Dealer Dan, pictured here with WWE Superstar Mick Foley, has been in internet marketing since 1996. He likes hugs, long walks on the beach, and making money while wearing his jammy jams. For more information, you can read all 
This is a continuance of a series of articles I have been writing where I’m clearing up my “Affiliate Bible Articles To Do List”.
That list had a random selection of notes and half articles and ideas and I’m either pasting them as is with a bit of refinement, or writing new articles. There’s no real flow to it all but hopefully there’s enough information to help you out.
You can see previous articles on the blog section of the site.
Read Every Plugin Update:
How many of you out there who use WordPress blindly update your plugins? I’d bet the mass majority of you.
It’s understandable too. Usually the updates are minor or some random bug fix but occasionally they can be a lot bigger – and can add new features OR change existing features.
I’ve been guilty of it in the past. Updating a better related posts plugin not realizing I had to go back and activate it again – causing that feature on the site to be broke for weeks. Or Yoast doing a big update to sitemaps requiring me to set everything up again.
Don’t get me started on any sort of social networking plugin – Twitter and Facebook are making updates all the time which usually require big fixes so it’s important to always read those.
In short – take a few seconds and read those changelogs. I’ve learned that the hard way.
Facebook News Feed:
This is a bit of an old one – but remember about a year or so ago when everyone was bitching about the Facebook news feed? They were raging that the algorithm wouldn’t just show new posts and that it kept reverting from “Most Recent” if you set it to that, to “Top Stories”.
I remember a lot of people, people I’d generally consider knowledgeable, raging about how this was the end of Facebook and they had no idea what they are doing etc.
It’s always interesting because I think people forget what Facebook is and how far they’ve come – especially with so much negative press. They don’t just do things willy nilly – there’s always a lot of thought that goes into it.
This is a great article that goes into detail as to why Facebook changed things around.
More Links:
TinyPNG: A nice resource for compressiong images fast. Also has a photoshop plugin. The quality of the image remains and in a search engine world where speed is important it’s best you get this done.
Growing a Blog from Zero to $6 Million: These articles are always interesting to read. A lot of them are more focused on being clickbait or trying to sell you something at the end. But that’s okay – there’s always a lot of interesting information you can pick up.
Great Video Poker Story: Always love stories about this in regard to gambling.
Track Every Site Adjustment You Do:
Any time you make an adjustment to a site – a notable one anyway – I’d recommend tracking it in a spreadsheet. You’d be surprised sometimes how things can impact your statistics.
You’d be surprised just how helpful it can be. From updates to content to redesigns to internal linking to adding youtube videos to updating wordpress and plugins.
I’ll save going into detail on this for a later post – but let’s say for example the only thing you do in 6 months is make youtube videos which also link to your site? Or do a bunch of reddit posts that link to your site? Then looking at your site stats after those 6 months, you see some natural growth in traffic and ranking?
That doesn’t mean that the youtube videos or reddit posts helped for sure – there are many other factors that come into play. However it’s still a good indicator – and then from there you can do more of that for your site or try it on other sites etc.
It can also be helpful to track things that impact a site negatively. For example – tag clouds. A few years ago I had a website doing fairly well and I installed a tag cloud and tag plugin as it felt natural for that site for the user browsing. However I didn’t really do much with it – I left it on its default settings.
A couple of months had passed and I was seeing a decrease in traffic and other stats. From that I was able to look through everything and see that the reason for it was the tag cloud and the way I had tag pages set up on the site. As I had been tracking everything I knew that was most likely the issue. So I removed the tag plugin completely, made a note of it and when I saw the stats jump up again I knew that was the issue.
So while it can seem like a hassle – be sure to track everything you do. There’s no more valuable information than first party information which is your own.
This article was written on May 30, 2016 however all articles are looked at on a monthly basis and updated to keep them relevant.
If you need to contact Graeme, please see his Contact Page. If you are an affiliate manager wanting promoted please see this page.
