When you run a WordPress blog, you have access to an overwhelming array of plugins. Some of them are free and some of them are paid. Some of them offer front-end modifications that your readers see, like having your Instagram feed in the sidebar. Others offer back-end enhancements, making it easier for you to do more powerful things with your blog.
And one plugin that just about every blog should have is Jetpack, partly because it’s really several plugins built into one. You can use it to automate your social media marketing, monitor when your site goes down, or integrate related posts into all your content. Another feature worth mentioning is Site Stats.
“But I already use Google Analytics.”
Yes, so do I. And I’m not saying that the site stats offered by Jetpack are going to replace what you get with Analytics. However, because of the deeper integration with WordPress, it’s a little more in your face; it’s right there every time you log into your blog. And it could provide some insights you may otherwise miss.
Something I noticed in the last couple of months is that a blog post I wrote eight years ago started showing up consistently among my list of “top posts” as determined by Jetpack. The blog post, which lists a number of books by Barack Obama, isn’t even all that well-written, but with the election and the inauguration of Donald Trump, it has somehow become much more relevant again. People are finding it again.
When I first wrote that blog post, I only had an affiliate account with Amazon Canada. So, the links to the books were affiliate links to Amazon.ca. Conversion was poor and understandably so. There’s a good chance that many of the people reading that post are American, so they probably wouldn’t want to buy a book from Amazon Canada.
To be honest, I’d almost forgotten about the post altogether. When I saw it pop up at the very top of my list of “top posts” for several days straight, I knew I had something. So, I went in, swapped in some affiliate links to Amazon.com (USA) instead. It only took a few minutes.
The result was practically instantaneous. Within the first couple days of making the change, I started to see people buying those Obama books through my links. It’s not a lot of money, but it was money I was leaving on the table up until then. Had I noticed even earlier, I probably could have earned even more.
Now, it’s unrealistic to go through an archive of thousands of blog posts to look for potential opportunities like these. That said, you should be on the lookout for when your old blog posts could receive some new life. Maybe there’s an affiliate program now for a service you had previously wrote about and it didn’t have an affiliate program at the time.
There are tons of strategies for boosting your Amazon earnings and they can just as easily be applied to other programs too. The great thing about blogging is the potential for passive income. Are you sitting on a gold mine and you don’t even know it?