Monday, July 06, 2015 / 0 comments /

Affiliate Program that pays per click

Hello folks,
Following my previous post MAKING MONEY FROM BLOGGING EXPLAINED, I promised another post where I would share with you an affiliate link that PAYS PER CLICK! Isn't it awesome? We all know, it is difficult to drive the sale via our blogs - people might not be interested in the companies we feature, they might not have money while they read your post or they might simply prefer to buy something in store especially when it comes to clothing or cosmetics.

Anyways, here comes the solution for us. Unfortunately, it is only available to bloggers residing in the following countries: 50 United States, The European Union, Canada and Australia. 
The website is called ShopStyleCollective (click) and even though it looks like it is mainly about fashion, it is not!
ShopStyle is basically sort of a data base of products from thousand of companies.
THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES ARE AVAILABLE:
Women (Clothing, Bags, Shoes, Beauty)
Men (Clothing, Bags, Shoes, Grooming)
Kids (Baby Gear, Bath, Bedroom, Nursery, Clothing, Toys & Activity)
Home (Bath, Bedding, Decor, Furniture, Kitchen, Lightning, Rugs, Tabletop, Luggage)
When searching for products you can search by Category, Brand, Store, Color, Sales & Deals. On the top of that, you can tick the option to display only items that pay high commission.
You can share products as text links or you can create a widget on the website, which allows to display products with images, with/without price and with/without brand name as well as with/without store name. You can see the widgets I created here and here.

Apart from getting paid per click, you also get paid % if you drive a sale. What I love about this website is that every blogger will find something for themselves - beauty blogger, fashion blogger, bloggers who write about their children, parent bloggers or even food bloggers!
The second thing I love it for is obviously getting paid per click! I don't think there is any other affiliate program that offers this. Most of us, readers, visit other bloggers to get inspired therefore we watch things and not necessarily buy that is, once again, something that makes ShopSense amazing!
When it comes to money, I have realized you can get anything between £0.01 and £0.04 per click! Imagine you create the widget featuring 10 items and 5 of them are clicked by 50 people - you would already make almost £8! 
The website also has some disadvantages:
1. We have no idea how much we made per click ( I found out how much I made per click because I shortened their affiliate link using Google Link Shortner, which allows me to see how many times the link was clicked :D This doesn't work with widgets)
2. We don't know how much we earned per every single item, we can only see the best performing products, how much we made per retailer and per brand.

shopstyleshopstyle2shopstyle3


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Monday, July 06, 2015 / 0 comments /

Awesome 'Awesome Font' everyone uses for social media icons

Hello everyone,
Can you see my social icons in the left top corner?
They are not an image, they are a font! Awesome font. It is awesome and it is called 'awesome'!
In this post, you will learn how to use this font on your blog and how to use social icons with it!

STEP 1. INSTALL THE FONT.

To install the font, we need to enter the following code below <head>.
<link HREF='//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/css/font-awesome.min.css' REL='stylesheet'/>

Blogger: Go to Blogger -> Template -> Edit HTML then click anywhere on your HTML code, click CTRL + F, which will open a small search window and type <head>.
BLOGGER ERROR: If after saving your html, the error appears, add </link> after above code - </link> will disappear after saving but will fix the html to make sure no error appears.

WordPress: Go to your dashboard -> Appearance -> Editor. From the list on the right, select Header. Click CTRL + F, which will open a small search window and type <head>.

STEP 2. INSERTING SOCIAL ICONS.

Once the font is installed, we can start using it. Don't skip Step 1 as the font will not work.
In order to be able to insert the font, we will need some list of codes to copy html code from. THE LIST IS AVAILABLE HERE (click).
Once you find the symbol you want to use, click on it, this will display the code starting with 'fa-', for example fa-facebook-official
You will also see the full code for the symbol:
<i class="fa fa-facebook-official"></i>
This code is enough to display social icon but since we want our social icon to be a link to our social account, we need to use the following code:
<a href='LINK-TO-YOUR-SOCIAL-MEDIA-GOES-HERE' target='_blank'><i class='fa fa-twitter'/></i></a>
The above code is what you need. Make sure you enter your social media link and you replace fa-twitter with another icon. DON'T DELETE the first 'fa', YOU ONLY NEED TO REPLACE FA-TWITTER, NOT FA FA-TWITTER.
Of course, most of us, will have more than one social icon and you can start inserting above codes one after another without any spacing. To have all social icons centered you can add <center> at the beginning and </center> at the end (after last icon, not after each symbol).
<center><a href='https://twitter.com/mycupofbeautyuk' target='_blank'><i class='fa fa-twitter'/></i></a><a href='http://instagram.com/mycupofbeautyuk' target='_blank'><i class='fa fa-instagram'/></i></a><a href='https://www.facebook.com/pages/My-Cup-of-Beauty/355544494651434?fref=ts' target='_blank'><i class='fa fa-facebook'/></i></a><a href='https://plus.google.com/+mycupofbeauty/posts' target='_blank'><i class='fa fa-google-plus'/></i></a><a href='https://uk.pinterest.com/mycupofbeauty/' target='_blank'><i class='fa fa-pinterest'/></i></a><a href='https://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/my-cup-beauty-13788237' target='_blank'><i class='fa fa-heart'/></i></a></center>

This is how the code should look like (more less) after inserting several social icons. Feel free to copy the code above and replace it with your own links if you want.

STEP 3. MAKING OUR SOCIAL ICONS PRETTY.
Ok, so we have inserted our social icons. We can now see that they are small and displayed very close to each other, we now need to add small piece of CSS code to make them look the way we want.

THIS CODE NEEDS TO BE ADDED TO:

Blogger: Go to Blogger -> Template -> Edit HTML and search for ]]> </b:skin> - add the below code ABOVE.

WordPress: Go to Dashboard -> Appearance -> Editor, add the following code to CSS file, make sure to not add it in the middle of another CSS but after } closing the object.

.fa {
font-size: 10px; /* size of your social icons */
padding-left: 3px; /* gap size - left side */
padding-right: 3px; /* gap size - right side */
color: #000 !important; /* desired color */
}

.fa:hover {
color: #fff !important; /* social icons color on hover */
}


Any issues? Feel free to comment below and I will try to help asap. 

Thanks for stopping by.
. Blogger: Go to Blogger -> Template -> Edit HTML then click anywhere on your HTML code, click CTRL + F, which will open a small search window and type . BLOGGER ERROR: If after saving your html, the error appears, add after above code - will disappear after saving but will fix the html to make sure no error appears. WordPress: Go to your dashboard -> Appearance -> Editor. From the list on the right, select Header. Click CTRL + F, which will open a small search window and type .
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Monday, July 06, 2015 / 0 comments /

Earn Money (per click) by sharing things on your social media and blog

Hi everyone :)
Today, I will be talking about another possibility allowing us to earn money per click. If you have a website or a blog and are trying to earn something from it, you know it's hard. It's hard for all of us. I think it's difficult to earn significant amount of money from ads that allow us to earn per click or per views because (1) it is difficult to get clicks on it - readers may not be interested in the ad or (2) the ads are irrelevant. Affiliate links - another great opportunity to make money but not everyone shops online and even if somone shops, they might not necessarily click on your link before shopping.

TODAY I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THIS SITE THAT PAYS $0.10 PER CLICK OR $5 IF YOU GET YOUR READERS DOWNLOAD THE APP (example figures).
BEFORE YOU GET EXCITED AND GO TO SIGN UP, READ IMPORTANT THINGS I WANT TO SHARE WITH YOU.

cover

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP AND START EARNING


1. Before you start sharing links, check campaigns available because some of them allow you to earn per click only in some countries. So if the campaign lets you earn from US clicks, if someone from the UK clicks on your link, you get nothing.

2. Read what you get paid for carefully as sometimes you get money per click, sometimes per download (with mobile apps for example).

3. You need to cover PayPal fixed fee + %. This will NOT be taken from your account until you receive the payment but be aware of it.

4. Visit regularly for new campaigns and opportunities and enjoy :)

What methods do you use to make money from blogging? What do you rely on?
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Monday, July 06, 2015 / 0 comments /

Things to consider when buying a blog template.


Hello everyone, this time I want to share with you things I can consider very important to review before purchasing Blogger or Wordpress theme.
Before I started offering designs, I was just blogging and I was buying themes from someone. Now, I do offer this type of services and I discuss template looks with many people and I just thought it would be great to highlight important things to check when purchasing a template.
These advises are important if you want to grow your blog and be found in search engines. You don't really need to worry about some of them if you blog for yourself and are not really thinking of growing your site.
I hope you will find my tips useful.

Readers, let me know what things you consider/look for when purchasing a theme. I am curious to find out!

Of course, there are many other things to consider when purchasing the theme but I wanted to highlight the ones I noticed disappoint very often.
 
1. MAKE SURE YOUR TEMPLATE IS RESPONSIVE - LOOKS GOOD ON MOBILE.
Earlier this year, Google announced that how your site looks on mobile will have an impact on how high you will rank in search results. Google algorithm does not only take your site being responsive or not into consideration, they also consider DA (Domain Authority), key words, social media sharing etc. This change came into effect on 21st April 2015. To check if your site is responsive, you can use this page: MOBILE FRIENDLY TEST (CLICK). If you are about to purchase a theme, you can use demo link to see if the template will be responsive.

2. MAKE SURE THE TEMPLATE WILL HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS.
There are hundreds of different bloggers out there with different goals. For example, if you are an aspiring photographer, you will want people to Pin/Share your work, if you create any other type of art, you will also want people to share so you can be easily found on sites such as Pinterest. If you are, however, a blogger like me, reviewing things, talking a little bit about lifestyle (cool places to visit, some recipes occasionally), you will want people to sign up to your site so they regularly come back to see what you reviewed. You will also want to be found in search results when others search for product review. Don't get me wrong, all of us will want people to sign up, people to share images on Pinterest but there are some bloggers that will focus on some things more, and on some of them less.

3. MAKE SURE THE THEME IS PERFECT FOR THE TYPE OF BLOGGER YOU ARE.
Again, if you are a photography blogger, you will, probably, want to display big images, have a gallery etc. If you are a fashion blogger constantly featuring new trends, you might want to consider newspaper-like theme. For example, I blog about different topics - beauty, fashion, recipes and blogging help and I want my readers to see all type of articles on home page that's why I decided to go for this magazine-like style.

4. NEVER (!) RELAY ON DEMO.
Almost every single template available out there has a live preview. When viewing this, try to imaging your own posts over there. When I create a demo/live preview, I ALWAYS try to match images from posts to the theme, so for black & white theme, I would add black and white photography or something with grey shades. When I was creating this cute pink template, I added images with neutral shades so it would look good. Many people purchase templates after blogging for a while so they already have around 50 - 100 posts published - that's why, again, it is important you imagine your posts and images with the theme.

5. 'READ MORE' OPTIONS.
I see this with MANYYYYY templates - this is something very similar to 'Never relay on demo' thing. I see lots of demos having very short posts - literally 4 lines and featured image - so the home page looks really nice and clean with around 4 posts displayed but which blogger writes 4 lines long post? If you see something like this in demo, make sure you ask the seller if the theme comes with 'read more' option that appears automatically (!) without you going back to every single post and inserting it manually.

6. IMPROVING BOUNCE RATE = INCREASING PAGE VIEWS.
Double check if the theme has some widgets/space for widgets that would increase page views - for example: Related Posts under each post or 'You might also like' suggestion. I have learnt that widgets in sidebar, such as 'Most popular' or 'Most commented' are encouraging too - make sure this widgets are visible, for example, I personally prefer small image and post title so the reader can have an idea what the post is about.
 
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