How To Make An Affiliate Marketing Blog (Step by Step Tutorial)

hey everyone my name is mike and in this tutorial i'll be showing you how to make an affiliate marketing blog this is something i love talking about and i've done quite a few times in the past we have countless different websites on all different topics pretty much anything you could think of and it's a great thing that you can eventually automate hire writers for you so you don't even have to be a good writer and even more than that you don't really have to have any kind of prerequisites at all you don't need any coding any computer background you don't need a writing background it's really a great way to get started that has a relatively low barrier of entry so in this tutorial i'll be showing you first of all how to make the website and like i said don't worry about the coding there's no coding at all it's just drag and drop it's as easy as really making a powerpoint for that matter and so i'll show you how to do that a very very easy and effective way and also the way that most people actually do this which is not the way you think most people do it then we'll get into how to set up the affiliate part of it how to get the affiliates how to get the commissions how to negotiate them and how to have the best rates possible and then of course we'll talk about how to optimize this and automate things in the long term so that whether that is getting writers for you or maybe you write for yourself regardless we're going to talk about how to rank better in google how to in the long run like i said essentially get more traffic with less effort overall so there's a lot to talk about in this video we're going to start off on my laptop but i want to mention a couple things ahead of time first of all we don't sell a course at no point in this video i going to cut out or omit any information and tell you to pay for a course we don't believe in courses we believe in free information and so this video should tell you everything that we think you need to know to build an affiliate marketing blog secondly there is a lot to talk about in this video we're going to cover a lot of information so i recommend you take out a notebook and start taking notes on this or otherwise if you have like an ipad or another device maybe watch the video on one device and and start building your website next to me side by side so you can follow along the steps there's also speed controls on here sometimes i do talk a little bit quickly or if you want me to talk faster you can either replay this slower or faster youtube has a little gear icon and you can change the playback speed from there so that's i think everything i had to talk about before we get started let's head over to my laptop and get started with the first step here so making this website we like to use a software called wordpress wordpress.org not wordpress.com they are different and this is the way that actually most blogs out there most big blogs actually make their website so a lot of people think that you could go with squarespace or wix or a lot of the quick website builders and while they're all great when you're making a larger scale blog not only are they more expensive they're also generally less scalable so you're not quite as efficient with making more blog posts you can't get as many plugins you can't get as many integrations and so there is a reason that a lot of people use wordpress not only can it scale and it's very very affordable as well but it also is very customizable and it's really not that hard to use i'm going to show you everything you need to know in this video so to get started with this let's go to centralmedia.com hostinger that's h-o-s-t-i-n-g-e-r hosting here there's also a link in the top of the description click on that link that'll bring us all to the same starting point so that should bring us to this page right here don't worry if the pictures look a little bit different that changes from time to time but on the top you should see something that says hosting so right off the bat a hostinger does host a lot of different software's out there so wordpress and some other ones as well we want to just work with wordpress if we click on hosting we can go down to wordpress hosting it's optimized for wordpress and now we can click on start now that'll bring us down to several different plans here and it can look confusing don't worry i'll walk you through it you have four different options and of course the first one is the most affordable the last one is going to be for when you're a much larger website these prices are also based on paying for more than just a month at a time and i'll mention exactly what that means in a second but of of all of these i would say the most popular one the wordpress starter is probably the one that makes the most sense for you to do so if we scroll down you'll see that you do have more storage with this you are able to have more monthly visits with this it does come with a free email so when you're reaching out to affiliates you can be mike at centralmedia.com well you can't but i am that right now we can also get a free domain with this you have unlimited bandwidth and other things like that these are all going to be very very important but if you're really on a tight budget the single wordpress website can still get you started so you can definitely don't feel bad doing that but like i said i recommend going with this one it's only three dollars a month we're going to select that and that'll bring us to ask us essentially how long we want to have this and as i mentioned if you're paying for four years you're getting a pretty substantial discount from 1249 a month down to just three dollars a month so i always do at least 24 months if not 48 months so right now there is actually a promotion going on that you can get 2.99 per month for 12 24 or 48 months sometimes that's only for 48 but like i said i usually recommend going with 48 anyway and as you can see here you don't actually get the free domain for the first year unless you go with at least 12 months they don't want to giving a free domain for a whole year when you only pay for one month of the website so let's go with 48 months for now we're going to go down and create our wordpress account so i'm just going to type in my email my credit card information and submit the secure payment now that we've done that we can just click on start now it's going to walk us through some of the basics of setting up this website we can skip this if we want it's just going to kind of make it easier for you in the future but like i said it doesn't really matter that much i'm going to say i'm creating this for myself i'm building it myself this is going to be a blog and i know what i'm doing this tutorial should hopefully tell you what you need to know so now we're going to create our wordpress account this is different from our hosting our account remember wordpress is like a microsoft word it's a software on which the website is being built hostinger is where the website is being hosted it's kind of easy to remember those with that analogy there and that's essentially like where the website's being saved it's being saved on a server so when somebody logs on to see your website they can go hosting or has their servers online and they can view your website so wordpress is going to be a different account we're going to make that right now we don't need to add woocommerce don't select that and we're going to say continue do not forget this password you need this to log into your wordpress account and i'm going to go down here and instead of choosing a theme or template they like to show you templates we're going to choose one later on i'm going to show you how to get one that is really really relevant and also gives you a full template that's super easy to use so i'm going to say skip i don't need one of these templates claim a free domain this is free with what we purchased so we might as well do this right now anyway i'm going to select that and let's just say the name of my blog is going to be santrell urban urban gardening central urbangardening.com that's going to be a lot better it says it renews at 13.99 a year that's fine that's not really the best domain you want something a little bit easier to remember but for the purposes of this tutorial this is just a demonstrative website so it is available we're going to say continue if it's ever not available you can always go to google domains and it's really a great tool to help you find some other domains that are similar and might be more available so we're going to click on finish setup you want to make sure the server location is at least close to wherever your target demographic is so they have the fastest load speed so if you're writing and you're using a vpn or if you're in another country and you're not where you're actually going to have your audience like if you're talking about texas real estate and you're blogging from like you know somewhere else in europe you're going to want to make sure that you have the servers close enough to texas so that makes sense for you now the primary details choose the country i'm in the united states uh united states of america personal say next step so now i'm just going to enter my contact information now the domain is being registered to me uh it should only take a minute for this to actually set up they're adding the finishing touches right now so now that we get to this point there's two things that we want to do before we actually edit the website so if we click on manage site the first thing is we need to have daily backups so if we scroll down here you should see first of all if there's errors on here about not pointing to your domain that's totally fine it takes a little bit of time until the domain you can see right on top domain status waiting for activation so make sure that you go into your email and you actually verify that if they send you a verification link and then second of all it's just going to take some time until it actually points to that so from here like i said two things we need to do one of them we need to set up ssl which should kind of automatically do that but we're going to want to make sure that it actually does that correctly and second of all so there's ssl right there second of all we want to set up daily backup so if we click on backups you never know when something is going to go wrong with your website especially as a novice you can break your website and rather than trying to rebuild your website or trying really hard to recover it from something else a daily backup is just such an easy checkpoint that you know you're making your website and then you save it the next day you break your website you can just roll it back to the day before and everything is exactly the way it was so i've used that so many times when i was getting started with wordpress so convenient and i kind of still turn it on anyway just out of habit because you never know when you know some updates gonna fail and your website breaks anyway so we can add daily backups for two dollars and nine cents per month like i said it's totally worth it in my book for four years or you can actually even do shorter times as well it doesn't really matter it's always charging the same amount so i'm going to complete the payment on that one and now we have daily backups like i said so convenient but let's go back and actually enable ssl that is going to be the little lock icon you see on the top and that's essentially whenever somebody goes to your website especially if you're selling anything you really require it for that but that's saying that everything's encrypted which is kind of a basic standard practice these days for a safe website in general and so when people don't see that essentially your browser is going to make a big deal out of that if somebody goes to your website and instead of seeing the lock like most people don't look for the lock but what browsers do is it says not secure really big and that scares people that makes them think that you're going to download some kind of virus on the computer people don't understand what that means and so having ssl so important it's best practice anyway so we need to enable that so if we go back to hosting where we were we can close out of that we can manage our website and as we go down we should see new ssl so if we go down to ssl it might say that it failed if it didn't actually finish this activation yet there we go it's failed but eventually once the activation it takes a little bit of time sometimes a couple hours and then it'll actually say successful we should be fine with that so if we type in our domain central urban gardening dot com slash wp-admin so it's wordpress admin easy way to remember that click on enter and this will take us to a wordpress login page so now i'm going to sign in i'm going to say remember me so we're going to log in right now all right so here we are on the wordpress dashboard now there's a lot going on here but i promise i'll walk you through everything on the left side and how to actually clean this up because one of the first things i like to do is to get rid of a lot of the junk that it gives us right off the bat so the way we do that is we start off with the posts on the left side click on posts they give us one little blog article we're going to select that go to bulk actions move to trash click on apply and then i'll get rid of that now the same thing we go down to pages it gives us a couple pages here we can select them go to bulk actions move them to trash apply there we go we get rid of that now we still have a lot of plugins on the left side and essentially with wordpress a plugin is like like an app on there right so if wordpress is ios then these are apps on there so we can go down to plugins and we don't need a lot of these like they're great they're powerful right but you don't want to have too many plugins because first of all that's more more to update more to keep up with second of all it's more surface area for attack or for just things to go wrong in general for your website and so we can get these back as we need them what i like to do is go through them select the ones we don't need i'm just going to select all of them except for analytics by wordpress monster insights like i like that one google analytics is good but let's get rid of all the other ones oh and we're going to keep hosting her as well so get rid of all these other ones select all of them we'll go to the top first we're going to deactivate these say apply it's going to deactivate them and then if we go to inactive there were two that were already inactive that's why i'm doing it like this we can select all of them click on bulk actions and go to delete click on apply and that will get rid of all seven of those and now you'll see on the left side it gets so much cleaner look at that we don't have anything cluttering up the left side now just on the top the first four are essentially how you interact with people visiting your website through posts blog posts media through pages like cornerstone pages and comments then here's how you kind of customize the look of your website and then these bottom three here are really more about the back end stuff that's going to be a one-time thing so if we go to settings we can touch on that right now starting off with the site title i'm going to leave it as central urban gardening sometimes the default is just like whatever.com so make sure it looks a little nicer and then our tagline we don't want it to say that so we could say uh learn how to homestead let's just say um growing uh vegetables i don't know say something like that uh let's get rid of the punctuation there and then down here right now it's still http i'm not going to change that yet because sometimes hostinger does take a little bit of time until the ssl is actually set up with that so sometimes it takes you know a couple hours until that's set up on the back end so we're going to continue editing our website but maybe in a day or two days go back to here or maybe even later today you can go back and you want to make sure that ssl is set up so if we go to hosting we can go to manage the domain right there and if we go down you'll see ssl down here so ssl if you click on that that'll tell you right now i think it's still failed because it's not actually pointing where it should if we click on install ssl it either works or it doesn't and if it doesn't right now then come back later and do that right but sometimes when you first set it up it doesn't work so that's why i recommend don't mess with that yet but eventually you can force ssl on here down here we have the date the time i'm going to save changes that all looks good to me if we get on to writing not a whole lot i want to change here reading there's nothing there discussions fine media is fine permalinks you do want to change this you want to make sure that uh you have i usually use post name i think that just looks the best instead of having some kind of date or or having the day name whatever numeric i don't do that with my blog posts i think that it's easier for google to understand as well as for the reader to understand as well as for me to understand when you go to a link it's central urbangardening.com how to grow in march or whatever i don't know whatever it might be the name of the blog post just makes the most sense to me going down here we can say save save those changes and that's really all the settings i wanted to point out so now we can start talking about how to actually design this website as i mentioned before there are some tools to make it incredibly easy so we're going to start off with a theme then we're going to get a template that has a builder associated with it and then we can go and simply drag and drop and we'll already have a big template there so there's not going to be much we actually have to do so let's go up here to appearance and we'll see theme so we can click on themes and from these themes there are three that are already there we're not going to use them we're going to go to add new and we're going to look for astra astra is a really popular one we can go and install that and like i said astra is one of the most popular ones on wordpress which is one of the most popular website building software's on the internet in general so this is you're in good company if you're using this which means it's robust and it works really well with a lot of other things so now we have to actually activate that it's not enough to just install things with wordpress and we're ready to go with this now from here you can see that on the top you should see this little banner that says did you know astra comes with dozens of ready-to-use starter templates you can either click on that right now or on the left side we can actually go over to astra astra options and we should see over here install importer plugin so we will actually be able to do that we can click on install importer plugin and that will activate that as well and that will get us started with what the next steps actually are so we can say build your website now they're going to ask us if we want to use one of these three elementor is the right answer for this video and now we can choose from a lot of different ones we have a lot of different templates some of them are paid you can see premium ones right there but there's an abundant abundancy of free ones as well so we can actually sort them if you want from all or premium i think they used to have free on there as well whatever we can't sort them the way i was thinking we would but let's go through these and search for a starter template that makes sense for us we are a blog and i want to be like a food blog maybe travel it's more like a garden blog so what if we just say garden blog let's see what we have for that one see if anything pops up so we have a couple that kind of makes sense this one's a business magazine nothing nothing that's really really similar like i was hoping for but instead we can just go up here let's say blog and let's just say we are a travel blogger that's going to be similar enough we can show a lot of larger photos on that style so we're going to travel blog see we find that's not what i want for this maybe something along the lines of this one's kind of popping out of me right here so maybe we'll go to this one we'll click on this and it's going to show you a little bit of what it looks like um well i don't know why they chose that uh the parallax effect but whatever it's kind of cool i guess i'm going to get rid of that guy down there and of course the other thing to keep in mind is you can change anything on here the text the literally anything you want to change this is just a starting point so you want to look at something that has a generally similar layout to what you want and so for me i don't want this one let's find another one this one looks good i think this one actually looks pretty good this will work for a little gardening blog we can show some pictures of a garden and things like that so we're gonna go with this one now we can upload our file here for our logo if we don't have logo we can do that later which i currently do not have a logo for this so we will do that later so we're going to say skip and continue we can choose our color scheme this is gardening so we want a lot of green based stuff we can choose a font that i think would make the most sense for us and of these i kind of like that one there actually so we'll say continue and then we can tell they want to know a little bit about us and what plugins we actually want so leave all of these down here selected that makes sense i don't want the newsletters though so i'm going to get rid of that one and type in my information right now now it's going to take a couple minutes to actually go and build the website but you'll see at the end of this we'll be able to go to centralurbangarden.com or whatever your domain is and you'll see a full-blown website ready to go and all we need to do would be to change some of the text and the images to our own stuff all right now we can go and view our website we'll click on that all right so like i said there is our website it's it's really there's not like we just have to change the pictures and what the words actually say but in general it's really a step in the right direction here so from here we can go and we can start editing this website so if we go back to wordpress by clicking on the little wordpress icon there we can go and choose an individual page so if we go to pages uh i will start off with the homes the home page now we have a lot of other pages we don't necessarily need right now we can change what they say later or we can delete them you already know how to do that let's go to home and go to edit with elementor don't click regular edit if you do it's going to have you do some you're going to edit a little differently and i'll show you that in a minute but elementor is how we want to really edit this now the way elementor works is with the section layout so you can see a section is outlined in light blue it's kind of hard to see right here let's go down and see this section here we can see this section outlined in blue starts up here it goes all the way down to here and everything in that section has the same you can have a background for that you can have you can move the entire section up and down and so we have all these little strips all these little sections and within a section we have rows and we have columns right so uh within right here we can see we have one column is what this one is and and then down here we have an intersection with three columns in there and they have uh elements within that as well so we've got an image a little text thing and then a little more basically a button down there as well and so if you go down here you can see that we have you know quite a few different uh sections on here and we can edit each one individually but let's start off with the very top one we're going to start off by clicking on the six dots and then on the left side will bring us to our editor for this section we can change the background and really everything you could imagine about this but let's start off with the photo in the background in order to change this one we'll go over to style you see we have an image right there delete the image first of all and you'll see it just brings us to some color and we'll talk about what that color is doing in a second that's actually a background overlay but if we go and click on add a new image i'm going to upload some files right now and in fact while we're at it we might as well upload all of all the images we have that are related to this blog you should have maybe five or ten images that you can use throughout your blog images that you took or images that you were allowed to use for some reason this is a demonstrative website so i'm not actually publishing it but we're going to select some files here now for the top let's go with the i don't know maybe this photo for example insert the media and now we have a background for the top and there is that background overlay so if we click on background overlay right now it's just green and we can change that to maybe a lighter green would be a little better or we can just change the opacity of that as well so darker or a little bit lighter having some tint to that kind of makes the text a little bit more readable so i'll leave it probably right around there now that's the first background we can change the text here by double clicking on that highlight that and let's just call this santorel central urban gardening and if we click on the little pencil icon that'll allow us to edit this little element being the text this is actually a heading right here and so we can change essentially how it's lined up so if we want it to be centered we want it to be left justified we can go to the style and change some more advanced things about this like how much space we have all the way around there how wide how wide it's allowed to be and things like that i'm going to leave it actually exactly as it is i think that looks pretty decent and then down here we can have a little subtitle so if we click on this we can say actually i don't even think we need that let's just click on that and get rid of that all together so we just right click on this one and go to delete that section now we have a button down there now the button this is pretty self-explanatory you click on it it'll take you to whatever link you want and so on the left side you can see we currently don't have a link but we do have a symbol there which is essentially going to allow you to use what's called an anchor now we can link this right now to any other page we want so if i want this to link to let's say our youtube page we'll go to youtube.com central media so now it's going to link to central media's youtube channel the text we can say watch our videos maybe that would be what you want to do if you're trying to drive traffic from your blog over to a youtube channel but one thing to keep in mind when you're making this website that you want to make sure you have a congruent across all the different pages goal for your website are you trying to drive traffic to a high converting page probably right are you trying to drive up social media are you trying to grow an email list what are you trying to do and so if your goal for example is to have a cornerstone page that is maybe top five uh different seed companies or top five like you know planting tools that you might need for gardening then you want to drive a lot of traffic to that page and have a really high converting page so with this one right here i'm just going to leave this is a home page it doesn't really matter quite as much being that it is a blog you're more likely going to want to have some relevant articles popping up up here and there are some really great things we can show you on how to do that but for now let's just say watch our videos sure maybe that's what we're going to do and we can close out of this here and continue going down to build out the rest of this page so down here and again this is going to look pretty familiar where you can simply click on what you want and we can see on the left side we can change the image let's change the image to maybe some tomatoes right here we can say that this is going to be let's just say read more about our our best tomatoes so if we go to the nine dots on the top right there we can go and click and drag a heading now let's add a heading up here and let's just say read and we can click on this and say maybe this is read more and then over here maybe we have a different article and this one let's just go and change the media for this one to uh maybe some lettuce right so we can say urban gardening tools and this could be these are our essential there we go so maybe that's another article right there this one doesn't have a button so we can simply duplicate this if we like this button we can right click on that we can duplicate that button and again click and drag it over to say right here we can have right there we can say read more and again any one of these you can customize so let's dig a little deeper into customizing the buttons for example if we click on the buttons we have three tabs we've content style and advanced i show you a little bit about what each of them does already but kind of summarizing what each one is content is going to be what's actually visible to or like what's written there essentially how the text is laid out style is going to be more about the colors and the shape of everything and then advance is going to be the spacing how it interacts with other things if it's showing up for mobile for desktop for tablets or all three and so starting off with the button on content we already changed the text we didn't add a link to this one but i showed you guys how you could add a link just type whatever link you want in but let's actually add um i mean for the sake of example let's add an anchor here so i can show you how an anchor works we'll do that in just a second let's say that this is going to be center aligned actually was better left aligned the icon we don't have an icon right now but you could add one if you wanted and of course the button id is not something i'm adding right now but if we go over to style this is where we can choose the color of the button when people hover is anything going to be different about the button a lot of times you can invert like a white and green or to switch whenever you hover over that right here it's going to darker green that also works very well we can add a radius on there so a border radius maybe we want like a 5 or 10 pixel radius on there so 10 pixels there we go a nice little radius on the button instead of being so square but given that the theme of this is very boxy and very square i would probably rather have no nothing change with that but something to note is the little chain icon here will actually link all the values together so if you click that and get rid of that you can only have a radius say on the top right so if you want to have like 30 pixel radius on the top right you have a little bit of a rounded edge there a little slope so that's a way to be a little bit more creative if you're trying to do that obviously not necessarily with buttons but with pictures that's a really common thing people like to do and of course if you click on the photo up here you will have the same tools you can add a radius to say one corner so if that's your style definitely go ahead and do that let's click on the pencil again continue on with this the padding and like i said everything around there i don't i'm not going to add any padding to this because i think it's pretty well spaced as it is but if you wanted to add some padding we could add a lot around there to change the size of the button so i'm going to undo that simply by clicking history we can go down there and click right here that's where we were last and we can say update that'll make sure we're saving everything and keeping it where we were now the history button i just showed you on the bottom uh hopefully you guys can see that on this yeah you can see that so that right there is a super powerful tool so if you ever mess anything up you just go back to you know undo as many steps as you need to all the way back to the beginning of the session when you logged on so let's click the little history button to get rid of that again let's actually go back to actually so let's click on the pencil icon to go back to where we were and we can go over to advanced here's more margin and padding so again padding is kind of redundant here and here but margin is what you're seeing on the top we have 20 pixels of margin above it and nothing below that if i wanted to put anything below there i'd probably want more space so on the bottom i want to make sure that's also 20 as well other than that we can change you know some real advanced things on here you probably don't need to worry about right now but what you probably will want to know about is the responsive section so if you overview this let me let me show you how to do this real quick if you click on the responsive mode you can view this on the top as a mobile site so in mobile if you decide you know what that's just like too many articles being recommended right there let's instead get rid of this entire column right here or maybe just get rid of the picture get rid of whatever you want to do let's say we want to get rid of the column we can click on this little column that's going to bring us into the settings again go over to advanced go to responsive and from there we could say let's hide this on mobile when you're on mobile you don't need to see that entire column this entire section is now grayed out obviously when they visit it's not going to be grayed out it's just going to be missing altogether but it's showing you because when you switch between to desktop then it won't be it's actually going to be existing there so that's a really powerful tool if anything doesn't look right on on tablet or on mobile it's very easy to just hide it there and show something else there instead so that's essentially how you'd go about editing some of the fundamentals on a page let's go down and see what else we have i want to get you guys a little bit more familiarized with how elementor works which by the way as you start to get more advanced with this i do have a full tutorial digging through all the little nitty gritty details of how to use elementor how to use every single one of these i recommend checking that out in the future but hopefully for now today this should be everything you need to know to build your website and get off the ground let's talk a little bit more about adding a new section you know i said i was going to go down and start talking about these this is kind of what i just showed you how to change so it's not going to be a whole lot interesting there i will change those images but let's say we want to add a new section we can click on the plus icon between the two sections where we want to insert it so if i click on plus we can add a new one and you can either add one from a template we don't have any templates yet we can add one from a starter template so that's going to use the starter plugin that we got from astra before and if i just i'll show you for demonstrative purposes we can go to blocks and we have a lot of different options here you can go and see all types of blocks from contact us to forms uh to you know doing all types of things like that and a lot of you know common layouts are going to be found here and it can save you a lot of effort and a lot of time so let's just say maybe this one looks really good for us we can just view it first of all and say you know what i really like that we can import the block and that's going to be used right here now i'm not going to do that right now because i want to show you some of the tools we have available to build it from scratch so on the left side like i said if you click on those nine dots you'll get all the different elements you can add and we have them in different little categories so we've got the favorite ones we don't have any favorites saved yet we've got the basic ones which you will be seeing right now everyone has access to those if we go down to pro upgrading to elementor pro if you go to centralmedia.com elementor you can upgrade to elementor pro it's a really powerful tool you're able to do a lot more with that to customize your website even more but like i said the free version already does a pretty decent job should definitely be getting you started so from here you can see we can add uh like a heading for example so if we want to call this section let's just say our our top articles i don't know maybe something like that that's probably not what i would actually add there but let's just you know for the sake of example let's do that and then we want to add you know three little things below that maybe four columns below that click on the nine dots and we want to add an intersection here so a section within a section click on that and if we click on the little six dots we can change how this is actually laid out so if we click on structure down there we can see well right now it's 30 it's 50 50. that makes sense you can actually also click and drag this back and forth 50 50 is probably like the most the easiest way that i would go about doing this but let's say we want to add even more columns than that we want more than just two sections there let's go about doing that so there are several ways you could do this the easiest way for me is to actually just right click on the little column icon and just duplicate the column so you have three let's duplicate it again and have four columns there that's going to be good that's a good way to add four different of our top favorite articles so going back to the nine dots on the top we can go and add a little subheading down here so click and drag a heading actually the best way to do this would be to make one and then duplicate that four times and then change them it'll save you work so we can actually do that instead but this should not be an h1 heading there's different or h2 right now there's different levels of headings and that's going to really interact with your search engine optimization your seo so i don't want this to be h2 i'd rather this be like h3 maybe even h4 but it's just a subheading underneath your h2 which is underneath your overall heading which is an h1 so the number is just kind of the tiers down the hierarchy uh for how important it is but also how large it is on the screen so from there we can go back and add maybe a text editor under there we can add a button under there and we can add maybe something else so you get the idea of how we're going to click and drag and edit things over there but the other things we do have like i said as you start to get other plugins we have more functionality so wordpress forms wp forms is a plugin that came with this theme and if you get other ones out there you can get different elements that can be clicked and dragged in very easily and so if we want to add like a form down here we can very easily add you know we're gonna have to set this up but i'm not gonna do that right now you can set up a form and collect you know emails or names or phone numbers or whatever it might be and that's a great way to build for example an email marketing list for a campaign that can recover even more affiliate marketing revenue for you so if you scroll down beyond the pro section you get to general and there are quite a few elements you can add here as well so if we want like a progress bar we can go and add that one maybe like right here for example and you can have multiple progress bars that could be for say a personal resume or something like that if you find a place to add that into your blog it's kind of a fun little thing you can add a fun little element that you know shows some animation on your on your screen or on your website that makes it a little bit more exciting other than that you can read through this on your own time and figure out what each of these are like i said i have a full tutorial on how to use them so that's all you know i don't want to waste too much of your time on this right here this is just your homepage this is your landing page here let's talk a little bit more about actually making a blog post in general and in order to do that we have to go back to wordpress so we're going to exit this right here so if we go back to wordpress you can just exit to dashboard or you can click on the wordpress icon do whatever get back to here essentially and so from here like i said we already talked about pages we have one page there you can edit other pages by just clicking edit with elementor and before we go into editing posts i want to really quickly mention what it what happens if you click on the regular edit button it's not actually a bad thing you have to do this it's important if you click on the regular edit button this will show you essentially nothing about your page so if you end up here by accident edit elementor will give you where we were but the column on the right side is actually very important so this is going to show you the visibility of your page if any pages are private maybe if you're building a new page and you didn't want to put it out yet you can make it a private page the template of course is going to show you be shown down here monster insights you could exclude this from tracking if you wanted to i don't really think that makes sense for this page the permalink is going to be essentially nothing because this is our home page but other pages would be santro urbangardening.com about would be the about us page the featured image is something that we didn't actually set yet so if somebody's googling this on on mobile or sharing the link somewhere we do want to have a featured image so we can say that maybe uh let's just say this one right here would be good for our brand maybe for example so that could be our image there as far as discussion goes we could allow or not allow comments on the homepage i'm not allowing comments and then page attributes i'm not changing anything there but eventually we will have quite a few more tools here when we actually go and enable a new plugin called yoast seo we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here so i'm going to click on update and i did say that the first thing we want to do is start making some blog posts so blogging is obviously going to be your bread and butter while you kind of have good cornerstone pages your homepage and about page maybe like something that you keep updated about your top picks or whatever that could maybe be a page but your blog posts in themselves are going to be what you create a large library of and these are going to be probably your primary source of traffic where most people are googling something maybe like how to grow tomatoes on a deck right and then you would have a blog article about that hopefully you rank high in google and we'll talk about how to do that in a minute and then they'll go and you know read through that article and then within that article the goal is to essentially have affiliate links in there that can drive you know traffic over to a product they buy the product and you get a commission from that so if you're not familiar with affiliate marketing essentially that's the way it works you are marketing basically for a company basically for free as well until somebody goes and buys the product and then you get a commission from that it's really the way most of the internet works that's why so many blogs are free and so people can just go and click on the link order their product at no extra cost to them the the actual creator the author will get paid then and it's a very lively ecosystem on the internet with that happening absolutely everywhere so continuing on here if we go to posts you'll see that we can go to add new we deleted the hello world post before and now the new one let's add a title so what was the title i said a minute ago i think i said how to grow tomatoes on a deck now of course you're wording on this and everything you will want to really optimize that figure out what articles are doing well what wordings are being searched for what wording has not really been targeted in the past and what do people want to actually find so the closer you are to the exact search that somebody's typing in the more likely you are to rank above competition so for this right here you could continue just making your entire blog post right here i don't recommend that at all we do have elementor so we do have some template kits as well but like i said let's go to edit with elementor and start off from there they're giving us a really a blank slate here and we can eventually make some templates so that it's easier every time you write a blog article there's already the same header the same template it's easier to work like that but the first time around you're going to have to build some from scratch essentially so looking at this we can go and add elements just like we did with the actual home page the original page i was editing but we do also have some other things as well because this is an article we can add things like for example if i type in author you'll see we have an author box we can add that if we go down to site you can see that we have quite a few pro ones here as well so you can have like an author box maybe for example you can have a featured image you can have archive title page title you can have some more interactive things so if you change like the title of the blog it'll change here as well i mean it's already going to do that up there but you know you can customize it a little bit more so let's just say for this one we want to start off with maybe a large image up here so we could go again if you upgrade to elementor pro you're going to have a lot more out of this but we're going to go and add an image up top and then down here we can add some text just to get a general layout we can have an intersection down here so let's add an intersection then and we can add some text on the left side and then we can have some text on the on we can add an image on the right side image on the right side actually i really don't like this gigantic image up here let's get rid of that one let's delete that and so we can have some text here let's get some dummy text to really fill this out there we go and then below that we can have some more text but maybe this is going to be a full width text if you just hover right down here so you see the wide blue bar let go there's some full text we can add some more down there and so obviously formatting is going to be you know depending on the style of your site you get the idea of how we can go about doing this but the most important thing when you're working with an affiliate website or affiliate blog is you want your affiliate links to be in here they have to be clickable right and so what a lot of people do is you'll highlight the text so if we just go to this right here we can highlight some text we can highlight text over here rather so we'll click and highlight say this text right here click on the link and this can be where you paste your affiliate link now there are many places to get affiliate links one of the easiest or one of the most common ones to get started with is actually amazon affiliates so if we open a new tab and go to amazon affiliates amazon affiliates you'll see that the amazon or sorry amazon associates is what they call it amazon associates is the affiliate program with amazon so their affiliate marketing you can essentially find any product on amazon get a link for that and then you'll get between i think one and three percent commission for that which like i said when you're getting started off you're gonna have smaller commissions but eventually you can find other things that have higher commissions you can work directly with manufacturers you can even have sponsors commission commissioning as well that will pay you a set amount of money to have a link in your you know their own link in your article for a certain amount of time in addition to having affiliate links in here a lot of people link out to other articles on their website or other articles on other websites as well these are called backlinks when somebody else makes a link and links it to you it's one of the ways you can rank higher on google when you start to essentially gain credibility so let's say for example maybe some you know big news outlet say cnn for example wants to make an article about things you can grow on your back deck and they view you as an expert maybe they'll email you and say hey we really want a quote from you on our article here and so you can give them a quote they can give you a link they'll link to you usually and that'll come back to here and that way google they don't want to show bad essentially bad sites to people they don't show bad pages to people without getting too deep into how google works there are many different tools for example moz does a great job of explaining this every year with different outlines and best practices but one of the things google does is essentially they don't always trust new websites right because anyone can make a malicious website they can make 20 a day go out and attack people and if that's showing up high on google people are going to click on those and say you know what google's not good and they're not going to like google and they're going to stop using google google makes less money so google wants people to rely on them they want to be a good reliable search engine so that they can show more ads they can make more money ultimately the user gets a better experience they get more money and the way they do this is by having a system that slowly builds up trust with different websites so when you're a new website they don't trust you right away they don't know enough about you but they do trust cnn they do trust some of these other big websites out there they do trust cnn to be a legitimate website that is not going to be scamming you out of your money or hacking you or or you know giving you malware so that's why cnn will rank high when you search for cnn but if you search for my website it's unlikely to rank high right now until you get that back link when a website with a high what's called domain authority links out to you then that'll boost you a little bit you know because it's essentially a token of credibility where google says oh this website that we view is very credible is saying that you're uh credible as well you know that's boost you a little bit and you get enough of those and eventually google will view you as a credible website and of course this will help you rank higher in google that's the more all that story there now with this i think you guys get the idea of how you can go about building an article so we can go and publish that when we're ready or we can save it as a draft this one is obviously super uh not done at all right now so i'm just going to save it as a draft but you get the idea it's all the same tools that you have available and you can build out your entire article like that so let's click on the top left we can go to exit right here and that'll bring us back to our wordpress dashboard click on the wordpress icon and there we go so now we have an article now we have our home page as well as a couple other pages and on your own time you will want to go back and change the other pages the contact the amenities the rooms whatever other comes with your with your template so continuing down the left side we've got our posts we've got our pages i talked about media that's not really anything that exciting that's just like the images that you upload if you upload all of them right here files images videos whatever it's easier when you build your website you can just pull from your media if this tab didn't exist i don't think it'd really be that different of a workspace to be honest but you know it's kind of convenient to have everything in one place comments as you write more articles if you have comments enabled with them which most people do then you will be able to interact with comments here you'll be able to filter out the spam comments and i would recommend getting a plug-in like one of the ones we actually removed but there are so many other ones out there that can filter the spam comments for you and it just makes it a lot easier because there are so many spam comments out of spam commenting bots out there elementor settings we don't need to worry about that templates like i said this is something a little bit more advanced i'm not going to cover it in this video but eventually you can make a template for a blog article and i know i'm going to cover this very briefly right now i know i said i wouldn't but just really quickly if we go to add new you can make a new template and so this could be a new page it could be a new section it could be a new landing page and then if we go down to plugins there are quite a few plugins that are super super beneficial most of them are free or freemium really where they're free to use but you can upgrade to much like elementor you can upgrade and get more functionality out of them so the first one i want to recommend is actually called yoast which is yoast seo we'll search for yoast yoast just like toast but with a y there it is with five million active installations super popular it's a great tool that can kind of audit what you're doing and give you the resources you need to rank higher in google by correctly populating your metadata and what i mean by that is we'll activate this and you'll see we'll go up to our post right there our blog article and it'll show us what we're missing if it's readable what needs to be improved maybe we have long run on sentences that just make it less readable maybe our images don't have alt text so google is harder for google to identify what our article is about maybe we don't have any keywords consistent or maybe we have too many keywords and that's a red flag for google and so all this kind of back-end stuff that a lot of people would typically hire an seo expert for and would charge thousands of dollars you can kind of get most of it done on your own just using something like yoast seo and like i said if you read through the moz annual report of what google cares about this can really help you a lot so going back up like i said if you go to posts you can see yoast will give you a lot of tools so if we go to regular edit not edit with elementor we scroll down you can see yoast shows up down here and we could say if this one is how to grow deck tomatoes or tomatoes on a deck maybe this could be deck tomatoes deck tomatoes hit enter and it's going to tell us first of all what it looks like in google when somebody searches for this but also it's going to tell us like how well we're doing with this the readability fine whatever but it's going to give us suggestions down here and say you know what you don't use your keyphrase like anywhere obviously it was all latin dummy text so that's true also we don't have outbound links we don't have internal links we don't have a key phrase in the title introduction we don't have all this different stuff and so it's going to make it a really useful tool for you to figure out make sure you're doing everything right all the best practices to rank in google and most importantly it also gives you the ability to change the url slug so your url you know central urbangardening.com what and so right now it's just the entire title but we could just call this one deck tomato guide deck tomato guide maybe that's what we want um and so that way we have deck tomatoes deck tomatoes guide maybe something like that that way we have our key phrase in the slug maybe that's helpful for some people at least to remember what this is and we can change things like our meta description instead of just pulling a random set of words from our article maybe we can have something in here that says this is a guide to growing the absolute there we go so that's going to show up in google instead of having some random text from your article and of course it shows us that we don't have an image there we can go to desktop results and see what that looks like as well so yoast seo a super super powerful tool i'm just going to publish this article anyway it's definitely never going to be found but we'll go and publish that nonetheless let's go back to where we were in the wordpress dashboard and so i want to talk a little bit more now about the different outlets you can go to to get some affiliate links so like i said amazon associates is a super popular one that's one of the big ones that people get started with another one people use is called planet howl uh this has a lot of different brands out there i've worked with them in the past and so they'll work with like best buy hp sephora samsung target a lot of these big box stores that you can buy a lot of stuff from but also of course they have their online retail as well so if it's not something that sells directly from amazon or if you want some you know a lot of these do have a higher commission or they'll have different promos you can work directly with that i'll have a link to that in the description actually we'll have a lot of links in the description so make sure you go down in the description and i'll have a list of a bunch of different affiliates that you can actually get started with and how planet howl is another one of course on top of that we have impact radius or now they're just called impact so impact.com if you go to impact.com this will have links to this as well this will have partnerships with more brands that i mean like i said they do have products on here but impact is in my mind it's more for like software-y kind of stuff right but you can work with adidas or airbnb like that's the kind of thing i'm saying about like airbnb type stuff or uber things like that mcafee those type of things are what i would expect to find on impact whereas planet howl would be more like product and retail type things but regardless walmart is still on impact we've got ticketmaster you can see as you know the little thing rolls by a lot of different options there so impact.com super powerful and really a big network as well they're also very easy to work with i find that their analytics are in depth easy to make sub ids for different articles because as you of course this is very important as you make more articles and as you find more affiliates the data that you collect is going to be very important that you keep it organized so you can figure out what articles are converting well because if everything is going to the same exact affiliate link you know how many link clicks that's getting but you don't know from which article it's really coming from and there are tools to find that out but it's just easier if you have sub ids for the affiliate links and once you set up impact it's really pretty obvious what that means but essentially each link you can have a sub id that categorizes it internally within impact that maybe this is for that article and then the same link for a different article the same link for another article so it's just way easier to track and really the fourth one i wanted to mention is cj so cj is right here they used to be called cj affiliate but now it is called cj kind of simplifying their name and this is a lot like impact honestly so if you're looking to promote uh you know some like turbo tax type things as you can see right there or hotels for example they do have a lot on here as well so between these four there's really a pretty limitless library of different products and services you can promote on your affiliate website on your affiliate marketing blog so obviously there are so many different affiliate networks out there depending on the niche you're getting into those are all great tools to get started with but you know tons of other ones as well those are just ones that a lot of people do end up working with in addition to that i want to talk about some of the tools you can use to really automate and boost your own website here the first one there's actually quite a few from google so i want to start off with the google based ones they're free and obviously one of the big goals of a blog is to rank on google that's really where you're probably going to be getting a lot of your traffic unless you're something that gets shared by email or on facebook or something like that but i think for most people a blog like a blog is really going to be found on google or at least that's the primary goal one of the most passive ways if you have good content so to rank higher on google we really want to start off with google search console and then google analytics those two combined gives you so much insight into how you're already ranking on google where your traffic's coming from and then what people are doing within your website are they reading article after article are they getting through one article and they end up clicking on a link and going to a 404 page like you it tells you kind of what people are doing on your website which is super super informative so in order to do this we do already have monster insights right there which makes it so easy to set up google analytics so let's go to launch setup wizard and that's going to ask us some really basic questions and make it so easy so we are a publisher we're making a blog we're going to save and continue down here we could get a license key we don't need a license though so if we want upgraded pro we can i'm just going to say connect now i already track a bunch of other blogs so i'm not going to mess up that analytics by signing into google here so instead i'll just show you i'm going to cut right here i'm going to show you another so when you actually get it all set up and you sign into google analytics this is what it would look like this is an older blog from a pretty long time ago when we started it you start off and when you connect it if you have any traffic in the beginning it'll show you how many page visits you get per day and you can see over time it's starting to grow and you can really dig into an audience overview down here as well as the traffic the source the referrals where things are coming from and it's a great way to figure out like what's actually working on your on your website where the traffic is so in what country what device they're using you can really find a lot of in-depth analytics here which is why it's called google analytics and again this is an entire tutorial for another day to dig deep deep into this and figure out how you can optimize based on that but that's one of the first tools i want to talk about the next one like i said is google search console so going back to where we were so from google we could just look up google search console google search console and that'll take us to search.google.com search dash console slash about and we can just click on start now and once again i'm not going to sign into google i'm going to cut over to another account that i already have it does take a little bit of time to set this up you have to you know do some stuff with your dns and stuff like that but it does give you instructions google's really good about telling you exactly what you need to do step by step to actually get that set up so i'm going to go and show you now what it looks like on the inside for another search console that i have set up with another blog so here's again an example from back in 2020 a blog that we started in the beginning uh it starts off with like almost no traffic over time it will pick up and you will notice like you might say oh that's not impressive at all well this i mean the world of blogs and google is just very very different it's a lot more of a mature industry right now so it's not at all like what you'd expect with some social media where things just suddenly hockey stick become viral and come crashing down and go back up a lot of times with blogs it's all about the long game it's going slow and gradually building up your library getting more backlinks building up a website that over time can get more and more traffic can rank in google and consistently earn you more money with affiliate link getting more traffic on there and so one of the most common things we see as i mean nate's mentioned it in previous videos as well we see a lot of people that will start a blog starting kind of website and they'll go at it for maybe one or two months maybe three months and they'll see no progress they'll get frustrated and they'll still have you know maybe like a couple maybe a hundred or a couple hundred visits and then they'll just give up and then maybe a couple years later they'll say you know what i really thought i had a blog and they'll go and sign on and they'll see that it actually grew substantially larger than it is and they'll wish that they kept pushing and making blogs so with blog articles it is a long game if you find the right niche that it you know is very unsatisfied on google like a lot of people are looking up and not a lot of people are finding articles that are good then that's a great opportunity and you want to make sure that you're pushing for a long time on that and don't expect to see too many results too soon like i said it's not going to be an instantaneous thing but patience is the biggest virtue in this industry here another tool i want to show you is one related to what i just mentioned being searches on google and this is so trends.google.com and this is absolutely the most powerful tool out there in my opinion whether you are investing or selling e-commerce items or making a blog article this is the this is the key to what the world is looking for and the world uses google or at least a lot of the english speaking world uses google of course other some countries use their own things google's such a common one that you can figure out what people are really looking for and so if we think people are looking for deck tomatoes we can type in type in deck tomato we can say that we could say patio tomato and you can see side by side which one has more searches so here you could say patio tomato might be a better article than deck tomato maybe people aren't growing tomatoes on a deck maybe it's more of a patio maybe it's a porch let's look up that one and you can see that people are growing different things in different areas and it also tells you where people are searching these so of course this is common in the northeast where a lot of people have smaller apartments i imagine if you live in nebraska or north dakota south dakota you're not living in a small apartment where you need to have patio tomatoes you probably have a larger property and so that's going to be all really important information for you and so i think that this tool right here not only can can you do an a to b comparison and figure out what people are searching for but it also suggests other similar search terms down here so patio tomato varieties is another one maybe people want to know that and on top of that if you actually just go to google i recommend doing this in an incognito tab so you don't have google being influenced by your previous searches but you can also see what google recommends as well so if we say tomato or if we say patio tomato plants we could say planter seeds varieties determinant or indeterminate plants near me these are all things that people are searching for and so they might be good things for you to actually write articles about so maybe what is the difference between indeterminate and determinant which one's better better for growing on a patio what are the best varieties it's all very useful for finding the best article titles the next great tool i want to talk about is called semrush a lot of people call this sem rush but apparently samarash calls it semrush so that's what i started calling it and so if we go to centralmedia.com slash semrush you can get started on on semrush and it's really a super powerful tool where you can look at what your competitors or what other blogs are doing what they're ranking for whose backlinks they're getting what kind of articles are doing better than other ones and you can really get so much insight into so many other websites as well as into your own as well and as it says right here you're really getting measurable results from that so if you are data driven which i mean i am i think it's a really good habit to be as well then you'll be able to really dig through this figure out what's working and so you're just getting so much vision through an otherwise opaque wall that is the internet right so if you can't you can't just go to a website and figure out what kind of traffic they're getting but this tool right here does allow you to do that also ahrefs is another competitor so if we go to ahrefs.com you can see that they have really similar stuff i'll actually log in and show you guys what these tools look like um but a third one of course is actually a free one that is from neil patel who is a bit of an seo expert if you haven't heard of him go check out his stuff as well and so he has a one that's called ubersuggest he's going to search on brave here instead of google but ubersuggest is a free keyword tool this one is a lot more limited but it is free a good way to start at the very least but let's take a look at semrush i have an account with them and i'm going to show you how you can actually utilize them so if we want to write an article for example let's go to google and let's just say we want to write an article about growing growing [Music] indeterminate tomatoes let's just say we want to grow indeterminate tomatoes look up that and you'll see that right here we have the first ranking article is this one and like i said it's just a regular blog you can go down i bet they have affiliate links in here they also probably have a little disclaimer up at the top about their affiliate links very very common and as you go down you can see best tasting tomatoes they're linking out to other articles they're linking out to the heaviest another article the heaviest tomato they ever grew and a lot of stuff like that but let's just say we want to know more about this oh there it is they want to get you a free vegetable garden planner there we go so that's how they're collecting their emails very interesting well if we copy the link to this article so let's copy this and let's go over to semrush and from here we can enter domain a url or a keyword i'm going to start off with this we're going to say search and from here you can see that it's telling us that this domain home homefortheharvest.com is getting a lot of traffic and they grew a lot in the past year but it seems like they had a little bit of a drop since july to august and actually they're still dropping now so that's also good insight to see if you're seeing a decline is that industry industry-wide or is that something that is specific to your articles maybe you're being out-competed by one specific thing so this is also super good to look at and i recommend looking at so they have a good a pretty a pretty decent 50 domain authority score and it'll tell you what yours is as well as you start to you know get more backlinks get more traffic make more content out there it'll tell you you can see some progress along that track as well but within here we can go and look at compare domains we can look at a growth report but if you go down here this is what's so interesting you can look at what their traffic what the source of their traffic actually is we can go to desktop or by mobile this is very interesting you can see each one individually going back to desktop though let's go down here and see what their top organic keywords are this is so important so you can see that they're getting a lot of traffic 22 000 clicks by looking up types of apples so this is actually huge because they're getting a lot of traffic from that and so you can go and view the details on all of these and see where they're actually getting traffics from so they're getting plant puns for some reason people are looking that up and going to them and if we go to this you'll see that it links to that article how much traffic they're actually getting on that article and so it might give you some ideas of what articles are working well for them what are not working well what kind of articles you can kind of make to compete with them and you can kind of figure out you know you can work backwards and look at what articles are doing well what are what articles probably have affiliate links you can go and check that out for yourself by looking at the articles and then what are the rates on those affiliate links so if they're selling like really really cheap things if it's some kind of you know tiny little garden shovel that's like two dollars three dollars they're probably not getting that much out of it but if they're selling like big rototillers that are over a thousand dollars and and people are buying this for the for their garden and they're getting a lot of traffic to that article that could really be a cash crop for you and now the very final tool i want to mention in this video this is to actually find more people to write for you fiverr tends to be slightly lower quality more like quick little gigs uh that'd be great if you're trying to make a logo or something like that canva.com is a great way to make your own logo i have a tutorial on that as well but the one that we would probably recommend besides just going out and finding them on your own which would be great is actually going through upwork upwork's a pretty easy way to find some pretty reasonable and capable people you'll see the reviews on there how well they did and you can find writers or people skilled at different things and so finding ghost writers like that can be a good way to get started and like i said ultimately if you're able to put out job postings or find people that can write for you through word of mouth or referrals that's a great way to really build up a library that you're not always writing all the time because ultimately the goal is to scale your blog as you start making more money you can hire more people to do more writing so you can spend more time of your own time looking for new articles and things like that so with that being said there's a lot to talk about in this video hopefully you took notes hopefully i didn't talk too fast for you but if you enjoyed the video consider liking and subscribing i'm mike o'brien from central media thank you all for watching i wish you the best of luck with your articles and your blogs please leave a comment below and let me know what kind of blog you're writing thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 202,074

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: C_xQX1TJcNw

Length: 63min 56sec (3836 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022