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Some hear about startups being bought for millions by big companies, and hatch plans to start their own inteet business.

Others nurture online business ideas that they think will shake the web for long-time before taking the leap of entrepreneurship. While there is nothing bad in dreaming big, it is important to keep the realities of starting and running an online business in mind.

When it comes to starting a web business, there are hundreds of details to be mastered but let’s just focus on 11Cs under the most critical phases of starting an e-venture. And it only makes sense to begin where it really begins.

Initial research and planning

‘Little can be accomplished without planning’. The statement holds true for almost everything challenging in life. Whether you want to start an online store or something completely unique, you need a blueprint, a roadmap or whatever you want to call it. And in order to do that, you need:

1) Clarity – The process of planning cannot begin unless you are crystal clear about your needs. Want to blog for a living? Answer these questions first:

• What kind of blog I’m capable of running?
• What is the competition out there?
• Are there unanswered questions that my blog can address?

Answering such questions will help you lea if you are ready to start and run an online business or need to busy yourself with groundwork.

2) Courage – Every idea is brilliant while it exists in your head. Finding time to put your thoughts on paper, discussing them with people, and taking concrete steps to materialize your ‘great idea’ are the real challenges. And doing all this requires real courage.

This is a part of planning because this is where it all begins. If you cannot muster the guts to start working on that glorious online business idea, we are sorry. It can do nothing more than impress your drunk friends.

Groundwork

Okay. You are done with the initial planning, and are sure that this is the online business idea that you want to bet on. Next is the task of doing the work that people won’t see but will become the backbone of your venture.

For multivendor e-commerce stores, this means getting merchants on board. For food ordering and delivery startups, this means joining hands with local restaurants. Got the idea?

Now to go through this phase smoothly, two Cs are most crucial, and they are:

3) Collaboration – Of course you cannot do it all on your own. You need people. People that are:

• Capable
• Trustworthy
• Skilled
• Righteous

Without collaborating with such people, it would be really difficult to get your venture off the ground. This bunch can be your friends or people you pay to do the work. Mostly it’s the prior.

4) Conviction – Starting something online just because it seems a good way to make easy money will never lead you far. To create an online business that survives the tests of time, you need to believe in your idea. And this ought to be true of your team as well.

Strong belief in your inteet business will help you and your team in completing the tiring groundwork.

NOTE: Even if your amazing online business doesn’t require offline struggle, you still need a team that believes in your idea and is willing to go the extra mile, online.

Site setup

Good news, it’s time to build your website, app or software. Bad news, it will be exhausting if you don’t know how to code. There is no dearth of amazing web businesses that never scaled because they failed to connect with target audience or came out with poor features.

Let’s straight get to the Cs that will play a dominant role in making you succeed with the Setup phase:

5) Capital: Already dreaming about making loads of money and raising millions in VC funding? Stop right there. Before that, your unique idea needs financial nurturing. The capital will be mostly spent on hiring:

• Designers
• Developers
• UX and SEO experts
• Infrastructure (servers etc.)

If you already have a team that has great design and development talent, then, the investment will be less. But don’t think you can go ahead and build something awesome without some dough.

6) Concentration: During the development phase, it usually happens that the focus strays away from the primary idea, making the end product something that doesn’t fit in the initial vision. This is why founders ought to stay true to the blueprints finalized during planning and development phase.

Here are some points that will help you with the task:

• Explain your vision to your team in detail in the very beginning.
• Write down your goals and objectives and paste it somewhere everyone can see.

This however doesn’t mean you have to ignore suggestions from the team members. Embrace ideas that align with your product philosophy.

Marketing (Yeah! you need to tell people)

Congratulations! You have a website just the way you wanted. Okay, somewhat like you wanted but it will not generate traffic on its own. You need to work for the visitors and it is not going to be easy since you spent a big amount of your savings in developing the site and don’t have handful of millions in funding. So, don’t even think of TV ads.

Below Cs will come handy to make your online business trend on inteet:

7) Creativity: Even offline businesses are trying to grab eyeballs online. In such a melee, how will you make your new venture stand out? We think creativity can drive your brand message across in the choking inteet advertising scene. All you need to do is:

• Plan memorable ad banners
• Create engaging explainer videos
• Run interactive video ads
• Engage your audience with insightful conversations

Okay, this is easily said than done but this is also exactly what you need to do if you are thinking about paid marketing. Check out this post if free marketing is on your mind.

8) Commitment: No matter how passionate you are, you will get tired of ‘selling’ on inteet at some point of time. It is inevitable unless you taste the fruits of success quite early.

Don’t stop your efforts when everything seems a lost cause. Stay committed to your marketing practices, and work relentlessly to:

• Get your venture featured on relevant blogs and news sites
• Communicate with relevant audience on platforms like Quora
• Speak about your online business offline as well

Stay true to your marketing goals and our next section will follow.

Funding! (Do you wanna accelerate?)

VC or angel funding is like getting paid millions to raise your own kid. While some startups and online businesses continue to grow without funding, it is nice to know that there is truckload of cash in the bank to undertake aggressive expansion. But dollars will not come walking to your door. You will have to ea them, and here are 2 helpful Cs for that:

9) Coaching: Even if you have the most brilliant online business idea in the world, it still needs to make sense to angel investors and venture capitalists.

Doesn’t sound difficult?

What if you only have a couple of minutes to explain:

This is why you need someone that has firsthand experience in presenting ideas to reluctant people in suits. Long story short, get a mentor.

10) Consistency: Time to refer to top dating rule! ‘Be prepared to be rejected, multiple times’. Your pitch for raising money will find no takers so many times that you will lost count. This is why you need to practice ‘not giving up’.

Keep approaching VCs and connecting with investors to find the one that will be ready to bet on your dream online venture. This however will only work if you do as Paul Graham (founder of Y Combinator). He says:

“Convince yourself that your startup is worth investing in, and then when you explain this to investors they’ll believe you”

And let’s not forget the most important point.

11) Customers/clients: Seems kind of obvious, right? Yes but still worth mentioning. Your website, mobile app or software needs users, and their number needs to grow as the months pass by.

While you need to think about this from the planning and research phase itself, don’t forget about the users while including new features. Answering such questions will also help:

• Will the new features add value to user experience?
• What matters the most to target audience?
• How to counter clones and competitors?

Besides Cs

There are 700-paged ebooks and rather small videos out there titled ‘starting an online business for dummies’ or something similar of sorts. And let’s not get started on the startup literature out there available for free and few pennies.

To put simply, there is overwhelming knowledge to help you gain perspective on starting and running an online business. But remember, the best way of leaing about anything is by doing. So, get out there and get your hands and mind dirty.

Are you one of the Amazon U.S. affiliate who is struggling with receiving affiliate payment? Well, you are not alone as many others from various part of the world are in the same situation as you.

If you are from countries like U.S., U.K, you can receive payment via payment method such as direct bank deposit. If you are from countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, SriLanka or other countries where the direct deposit is not available, here I’m sharing the way to receive payment. This question was asked by one of our readers in the forum:

This method is tested & tried by me, so you can use it without any issue. For late comers, you can read this guide & this one to lea about Amazon affiliate program.

Receiving Amazon U.S. Affiliate commission using Payoneer:

I have talked a lot about Payoneer earlier & if you are not aware of Payoneer let me quickly explain it for you. Payoneer is a service like Paypal that can be used to send & receive payment. What unique about them is, Payoneer let you have a U.S. & Euro bank routing number that can be used to receive payment from various services. In fact, in recent time they have partnered with many services & their reach is growing as we speak. You can read below tutorials to lea more about Payoneer:

If you don’t have an account on Payoneer, you can create one using the link below. Do remember; you will also get a bonus of $25 once you have made a transaction of $100 using Payoneer. (Even if you receive Affiliate commission via Amazon of $100 or more, you will get $25 bonus money). Pretty cool, huh?

Create free Payoneer account

Once your account is activated or if you already have an active Payoneer account, login to the Payoneer dashboard. Click on Global payment service & the next page you will get USD receiving account (ACH) information. This is how the page would look like:

Now login to your Amazon U.S. affiliate dashboard & click on account settings > Change Payment Method & here you need to enter the details of your U.S. account from Payoneer.

Select the option which says “Pay me by direct deposit (United States Based Associates Only)” & enter the details. You can use below screenshot for the reference:

Click on Submit & that’s it. You need to ensure that you have filled out tax information which is mandatory to receive payment. I missed out on filling tax information & my payment got delayed due to this. So, you don’t want to make the same mistake as me.

I hope this helps those who are eaing money from Amazon affiliate program & couldn’t find a way to receive money in their country.

Here are recommended articles for Amazon associates:

1. How I make money from Amazon Affiliate Program
2. How to make money from Amazon Affiliate program
3. How to create Amazon affiliate links

If you still have any question regarding configuring Amazon U.S. payout information, feel free to let me know.

Whenever we talk about WordPress SEO, WordPress duplicate content is one thing which every SEO professional will suggest you to avoid. It doesn’t mean when people say “WordPress is SEO optimized” they are lying, they are right, but the duplicate content issue in WordPress arises because of many reasons. Today, we will look into some of the basic reasons and will try to fix it one by one.

Whenever we talk about WordPress, one common comment which you will always get “WordPress is SEO optimized”. That’s true but not completely. You can start a website on WordPress and expect to start ranking well. By option for WordPress as your Website/Blogging platform, you have taken a wise decision but that’s not all. There are many things which you need to do from the first day when you start using WordPress.

What exactly is WordPress duplicate content issue?

Content which is the same but can be accessed by two URL. This could be within your blog or could be on some copy-paste blog. For example, on a poorly optimized WordPress blog, an article can be accessed by:

• http://www.domain.com/SEO-optimization
• http://domain.com/SEO-optimization
• http://domain.com/tag/SEO
• http://www.domain.com/tag/SEO
• http://domain.com/category/SEO
• http://www.domain.com/Category/SEO
• http://domain23.com/SEO-post (Exteal website)

You can clearly see; unknowingly you created six copies of your content and Google will get confuse on which link they should show it. Precisely they will pick anyone of them and rest will be hidden from Google search. At the same time, this will be an issue as Google will slowly start penalizing your blog for lots of duplicate content. Now, the most common question is what are possible duplicate content in WordPress and how to fix it.

Here I’m going to show some of the common WordPress duplicate content that you might be creating on your blog and how can you fix it.

How to find WordPress duplicate content:

Let’s talk about duplicate content within your WordPress blog. This is the very first place to start with and by fixing this, you will be taking care of 40% of your blog SEO problems. Go to Google.com and search for your site name in this format:

site:www.shoutmeloud.com

See all the links and browse to the last page and see show results with omitted results. You will be able to see what all links Google have indexed from your blog, and you can analyze what links Google should not index. Some common parts which search engine bots should not index are Tags, Categories, Author, Archive, Search and so on. If you see any of these results, it’s time to work on your blog SEO and make it better.

Tags and Categories no index:

This is the first place where you should start with. In case if you are showing complete post in Tags & Categories page and keeping your tags and categories as indexed (By default), you are already creating duplicate content for your blog. Moreover, do you think your tags and categories pages are adding any value to search engine? My suggestions, keep them no index and do follow. You can use plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast to quickly configure no index tag.

Author/Archives:

In WordPress, you can always browse author archive or archive for older months. This is a usability feature and useful for your readers. But for search engine these are just another page, and there is no reason that they should index it. Because it will have the same content as your single post page. Maybe excerpt & not complete post, depending upon your theme settings. Setting them, no index would be helpful.

Attachment Image URL:

Here is one small issue but many of you won’t realize it until you see it yourself. When we attach an image to WordPress post, it adds images as attachment URL, and when Reader click on the image, it will be taken to image attachment page.

So your URL would be like:

• www.domain.com/1/
• www.domain.com/1/SEOImage

Now there are many problems related to this one. First, duplicate content issue or very useless page is indexed in Google, which is not adding any value. In your Google Webmaster tools, you will see such links listed at short meta description tags and that again is not very useful.

How to fix Image attachment URL issue in WordPress?

One quickest way is to use Permalink setting of Yoast SEO plugin. You will see an option which says “ Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL.” Keep that option checked, and that will take care of your this issue.

Else when you are uploading image to your post, you can always link it directly to image or none.

ReplytoCom issue:

After Google Panda had rolled out, this is one of the most common issues I have seen on my and other people site which impacted search engine ranking for that particular domain. Especially when ShoutMeLoud got hit by Panda, this is one of the major reasons for the same. Almost 35K replytocom links were indexed, and it took quite some time to remove those links from search engine index. Even setting URL parameter for replytocom didn’t remove the URL immediately. Now we have less no. of replytocom links, but it’s still there. You can check for your blog too by searching on Google with Site: domain.com replytocom

If you see links from replytocom, it’s time for you to quickly set URL parameter from Google Webmaster tool as noindex. You can refer to my previous post on How to fix replytocom issue in WordPress.

Canonical URL:

Canonical URL Tag is one of the important aspects of On-page SEO. A URL could be accessed using:

• http://domain.com/1
• http://domain.com/1/
• http://www.domain.com/1
• http://www.domain.com/1/

Now all the URL’s point to the same post and thus again create duplicate content for you. By setting up canonical URL, you are directing search engine robots to which link they should index. This is one of the first things that you should look into your blog.

In WordPress 2.9+, this is a default feature of WordPress or else you can use a plugin like SEO By Yoast inbuilt feature to quickly add canonical to your WordPress blog. Moreover, if you see comment-page-1 and such issues, it will also be fixed by using canonical URL. You can also manually add this code to your theme before <head> section

<?php if ( is_singular() ) { ?>

<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />

<?php } ?>

</head>

You should also check out this video from Matt Cutts where he explains more about Canonical tag:

Fixing duplicate content when somebody copied your article:

Now all the above mentioned WordPress duplicate issues are one which you can deal directly within your blog. Now, this worse duplicate content penalty is when you are penalize for someone action. For example, some blogger copying your blog post and he outranked your post. This is where you need to take help of Google DMCA. Google DMCA is very useful for Bloggers and webmasters to file a complaint regarding any such content on net which is copied from your blog post. If it’s a BlogSpot blog, Google will delete the post immediately & if it’s a self-hosted blog or static site, Google will remove it from web index. How to start with it?

You can use Duplicate Copy content finder tools to find duplicate content on your WordPress blog. Now refer to my post on How to file a DMCA complaint using Google.

Some important thing you should know:

In most of the cases any good WordPress themes take care of duplication issue. For example, Genesis and many other theme club offers such SEO optimized framework and that’s where a premium themes stand out of free WordPress theme. Though you can consider using Genesis theme or you can simply tweak your existing theme with the help of codes and plugins to make it duplicate content free.

If you like this post, I would suggest you to read:

Do let us know what other WordPress duplicate content issues you have faced till now and what steps have you taken to fix the issue on your Website?

Have you ever thought what Affiliate marketing integration with your service/product can do for you business? Like you, even I had no idea what it could do. Though, I heard a lot of great things about it & finally gave a shot to integrate affiliate marketing with my WordPress plugins buiness. In simple words. this post is case study of my experience of implementing affiliate program for my digital products.

I wouldn’t try to paint my brand into a great pacture rather I would share up’s & down’s after implementing affiliate program for my product. So grab a cup of cofee & get ready to lea something which costed my money & considerable time to understand the truth of affiliate marketing from a product owner perspective.

Affiliate marketing business can be similar to a roller coaster ride. It can be full of ups and downs both for the product owner and the affiliate marketer.

As a product owner, we (Plugmatter team) have been riding this affiliate marketing “roller coaster” for 2 to 3 years for our premium WordPress plugin business and it’s been a quite a jouey – some of it pleasant, some of it unpleasant, but most of it quite rewarding.

After we launched our first plugin, the Optin Feature Box, we got hooked on to the idea of building an army of affiliates to promote our plugins.

Why affiliate marketing?

Well, list building has always been bloggers’ favorite subject. Many top affiliate marketers write all kinds of stuff about list building and email marketing on their blogs. And we thought our product – being a list building tool – is the perfect bait to rope in few affiliates to review our product in exchange of some commission.

Here’s how we proceeded…

We researched bloggers who were specifically reviewing WordPress plugins and had affiliate links in their Call to Actions. The good news was – almost every blogger who reviewed WordPress plugins wrote about opt-in plugins too. It’s the same even today.

And we thought it would be a cakewalk.

The first email we sent was to The Blogging Wizard: Adam Connell. However, it was a bummer! We asked for a review without mentioning anything about the commission.

But, Adam was kind enough to advise us to offer commissions to everybody who we expect to review our product.

After gaining our first affiliate to promote our product, we began to use various methods to attract more; after all, we wanted an army, not just a platoon.

And although building that army has not been easy, it has been satisfying. We now have 200+ affiliates as our marketing partners.

So, let’s dive in…

I have decided to split this post into three parts:

Tips for product owners

Many product owners fail to leverage affiliate marketing to it’s fullest potential, due to various reasons. Let’s spend some time on how these plugin / theme developers, SaaS companies, etc. can get the most out of it.

Tips for affiliate marketers

We all have leat about affiliate marketing from experts like Harsh Agarwal, but rarely do we get to lea it from a product owner’s point of view. Today, you’ll do just that.

General Tips on Affiliate Marketing

I will end up this post by putting across my thoughts on affiliate marketing in general and how it fares to few other popular online marketing methodologies.

Affiliate marketing Tips For Product Owners

1. The 80/20 Truth In Affiliate Marketing and How to Go About It

When you look at overall statistics in affiliate marketing programs, 80% of affiliate sales comes from 20% of the affiliates. While this may seem like a crazy percentage, it is a fact. 80% of your affiliates will do very little, or nothing at all that contributes to sales.

So the key to getting the most out of it is: focus more on those 20% affiliates and build better relationships. Here are some great ways you can do that:

With every new affiliate, send him a welcome email. Tell him what’s in it for him, as an affiliate. Lea what his goals are with becoming our affiliate. Talk to him about the ways he intends to promote your product. Ask him questions about his business plans, blog etc. Just build better relationships.

Engage with them on social media. We created a Twitter list of our affiliates on Twitter, and we regularly keep in touch with them. You should do the same on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or any of the other social locations. You can just send them a DM or simply say hi and ask how their business is doing.

Emailing your affiliate marketer personally after sending their affiliate payment is a small gesture, but it can mean a lot to them. And can keep you regularly in touch with them.

Share ideas you have with your affiliate marketers on how they can improve their affiliate business income, more specifically, how they can generate more sales for you.

Most product owners rely on affiliates’ network, ideas, strategies to get more affiliate sales but it doesn’t have to be that way. Whatever sales strategy you plan on, you can share with your affiliate too. If it sounds interesting and feasible to him, he’ll most likely join the bandwagon.

Finally, go that extra mile by offering your best affiliate marketers a higher commission in exchange for performing extra promotional tasks for your product.

Some examples could be:

1. Writing a guest post that promotes your product
2. Writing a case study on your products abilities
3. Possibly doing a video or podcast on how to use the product.

2. Move Your Affiliate Marketer Beyond The One-Time Review

We noticed in a short span that most affiliates write a one-time review, and they begin to make money. But, they do not promote the product further. In fact, in most cases, they simply did not know what else to do to promote the product. What we did, and what you can do is help them develop a marketing plan.

Immediately when they sign up as an affiliate marketer, ask them what their affiliate marketing plan is.

Tell your affiliate marketer the sales strategies that have worked for you, and ask them if they would be willing to try them.

You can help them by providing all the necessary materials they need. Always know that your affiliate marketers are busy, and any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated by your affiliate marketer. Some ways you can help your affiliate save time could be:

Show them a demo video review you created instead of asking them to try it out. Tell them it really doesn’t have to be too detailed. We showed our affiliates a quick demo video of the optin feature box we created. This gave them the needed information they could use.

For every affiliate that we sign-up with, we offer this quick product demo done by one of our other affiliates; it aptly describes the feature box plugin:

When your affiliate marketer agrees to write, supply them with several potential outlines for the review. But, before doing so, study their previous reviews to understand their style of writing.

Those individuals who have an affiliate marketing business are very busy people. So, it’s best to reduce their efforts as much as possible to get your products reviewed.

3. Manage Your Affiliate Marketing With A Professional Tool

We found that building an army of affiliate marketers can be a nightmare in terms of management without the proper tools to do so.

There are many types of small time affiliate marketing tools that do not provide enough features to manage affiliates as comprehensively as Post Affiliate Pro does. The features that we use the most from the tool; and perhaps will be helpful to others as well are:

• Automatic refund update: As soon as we issue a refund to our users, it updates the payment status to refunded.
• Trends Report: The tools allows us to have a quick glance at the trends happening with our sales number of impressions, clicks, affiliate sales, commissions, etc.

Tips For Affiliate Marketers

Starting an affiliate marketing business is a wise decision. It’s completely residual (especially if the promotion is done well), and as automated as it can get.

Following these tips can help you be successful doing so.

1. Understand That Affiliate Marketing Can Be Your Most Automated System To Make Money

You can perform some simple tasks and your affiliate marketing business can become a residual income.

I mentioned The Blogging Wizard: Adam Connell earlier in this post. We have been paying him affiliate commissions, along with some other bloggers for reviews that were written in early 2014.

You can also receive residual commissions by promoting other people’s or businesses products. So, it is wise that before you become an affiliate of a product, you should research and understand their payment terms.

Another perfect example is the blog post; Harsh wrote about our document importer; that post has been bringing maximum sales for a long time, and supplying Harsh with commissions from those sales.

Harsh wrote an ebook called Affiliate Marketing: A-Z Guide For Beginners.

And I strongly recommend this book, as it will give you the complete ins and outs of affiliate marketing.

He tells you how to get started with an affiliate marketing business and the most profitable affiliate programs to join.

He also gives some expert tips on promoting the products, and getting paid. In short, it’s a “must-read” if you aspire to be a successful affiliate marketer.

2. Get Serious About Leaing / Using Affiliate Marketing

I have discovered many “would be” affiliate marketers who are not serious about their business. Yes, you can write one blog post and get commissions of the sales it generates, but why stop at one? Will that commission provide enough income to suffice?

Look at any successful affiliate marketer, and you will see that no matter how much revenue is coming in, they do not stop marketing, the same product again and again.

Here’s how Pat Flynn promotes LeadPages multiple times, like within his posts, webinar and more about rapid list building, landing pages and conversion optimization.

Your affiliate marketing business should be run with that same mindset.

So, how to be a serious affiliate marketer?

Don’t focus on short-term results. Think about affiliate results in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years and even 10+ years. Have you went back and edited those affiliate marketing blog posts to fit in this time period?

The best way to grow your affiliate marketing business is to build a solid audience for your blog.

Lea the whats, wheres, whys, hows and most importantly, the who’s who of affiliate marketing.

Read, watch and lea, because there is always something new to lea in affiliate marketing, just like in any other business.

3. Use Innovative Techniques to Promote Affiliate Products

The most successful affiliate marketers use innovative techniques in promoting the products or services. One innovative method is using in-content promotion of affiliate products.

By adding a contextual reference to the blog post with your affiliate link, you will most likely get clicks from the readers.

The idea is to basically create marketing, traffic generating systems and then nurture them.

And your blog could be biggest traffic channel for your affiliate product.

Ultimately, each affiliate product will become an automatic revenue generating machine.

4. Do Not Promote Multiple Similar Products

I have watched affiliate marketers promoting 5-10 products that all are similar, but from different companies. This can confuse your audience, and can also give the impression that you are just in it for commissions, and not to actually help the readers.

Instead of money, focus should be on the most value that a particular product provides.

If two products cater to the same problem, but are completely different in how they work, have different USPs, go for it.

5. Use Banner Ads

Yes, it is an obvious choice, but it would surprise you how many affiliate marketers do not use their banner space to promote affiliate products.

6. Get In During the Launch

Some of the best affiliate action can come immediately upon the launch of a product or service. This is where your affiliate marketing business can differ from many other types of businesses.

Most businesses will not work with a vendor or another company that is new. They want to know that the business and product are going to survive.

While affiliate marketers do want the products to survive, you need not let that worry you. Jump in at product launch, because that is normally when the biggest percentage of sales happen.

Affiliate Marketing Versus Other Marketing Methods

There are many types of marketing methods, but when we look at the big picture, affiliate marketing is the best to create automated income. With affiliate marketing, as soon as a visitor clicks on the affiliate link – no matter how many days later he purchases the product, it will still be considered as an affiliate sale, entitling you for a commission.

Visitors may not purchase the first visit, or even the second or third, but at some point, that product you have affiliated with may become enticing.

Affiliate marketing provides an army of promoters to the product owners whereas other strategies like email marketing requires them to have them own audience.

Now, I’m totally for list building and email marketing. I think it’s the most powerful strategy. But affiliate marketing could be started by writing few simple emails.

Content marketing and other marketing methods require way more efforts, which most people cannot afford in the early stage of your product launch.

In Conclusion

When you really look at the complete picture, having an affiliate marketing business makes good sense. It is a passive income that will pay for months and even years to come.

I want to reiterate, to lea more about affiliate marketing, I suggest you to follow Harsh’s advice, and even download his ebook: Affiliate Marketing: A-Z Guide For Beginners. You will be glad you did.

Whether you have an existing affiliate marketing business, or you are just getting started in affiliate marketing, I also want to invite you to join the Plugmatter affiliate program. You can perform some simple tasks and begin to receive 50% commission on all our premium plugins.

Your contact forms on blogs serve a better job than just letting your readers contact you.

If you have created your contact form in a way that filters out useless contact messages, you might end up saving a lot of time (Stay productive) & getting those details from the readers, which helps you to take better business decision & serve them faster.

This is no brainer that copy (Text) on the contact page, service page, sidebar should complement each other. I believe you have already got the copywriting part sorted out, & let me make your task easier with these hand-picked best Form builder WordPress plugins. When it comes to WordPress which now powers 22% of the websites in the world, there are many form builder plugins out there. Newbie bloggers usually stick with basic contact form builder plugin such as Contact form 7 of the one that is offered by Jetpack plugin.

A blogger who is managing their blog as a business or offering services, usually use an advanced form builder plugin like Gravity Forms. Depending upon your needs, you should pick one plugin that solves today & as well as tomorrow’s requirement.

Besides the niche specific forms like restaurant booking forms, car rental forms and professional event forms, people also use forms for various purpose like getting access to webinars, subscribing to newsletters, registering to a service etc. For all of these purposes, we need to create separate forms. And that’s when form builder plugins come in handy.

These below-mentioned form builder WordPress plugins allow you to create online forms through a simple user interface. By using these plugins, you can avoid the hassle of creating the forms manually.

In today’s post, I will introduce you to the seven best free and paid form builder plugins for WordPress. It does not matter what type of form you want; you will find a suitable plugin from this list.

Best Form Builder WordPress Plugins For Beginners & Pro

1) WPForms:

This WordPress form plugin was launched in March 2016 by Syed Balkhi & his team. Looking at the track record of Balkhi, this seems to be one of those form builder plugin that you would be hearing a lot in 2016 & coming years. This plugin is by the same company who is behind Opt-in monster. The basic plan of plugin cost only $39/year which is pretty cheap considering all the features you are getting with it.

Check out WPForms

2. Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a premium contact form builder plugin with lots of advanced features. This is one of the few plugins that allow you to create multi-page forms and show the progress bar. ‘Limit entry’ is another interesting feature of the plugin. By using this feature, you can make sure that you are receiving only a certain amount of submission per form.

It is possible to create forms in advance and make them visible for a specific period only. You can display a custom message when the form expires. Gravity Forms also makes it very easy to create order forms. Besides the default customization options, it is possible to apply custom CSS to your forms. This most popular Form builder WordPress plugin is priced at $39 per year for personal use. If you are looking for one plugin suggestion that is updated every now & then, I would recommend getting the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin.

3. Fast Secure Contact Form

Fast Secure Contact Form provides a simple and easy way to create the contact form and other forms for your WordPress site. As the minimal plugin does not come with any default templates, you are free to create any form you want. You can add, edit, delete and re-order fields according to your requirements.

If you want to redirect the users to a specific web page once they submit the form, you can do so from the ‘Email Settings’ section. The plugin comes with Akismet and CAPTCHA support for blocking spammers. There is also a handy feature to let the visitors set an appointment with you.
4. Contact Form by BestWebSoft

By using this plugin, you can add a feedback form to your posts or pages very quickly. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and paste the following shortcode into the post body –

[bestwebsoft_contact_form]

However, it is possible to customize the default fields and add an additional field for file upload. Besides choosing the receiving emails address(s) for the message, you can choose to send a copy to the user too.

There is a premium version of Contact Form by BestWebSoft. By purchasing the pro version for $30 per year, you can enjoy advanced features like custom placeholder text, tooltips, input validation, custom checkbox, select field and premium support.

5. Ninja Forms

Featuring a simple drag and drop form creation interface, Ninja Forms is another very popular for builder plugin for WordPress. Despite the simple interface, there are plenty of hooks and filters available for the advanced users. From the settings section, you can control specific options for each field.

The translation-ready plugin allows you to manage, edit or export the data submitted by the users. You can save any field as favorite and use it on other forms. It is also possible to mark any field as required. You will also find several readymade fields that could be used instantly. The AJAX based submission system and custom date-picker will improve the user experience.

6. Jetpack

Did you know that Jetpack has a built-in module for creating contact forms?

Yes, that’s right. And that means if you have Jetpack installed in your website, you won’t have to install other plugins for creating the form. To use the module, you need to activate the feature first. And to do that, go to the Jetpack > Settings page. Find out the module titled ‘Contact Form’ and activate it.

Now, go to the new post editor. In the page, you will find a new button titled ‘Add Contact Form.’ The button will be located right after the ‘Add Media’ button.

By default, the form will come with four fields – Name, Email, Website, and Comment. You can move, edit or delete any of them. It is also possible to add new fields. And on the ‘Email Notifications’ tab, you will customize the recipient and the subject of the notification email. Here is a video guide on using Jetpack plugin contact form feature:

7. Contact Form 7

With more than 1 million active installs, Contact Form 7 is undoubtedly the most popular free form builder plugin for WordPress. Despite the name, you can use the plugin to develop any form. The plugin also allows you to create an unlimited number of forms. And the forms could be customized by using simple markups.

Contact Form 7 is provided with all the relevant features like CAPTCHA; AJAX powered form submission and spam filtering by Akismet. It is possible to customize the emails sent by the plugin. Besides the regular English version, the plugin is available in a lot of other languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Bengali. If you want to store all the submitted messages into your database, you should use this free plugin call Flamingo along with contact form 7.

8. FormCraft – Premium WordPress Form Builder

FormCraft is a professionally designed form builder plugin with a drag and drops interface for creating beautiful forms. As the plugin comes with several form templates, you can get your form ready within a few minutes. The AJAX-powered plugin works without reloading the page, thereby delivering a superior user experience.

Besides embedding the forms, FormCraft also lets you display forms as popup boxes or slide-in forms. The fully responsive forms could also be set as multi-page. The powerful conditional logics will automatically perform various actions like show/hide fields, send email notifications, alter field values based on the user inputs. The form capabilities could be further enhanced by purchasing add-ons. You can get the feature-rich plugin for $33.

9. Contact Form Generator – Form Builder

Contact Form Generator is an excellent premium form builder plugin for creating any forms including contact forms, online surveys, feedback forms and event registrations. The intuitive drag and drop interface will let you create the forms within a short period. You will find separate options to customize the form appearance including the typography, text size, colors, and buttons.

The email notifications could be sent to multiple email addresses. The name, subject and body text of the emails could be customized. It is also possible to save the user submitted data into the database. Other interesting features of the plugin include customizable auto-responder, file uploads with the progress bar, upload validation, spam protection, 18 field types, etc. The plugin is priced at $15.

Your Thoughts

It is impossible to create a fully functioning mode website without using a form builder plugin. And if you are creating forms quite often, it makes sense to have a form builder plugin installed in your WordPress site.

Now that you have gone through the list of 7 best free and paid form builder plugins for WordPress, which one looks most interesting to you? Let me know in the Idea.

Are you using any of these form builder plugins currently? Or maybe you are using any other form builder plugin. Whatever the case is, don’t forget to share your experience by leaving a comment below.

Do you know how content goes viral?

The answer is simple and I’m just looking for one word: Shares.

People share content they really like and their friends share it to their network and so on is the “Secret” behind Virality. We’ll come back to this.

That one friend.

We all have friends whose posts get a lot of engagement. People are “Liking and Reacting” to their posts, they are engaging with this person in the comment section.

Now have you noticed that when they share content to their networks, they get more likes and shares to that post compared to the same content shared by another person in your list. They’ll also put a word out like “Hey! My friend has started a new cake shop, show her some love!”

Now this person in simple terms is an Influencer in your list.

So what is Influencer marketing?

Social Media especially Facebook is like a huge party. You have to put cool content out there and hang out with the popular people. Influencers are these popular people, everybody, flock to. They have a massive following on social media, people listen to what they say and they hang on to their words religiously.

A perfect example of an Influencer is Lazar Angelov.

He’s an athlete and a fitness expert who has close to 12 million followers on Facebook. He may not come in TV channels or in your newspaper, but he is Facebook famous.

Now people who follow him take his tips very seriously and want to look like him. Lazar suggests products to his fans that help them with their bodybuilding.

Check out the image above. He says “Cooking my meal while I’m drinking Shredz Supplements”. Now “Shredz Supplements” is the product that Lazar users to keep his muscles intact. Now this post got 20,000 likes and over 110 shares.

For folks who are his fans and want to look like him, they also want to use products that he uses. Why?

He is an authority, he knows what he talks about and the results are clear to see.

The other reason is, we are humans and we have mirror neurons that copy other people’s behavior, this includes wanting other people’s products as well.

So they click on the link and purchase the product. Now Lazar has used his influence to make people purchase the product of that company. That for you is influencer marketing.

You choose mini-celebrities, get them to use your product or talk about your product in their normal social media posts, Youtube videos, blog posts etc.

How influencer marketing is better than Facebook advertising?

Now, remember I said Facebook is like a huge party. Everybody is having fun, watching great content and sharing jokes, memes and videos.

1. Intrusive:

Now in the middle of this party, you go and in and tell everybody “Hey look at my product that I am trying to sell you, pay for it now”. It just doesn’t seem to fit in.

The thing with Influencer marketing is, the pitch is inside the content that people already like and love. There isn’t any intrusion.

2. Creative:

However much you try to be creative with your advertising, it cannot compete with the Influencer’s style. This is because people who have chosen to follow the influencer like the way they talk, the jokes they crack, the way they describe the product. You cannot have this kind of connection with your audience through an advertisement on Facebook that people barely see for a few seconds.

3. Click Farms:

Truth be told, Facebook advertising has a lot of fake likes and spam. Facebook’s algorithm isn’t good enough to figure out fake users who a part of click farms. For your budget, Facebook targets these users who will ‘like’ your content, but the relationship stops there. Your marketing ROI takes a hit. Although Facebook suggests you have a lot of ‘Engagement’ on your posts, those aren’t valuable to your startup.

Read a little more about click farms here.

4. Quality People:

With Influencer marketing, the Influencers have spent money and time to build their quality audiences. You know for a fact that the people who are seeing your products through the ‘influencer’ are real people, and are your right target audience.

6. How content goes Viral:

I started off this article with this. And this is an important aspect of Influencer Marketing. Your advertising cannot go ‘Viral’. Posts can. A lot of companies collaborate really well with Influencers to make Viral videos. People barely share advertisement posts, but they do share posts with great content.

Other reasons

Don’t use Kim Kardashian to sell enterprise software.

One thing a lot of brands do wrong is, get a celebrity for the sake of it without considering the people they are trying to reach.

With Influencer marketing, you can choose the exactly right people you want. If you want to sell a product, which is a gadget, you could contact somebody like Marques Brownlee.

He/she is an authority in his space and people take his/her word before they make a purchase.

How does it work?

Influencers charge a price for certain kind of posts. It depends on the level of engagement.

How to start with Influencer marketing?

The best way to start Influencer marketing is to reach out to your own community and get people to start talking about your brand. Reach out to your friends who do well on social media and ask them to do a post on your product. This will give you an idea of true organic reach in social media.

If your product or a service is something that your friends and their network will be interested in, do the following:

1. Create a template. That is a little bit of copy about the product and an Image along with. When friends share on their own timelines they tend to add their own text. For this reason, keep your copy to the minimum.

2. Incentivize your friends by giving them the product or a sample, or a free service that they can talk about. Ask them to post a picture along with a few lines.

3. Create FOF (Friends of Friends) discounts for people who come through your Influencer friend. This is one of the growth hacking Dropbox did to become so successful.

4. Try creating networks in multiple cities and multiple countries. Identify potential influencer friends and reach out to them.

5. You can also create ambassador in various college or cities. One thing which made Firefox so popular & many other companies like Truecaller is doing actively these days. Here is one example from Inc42 which I spotted recently:

For a more professional approach to Influencer marketing and to reach bigger brand names, there are services like Fango, Tapinfluence, Traackr, Famebit. There are a few companies that focus in the Indian space, and a popular one is Blogmint.

I hope this article has given you a start on Influencer marketing. Try this for your own startup and let me know what you think! If you have tried Influencer marketing in the past, do share your experience & leaing with us.

Earlier, I talked about the importance of having newsletter for your blog, and out of all essential subscription option, we should focus more on Email Subscription. It doesn’t matter if you are using Aweber, Getresponse or any other service to build Email list, but you should keep working on it to grow your Email list. There are many WordPress plugins, which let you create beautiful Email opt-in form, to get more Email subscribers. Most of these below listed Email subscription plugin supports mode Email marketing services.

Email list is one of the essential parts of a Blog, and I have already talked in detail about it earlier:

Undoubtedly, building an email list on your blogs can be a BIG asset for your online businesses, in the long run. Most people, especially the new bloggers don’t know how to grab their audience attention to make them subscribing to their blogs. If you want to get more people subscribing to your blog, you must have the compelling offer on your blogs. To get it done easily, you should consider using few Email Subscription WordPress plugins to grow your list.

WordPress plugins to grow Email subscribers:

Here are ten awesome WordPress plugins to grow your email list

1) SumoMe List builder: (Free)

Upon popular request, I have finally included SumpeMe list builder to our epic list of Email marketing WordPress plugins. This plugin is probably the easiest plugin you will ever use to capture emails. Using SumoMe you can add any kind of pop-up, welcome mat, scroll box (The popular one) & use any condition to show the email subscription box. It integrates with all popular email service such as InfusionSoft, Aweber, Getresponse to name a few.

Getting started with SumoMe is easy & you can join it for free from here. They offer WordPress plugin which makes it easier for you to integrate. In case if you are stuck in configuration, let me know & I will do a separate post on the same.

Create your free SumoMe account

2) OptinMonster:

OptionMonster is one of the most popular email marketing WordPress plugin. OptinMonster can also be used by non-WordPress platform but for now let’s focus on how you can use it for your WordPress blog. OptinMonster offers various kind of subscription box that could be used to capture email of your readers or leads. In January 2016 I tried their full-page welcome gate & result was astonishing. Below you can see the conversion of 4.09% which is above average.

One of the thing which I like about OptinMonster is; it’s user-friendly interface & they have round the clock support. You don’t have to be technical to create a pop-up as you can use their ready to use subscription box & just edit the word to personalize it for your website.

I have been using them from last 2 years & so far I’m happy & recommend the same for ShoutMeLoud readers. Reason being, they keep adding latest techniques which will help an end user like you & me to sky-rocket our email capture campaign.

Grab OptinMonster license

3) LeadPages:

If you are looking for one perfect solution to grow your Email list in the small time, look no further than Leadpages. This is the most popular lead generation solution that will blow your mind. Leadpages let you create stunning looking landing page, email subscription page, Thank-you page within a minute. Leadpages WordPress plugin that let you quickly integrate the create

Leadpages WordPress plugin that let you quickly integrate the create a landing page on your WordPress blog in a minute. This is a complete value for money, as you start with only $17/month (Paid every two years), and you get access to unlimited Squeeze pages.

If you hire a freelancer or designer to design your Squeeze page, look no further and get Leadpages. I’m using Leadpages on my blogs, and it increased my email subscription by 34%. I will be sharing the complete review and walk-through guide in coming days, for now you can get this tool and use their free video tutorials to start using it for your blog.

Check out Leadpages

4. Optin skin (premium):

Optin skins is developed by Glen Allsoop (the founder of top blog “ViperChill”) to easily build an email list with cute opt-in forms on your blogs. Most popular bloggers like Glen, Pat Flynn of “Smart Passive Income” uses optin skin plugin on their blogs. This plugin helps you to create great opt-in forms at the end of your blog posts to make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your email list without any hassle.

Features of Optin Skin plugin are:

• Split test to track your results
• 18 Default designs to grow your email list
• Ability to create custom designs too
• Ability to place these opt-in skins anywhere on your blog with just one click

Download here

5. Hellobar:

This free plugin creates a small header bar in your blog header section (above your blog’s logo) and your visitors can’t easily get away without noticing it. You could use hellobar plugin to grow your affiliate sales, or direct users to landing pages. If you have compelling words on your hellobar, you can bring more email subscribers to your list in no time.

6. Popup domination (premium):

This is one of the most popular Email subscribe plugin for WordPress. If you want to quadruple your email list on your blogs, this is a MUST have plugins then. Seriously, popup domination is a great plugin that will create pop up’s on your blog (they look great on ANY blog design) and help you get more email subscribers. The best thing is, you don’t need to be a designer or coder, to use this plugin. Easy to integrate, and easy to use.

Download it here

7. Optin crusher (free):

This is a FREE plugin that will help you create an email opt-in form at the footer of your blogs. It won’t look clumsy, but it gives more visibility for your visitors to subscribing to your email lists. Here is a video showing working of Optin crusher WordPress plugin:

Get it here

Update: I have removed 3 plugins as they were outdated.

All the above-listed Email newsletter WordPress plugins are popular for one or other reason. Depending upon your marketing strategy, you can pick any of them. You can offer free eBook on your niche topic, which will also help in grow your Email subscription rate. Pop-up are annoying, but they work better than any other method.

Do let me know which WordPress plugin you are using to grow Email subscription on your blog? Are you building separate squeeze page to grow Email subscriber or some other method?

Placing the right number of & mode social sharing buttons can increase your social media sharing by great extent.

From past one week, I have been testing not so new free tool call SumoMe to add social media sharing button here at ShoutMeLoud. My experience with the SumoMe was pretty solid & finally after testing. I’m sharing the complete guide to getting social media sharing button on your blog. The good thing is, even if you are a BlogSpot blogger or using any other platform than WordPress, you can still add these mode looking social media sharing button on your blog.

I will share the stats, features & other stuff by the end. First, let’s quickly follow the steps mentioned & Let’s add social media sharing button on your blog.

How to add Social media sharing buttons on your Website:

Head over to Sumome SML landing page & add your blog URL to get started.

On the next page, enter your name & email to complete the registration. On the next page, you need to add Sumo me tag on your blog. The good part here is, you need to do it once & after that you can configure everything using SumoMe without touching your codes.

Here are suggestions for you to integrate Sumome tag on your blog:

• If you are using BlogSpot or WordPress, you can use Google Tag Manager to add code.
• If you don’t want to use Google Tag manager, you can use WordPress plugin to install Sumome

In my case it’s WordPress, so I clicked on WordPress & installed/Activated the SumoMe plugin.

Select the site from the list & click on Activate now. This will bring a screen like this, where you need to click on Sumo Store.

What is Sumo Store?

Sumo store is the place where you will find various apps like Email marketing apps, Analytics apps, contact form & many other that you can integrate on your blog. Most of them are free & you can get pro features by upgrading it. If you have never used SumoMe before, I suggest you to use their free features for a week to see the effectiveness. This is what I did before reviewing it here with you.

In the above screenshot, you can see how Sumo store looks like. On this page, scroll down to the sharing section & click on Share icon. On next page click on Free > Open to install & start configuring social media sharing feature of Sumome.

Payment plan:

They have three payment plan & depending upon the size of your blog & your requirement; you should choose one. I would recommend you to start with the free plan & test their all apps. Depending upon your experience, you should pick the right plan for yourself. I would recommend you to buy SumoMePro in the longer run as it offers all pro feature. (You can anytime upgrade or downgrade plans).

For now, let’s select the free option & move ahead.

Select the social media button:

This is the section which you will find most interesting. Sumome let you select from wide variety of social media sharing buttons & you can drag & drop to offer popular buttons first. Once this is done, then click on Save at the bottom & then click on Layout.

Placing the social media sharing buttons:

Layout option let you select & display sharing buttons at your desired location. This supports desktop & mobile both. In the above screenshot, I have placed social media button at all the prominent place.

Another important option that you should configure is the services. Here you can add the Twitter URL, which will be added by default when a reader will tweet your article. After that, you can configure to suggest a Twitter profile to follow.

Another feature such as tracking, URL shortener is also there. If you are a pro member like me, you can configure the buttons for your mobile site. This is pretty useful, especially when we know that users take different action on mobile. Here is what I have for ShoutMeLoud (You can probably see it if you are reading it on mobile phone).

When I was checking the stats for last week, I was pretty surprised to see email being one of the popular ways of sharing articles here at ShoutMeLoud. Needless to say, this made me put email sharing button at more prominent place. Here is how the stats feature looks like:

There are many more features which I’m not covering. I let you explore some of the features of your own. Overall, my experience with Sumome is pretty good & I was wondering why I took so much time to try this. What appealed me about Sumome is the ease of adding latest apps which are proven to increase conversion.

For example Apart from Social media sharing buttons, you can also add the various opt-in box around your blog. One of the features that I love the most is Heatmap feature of Sumome. It helped me discover the biggest flaw of ShoutMeLoud existing design & it let me work on the new homepage layout. More on it later & for now, I suggest you create your free account on SumoMe & get started.

Create free SumoMe account

Since Sumome works with all kind of online website & blogging platform, you will have no problem integrating it. It takes away the biggest headache of adding mode social media sharing buttons & making changes on the fly.

Initially, it might take 5-10 minute to get use to Sumome interface & after that, you will have gala time working with it. Do let me know your review & experience of Sumome. Share about this useful suite of apps with your friends via email or Facebook.