 to talk about how to monetize your WordPress website without spamming it with ads. Ads like, click here, subscribe now, subscribe, click, like, shop, all of these ads, they just pop out at you and they're very annoying, we're going to talk about why. So hello everybody, I am Mary Beth, I work for Nexus and I am an affiliate program manager there. I manage all the managed WordPress and manage WooCommerce accounts. You can find me on Twitter and you can email me at marybeth.smith at liquidweb.com. You could also visit my website, I have it on here but it's marybeth.smith. So what we are going to learn today is very important, it is WordPress can make you guys money and that's what everyone wants to do, right? I mean that's what you want to do with your WordPress site. So here are some popular ways to monetize your website. The first is display ads. Display ads are like posters for the internet, they're pictures and they're videos that people put on to promote their products and services. One that's not as known are like info links, info links are like in-text advertising that people will put in their, in their, I can't talk today, sorry, but in their stuff to pay with paid cash or displaying mildly relevant ads. And the other one is selling backlinks. So selling backlinks is like one site paying another site to link to their page. These are all bad ways to make money on your website and I want to tell you why. So pop-up ads, they are evil. There's so many reasons not to do that. First off, 25% of internet users have ad blockers. So they're not even in the senior display ads and then what's the point really? To earn $100,000 with Google AdSense, you need to have approximately 20,000 daily visitors. Plus you have to have an extra 25% more to make up for all those people with ad blockers. So that's a lot. Most, if not all, people have really mixed feelings about pop-up ads. According to BioDesign, 91% of people find today's ads more intrusive than two to three years ago and they're finding it a little obnoxious and let's all, I mean we can all agree, they're a bit creepy. I mean, so info links. They're so 2000s. Back in the day, there was this in-text advertising network that would pay cash for you to put links in their site. They were really popular in the early 2000s but now like when people see the click here, most people don't click. No one wants to know what's going to happen next. Selling back links. I get emails on a daily basis. Do follow me. You don't want to do that. There's a really big reason why you don't want to sell back links, guys. And that's it. It's against the Google Webmaster's guidelines. So not only will you get a penalty if you do it, it's going to kill your SEO and you don't want to kill your SEO. You want more people to come to your site, not less. So you guys are probably asking, Mary Beth, how do we make money with our website? Well, let me tell you guys. Introducing affiliate marketing. Has anybody heard of affiliate marketing before? Awesome, awesome. Well, I want to tell you a little bit about it. I want to ask some questions so you, I want to know how much you guys know about affiliate marketing. How much do you think was spent on affiliate marketing in 2022? Billions? How many billions? 10. All right. Anybody else? No one? 11. 11. You guys are a little bit over, but you're close. 8.2 billion dollars was spent on affiliate marketing in 2022. That's a lot. This is even more. How much is the global affiliate marketing industry worth in 2023? So think 8.2 billion was spent on it. How much do you think it's worth? Anyone? What do you think? 53.23. That is a great number. Great number. You're close. 17 billion. So that's a lot of money being spent on affiliate marketing. And this is a great question here. In this top revenue source for what percentage of publishers? So they're talking about every website out there. How many publishers do you think are using affiliate marketing today? How much? One. Yeah? One. Not quite. So 31% of all publishers are using affiliate marketing today. Now here's my favorite part. You guys, meet Fezzy Wigg. Fezzy Wigg is the cutest puppy that ever walked this earth. I got him this December. I love him to death. And everything is about my puppies. So we're going to make our presentation about my puppy too. And Fezzy Wigg has a question, you guys. Affiliate marketing. Because you guys are probably all asking that too. Well, let's put it in puppy's perspective. First, we've got the boring definition here. Billion marketing is a type of online marketing where business rewards its affiliates. The people who promote its products and services for each customer or sale they bring in. What does that mean to Fezzy Wigg? He doesn't care about that? Well, say Fezzy Wigg has a toy, favorite toy. He tells all his puppy friends about this toy. And those puppy friends buy the toy. Well, Fezzy Wigg is going to get a cut back from the toy company. Fezzy Wigg is going to be rolling in cash because he played with his favorite toy. I mean, he's a winner there. I'm going to Fezzy Wigg, I'm going to tell him. Basically, Fezzy Wigg, this is similar to how your human may recommend a product or service to their friends and receive a referral bonus for doing so. So, it's a way for companies to increase their sales and their affiliates earn some extra money by sharing their favorite products and services. Now, don't forget Fezzy Wigg because he's going to come back later. So, you're probably saying, Marybeth, how can affiliate marketing benefit me? Well, first, let's talk about how to get started. And then we'll talk about the benefits. There are many affiliate marketing can be very beneficial. I'll name some of the disadvantages and disadvantages. And then we'll walk through how to get started in affiliate marketing. So, let's start with how to get started. First, rule of affiliate marketing is to create killer organic content. And I want to put a big emphasis on organic content. You don't want your content to be chat GBT or copied from another website. You want it to be your own just unique content. The program that's right for you, depending on what your product is and what you want to sell or what you want to promote, you'll find that program. Then you join the affiliate program. It's that simple. So, using your WordPress site, you can create killer content, awesome content that and I want to point out that what you want to do is you want to inform your readers of something. Informing them is going to get them hooked. So, first, you find a problem to solve. Then you ask a question. The next thing you do is you answer that question. So, by finding that problem, asking that question and solving that question, you're teaching your readers something and giving them really good information. I've got an example. Everybody remember Fezziwig? Everybody remembers Fezziwig. Well, Fezziwig is a master escape artist. Fezziwig can escape his crate into ours flat, make a huge mess in my living room, and everything is a disaster. So, you guys, I need to figure out a way to keep him safe when we leave the house. So, the question, what's the best crate for a dog with the world's worst anxiety? And let me tell you that little guy, he's got anxiety. So, there I have my big question, guys. What is the best dog crate for a dog with high anxiety? Simple question, but people are probably asking it. I know I am. So, then you're going to have to do a little bit of research. I mean, everything takes a little bit of work, and I did some great research on dog crates. Sounds silly, right? I mean, dog crates? Well, there's a few dog crates, and each of them are great in their own way. You have the pro-select empire. It's a great crate. Look how strong it looks, right? The dog's never going to break out of it. Well, here's my problem. This crate's got bars, and I've got to cover the crate at night, and my dog, when he wakes up in the morning, loves to pull that blanket in through each of those bars that I've got to fix in the morning. So, I don't know if that crate is right for me. I got the impact crate. Impact crate looks scary, but that impact crate is meant for a dog with high anxiety. It can't chew through the bars. It can't bring the blanket in. It is safe as safe can be. And then lastly, you got the gunner crate. Well, the gunner crate is great. You know, probably never get out, but it's really meant for traveling and putting it in a bed of a truck. So, maybe not the crate that I'm looking for. Okay, so I have these three crates now. What do I do with them? Well, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make a list on my website. I'm going to list all the pros and cons of each of them. I'm going to list which one I choose, which is the first, and then I'm going to put it on my website. It's very simple. And then the next thing you want to do is you want to include your affiliate link. And you guys are probably saying these are dog crates. Like, there are affiliate links for dog crates, really? Guess what, guys? ProSelect Empire is on Amazon Associates. You can get an affiliate link for that. Has their own program, Avant Link. You sign up to it, and there you got a link for your impact crate. And then gunner crates, they're so, like, into affiliate marketing, they have their own affiliate marketing system through gunner crates. So no matter which crate you guys are putting on there, it's going to have an affiliate link. You could do the same thing with anything. Cat toys, dog toys. I mean, fashion, toys, retail, it's all on there. What happens next? What happens next is wonderful. First, you insert your link into your post and your page. Then people read your stuff and you make a sale. And that's great because what happens when you make a sale, guys? That's right. You collect money from each of those sales. And you do it without annoying your readers. You're just putting a simple link in there and you're giving them something to read about. And that's what's really important is you're informing them of something they're interested in. I've got all the sources right at the end. There are different articles. They have a lot of this information on it. So here's some examples of some affiliate programs. So obviously Amazon Associates is probably one of the biggest ones. You get their average sales about $50 and you get maybe one to 10% depending on what the product is. So maybe you're not earning a lot unless you're selling a lot on there. But you guys with Gunner crates, you get 5% of the sales price. And their crates run $800 to $1,000. So 5% of $1,000 is a lot of money. My program at Nexus, go ahead. I knew before they had a certain like minimal amount of traffic in order to become an associate. Is that still the case? You know, I don't know. That's a great question. I don't know. But I can find it out and email you in that and tell you about that. So with Nexus, we have a minimum of $150 up to 150%. Now our average sales price is like $99, but we have products that are like $1,000 a month and you're getting 150% of that $1,000 when you make that sale. So really, you can make a lot of money from a little bit to a lot depending on what you're selling, what you are promoting. So there are some warning signs of bad affiliate programs because not all affiliate programs are made equal. There are a lot of different things that you should watch out for. The first one, what? That's definitely a good thing to watch out for. One of them, though, is like an unresponsive affiliate manager. If you have an affiliate manager, like what I do and I'm not responding to you and I'm ignoring your meeting requests, you don't want to work with me. You want to work with another program. You'll get a threat of removal from it and saying you didn't make any sales or enough sales, so we're going to remove you from the program. That's not a program you probably want to be a part of. There should never be a minimum amount of sales that you have to make to stay a part of the program. There's also commission reductions. Sometimes out of the blue, they'll just reduce your commission by a certain percentage and they won't even tell you why. That is not a program you want to be a part of. So you're probably asking who can do affiliate marketing. I think I've answered that, but let me give you some facts here. 15% of affiliate programs were in the fashion industry, so you've got clothes, you've got shoes, you've got makeup, all these things that you can promote. There's 109% growth in the toy industry in affiliate marketing last year. 43% of affiliate revenue was generated by the retail sector. So guys, I bet you can guess who can do affiliate marketing. Anyone have a guess? Anyone can do affiliate marketing. So all of you can add affiliate marketing to your websites. So now you asked, what's in it for me? So let me tell you some advantages guys. First, there's low to no startup costs for every affiliate program. Basically, you sign up for the programs, you get your links and you don't pay anything to do it. You just promote their product so it's basically free for you. The next thing is really important because once you make that really good killer organic content, you're going to increase your SEO and increase your traffic and increase your rankings on Google, which is going to bring more people in, which means you're going to make more conversions, which makes this really high ROI. There's little no startup costs, so basically your return on investment is really high because you're making way more than you're spending. So if you have a domain and you're doing real well with parking ads and you're probably going to turn it into a parking service. I'm sorry, I didn't catch it. If you have a domain and you're doing real well with parking ads, you're probably going to turn it into a parking service. You could do that, definitely. I think that's a good idea. I think it depends on the domain name and it really depends on the products that you are promoting. So there are advantages, but I mean everyone knows there's also disadvantages and I don't want to leave you in the dark. There are some things to watch out for when you're doing it. One is that affiliate marketing is commission-based. So basically, you don't get paid unless you make a sale. So it's really important to have that really good SEO, have that really good content because unless you have those things in your ranking on Google, you're not going to make any money. So I want you guys to make sure you have really good content. But there's one thing that you have to know also is that affiliate marketing, since anyone can do it, can be really competitive. I mean, when I work in the hosting space, you know, you have to watch out because a lot of the big players have ranked first and get a lot of those sales. So it's really important that that content ranks well on Google. And then the hardest part is guys, it takes time. You don't get organic content to rank overnight. It takes time to do that. It takes time to write the content. I mean, that is really the biggest spend you're going to make in affiliate marketing. So with these advantages and disadvantages, I want to give you guys some tips and tricks that we have learned over the years. So there's some ways to increase your conversions. You guys are all using WordPress. You can also use WordPress plugins that are meant for affiliate marketing. You can use them that create and manage your affiliate links in the dashboard. You have some plugins that will share all of your links to social media. And then there are some that create auto links just for certain keywords, so the auto link your keyword right there for you. So I mean, these plugins, they make it easier for you to do your job. Another way is to track your results. You can use analytic tools such as Google Analytics or the analytics for the affiliate program that you're in. And you can track your conversions from your affiliate links, which is really important because if you're not tracking your metrics, you don't know what needs to be changed. And you don't know what you can improve upon. All these affiliate plugins that I found on this wpforms.com, these are just some of the plugins guys. And if you want to, if you don't want to make a list of them right now, these are on my website, you can see the whole presentation. But I mean, there's just countless plugins you can use. I think it's a great idea to make sure that you do some research and get the best plugins for yourself. And then I talked about tracking your metrics. Here are six key metrics to track. One is clicks. You want to know how many people are clicking on the links you've got on your website. The next is very important. From those clicks, how many people are making sales? Then the conversion. For how many clicks, how many sales are you making? What is the conversion rate that you're getting on your website? There are things like return on ad spend, incremental revenue, and cost per click and cost per sale. Those are all very important. And I really suggest you keep track of all of those things when you're doing affiliate marketing. Can you explain, I'm sorry, can you explain what incremental revenue is? Incremental revenue is when you're getting, say, sometimes you're getting like 10 percent, sometimes you're getting 15 percent. It's how it grows. So you're probably saying Mary Beth, sales prices and product, they change all the time. How are you going to keep up with that? Because, you know, people have sales. They change their prices. I mean, we just did a huge logo revamp and people had to update the logo for us for all of their things. So you want to know, how do you keep up with all that? There's something you can do. They're called data feed tools. And the data feed tools will scour the internet and they will tell you when there is an update. So I found three that are really good. One is Avant Link, which Avant Link is an affiliate program. So that's a great one to start with. Another one is products up. And there's also feed enomics. So with these data feed tools, you can really keep up to date with what you are putting on your website. And then there's less work for you, which is also the same with the plugins. The more you put into it, like the less work that there's going to be. So you guys, let's get started. You can do this. You can do affiliate marketing. Candice, you got this. Questions? Regarding the content, that's the most important thing. Yes. And I would ask that you either would want to affiliate with something that's connected to whatever your website has to do with or find a way to tie it in. But what page do you post the content on? So you can make a page or I would suggest doing it as a blog post or an article on your website. So take for instance, like web hosting, you can do like the 10 best web hosts or you can do a review of a web hosting company. Like you can do that for all those. Like I could have four articles out of these crates. I could have a top three crates. I could have a review for each of those crates. And there's like four sets of content that you can use to bring SEO to your website. You can do a couple different things with video. Like you can, if you have a YouTube channel, you can use YouTube on that. And then you can include your affiliate links in the description of the YouTube video or you can put a video in your article. You can just embed it in your article and then put the affiliate links below in the description. Does that answer the question? Okay. Run Google ads on website with link then. But it also runs into some, I forget, I haven't looked over this full extent of their policy in a while. It just limits some of what advertising you can actually post on there. So, and that makes, that's what the kind of the difference is. Because like with pop-up ads and stuff, and those are like Google ads usually and stuff, within affiliate marketing, all you're doing is placing a link in your article and in your content. So they don't, like, they don't like alert Google that you've got this ad there. It's a little more organic, if that makes sense. I think I had attempted to do a return on this to kind of over 10,000 users. Yeah, you can definitely do that with affiliate marketing. I think Amazon associates specifically said that you're not supposed to use it in emails. So it definitely can vary depending on an affiliate program. Each affiliate program has their own rules, their own like set of what you can and can't do. Like say with ours, like some people will just use our affiliate links and put them into ads and try to like bid on our keywords, which that's kind of a no-no. Like you can't bid on like trademark keywords. So there's, there's different ways that you can do that. But I don't suggest that as much as actually making content for it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of people will have like on the bottom of their website, they will have an affiliate disclosure. And you can put the affiliate disclosure in your YouTube like, like most people will like put their affiliate links. And then at the very bottom, like these are affiliate links. I do earn income from them. You can do that per video or you can have it on your site just generally so people know. Do you have any advice on recruiting affiliates or re-engaging them to do more stuff? Are you talking about from an affiliate program manager's side or from like an actual affiliate marketer who's writing the content and... So I have a product. Okay. And I have a lot of affiliates, but I like more. Okay. Also the ones that are doing well to do more. So there's, there's some things that I do. As a program manager, I do a lot of Google scraping. I do a lot of searching for people who are looking for our product, like the top 10 web hosting companies, or the top 10 WordPress web hosting companies. But then I use a tool called SEMrush and you can actually do research on keywords and find like more links through that. So like if you've got a company say that is, they're, they're, I can't think of my word. I'm so sorry. They're trying to promote the gunner crate. Well, they're trying to promote the gunner crate. Chances are they're going to want to promote that impact crate too. So if they're promoting someone else's, like a competitor's product, they will probably likely promote your product as well. Does that make sense? Yeah. A call to action. You might write like you said a review or something like that specifically for the affiliate, but articles that relate to your dog, you could put in a call to action if you're just taking this article. Here's the article on crates for this kind of dog. Yeah. So a lot, a lot of our affiliates do use call to action on their pages. A lot of them, like if they do a review it, you know, right at the end, there's a button, you know, purchase now or something like that. So that's really a great idea. Really great point. Instead of having like a static link, is there anything you can recommend or what you would do if you want to like pay the call and play a program, you want to put a phone number in there? No, there's not that I know of. Most of things work through the actual affiliate link. There's, you've got to use that link because it caches the cookie. And that cookie is what tells people that they purchased it from your link and not from like the actual website. I mean, you can do that, but still you're going to have to use that. Well, you know, there are other ways because you can actually use coupon codes. A lot of people will track through coupon codes. So that's always a possibility as well. So if you wanted to do that call, you could give them a coupon code over the phone. And that would be your specific code. Any other questions? I really appreciate all of you. Thank you so much for coming.