Making Money

January 11, 2021 by James McAllister 5 Comments

The Top 5 Amazon Affiliate Programs For WordPress (Free And Paid)

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If you’ve registered for Amazon’s affiliate program, you probably realized pretty quickly that Amazon doesn’t exactly make it easy to promote their products.

Manually going over to their website and grabbing their link is a tedious process.

Then – if you actually play by the rules, you aren’t even allowed to download the pictures from the listing. You have to fetch them from the API, which can take even more time.

It’s a huge hassle.

Fortunately, developers have recognized the need to simplify this process, and have developed a number of WordPress plugins for Amazon affiliates to use.

Truth be told, they can save a lot of time and make it even easier to promote products within your content – among a number of other useful features!

In this article, I will be covering the top Amazon affiliate plugins for WordPress, including both free and paid options.

Note that only plugins specifically designed for Amazon’s affiliate program will be mentioned. Link cloaking plugins for example – which are good for other affiliate marketing channels, aren’t allowed by Amazon, so they won’t be mentioned.

Let’s get to it!

[Read more…]

August 3, 2020 by James McAllister 16 Comments

The Top Affiliate Program Plugins For WordPress – Free And Paid!

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When it comes to choosing an affiliate program plugin for your WordPress website, it’s very important to make the right choice from the beginning.

Unlike so many other plugin choices, this one doesn’t only affect you. Once you have affiliates registered on your blog or website and they’re actively earning commissions, it will be far more difficult to switch systems later. Even if you’re able to migrate accounts and data, it can be difficult to get everything transitioned seamlessly if you decide you want to change plugins later.

I don’t say this to scare you, but to illustrate an important point – this is a topic you’ll really want to research before you commit to any final decisions.

In this article, I will be covering the top affiliate management plugs for WordPress – comparing and contrasting them against each other, to help you decide which plugin is best for your affiliate program. Note that this is solely based around plugins that are designed to help you run your own affiliate program for your products and services. This list does not include any plugins to help you with affiliate marketing itself.

Let’s get into it!

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July 28, 2020 by James McAllister

Is Pinterest Traffic Worth Anything? How To Maximize Its Value

Note: Listen to this post instead using the audio player below, and consider subscribing on your favorite podcast player!

One question I commonly get from website owners – both bloggers as well as eCommerce store owners, is the value of Pinterest traffic.

Is Pinterest traffic worth anything? How does Pinterest traffic convert? Should I actively be focusing on my Pinterest strategy?

To be fair, I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Pinterest traffic.

On one hand, my baby product brand, which is a wonderful market for Pinterest in general, gets a ton of traffic from Pinterest. It was by far our biggest traffic source from social media, and for a long time was our biggest traffic source period.

At the same time, it was also our poorest converting traffic source – converting 7x worse than organic Google traffic over the course of a year.

Why is that, and is there anything you can do to make Pinterest traffic more valuable? I’ll cover both of these in just a moment. [Read more…]

June 30, 2020 by James McAllister 10 Comments

How Many Email Subscribers Do You Need To Make Money?

Note: Listen to this post instead using the audio player below, and consider subscribing on your favorite podcast player!

How many email subscribers do you need to make money? This is a question that I get asked quite frequently, and unfortunately it doesn’t always have a straightforward answer.

While I won’t be able to give you an exact number to strive for, I’d like to point out some variables that can affect your earnings per subscriber, and try to help you come up with an accurate target for yourself. Because while it is certainly possible to make money even with a very small mailing list, it’s also possible to have thousands of subscribers and still not earn very much.

Therefore, anybody that tells you that you need X amount of subscribers to make X amount of money, does not understand what they’re talking about.

To gain a better estimate however, let’s look at a few variables: [Read more…]

June 22, 2020 by James McAllister 13 Comments

5 Lessons I Learned Spending $100,000 On Amazon PPC Ads Last Year

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Having spent over $100,000 in Amazon pay-per-click ads in 2019 across of hundreds of campaigns, I’ve learned a lot of lessons that wouldn’t have been obvious at the beginning.

Relatively speaking, Amazon PPC is still a relatively new platform, and it is constantly evolving. New tools and advertising strategies are coming out all the time, and there isn’t as much known about the platform vs something like Adwords or Facebook ads.

Therefore, I wanted to release this post to share all of my key findings over the last year.

Let’s look over some key Amazon pay-per-click strategies that have been helping me to reduce ACoS and make more sales on Amazon!

[Read more…]

June 15, 2020 by James McAllister 2 Comments

Social Media: The 6 Stages Every Future Customer Must Go Through (To Actually Make Money)

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Social media is great for building a following, but the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is stopping its power there.

It’s nice to see your following growing, and receive likes on all of your posts. It truly is. However, likes won’t pay your bills, and a following won’t do much for your business if it can’t be monetized at some point down the line.

Contrary to popular belief, social media is still an incredibly powerful tool for actually generating future customers. However, it requires a strategy that helps to move people from one stage to the next. And if you keep structuring your social strategy to generate awareness, you’ll never get those people anywhere close to spending money with you.

Therefore, I encourage you to read through this article carefully. It is one of the most important articles on social media that I’ve ever written. By following the advice, you’ll learn how you can start generating real income from your existing following (even if it’s not very large) and grow your overall audience profitably all at the same time.

Let’s start with the first stage – the one most business owners never move far beyond.

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June 8, 2020 by James McAllister 8 Comments

One-Off Courses Vs. Membership Sites – What’s Best For Your Info Product?

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When it comes to selling digital products – especially courses, there are a few routes you can take.

On one-hand, you can release your course as a one-off payment. The customer purchases it, and they have access to it forever.

On the other hand, there has been a rise in membership sites / subscription services – entrepreneurs offering access to all of their courses, for a recurring monthly fee.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what option I wanted to pursue myself, and had the opportunity to really dive deep into the pros and cons for each strategy.

In this article, I want to help you make your decision, by covering the advantages of disadvantages to selling online courses in a flat, one-time fee, vs a recurring membership option. I don’t think there is a clear best choice for everybody, so I’m going to help you decide what the best option is for you.

[Read more…]

May 25, 2020 by James McAllister 19 Comments

Amazon Affiliate Program – Pros, Cons, And FAQ

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Looking to maximize your earnings from Amazon’s Affiliate Program? Grab my Amazon Affiliate Blueprint on my Products page!

The Amazon Affiliate Program (also known as Amazon Associates) is something that every affiliate marketer should have in their arsenal – but it is not without its fault.

Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, and offers just about any physical good that you’d want to promote. While it’s not the ideal choice in every situation, you would be foolish to ignore the power it can hold for you.

In fact, there are people who build entire companies – pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year – solely around promoting products on Amazon.

In this article, I’d like to talk more about the pros and cons of Amazon’s affiliate program in detail, as well as answer some of the most common questions regarding the program.

This way, you can better idea on how you could benefit from signing up, and how to make more from Amazon’s affiliate program once you choose to do so.

[Read more…]

May 15, 2020 by James McAllister 4 Comments

Q&A: Why Am I Receiving Poor Conversion Rates With Amazon’s Affiliate Program?

If you’ve been sending a lot of traffic to Amazon landing pages, but you’re not earning many commissions, this can be incredibly frustrating. [Read more…]

March 16, 2020 by James McAllister 4 Comments

7 Powerful Reasons To Implement Live Chat On Your Sales Pages

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One of the quickest ways to improve your website’s conversion rate and increase your sales is to implement live chat.

Live chat may be the most effective way to offer customer support – both pre-sale and post-sale, in today’s day and age. It’s far quicker to communicate than email, and allows you to accomplish so much more than just using the phone.

That’s not to say the others should be ignored, but it’s a fact – live chat has insane potential.

In this article, I want to cover some of these benefits in detail – sharing with you why live chat is important for every business, and giving my recommendations on how to set it up today.

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