What a great day for my blog and blogging today!! I have made first affiliate sale with HostGator affiliate marketing today. Which means, someone has read my hosting reviews, loved my review and bought hosting plans by clicking on my link. I feel happy for me and that person as well cause I was able to refer him/her to a great hosting provider. I wish him/her all the best for his/her new blog or website.

Though I have made first affiliate sale with HostGator today, the path was not easy at all. But I have enjoyed the journey and it was full of adventure. I am enjoying the journey though I have a long way to go.

I am blogging for my tech blog TechnTechie for almost 6 years now. The major source of my income was displaying direct ads and Google Adsense. But after reading all the big blogs and spending quite a lot of time in blogging arena, I have got to know, if you want to earn real money, you will have to earn it from affiliate marketing. But, my blog was not doing good in terms of traffic though I have around 1600+ posts. So, I was desperately looking for the reasons which is abstracting me to gain my success!

I started looking for suggestions around the web about how I can improve my blog. I remember, about 1 month ago I have posted one topic in ShoutMeLoud Forum about this. Also mentioned there how can I make my first affiliate sale. One Forum member replied my blog is just another WordPress blog. Another member replied, my SEO is not right at all! I had appreciated their comments and started working on SEO. Please have a look at the post below:

Improving My Blog SEO Helped Me A Lot:

To improve my SEO, at first what I did is generated some SEO audits from web using some SEO auditing tools which provides around 7 day trial period. After generating the report, I have found some real problems with my site. The main problems were below:

• My site was not SSL certificate enabled. You can read how SSL Certificate can improve your SEO. So, the readers of my blog were not getting a feeling that my site is secured. So, I have enabled my SSL certificate straightaway. As I use HostGator as my hosting provider, it was already there for me. I just had to enable a plugin in WordPress and it was all good! Up and running. If you have a quick look at the browser, you will be able to see that green lock on my browser which means my site is secured. This provides and extra confidence to my readers and make them feel that I am not in my initial stage.
• Second thing which I have found is, I was not using Header tags properly. Which means I was using H2 before H1 and so on. So, I have adjusted all those errors.
• The third major SEO defect was, I was not using Meta Descriptions for my posts. Which is really bad and I did not know it can affect my website very badly. So, I started fixing those errors. But I still have 300 posts with no Meta Tags. I am working on those.
• To conclude this paragraph, I  should say that I am still working on my SEO.

Social Media Engineering and Thinking Out of the BOX!

If you want to do good in anything, you will have to think out of the box. I believe thinking out of the box has helped a lot to drive my first affiliate sale. So, what I did is:

• I have started experimenting the positions of my Affiliate ad link units.
• Then I though, people will not notice if I use the same Affiliate ad units that they see 100 times on the web. So, I have created customised banner and placed it in my blog with my affiliate link.
• Third point is a secret. If you know then you know it otherwise, it will be a huge help for you! I was quite active in Pinterest cause Pinterest allows you to post your product link. So, I have created some nice attractive banners with CANVA and posted them in Pinterest with affiliate links.
• I have also joined on other peoples Pinterest boards and starting posting my Pins on those boards. From my tracking I have see a few traffics are coming from these sources.
• Then I have updated all my review articles about HostGator review with latest information. Like – HostGator is providing Free SSL certificate, so I have emphasised on that  as this is a hot cake these days.
• Last but not the least, I have created my main HostGator review post a sticky post in my blog which had given me a huge boost to grab all the future buyers.

Finally, I have made first affiliate sale with HostGator affiliate program. When I have opened my Impact Radius Dashboard today, I have seen the good news which is below:

This is a huge success for me and encouraged me a lot to take my future actions. I was eagerly waiting for it and made first affiliate sale with HostGator. I though writing a post reading this is a great way to celebrate the success with all the fellow bloggers and with my readers as well.

HostGator affiliate program is a high paying affiliate program which gives you $50 per affiliate sale and also the referral period is 60 days. Which means if someone clicks on your affiliate link and buy the product even after 60 days, you will get the affiliate credit (your link click should be the last click on their browser). You can see from the screenshot above, just from one action made first affiliate sale with HostGator and I have earned NZD 71. If you want to join HostGator affiliate program, you will have to sign up with Impact Radius because HostGator does not support direct affiliate program from their website. Let me know your success story at the comment. Happy blogging and happy affiliate marketing!