How to Squeeze More Income From Your Website Without Lifting a Finger

Blogging, having to manage affiliate links and producing awesome content for your audience to consume is a full time job. I am well qualified to state this as I do it myself. If I don’t do it, then a VA has to do it. Someone is always working late cranking out fresh content like a juicer that squeezes oranges.

It is a myth to think that great content brings huge traffic and revenue. Well it does but not overnight. Running WordPress or your favorite CMS also saps energy and time. As does negotiating with advertisers, designing graphics and building landing page funnels and so many other tasks.

You feel like a well drained battery in next to no time, especially if flying solo. There are plenty of one man heroes out there who can attest to what I am saying. So we like to be rewarded for our time and passion.

There are may great ways to monetize a blog, some I have touched on previously. These are excellent passive revenue sources that stack up in the background while you type fresh content, Photoshop graphics or crank out ad deals on Skype. Be sure to also check out affiliate marketing reviews before you start to monetize your site.

Increasing Revenue and How to Manage Affiliate Links

The thing is the revenues from display ads and their brethren can be woefully poor. There is no point whining with nostalgia about the $15 per click rates of yesteryear. It is not 1999 anymore folks. So how can we earn more passively so we can work harder producing even more fabulous content?

The answer to this problem is in direct advertising and affiliate marketing. The former will come eventually when your brand and site carries enough capital to attract direct advertisers. They will nearly always pay more than network and display ads. However you need a lot of traffic and a good reputation and offering.

A better way to top up passive revenue is with affiliate marketing. It is very passive since you are relying on organic traffic to generate clicks and revenues. So you don’t have to worry about driving clicks with those pesky Facebook ads unless you want to.

Using OfferVault For Affiliate Marketing

There are hundreds of affiliate marketing networks. A great place to see them all at a glance is to use a aggregator such as OfferVault. This great service for digital marketers will list offers by network and you can search and sort in so many useful ways.

Unless you are operating in some way out crazy niche it should be easy to connect with an affiliate marketing network or account manager. Once you have an account you can start populating your blog with relevant affiliate offers. This is where we get to the crux of this post.

You see it is tempting to stuff your pages with all kinds of affiliate marketing banners, text links and creatives. The reality is that this will not work nearly as well as it should. Audiences are fairly savvy on the whole, they can spot over promotion and ads with relative ease. Most affiliate marketing links look like the ClickBank example below:

Please note this is a live affiliate link and I wanted to be transparent with you. So if you do like taking surveys for cash that is awesome! Here’s the thing though; most affiliate links look like this image below:

When you mouse over the link this is what the user will see in their status bar. So they know its an advert. Some of your audience will not care, they will click and buy if it interests them. On the other hand a good percentage will say ‘see ya’ and the traffic opportunity will evaporate there and then.

Now if you have lots of links like this populating your blog what do you think will happen. It seriously degrades the ability of your pages to do good and to convert your audiences. It furiously screams spam and people will leave your blog without visiting your offers. You need to manage affiliate links properly.

What if I told you there is a way to make your affiliate marketing links appear natural and discreet? Would that be worth something to you? Not only that but you can easily manage affiliate links and add no follow tags and organize all of your important revenue links site wide.

Your marketing links will appear neat, clean and discrete and you have complete control over the display of your affiliate offers. None of your audience need know that your links are affiliate urls.

ThirstyAffiliates Plugin for WordPress

The solution to how to manage affiliate links is with a WordPress plugin entitled ThirstyAffiliates, here’s the lowdown on this incredibly useful affiliate marketing plugin.

ThirstyAffiliates affiliate link management plugin is a new breed of WordPress plugin that allows you to treat your affiliate links like the assets that they are.

Unlike other plugins that simply redirect URLs, ThirstyAffiliates gives you the control to create a link once, and reference it many times over. Even letting you import your links to other blogs so you only ever have to set it up once.

Manage Affiliate Links With Zero Stress

ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin gives you unprecedented control over your affiliate links.

One of the most important features we wanted to build in to this plugin was the ability to categorize your affiliate links.

This means you can have a parent category for example “Amazon”, and children categories for every type of product you promote.

Just Add an Affiliate Link Once

From the editing screen you can easily manage the link’s destination URL (your affiliate link) and it’s corresponding cloaked URL. You can also set a friendly display name so you can easily find your link using the affiliate link picker.

Attaching images to your affiliate link is easy with the media uploader which allows you to quickly add images that are pre-linked with your affiliate link while writing your posts.

Add or edit the link’s category for quick organisation and better reporting which is important for professional affiliates with hundreds of links to manage.

ThirstyAffiliates has been designed from the ground up to be simple and clear in it’s purpose and every part of the user interface reflects this methodology.

Harness the True Power of ThirstyAffiliates

ThirstyAffiliates is a unique affiliate marketing WordPress plugin for redirecting and managing affiliate marketing links It is extremely useful and best of all free on the WordPress.org Plugin Repository. So you can test the plugin on your niche blog without having to fork out a dollar, how cool is that?

Be a Powerful, Discrete Digital Marketer

So the point that I am trying to impress on you is to be intelligent and discreet about the way you advertise third party content on your pages. You may not wish to follow an 80/20 value/promotion rule that’s absolutely fine. However you should balance the ratio of content to advertising and properly manage affiliate links.

Just try and add your offers in a more elegant and refined way. Less can be more after all. With neat, clean and tidy affiliate links via the ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin your visitors will trust your content far more and reward you with a higher volume of sales and revenues. That can never be a bad thing.