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A true omnichannel strategy makes the most of offline not just onlineConsider the main ingredients to a sale when a customer is in your place of business. You have product placements that suggest what a customer should buy, education on the products and services you are selling, the ability to experience your brand firsthand, and most important, people available to educate buyers and make a sale. All these make up the customer experience, and digital is just another component.
Clearly, bricks-and-mortar businesses that aren’t yet capitalizing on their digital channels were successful before the internet took over their industries. There are reasons for that success, and those can give you an edge over your internet-born competitors.
Digitizing Your Offline StrategyA successful online strategy shouldn’t be a matter of abandoning old tactics and replacing them with a trend. It should be a process of using the digital experience as an extension of what has worked to differentiate your business in the offline marketplace.
This approach ensures your organization’s digital efforts extend the unique customer experience that buyers look for and allows you to capitalize on an asset any internet-only business will have difficulty competing with. The customer experience matters more than you might think. Sixty-four percent of people think that customer experience is more important than price in their choice of a brand, and three out of four customers are more likely to visit your store if your online information is useful.
The Digital DifferenceCustomers are exposed to too many factors in their decision-making to not take digital into account. Consistency is key, and your website and surrounding digital marketing are great mediums through which to replicate and promote what your top sales agents have been doing on a one-on-one basis for years.
Take Zappos, for example, which acknowledged the offline experience in its exclusively online business. This company revolutionized the online shoe-buying experience by offering free returns and shipping. True, it’s not a brick-and-mortar business, but it essentially digitized one of the main values a storefront experience provided to consumers better than online-only retailers. Other businesses that have successfully gone digital — like Warby Parker, Tesla, and Target — have done so by replicating a few key elements of the bricks-and-mortar experience.
Home Depot has always had a location-based strategy, providing easy access to building materials and supplies. Essentially becoming the nation’s local hardware store. Its online experience offers the best of both worlds: Users can instantly see available inventory across all stores and select whether to purchase online and have it shipped to their homes, or they can purchase online and designate items they need immediately to be picked up at the store. It has extended its product catalog to enable more options for its customers without having to increase the goods carried in its physical stores. And buyers can elect to pick up the items not carried in their local stores to save on shipping charges.
Duplicate What WorksBefore any bricks-and-mortar organization invests in their digital strategy, though, they should remember what makes them successful despite digital. Focus on what sets you apart. Where is your organization demonstrably different from the competition? Find ways to make the differentiator the most evident part of your digital strategy.
Ensuring that you have proper analytics in place will allow you to consistently monitor and adapt your digital efforts. Digital makes this information involuntary and honest in terms of seeing which tactics yielded conversions and which did not. And always leave an option for customers to interact with you the old-fashioned way. The online experience should complement the in-store experience — not compete with it. Your customers will interact with you the way they’re the most comfortable.
Once you’ve established a digital foundation that sets your business up for success, replicate these four brick-and-mortar elements in your digital experience to keep customers coming back — both in-store and online:
Maintain human interaction. One of the key elements to an in-store customer experience is interaction with individuals from your organization. This component defines personal interaction and helps in building real-time trust with the consumer. A great way to translate this to digital is by offering online chat on your site.
When implementing this, just as you don’t want your sales reps to follow around and annoy customers, the chat should be something customers can easily access if they want to — not something that pops up on every page they’ve closed out of.
Enable product interaction. The second major benefit of the offline experience is the ability to interact in-person with the product. As discussed previously, companies like Zappos and Warby Parker are sending the product to consumers to interact with before they’ve been purchased.
However, there are ways to do this without the overhead of shipping costs. Giving customers 360-degree product tours that allow them to zoom in on materials, view multiple images, and watch videos can easily simulate product interaction.
Two approaches can support this need digitally. The “recommended products” feature can be helpful, but today’s educated consumer, who understands that recommendations are likely based on products being pushed, doesn’t always trust it.
Taking a lesson from Amazon, using helpful features like “buyers also viewed” and “customer reviews” gives consumers even more information to use in making decisions than they would get from an in-store experience.
The second approach is to be consistent in reminding customers how close your physical store is and that you have experts on-site who can help them. Driving a customer to your physical store creates not only a captive lead, but also a qualified one because that customer is coming in after researching other options online.
Get personal. A customer who frequents your store and is greeted by familiar faces will feel a connection, especially when those faces remember the customer’s last purchase and make recommendations that match his style. Customers shopping a brand in Chicago are likely going to have very different needs from customers shopping the same brand in Los Angeles, so take those person differences into account.
Tools like Optimizely make it possible for your site to feature umbrellas on your homepage when it’s raining in that visitor’s location, and simple IP detection can localize your messaging and product offerings. Using such third-party services make it possible to leverage prior actions a customer had on your site to alter her experience to cater to her interests in the future.
Digital is mandatory, and with it comes new ways to market your company and your products. But you should incorporate what made you successful offline to create a truly well-rounded digital strategy and maintain your edge on the competition.
Ted Novak is a partner and managing director at Clique Studios, where he helps build and introduce innovative solutions for the digital market. Based in Chicago, Clique Studios is an award-winning design and engineering company building digital experiences for high-growth organizations.
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How To Create & Use Data
Whoever coined the term “content is king” didn’t warn us that all of the steps needed to create link-worthy type of content.
It’s easy enough to write your copy, post it to your blog, and call it a day, but the “king” part only comes when you structure your content to get found in the SERPs.
I’ve worked with a lot of brands to create data-driven content.
One, in particular, was an education company based in New York City. I worked with the editorial team for 3 months to create a long-form piece of ego bait content.
Not only did it gain 52 backlinks in one month, but it generated more than 100 press mentions and drove over 100,000 people to the website.
Learn how to create and use data-driven content for your link building strategy below.
Be the SourceCreating your own data for an article is typically one big headache.
if you’ve ever tried to survey customers, you know what I’m talking about.
But, as Search Engine Journal’s founder Loren Baker says, “Be the source.”
When you create your own data, people will want to link back to the place they cited.
Using tools like Google Trends (you can also subscribe to Google Trends) and Google Consumer Survey, you can search for trending topics and build your own data.
Take Echelon Insights, for example.
They leveraged Google Consumer Surveys to understand the Republican Primary Electorate. Echelon Insights found that Donald Trump was leading at 32% going into the first Republican Primary Debate.
This study generated links from top sites like Wired, The Washington Post, The Observer, and many more.
Pick Your TopicGood data doesn’t always equal good content.
You have to figure out how to tell a story with the data you have.
First, you must decide what your content is going to be about.
With data, this can be a chicken and egg situation – do you use the data you have to form your topic or do you choose your topic and then collect some data around it?
It may depend on whether you have pre-existing data or whether you already have a subject matter in mind that’s newsworthy or trending.
When researching what topics I may want to cover, I’ll start researching with Google Trends and BuzzSumo. These tools are built for research and exploring trends.
Gather Your DataThe first step to creating data-driven content is to collect the data.
I begin to gather my resources of data, whether I’m surveying users or if I’m using my own data.
Important note: When building content with your own proprietary data, it’s not about quantity.
For example, Shutterstock uses its proprietary data to create a genuinely useful piece of content with its 2023 Creative Trends infographic. This infographic generated more than 50 links.
Conduct SurveysThe go-to place for collecting fresh data, surveys are a fantastic way to gather information and to get statistics and data around subjects that you specifically want to focus on.
Think carefully about your questions before asking them. You want to get the best results possible to generate a variety of angles for you to use in your content.
Make sure your questions will support your story and limit the number of open-ended questions you ask. Like what I did here with our SEJ survey for an article I was working on:
Include a variety of demographic questions so that you can cross-reference answers given with details about the respondents. This will allow you to create multiple sub-stories and angles to push out to the local press.
Ask Your CommunityDo you have your own community of customers or fans?
Then ask them a few questions, survey them or send out a questionnaire to turn that data into content.
Like Moz does with their survey.
You can see the survey questions here. And, the results of the survey here.
The results alone drove 32 backlinks.
If you work for a bigger brand and have forums where your customers come together to discuss a range of different topics, this is a great place to start a conversation about the topic you want to create content around.
Many businesses also have a large database of customer contact details and some regularly send out newsletters.
If you have a large social media following, you can use Facebook and Twitter polls to gather data.
Use Your Own Data & ReportsMany SaaS companies don’t realize the amount of data they are already sitting on.
You likely have some analytical tools to track the success of your own website and marketing efforts. These tools could be used to give you useful insights and data you could use as part of your content marketing strategy.
Google Analytics is a good place to start, as you can look into different consumer demographics such as their age, gender, and location of your customers, along with the industries they work in, what they buy, what devices they use, and more.
You can also carry out your own tests and experiments to generate data and insight that will interest others in your industry or your customers.
Look for Interesting AnglesOnce you’ve got your data, you need to analyze it and pull out the angles you want to use to tell your story and make your content as newsworthy as possible.
Try and highlight any key points and statistics that support the storyline or headline you want to use and pull out any compelling insights into your results.
Use conditional formatting and create pivot charts to find correlations between different data sets.
If you don’t get the answer or result you were hoping for, don’t force it — put it to one side and focus on a different angle.
Once you have some strong data in front of you, segment your results demographically. This will help you find a range of local angles you can pull out for your content based on gender, age, location, etc. – perfect for pushing out to regional press and publishers for extra coverage.
Visualize Your DataThe way you present your data is key to the success of your content.
Data visualization is the first step in making your content engaging and shareable. But it isn’t easy.
Ideally, you should work with a designer to visualize your data. But if you don’t have access to one (or don’t have the budget), you can make it yourself using a data visualization tool.
This is one of my favorite visuals that came from data by Podio.
Once you’ve created your visual, you need to make sure there is still some content around it to tell your story and make your data come to life.
Always keep in mind how you want your readers to digest your content and that it needs to be responsive on mobile and tablet devices.
How to Structure Your Content Support ActivitiesIf the content is truly a unicorn, as Larry Kim would say, you need to do all the supporting activities around this piece.
Here’s how I structure my content support activities:
Collaborate with the PR team to create a strategy. PR teams develop some of the highest-quality link opportunities, but they leave a lot of opportunities on the table. This is where link builders come in to do the manual outreach.
Conduct manual outreach to industry blogs for backlinks and guest blogs.
Partner with other companies on a webinar to discuss the data.
Create a blog post series to give further context to the data and optimize for new search terms.
Use the data in presentations at conferences.
Recreate the data in infographics, charts, and graphs.
Awesome Examples of Data-Driven ContentHere are a few pieces of data-driven content to inspire you:
The Guardian has really taken the lead with data visualization and has a whole section on their site dedicated to it. It’s a great place to go for inspiration on how you can shape your data into eye-catching graphics.
Here’s another really cool example of some data visualization based on A Day in the Life of Americans:
Don’t Have Any Data?Don’t have time to collect data yourself?
No problem!
There are plenty of data sources you can use and combine to make a whole new data set.
For example, you could take two similar data sets that were created 10 years apart and then compare and contrast them.
Or, you could analyze someone else’s data and pull out some new angles that haven’t been used yet.
Here are some other resources to find some interesting data to use in your content or as a starting point for a bigger piece of data journalism:
You can also simply type into Google “[keyword] market research” or “[keyword] data sets” to find a range of different information available online.
Read this article for a case study and even more ideas: Building Links with Data-Driven Content (Even When You Don’t Have Any Data)
SummaryTimeframe: Every 3 months
Results detected: 2-6 months
Average links sent per month: 60
Tools:
Google Trends
Google Consumer Survey
BuzzSumo
Google Analytics
Benefits:
Great content has no shelf-life. With high-quality content, you will see a spike at the beginning and again 6 months later as you start to rise search rank.
Data-driven content always works because you created something people want. If you did your research right, you should have a powerful piece of content.
How To Create An Anonymous Facebook Account
While nothing on the internet is truly private, having a public Facebook account comes with extra privacy risks. Every picture you add to your Facebook page, every friend request and event invitation you accept – all of it is monitored by the company.
If you’re done worrying about what that information could potentially be used for, there are a few ways out aside from deleting your Facebook account for good. You could either deactivate your Facebook and switch to Messenger to keep in touch with your friends, or – if you’re not ready to stop using the Facebook app – create a new anonymous Facebook account.
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Why Create an Anonymous Facebook AccountStaying anonymous on Facebook protects your privacy in more than one way. Should Facebook ever be compromised, you’ll be in the clear if you used a fake name and information when registering your account. That means you don’t have to worry about your personal data falling into the wrong hands.
Another reason to go anonymous is to avoid unwanted attention from your work colleagues or people from school. With an anonymous account, you don’t have to add acquaintances and people you barely know out of politeness and allow them to snoop on your private life on Facebook. At the same time, your friends and people that you actually want to have on your friends list will still know who you really are, so you won’t be totally disconnected from the digital world.
Finally, you might want to create an anonymous Facebook account for professional reasons. For example, if you’re running a Facebook page for a business and want to be an admin, you’ll have to tie it to your Facebook account.
How to Make an Anonymous Account on FacebookWhen creating an anonymous Facebook account, remember to keep it simple. That’s the best strategy for when you want to blend in. Follow the steps below to set up your anonymous Facebook page.
1. Create a Burner Email or Phone NumberYou’ll need an email address or a phone number to create a new Facebook account. If you use your personal email address, especially one you used to sign up for other websites, it can be tied to your data. The best course of action is to use a temporary burner email or phone instead.
To create a burner phone number, you can use a service like Google Voice or Burner app. Alternatively, make a new email account without adding any personal details.
2. Create a Facebook AccountNow that you have a burner phone number or email address, you can use it to sign up for Facebook.
Go to chúng tôi and select Create New Account. Use a fake first and last name, fill in your email or phone number, add a fake birthday and gender. Make sure not to use any of your real details to avoid accidentally revealing your identity. Select Sign Up to confirm. You’ll then receive a confirmation email or a text message from Facebook.
Facebook will also ask permission to access your contacts. Select No to deny access, otherwise your profile will appear in the People You May Know section of other Facebook users.
3. Start Adding FriendsNow that your new Facebook account is confirmed, you can add a profile picture or an avatar and start adding friends. Make sure you only add people who you know personally and who are trustworthy. You don’t want your contacts to share the link to your new Facebook page with other users.
How to Keep Your Privacy on FacebookOnce you start using your private Facebook account, you’ll need to be mindful of your actions on Facebook to keep your presence on the platform anonymous. Aside from simple things like not adding a photo with your face as your profile picture, there are other mistakes that you can make that will jeopardise your anonymity on Facebook. Here are a few tips that will help you stay truly anonymous.
Check Your Privacy SettingsOne of the first things to do after you create your anonymous account is to do a privacy checkup on Facebook and adjust your privacy settings so that you’re not discovered by other users.
In the privacy settings section, you can review who can see your Facebook posts and your friends list, as well as who can contact you on the platform. This will help you keep your activity on Facebook as private as possible.
Never Use Your Real Name on Your New Facebook PageOne of the first things Facebook will ask you to do is to fill in your first and last name. However, after you create the account, you can also customize it by editing your id handle (or username) and changing it from random characters to your name or nickname. It’s best to avoid using anything that can be linked back to your real identity.
Keep Your Personal Details Off Your BioWhen you create a new account, Facebook will constantly prompt you to fill in your About section. Even if you don’t think the information you’re sharing is relevant, it’s best to keep any (real) personal details off your Facebook page to keep it anonymous.
Don’t Interact With Other Users PubliclyTo keep your private Facebook account truly private, avoid any public activity or interaction with other people and use direct messages instead.
Stay Anonymous While on FacebookHaving an anonymous Facebook account is a great solution for anyone who’s concerned about their online privacy but also isn’t ready to quit social media. Instead of deleting your Facebook account, you get to keep it and preserve your digital social life. All without endangering your personal data.
How To Create An Affiliate Website 2023
Affiliate marketing involves promoting a product or service and earning a commission for every lead or customer you generate. The idea of generating passive income attracts many to affiliate marketing.
With Business Insider reporting that affiliate marketing is as effective as email marketing, it’s no wonder that 80% of brands have an affiliate marketing program. Affiliate marketing spending is projected to reach $8.2 billion in 2023, making it a great time to learn how to create a website for affiliate marketing.
In the eight steps below, we explain how to create an affiliate marketing website.
How to Create an Affiliate Marketing Website [With Infographics] 🖼️To build a website that consistently makes you money, you must first understand how to pick a niche and product before learning to build a website.
How to Create an Affiliate Marketing Website in 8 Steps
Step 1: Pick a NicheSuccessful affiliates understand that picking the right niche is about balancing personal interests, skills, and market demand. There is no shortage of niches that seem profitable, but picking at random will do you no good.
Market trends largely dictate your website’s success, but factoring in your interests is vital to ensure you continually work on the website without becoming disinterested.
Some excellent niches you can pick from are:
Health: While the niche has always been lucrative, new affiliate marketers focus their efforts on marketing weight-loss products, diets, vitamins, and vegan food. The best way to find the right topic to base your blog on is to consider your target audience’s preferences, age, gender, and location.
Your niche options are not limited to these, and you shouldn’t hesitate to come up with your own affiliate niche website ideas. That said, make sure you do your due diligence and gauge the competition in the niche before starting a website.
Looking at the traffic competitors drive, the keywords they target, and their respective search volume should give you a fair idea of how difficult it will be to monetize your website.
If the competition is too fierce, there may be no point in making an affiliate website in that niche since climbing up the SERPs and reaching your target audience will be nearly impossible.
Step 2: Search for Affiliate ProgramsAdvertisers (merchants) join these networks and upload their affiliate programs (or “offers”) to them to connect with affiliates that meet their criteria.
In other words, you will be able to find several products to promote on an affiliate network. Most affiliates join more than one network and find a handful of products to promote.
How to Choose a Product to PromoteThere are four things you should look at before deciding to promote a product on your affiliate site:
While the product need not have upsells or offer recurring commissions to qualify as a “good” product to promote, choosing products that pay commissions in that model is the best way to generate passive income consistently – whether you’re a new or a seasoned affiliate.
It’s common for new affiliates to be taken aback when they notice the significant differences in commissions from product to product.
Here’s what new affiliates need to know:
Often, there is a trade-off between the commission percentage and the product quality. Naturally, most affiliates want to promote products that offer the best commissions per sale.
However, not every product that offers a big commission may be worth promoting since it may not sell as well as another product offering a smaller commission.
If product A costs $100 and product B costs $50, but the conversion rates are 5% and 15% for products A and B, respectively, you will make more money selling product B.
Not every affiliate network discloses the average conversion rate for products. A good way to determine if an offer is worth promoting is to see how often competing affiliates are promoting the offer. If many affiliates promote the offer, the chances of the offer paying good money are higher.
After thoroughly reading the sales page, you can consider signing up for the program.
How Affiliates Make MoneyAt this stage, you may be wondering how exactly you will make money as an affiliate.
For instance, Amazon’s product links look like this:
But an affiliate’s tracking link for the same product would look like this:
The “xxxxxxx-20” part of the affiliate link indicates your affiliate ID.
Cookie-based links place a cookie on the visitor’s computer with the details of your affiliate ID. If the visitor decides to purchase the product or complete the suggested action after a few days, the lead or sale generated is still attributed to the affiliate.
On the other hand, postback URLs do not utilize cookies and instead rely on query string parameters to track conversions and work out commissions.
In other words, the conversions are not processed on the visitor’s browser but on the affiliate network’s server instead. For this reason, this tracking method is sometimes called “cookieless tracking.”
Step 3: Choose a Domain NameYour website’s name is the domain name. Short and catchy domain names work best to capture your audience’s attention. Additionally, your domain name should also be relevant to the niche.
Domain owners must renew their domains annually, so you will need to buy the domain for at least one year.
Since you need a domain to run a website, and domains aren’t free, there is no direct method to build an affiliate website for free.
That said, if you’re wondering how to make an affiliate website for free, you could use a website builder that offers a domain and a website for free and begin your affiliate marketing journey there. Several website builders offer free domains, such as Wix, but it’s important to remember that these free websites will have limitations.
Most website builders that offer free domains do not allow you to set a custom domain name. Additionally, you can expect your free website to have a watermark, making the site look less authoritative.
For those wondering how to make an affiliate website for free, while it is possible, it certainly is not the best way to become an affiliate marketer. If you want to get involved with affiliate marketing without spending money, the passive income you want to generate may never come.
It’s best to spend a small amount of money buying a domain from any reputable domain registrar, such as GoDaddy.
How to Choose the Best Domain NameDetermining the right domain name can be just as challenging as finding the right product to promote. Using domain name generators such as those offered by IsItWP and Nameboy can make the job easier.
When picking a domain name, you must ensure
It is memorable.
It doesn’t contain hyphens and numbers and isn’t too long.
It doesn’t use a brand name, unless you own the brand.
It doesn’t involve a trend, since trends can come and go quickly.
Step 4: Sign Up with a Hosting Service and Find a Website BuilderModern website builders are remarkably easy to use and require zero technical expertise. Most website builders offer access to their editing features in conjunction with hosting. Therefore, if you prefer using an online website builder such as Wix or Weebly, you do not have to worry about signing up with a hosting service separately.
On the other hand, if you’re wondering how to build an affiliate website with WordPress, you must understand that while WordPress is free to use, you will need to purchase hosting and install it on your server. You may also need to purchase themes and plugins to make your website look and perform as you envision.
Some hosting companies you could rely on include:
Hostinger: A domain registrar and hosting provider since 2004, Hostinger has established itself as a reliable resource for affiliate marketers.
GreenGeeks: Boasting fast, secure, and eco-friendly hosting, GreenGeeks stands out as a top hosting provider for affiliates worldwide.
Bluehost: One of the hosting providers officially recommended by WordPress, Bluehost is the perfect site hosting provider if you doubt your other options.
Website hosting is quite cheap, and it’s easy to find monthly hosting for a price lower than the average lunch. While using WordPress to build a website can be easy, it won’t be as straightforward as using the drag-and-drop builder on Wix or Weebly. Drag-and-drop functionality can be added to WordPress, but it requires setting up.
You could also blog on platforms like Medium and Blogger for free. However, your site’s performance will depend on the platform’s performance.
If you want to build an affiliate website for free, you could use some of the free hosting services on the internet. But not all of these can be trusted, and it is rare for one of those platforms to meet your site’s hosting needs adequately.
Setting up an affiliate website may initially cost you less than $100 and much less than $50 per month to keep running. However, it’s best not to expect the website to generate income for the first few months.
If you prefer not to build your website, you could hire someone to build it for you. But this could cost you thousands of dollars.
Set Up Your Site’s Theme and PluginYou must consider your niche when picking a theme to use on your website. The plugins you need largely depend on the kind of website you’re running.
If you decide to use WordPress, you will have thousands of themes (free and paid) to choose from right from the theme repository.
The majority of the themes for WordPress are designed for affiliate websites, so finding the right theme to use shouldn’t require much looking. If you don’t mind paying for your themes, browsing through the Themeforest market will be worth the time.
While many useful plugins are free, some of the best ones give you access to the full suite of features only after you purchase the plugins.
Step 5: Write and Publish Content Relevant to Your NicheAfter you’ve set up your website, you can begin uploading content to it. To succeed in affiliate marketing, you must publish original and niche-specific content to your website, preferably with some images. Using video is optional but an excellent idea if you can manage to make video content.
It is easy to write the content yourself, although you will need to do a lot of reading to learn the right way to do it. There is no shortage of free writing guides online that break down the structure of blog posts in a simple manner. All you’ll need to do is fill in the gaps.
Alternatively, you could source content for free by guest blogging, but bloggers are typically only interested in blogging for well-known blogs.
Alternatively, you could get a content writing agency on the payroll or use an AI-based content writer to do the heavy lifting for you.
You can source stock images for free for your blogs from websites such as Pexels and Pixabay. However, if you don’t mind paying for your images, using sites like Shutterstock is the way to go.
Types of Blog Posts that Help Convert VisitorsMaking money from affiliate marketing takes a lot more than setting up a website. You will need to put consistent effort into writing and publishing content that your target audience will find helpful.
Over time, your target audience will begin to see you as an expert in the niche and vertical, and the audience will trust you to make informed purchase decisions.
The different types of blogs you can publish on your website include:
“How-To” PostsThese posts describe to readers how a product works and how they can use it to accomplish specific tasks. How-to posts provide value to readers and establish your blog and brand as a reliable source of information in the niche.
You could take a few different approaches when creating how-to articles with the overarching goal of promoting products. One effective approach is to provide readers with ways to get the most value out of the product in question.
Another way to approach a how-to blog is to write more general content and redirect them to alternative products that may get the job done better.
Regardless of how you choose to write your how-to posts, here are some things you must bear in mind:
Looking at the how-to guides published by competing websites can help you get an idea of the type of blog you should publish.
To make your how-to blogs easy to read, break down the post into chapters and the steps into bullets.
Adding a table of contents after the introduction will make it easy for your readers to find the information they’re looking for.
Anticipating the readers’ needs and questions and providing the answers in your content is a sure-shot way to build trust.
Product ReviewsBesides providing valuable information to your readers that they can base their purchase decisions upon, product reviews allow you to include affiliate links in the content naturally.
Product reviews are a key part of most affiliates’ marketing strategy, and you can expect to spend a lot of time writing this kind of blog.
Since these types of posts are common, you will need to take steps to stand out in a huge crowd of competitors. There are many ways to stand out – you could write more in-depth reviews than your competitors or dream up a unique rating system. You will need to do all you can to stand out as an authority in the niche.
Product ComparisonsPeople have a natural tendency to compare similar products – it is an effective way of ensuring they get the best deal. Product comparison posts make this easy for readers.
The idea with these posts isn’t to try to sell any of the products you compare. In these posts, you must provide your readers with all the information they want.
Product comparisons are an excellent way to build trust with your target audience. The tactic has proven effective enough for websites such as CompareRaja to thrive on only these types of posts.
Step 6: Work On SEOTo improve your website’s visibility on search engine result pages, you need to optimize the site for search engines. The key steps involved are:
You can also employ tools such as SEMRush to improve your website’s SEO. Some other trusted WordPress SEO plugins include Yoast SEO, Rank Math, W3 Total Cache, and WP Meta SEO.
A “backlink” is when another website links to your website. The idea behind backlinks is that websites only link to pages with reliable information, and the more sites backlink to your website, the more reliable it looks to search engines.
That being said, not all backlinks are good. Backlinks from low-quality, spammy websites can impact your SEO negatively.
Here are four effective ways to gather backlinks:
Offering your audience a free tool or a template generator that will be helpful for them is an excellent way to attract backlinks.
To determine what tool or template generator will appeal to your target audience, do keyword research with the terms “template,” “tool,” and “generator” in your niche.
Go through the top ten results and find a tool or template that you could easily make a better version of. Commission a developer to build the tool for you, and watch the backlinks flood in.
2. Publishing Skyscraper ContentComprehensive, long-form guides are also called “Skyscraper” content. Writing comprehensive posts that cover all the aspects of a topic can make the blog more detailed than any of your competitors’ content, making the content attractive to backlink to.
3. Using InfographicsComplementing your written content with infographics is a nice way to provide your visitors with a quick overview of the topic. Infographics with exclusive statistics in them are particularly effective in attracting backlinks.
4. Using TestimonialsOffering to write a testimonial for a competitor’s website or a website in another niche can earn you a high-authority backlink with little hassle.
Step 8: Set Up AnalyticsInstalling analytics tools or making good use of the ones installed on your website builder will give you a clear picture of how much traffic your website is driving.
It will also provide reliable conversion rate figures and enable you to gauge which content is performing the best.
Most affiliates rely on Google Analytics since it is free and facilitate comprehensive website analysis. However, there are other tools (free and paid) that you can use for analytics.
Conclusion: Your Affiliate Site is Ready to GoOnce your website is ready, you must continue adding affiliate products to the arsenal of products you promote. Growing your email list in tandem with publishing blogs is an excellent way to build trust and drive more sales.
There are several ways you can grow your affiliate site as a business over time. Once your website attracts a respectable amount of traffic each month, you could consider creating your own product and selling it to your email list for bigger payouts.
You could also sell your skills by coaching other people about affiliate marketing. Many affiliates decide to sell their websites for thousands of dollars in profit and start another affiliate marketing project.
Also, Read our guide on how to start your affliate marketing in India.
With this guide, you’re only eight steps away from generating passive income. Start building your affiliate website today to make headway and make money as you sleep.
How To Use Stable Diffusion To Create Ai
Artificial intelligence chatbots, like ChatGPT, have become incredibly powerful recently – they’re all over the news! But don’t forget about AI image generators (like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney). They can make virtually any image when provided with just a few words. Follow this tutorial to learn how to do this for free with no restrictions by running Stable Diffusion on your computer.
Good to know: learn how to fix the internal server error for ChatGPT.
What Is Stable Diffusion?Stable Diffusion is a free and open source text-to-image machine-learning model. Basically, it’s a program that lets you describe a picture using text, then creates the image for you. It was given billions of images and accompanying text descriptions and was taught to analyze and reconstruct them.
Stable Diffusion is not the program you use directly – think of it more like the underlying software tool that other programs use. This tutorial shows how to install a Stable Diffusion program on your computer. Note that there are many programs and websites that use Stable Diffusion, but many will charge you money and don’t give you as much control.
System RequirementsThe rough guidelines for what you should aim for are as follows:
macOS: Apple Silicon (an M series chip)
Windows or Linux: NVIDIA or AMD GPU
RAM: 16GB for best results
GPU VRAM: at least 4GB
Storage: at least 15GB
Install AUTOMATIC1111 Web UIWe are using the AUTOMATIC1111 Web UI program, available on all major desktop operating systems, to access Stable Diffusion. Make sure you make note of where the “stable-diffiusion-webui” directory gets downloaded.
AUTOMATIC1111 Web UI on macOS
In Terminal, install Homebrew by entering the command:
Copy the two commands for adding Homebrew to your PATH and enter them.
Quit and reopen Terminal, then enter:
brewinstall
cmake protobuf rust python@
3.10
git
wget
Enter:
Download the latest stable version of Python 3.10.
AUTOMATIC1111 Web UI on Linux
Open the Terminal.
Enter one of the following commands, depending on your flavor of Linux:
Debian-based, including Ubuntu:
sudo
apt-get update
sudo
apt
install
wget
git
python3 python3-venvRed Hat-based:
sudo
dnf
install
wget
git
python3Arch-based:
sudo
pacman-S
wget
git
python3Install in “/home/$(whoami)/stable-diffusion-webui/” by executing this command:
Install a ModelYou’ll still need to add at least one model before you can start using the Web UI.
Go to CIVITAI.
Move the .safetensors file downloaded in step 2 into your “stable-diffiusion-webui/models/Stable-diffusion” folder.
Run and Configure the Web UIAt this point, you’re ready to run and start using the Stable Diffusion program in your web browser.
Paste the link in your browser address bar and hit Enter. The Web UI website will appear.
Scroll down and check “Enable quantization in K samplers for sharper and cleaner results.”
FYI: If you need to find an image source, use Google.
Use txt2txt to Generate Concept ImagesNow comes the fun part: creating some initial images and searching for one that most closely resembles the look you want.
Go to the “txt2img” tab.
In the first prompt text box, type words describing your image separated by commas. It helps to include words describing the style of image, such as “realistic,” “detailed,” or “close-up portrait.”
In the negative prompt text box below, type keywords that you do not want your image to look like. For instance, if you’re trying to create realistic imagery, add words like “video game,” “art,” and “illustration.”
Scroll down and set “Batch size” to “4.” This will make Stable Diffusion produce four different images from your prompt.
Make the “CFG Scale” a higher value if you want Stable Diffusion to follow your prompt keywords more strictly or a lower value if you want it to be more creative. A low value (like the default of 7) usually produces images that are good quality and creative.
If you don’t like any of the images, repeat steps 1 through 5 with slight variations.
Finding the Prompts Used for Past ImagesAfter you’ve generated a few images, it’s helpful to get the prompts and settings used to create an image after the fact.
Upload an image into the box. All of the prompts and other details of your image will appear on the right.
Tip: use one of these Windows tools to batch-edit images.
Use img2img to Generate Similar ImagesYou can use the img2img feature to generate new images mimicking the overall look of any base image.
On the “img2img” tab, ensure that you are using a previously generated image with the same prompts.
Set the “Denoising strength” value higher or lower to regenerate more or less of your image (0.50 regenerates 50% and 1 regenerates 100%).
Rewrite the prompts to add completely new elements to the image and adjust other settings as desired.
Use inpaint to Change Part of an ImageThe inpaint feature is a powerful tool that lets you make precise spot corrections to a base image by using your mouse to “paint” over parts of an image that you want to regenerate. The parts you haven’t painted aren’t changed.
Change your prompts if you want new visual elements.
Use your mouse to paint over the part of the image you want to change.
Change the “Sampling method” to DDIM, which is recommended for inpainting.
Set the “Denoising strength,” choosing a higher value if you’re making extreme changes.
Good to know: look through these websites to find images with a transparent background.
Upscale Your ImageYou’ve been creating relatively small images at 512 x 512 pixels up to this point, but if you increase your image’s resolution, it also increases the level of visual detail.
Install the Ultimate SD Upscale ExtensionResize Your Image
On the “img2img” tab, ensure you are using a previously generated image with the same prompts. At the front of your prompt input, add phrases such as “4k,” “UHD,” “high res photo,” “RAW,” “closeup,” “skin pores,” and “detailed eyes” to hone it in more. At the front of your negative prompt input, add phrases such as “selfie,” “blurry,” “low res,” and “phone cam” to back away from those.
Set your “Denoising strength” to a low value (around 0.25) and double the “Width” and “Height” values.
In the “Script” drop-down, select “Ultimate SD upscale,” then under “Upscaler,” check the “R-ESRGAN 4x+” option.
Frequently Asked Questions What is the difference between Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney?All three are AI programs that can create almost any image from a text prompt. The biggest difference is that only Stable Diffusion is completely free and open source. You can run it on your computer without paying anything, and anyone can learn from and improve the Stable Diffusion code. The fact that you need to install it yourself makes it harder to use, though.
DALL-E and Midjourney are both closed source. DALL-E can be accessed primarily via its website and offers a limited number of image generations per month before asking you to pay. Midjourney can be accessed primarily via commands on its Discord server and has different subscription tiers.
What is a model in Stable Diffusion?A model is a file representing an AI algorithm trained on specific images and keywords. Different models are better at creating different types of images – you may have a model good at creating realistic people, another that’s good at creating 2D cartoon characters, and yet another that’s best for creating landscape paintings.
The Deliberate model we installed in this guide is a popular model that’s good for most images, but you can check out all kinds of models on websites like Civitai or Hugging Face. As long as you download a .safetensors file, you can import it to the AUTOMATIC1111 Web UI using the same instructions in this guide.
What is the difference between SafeTensor and PickleTensor?In short, always use SafeTensor to protect your computer from security threats.
While both SafeTensor and PickleTensor are file formats used to store models for Stable Diffusion, PickleTensor is the older and less secure format. A PickleTensor model can execute arbitrary code (including malware) on your system.
Should I use the batch size or batch count setting?You can use both. A batch is a group of images that are generated in parallel. The batch size setting controls how many images there are in a single batch. The batch count setting controls how many batches get run in a single generation; each batch runs sequentially.
If you have a batch count of 2 and a batch size of 4, you will generate two batches and a total of eight images.
If you prefer drawing things yourself, check out our list of sketching apps for Windows.
Image credit: Pixabay. All screenshots by Brandon Li.
Brandon Li
Brandon Li is a technology enthusiast with experience in the software development industry. As a result, he has a lot of knowledge about computers and is passionate about sharing that knowledge with other people. While he has mainly used Windows since early childhood, he also has years of experience working with other major operating systems.
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How To Use Microsoft Designer To Create Graphics
Microsoft Designer is a tool that allows you to create professional designs for various purposes, but it has been designed primarily to share graphics on social media and other channels.
It is a web-based application that you can access through a browser (but you can also install it as an app on Windows 11), and it offers a wide range of design templates and tools. However, Microsoft Designer integrates with DALL-E 2.5 from OpenAI, which can translate text into images, but in this case, into graphics, posters, and presentations.
Furthermore, the Designer app can offer suggestions, generate captions and hashtags, create animated visuals, backgrounds, text transitions, and more.
In this guide, you will learn the basic steps to get started with Microsoft Designer on Windows 11, 10, macOS, or Linux.
Get started using Microsoft DesignerTo use Microsoft Designer to create graphics, use these steps:
Quick note: During the preview trial, the app is free for anyone, but eventually, it’ll become available as a free addition for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
In the web app, you will find a chatbot prompt box where you can use AI to generate templates based on your description. On the right side, you will a list of templates you can select to get started understanding how to request the app to generate an image. For example, selecting one of the templates inserted the “a thumbnail for my YouTube video offering tips on sustainable living” prompt.
You can also use the “Add image” option to upload images that the tool can use to generate a new design.
The “Generate image” option is a separate feature that uses the DALL-E 2.5 model from OpenAI to generate images from a text description. You can then select one of the AI-generated images the Designer can use to create graphic suggestions.
If you want to create an image manually from scratch, you will have to use the “blank canvas” option at the bottom of the page.
The Microsoft Designer app is divided into three sections. The toolbar at the top includes some basic options to zoom, undo and redo steps, start a new design or resize the current project, and download the project.
On the left, you will find the tools you will use to edit and create your image. The “Templates” tab includes every design template available with Microsoft Designer.
Quick note: If you are using an AI-generated template, you won’t be using this option.
The “My media” tab allows you to upload images from your computer or other services, such as Dropbox, Google Photos, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and from your phone. You can drag and drop the file directly if you’re uploading an image from your computer.
The “Visuals” tab includes AI-curated images to add to your project. You can also add different types of shapes, videos, and other types of illustrations. You can use the search or tabs at the top to find the visual you want to use in your project. The “Generate” tab allows you to use AI to create images you add to your design.
The “Text” tab includes various styles of text that you can use for heading, subheading, and body text. You can also use the chatbot to generate rich text for a description, catchy title, etc.
On the right side, you have the “Ideas” panel that shows additional templates you can use related to your project. The “New ideas” button brings you back to the start to create a new design.
While editing or creating an image, when selecting an element, a floating toolbar will appear with the different options you can use for that particular element. Some of the options include the ability to change the opacity, change the layer position (front, forward, back, and backward), color, text style, cropping tool, effects, and more.
Although this is an excellent tool for beginners and content creators to create various types of graphics, it’s not meant to be a replacement for Photoshop and many other tools that provide many different functionalities and capabilities.
The idea of the Microsoft Designer app is to use AI tools to automate the creation process as much as possible to stay more productive when you don’t have a graphics designer on speed dial.
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