideas I want to try out, including ads for my own plugins as well as promoting other WordPress products that I’m an affiliate for.

Disclaimer: I’m primarily writing for myself so I might skip a few important things just because I was already aware of them before I started this process. Also, I’ll be focusing mainly on Google AdWords and Facebook as my channels, as those are the ones most relevant to my business.

First Things First

Let’s start with the very basics. Why use PPC? The main advantage of PPC is that it gives you instant traffic and allows you to test new business models in real time. Of course, free organic traffic is great and something that we should always strive for, however many times we can’t afford to wait until that organic traffic starts trickling in.

Pay-per-click allows you to be listed at the very top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) very quickly, and this gives you the opportunity to:

• Evaluate the state of a market and its readiness/openness for your product
• Split test your landing pages and gather fast results
• Prototype a new product/service before you invest big money in fully developing it.
• Determine which terms work best and start targeting them via SEO

The ability to test ideas is one of the most compelling uses for PPC in my opinion. For example, if I want to create a new WordPress plugin I can create a landing page for it and add a subscription box for those who want to get notified when the product is released. Based on how many people sign up I can have an indication of the real interest there is for the product, and I’m already building a list of people that have the high potential to be my first customers if I decided to go ahead with the project.

If there is little enthusiasm for my offer, on the other hand, it might be that the market does not need yet another plugin with this feature set, or maybe I am marketing it to the wrong people or from a wrong angle. Essentially, it allows me to fine tune a product’s target audience even before I create the product itself.

Typical Conversion Rates

PPC is a highly trackable marketing medium, which is great as it gives you an easy way to calculate your Return On Investment (ROI). So when starting out we need some kind of yardstick to measure our success by.

Most PPC campaigns are either doing lead generation or direct selling.

For lead generation the typical conversion rate is between 10% and 12%. For direct selling it depends on whether you are selling high ticket items (lower conversion rate) or cheaper items (higher conversion rate). It can be anywhere between .3% and 5%. It’s probably a good idea to try and get some insight into the conversion rates of your particular industry when measuring your results. In my case, I could ask other people selling WordPress products what their conversion rates are.

All this means that we need a means to calculate our ROI; enter the PPC ROI Calculator from Fuel Interactive.

Below you can see a quick calculation I’ve done. I’ve calculated my average sale (total earnings/total sales) to be $82. I also decided that as a start I’m going to spend $500 per month on AdWords. Since I’m just starting out I don’t have much data relating to conversion rates or cost per click, so I entered a conservative conversion rate of 1% and a cost per click of $3, based on the cost of each click in a recent test campaign I did. The results weren’t pretty.

So I would be spending $500 and only earning $82, which means that I’m throwing $418 down the drain; not good. Sure, it’s common knowledge that when starting out you will lose money, that’s part of the learning process until you fine tune things. However I at least want to have some goals to aim for.

So I changed the conversion rate (I would have to improve my landing pages for that to happen, but that’s part of the game) and also reduced the cost per click, which can also be done once my ads start converting well. Here are the new results.

With these small but significant changes I now have a return on investment of 14% and a profit of $74, which is a huge difference compared to the previous results. Once I’m getting a positive ROI I can then scale things up, spending say $2000 a month instead of $500, which would net me a profit of $460.

It’s also keeping in mind that sometimes it can be more worthwhile to improve your site’s SEO rather than spend money on PPC. This is especially true when the cost-per-click is high, say $5. If you spend $1,000 on an SEO campaign (which tends to be much longer lasting) it will pay for itself very quickly after only a few hundred targeted visitors.

Keeping Tabs on the Competition

One of the best ways of learning what works without spending a dollar is to survey what your competitors are doing. If ads from your competition are ranking around the same ad position over the course of a few weeks to a month, they are probably generating profits that allow them to keep advertising. It’s worth doing this exercise before jumping in with your own ads. I’m not sure if there is some tool that helps in doing this kind of monitoring, but I’ll probably stumble across it sooner or later and will post a link.

And that’s all for today. It’s fun learning PPC and I’m looking forward to get into action with some of my own campaigns and see what kind of results I can get.