You may have picked up a bad habit
I work with new bloggers and internet marketers nearly everyday. I see them make many of the same mistakes over and over again. That is totally ok because I’m here to give them a helping hand. Unfortunately, they often pick up these bad habits from “seasoned” internet marketers. One of the most common bad habits I see happening is promoting your recommended products the wrong way.
What the problem is
You may have already fallen victim to this bad habit or you know someone who has. You’re told that you need to have a “Recommend Products” page where people will flock to it and buy everything you recommend and you make a small commission from each sale. Well in a perfect world that would be awesome. However, there are some things that must happen before that becomes a reality. The most important one is acquire Trust. You can’t successfully recommend a product or service to someone unless they trust you or acknowledge you as an expert. Now gaining their trust is outside the scope of this article but I will tell you what to do once you have their trust and the proper way to recommend those products to them.
List of Benefits
I always encourage people who choose to have a “recommend products/resources” type page to avoid doing such. Instead, make it a Category. First I will list the benefits then tell you how to set it up properly.
- Additional content for blog post chronicle.
- Search Engine Optimization
- Better focus on a single product
- Encourage more comments
- Boost social media sharing of a specific product
- Less of that “spammy” advertising feeling
- Show it’s importance in article form
- Many more….
How to properly recommend products from your blog
- Go to Posts > Categories and make a new category called “Recommended Products”.
- Go to Posts > Add New. Title your blog post with the product keywords e.g. “Why I Use My Leads System Pro”.
- Then, continue to write/list reasons why you use the service and why you recommend it to anyone.
- Add your banner and any other videos, affiliate link, promo material to the post body.
- At the bottom of that post, suggest your other recommended products with links to their post. So visitors can see what other products you recommend. e.g. My other recommend products are….
- Add 4-5 keywords into the Tags box on the right hand side.
- Check the “Recommended Products” checkbox in the Categories box on the right hand side.
- Go to Appearance > Menus and add the “Recommend Products” category to your menu. When someone clicks on that link, they will see the excerpts of all the recommended products on a single page. From there, they can read more about the product on its individual page.
UPDATE 8-10-2011
I forgot to mention something. By making each product a blog post, you can organize that product into multiple categories. For example, a recommended product might be the SEOPressor WordPress Plugin that can be added to the categories Recommended Products, SEO, WordPress Plugins, and Blogging.
Final Thought
You want to show your visitors that each product is worthy of its own article. Be descriptive why you recommend that product and the success you’ve had using it. Share your experience with it. Simply listing it on a page with several other products is boring, disorganized, and too much of just an advertisement. When you recommend a restaurant to someone, you don’t play the commercial for them. Do you? No…You tell them how much you enjoy their food, service, and about their value in the price. Recommending products on your blog should be treated the same way.
What are your thoughts?
Have you noticed this on other blogs or have you fallen for this bad habit?
