Last time when I was on my trip in Italy without an Internet connection I couldn’t publish posts on my blog. According to Google Analytics the number of my visitors dropped during these days.

A lot of blogs seem like every author sit behind the screen all day long to publish (4-5 posts) daily. They can post every day whenever they are. These bloggers never go away for vacation or if they do, are posting from the beach, from the shops or from the museums.

Or… Can they write posts and schedule them for later? Googling my question I found a post on JohnChow.com about WordPress’ timestamp feature.

WordPress timestamp is a great built in tool that can save you a lot of time – also can save your blog’s traffic when you are out for weeks. You can write a bunch of posts in advance and schedule them to be published in the future. You can use it to improve your productivity.

There are days when we are feeling inspired, have a lot of great ideas to post, your writing is really flowing – and there are days when you can come up with nothing. If you are starting your brainstorming session, write your posts and use the timestamp to post them later. You don’t need to worry about periods you have nothing to write about.

How it works?

• Write your post as normally
• Look for the “Publish” section on the right side and click on the “Edit” where it says “Publish immediately”
• Select the date and time you want your post to be published – you can use a date in the past too
• Click on the “OK” button
• If the date is in the future your “Publish” button will become to “Schedule”
• Hit the “Schedule” button – your post will be automatically published at the chosen time

Remember to publish the post. If you’re just saving it, WordPress will leave it as a draft. Once you press the publish button, your post will queue. When the time comes, your post will be automatically published.

How many times do you use this WordPress feature? How many of your posts have been timestamped?

As I mentioned before only 1-5% of all affiliate marketers are succeed in internet business. The others fail.

What are the most often repeated mistakes you should avoid? I want to show you some very basic mistakes I made myself and many ‘marketers’ are still making.

1. Signing up for every affiliate program – Most of the affiliate networks are free to join and offers thousands of merchants. Affiliates who participate in too many programs will not have enough time and money for promote all of them. Instead of focus on one vendor or niche they are trying to make huge money by offering hundreds of products. They bite off more than they can chew…
2. Promoting unrelated programs – I wouldn’t recommend a software on a jewlery site. But sometimes marketers do. If your visitors are not interesting in what you are promoting, you will never see them again.
3. Poor website – There is a lot out there… I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Poor design, hard to read sites, worthless and duplicated contents, ‘useful’ widgets (weather etc).
4. Banners only – Some of the ‘marketers’ thinks that a banner is enough to sell those products. They found some great banners in the affiliate resources area so they put some of them here and some there. Now they ‘do the hard work’ and waiting for the results. But what we really need is unique content, CTA (call to action) graphics and targeted traffic.
5. Abandoned affiliate sites – Would you ever buy something from an affiliate who can’t remember when s/he saw his/her site last time? Updates are really important. There is always something happening in your niche. You should talk about it.
6. Hard selling – Don’t sell, recommend. People are not stupid, they know when you want to sell something. Build a website, get targeted visitors and just talk about a product that makes your/our life easier.
7. Pay Per Click traffic – Setting up a successful PPC campaign is really hard. Newbies should stay away from PPC (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter). Organic traffic is the most important way to get visitors to your website.

Of course this is not a whole list of mistakes but avoiding the above mentioned mistakes can help you making your first commissions.

It’s the fifth unsubscribe link I clicked on today.

Unsubscription from a mailing list. It’s a nightmare of every affiliate marketer. You are trying to build your email list but more and more people clicking on the unsubscribe link.

I cover 5 reasons why readers unsubscribe from your list(s).

1. Too many emails – Readers are on more than 1 list. You are not the only marketer they’re receiving emails from. Sending more than 2-3 emails every week is not just unprofessional but also makes them angry. Especially when you have no time to read your email out so you send a second one to correct the previous letter.
2. Emails are too long – We simply don’t have the time to read a 500 word email. Readers are impatitent and you should be able to get your point across before you lose the interst of the reader.
3. Respect - 99% of readers wouldn’t like to receive emails written in the RichJerk style. Some of the marketers are trying to write in a cool style. Marketers should respect others…
4. Lack of valuable information – Readers opted in to learn more and earn more. As I mentioned above you are not the only one marketer we receive emails from. If you can’t provide value, there are others. Readers don’t need those featured articles all the time. And they also don’t need every product you can find on ClickBank. Give them other than just standard sales pitch.
5. “My good friend, Ewen Chia” - Ahh, every so called Guru is your friend. I know. But the sad truth is that you (I mean your name and your email address) are only records in these Gurus’ databases. They never heard about you and you have reletionship only with their Aweber account.

Building a growing mailing list doesn’t rely upon knowing some secret strategy. Give your readers more than they are expecting to receive, and give them a pleasant surprise.

Check your mailing style and try to avoid the mistakes listed above. Once you do this, your emails will surely grab attention and you can reduce your unsubscribe rate.

Almost forgot to mention – never send an email without unsubscribe link.