The Cash Diaries

The more traffic you have the more money you can make.  It’s a pretty simple concept.  But what’s not simple is how you actually get that traffic.  It can sometimes seem like a bit of a dark art, with so much conflicting information.  So it’s best to stick to the basics.  And for my basic SEO work I like to use SEMRush.

I started using SEMRush a little over a year ago, to help build traffic to my authority and niche sites, and I managed to increase traffic across the board.

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You probably already know if your blog has outgrown shared hosting.  It might be experiencing outages.  It might go down whenever one of your posts go viral.  Or you just might be wanting to install a plugin that isn’t supported on shared hosting.

You could suffer through, or you could move up to something more suitable.  The truth is, at some point pretty much every wordpress blog is going to struggle on shared hosting.  This is because shared hosting is just that…. its shared. If another website on your server suddenly gets insanely popular, your site is going to suffer.    And let’s be honest – downtime is a bitch!  It not only affects your rankings, but it can lose you customers and revenue.

So what are the other options?  Here are some ideas I put together.

Start Using Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a free utility that gives your website a CDN (content delivery network), lots of performance enhancements, and some additional security features too.   Using cloudflare all your js, css and images will be delivered to your visitors from Cloudflare servers.   Meaning less load on your shared hosting.

I think pretty much everyone should use Cloudflare on their wordpress blogs.  Not only will it speed up your site, it will make it more secure.  Plus its free!

Try Grid Hosting

Most people think that after shared hosting, the next step up is a VPS.  They are wrong.  Instead they should try grid hosting.  It basically gives you the same easy to use interface as shared hosting, but your site is hosted across numerous servers.  That way, if one server goes down, your site will remain online.

Mediatemple offers the best Grid Hosting.  I would know – I host my site there and experience no downtime.  They offer 1-click wordpress installs, which makes running a blog easy.  And your site will be able to handle waaaay more traffic than it could on Shared Hosting.

A VPS?

I honestly wouldn’t recommend it.  Why?  Unless you are a server pro, there is no way you are going to be able to secure your site.  It’s gonna get hacked!  Trust me.  I’m a programmer, and even I don’t setup my own servers – it takes an expert.   So you’re gonna have to pay someone.  And then you’re gonna have to pay for your server as well.

Here’s a little tip that I recently implemented on one of my websites and increased my affiliate conversions by a massive 60%.  So if you’re into affiliate marketing or own your own website and looking to profit from affiliate marketing then read on.

Ever noticed a popup appear on a page when you are about leave?  These are know as exit offers and they are a powerful way to capture additional leads.

How do Exit Offers Work

Exit offers use a script to detect when a user’s mouse leaves the web page and shows a non obtrusive modal box overlay on the page.  This grabs the users attention just as they were about to leave and gives you another chance to sell to them.

What Content Works best in Exit Offers

You need content that is going to reach out and grab a user.  Remember, they were trying to leave, so they haven’t been completely sold on what you’re selling.  Discounts work really well.  So does giving away free stuff.

How I use Exist Offers with Affiliate Marketing

One of the best way to sell affiliate offers is through email marketing.  So one of the techniques I use to build my email marketing list is giving away a free bonus when people register with my newsletter.    This is a really effective strategy and it’s massively increase my conversions.  So the strategy in dot points:

1. Create an email marketing list
2. Create a “free bonus item” like an ebook or report.
3. Use PicReel to sign up people to your list by offering the freebie.
4. Post to your email marketing list!  I use an autoresposnder to push an affiliate offer one day after people sign up.  This returns massive conversions.

How to implement exit offers

The best way is using a service such as Picreel (which I use).  They allow you to set up multiple campaigns and test out different types of offers.  It’s a hugely powerful marketing suite and I can’t recommend it enough.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest… yet email is still my number one earner.  I promote my blog posts all over the place, but nothing compares to good old fashioned email.  Crazy!

I’ve been running an authority site for quite a while now.  It brings in a modest $2k+ each month from affiliate commissions.  And I credit almost 80% of this income to the email newsletter I run on that site.

Once a week I put together a collection of links related to the niche.  I also do a quick round up of blog posts from that I posted during the week. And of course I also include a link and quick sales pitch to the affiliate link I’m looking to promote.  And every few days, without fail, I manage to make a sale.

This strategy isn’t rocket science.  It doesn’t require any special skills and it also doesn’t take very long to complete.  In fact I spend less than an hour per week on it.  That’s 4 hours a month for $2k of revenue.  Not bad.

Running an email newsletter doesn’t also need to be all about selling.  In fact, I do very little selling to my email list.  I do a lot of support – I let people email me back, ask questions and i respond.  It’s turned out to be a very personal communication platform.  And people appreciate that.

I thought I would do something similar here.  I usually use GetResponse for my email lists – and I think it works best for large email newsletters.  Because this site is much smaller, I wanted to try something different.  I’ll be created a tiny newsletter list.  I want to keep things small so I can keep things personal.   That way I can share more.  You’ll notice I don’t share too many specifics on this blog (I am trying to change that).  But I will share them through the email list.  So if you’re interested in how I make money from sites like etoro, popcash and this one – jump on my newsletter.

I’m not gonna jump on the Godaddy Hating train.  I don’t mind buying domains there.  But recently I’ve found their prices to be too expensive.  Domains are a commodity and I’ll go wherever it’s cheapest + easiest to register.  Godaddy used to have lots of coupons to get cheap domains, but they’ve now limited these so you can only use them once.  Which for someone who owns hundreds of domains is not going to work.  So here are my favorite alternatives to Godaddy.

iWantMyName – the minimalist choice

If you’re looking to quickly register a domain with all the upsell that you get on Godaddy and other providers, then iWantMyName is for you.   It is focused solely on domain registration.  No hosting, no marketing offers.  iWantMyName also has probably the largest base of domain extensions to register.  It’s particularly good for international extensions.  I’ve registered lots of domains here and never had any issues.

NameCheap – the true Godaddy alternative

Looking for a product as close to Godaddy as possible, then try NameCheap.  Ironically, I’ve never found them to be as cheap as GoDaddy, but they have a nicely designed website and a similar range of products to GoDaddy.

NameBright – the domainers choice

Looking for dirt cheap domain registrations?  Then NameBright is the place to go.  It’s owned by a prominent domain investor and so it’s been designed from the ground up to cater to this crowd.  It has the cheapest .com registrations I could find – they claim to offer at cost pricing.    I’ve used NameBright to handle some of my more valuable domains.

So there you have it three really good alternatives to GoDaddy.  Who do you use to register domains?  Let me know why in the comments.

I’ve never been a fan of Google Analytics.  I’ve always found the interface to be too complicated.  And it’s just too difficult to get a good overview of what’s going on in your website.

I’ve been using Clicky for the past 5 years, and I think it is much, much better.

Clicky is a realtime analytics platform.  That means there is no waiting to see your analytics reports.  As soon as a visitor hits your website, it will appear in clicky.

It tracks everything you could want – visitors, content, entrance/exit pages, bounce rate, referrer etc.

But what I love best about clicky is its interface – it has what I believe to be the very best interface of all the analytics programs.  It is simple to use and data is displayed in a logical fashion.   Clicky is the best Analytics tool.