A question commonly asked by budding affiliate marketers is “Which blog should I use to promote my stuff?” There are many pros and cons to promoting your affiliate links on a free blog host and I’m going to look at some of them right now while comparing them to hosting your own WordPress site.

Pros

Price

Obviously it’s cheaper to host on a free blog. Most are free; some charge a nominal fee per month or charge as an optional extra to remove ads from their sites. When you’re starting in Affiliate marketing you may not have the money to buy a domain name and hosting so adding your content to a free site is a great way to get started. You can get a self hosted site for £80 which covers the cost of a domain name and two years hosting.

Ease of Use

They are very easy to use.  Most just require a standard sign up, confirm email address and then you can post absent. Some take a little longer depending on how much you can customise. The easy way to get started compared to buying a domain, changing the nameserver, installing WordPress, installing the theme, customising the theme THEN finally adding content is very favourable to the newbie affiliate.

Easy Updates

Usually, when a free blog site updates, your site gets updated automatically. Not to say updating on a self hosted WordPress site is difficult, but you SHOULD backup your site before updating which can take a while.

Uptime

Depending on your own personal host, a free blog site generally has a better up time.  This is due to the mass of servers your site is spread across usually meaning a 100% uptime for your site. A self hosted site, especially on poor quality hosting can go down often.

Backups

I mentioned taking backups and this isn’t really an issue on a free site.  Due to your blog being hosted on several servers there will always be a few left to carry on showing your blog to the world should the worst happen…

Extra Traffic

Traffic from similar blogs, via tags or a related posts menu, is one example of a way that a free blog site that hosts thousands of blogs can earn you a few more visits. This traffic will usually be relevant traffic too so there is a chance they will click on your link.

Dupe Content

We all know content needs to be unique, the unique the better.  If own three self hosted websites you will need to make a similar post on all three completely unique to each 1 or face a potential penalty. If you have three free to host blogs, you can write 1 article, and copy it onto all your blogs and if they get a penalty? Well, that’s their problem! The same goes for link building, you can spam the site worry free.  Got penalised? Well, begin a new blog! Seriously though, the point to take form this is if you gain a penalty, it won’t be to a site you’ve paid good money for.

Cons

Customisation

Admittedly some free blog sites have some really nice customisation tools and you can really go to town on dressing up your site. Having said that a lot of them are very basic, very samey and can be pretty dull and restrictive and won’t let you do exactly what you want them to.

Plugins

In the same way, some sites won’t let you add plugins that not only help the user navigate your site but also stop you viewing useful visitor data.

URL’s

The URL’s are not clean and are usually a subdomain of the blogging site itself. Some use post ID’s rather than real words in the URL so that will affect the search traffic you receive. With a WordPress blog you have full control over you URL’s, Descriptions, title tags etc. This can result in a gigantic loss of search traffic. Some ban PPC ads pointing to their brand too so you can’t even make the traffic up that way.

SEO

Basically reiterating what I just said. Poor URL’s, no custom meta descriptions or title tags can really harm your search rankings.

Ads

A visitor to your WordPress blog may or may not click on a link to a product. A visitor to a free blog with paid adverts (The reason it is a free blog) has a third choice and can dilute the amount of traffic you send to the merchant.

Professionalism

MoreNiche.com has a much better and more professional and authoritative title than moreniche.blogspot.com.

Scrapers

Content scrapers can easily get a bot to scrape your content on a free website. As each of the 10000’s of pages on a free blog are all the same, a scrapers can sit back and take your content with small effort.

Control

You don’t have any. The recent panda update for Google say many top article sites ditch 1000’s of articles, many belonging to affiliates.

What if your top performing free blog decides it doesn’t allow affiliate codes? Or ups the percentage of genuine content required? Goes bankrupt? Bans content relating to the more adult nature of certain affiliate programs?

You wouldn’t do this to your own site, you have control.

A new report has revealed that business to business email marketing remains the most popular way of communicating with customers.

The research, which was carried out by Econsultancy, found that 86 per cent of companies and brands opted to use this method of communicating with their customers and prospective customers.

Email marketing was also the go-to method when it came to communicating offers. Eighty per cent of firms used email marketing for voicing product and service updates, whilst 70 per cent turned to the method for feedback. Sixty per cent used email marketing as a means of communicating customer service options to their existing clients.

Writing for Econsultancy, email marketing expert Richard Lees said, “Marketers must ensure consistency of data collection across channels to smooth the passage of data into a single database.

“Good practice in this area will not only make data integration easier, it will also make compliance simpler,” he added.

The Econsultancy research also revealed an ever-increasing challenge facing marketers: How best to put together information from numerous different channels in order to gain the most comprehensive and workable data list.

When looking at what works best within the marketing sphere, the Centre for Retail Research reported that utilising social networks such as Twitter can be a positive step for many companies, no matter what their size or sector. The centre found that the most successful small businesses were using Twitter and other social media sites such as Facebook as an integral part of their online marketing strategies.

Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the Centre for Retail Research, told Equimedia, “There are a lot of new retailers selling interesting products that aren't easily available elsewhere where tweeting can be [used] about new products, extensions of ranges and new shops.”

However, despite the positive impact that Twitter can have on a business, Professor Bamfield warned that "you've got to have lots of new things coming through before you can do it".

Virgin Media Business recently carried out an investigation into the retail sector's usage of Twitter and discovered that, out of 500 UK businesses questioned, a tiny nine per cent currently utilised the micro-blogging site for business purposes.

“It's probably true that the smaller stores have not got on this bandwagon yet, but this may simply reflect the fact that they're very busy, they don't have the skills and they don't see why they should bother,” he added.

With online shopping sales in the UK increased each year, the importance of opening up to new customers and keeping existing ones happy is more relevant than ever before. Using social networks can help to achieve this.

Figures from the recent IMRG CapGemini e-Retail Sales Index revealed that online shopping rose by 19 per cent during the first quarter of 2011 as opposed to the same time period in 2010.

The 2011 Edition of the Email Marketing Metrics Report from email marketing service provider MailerMailer, has uncovered some interesting findings about the receipt of emails.

Analysing data from almost one billion email messages to uncover email marketing trends, the eleventh annual report aims to educate marketers about how to improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

The 2011 report reveals that click rates increased year-on-year to three.two per cent and two.nine per cent during the first and second halves of the year, a rise from two.six per cent and 1.6 per cent respectively.

On a Sunday, high open rates of 12.two per cent were recorded, along with click rates of four.4 per cent on average, when compared directly to the rest of the week.

The MailerMailer report also revealed that the highest volume of open rates for email messages happened between six and 11am local time, when people were most likely to be sitting down at their desks to start work.

Personalising the email subject line was found to have an impact on the click rate, generating a 0.8 per cent click rate, while personalising the message caused click rates to rise to three per cent. The report found that subject lines which were made up of between four and 15 characters led to the highest open rate, of 14.1 per cent.

CEO of MailerMailer, Raj Khera, said, “Email marketing is extremely measurable and we have a great amount of data at our fingertips. This report is provided for free as a community service to help businesses improve their email marketing effectiveness.”

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