Tag: WordPress

Amazon Affiliate is not Useful

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

After a period of testing Amazon Affiliate, I realise it is not as useful as I thought. It is only for high volume website and you will be deactivated for zero sales after a period of time. For new startup or website, there is little incentives to get this.

As a reminder, Associate accounts that have not referred three required sales to Amazon.sg within 180 days of sign-up will be automatically rejected.

Amazon.sg
Affiliate Program

Product mix is important as Amazon Affiliate is mainly focus toward physical goods like books. In reality, the theme of the blog plays a part in these affiliate programs. Not all are really suitable. On the whole, there are many fine prints with these programs and they tend to distract you from your overall content.

Not a Must Have

For new website, it is really not worth the time and effort to setup affiliate program. You may be face with a need to turn in a minimum sales like Amazon Affiliate program. Since traffic is usually low, it will take some time to generate much user volume. In addition, these program may even require actual sale of certain product instead pay per click program.

Overall, affiliate program are potential revenue streams. However, it is not suitable for new website or eShop. You are better off to focus in content creation rather than relying your website with affiliate program.

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How to view Google Analytics and Statistics in WordPress

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

There are two ways to view your visitors for your website. Google analytics is a good comprehensive view of your visitors demographic and trending topics. However, you will require WordPress premium plan for Google Analytics integration. WordPress also provide a default statistics.

Google Analytics
  1. Desktop > Go to Google Analytics.
  2. Login with your Gmail account.
  3. Select the domain name if you have more than 1.
  4. Mobile > Download Google Analystics.
  5. Similarly, Login with your Gmail account.
  6. It will take about 24 hours to populate the data.
WordPress Statistics
  1. Go to My Sites > Stats.
  2. You can view Traffic, Insight or Ads.
  3. Traffic is similar to Google Analytics with less details.
  4. Insight is something related to WordPress and your posts vs the traffic. It will give you a clue to the type of content, tags and categories that will attract more audiences.
  5. Ads is another feature which Google Analytics will not have because WordAds is enabled by WordPress Premium Plan itself.

Overall, Google Analytics gives a detailed breakdown of traffic compared to WordPress stats. The advantages of WordPress stats are the correlation of traffic vs type of content. The Ads stats also give a good view of $$ made from your content. Of course, I will do a detailed review once I made my first $100 from Ads. 😁

How to connect to social media with WordPress

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

Sharing to social media is easily configurable with WordPress Premium Plan with its advanced social media option. There are 2 key options, automatic sharing of post to social media and manual sharing buttons of social media.

Automatic sharing to social media
  1. Go to Configure > Sharing > Connections.
  2. Select one of the 4 social media to publish automatically i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr or Twitter.
  3. Login to your social media to connect to your account to WordPress.
  4. Once connected, your blog post can be automatically publish to your social media account as well.
  5. Post can only publish once.
  6. If you publish incorrectly, you will need to unpublish in WordPress and delete the erroneous post at social media. The same post will not be publish again. You will have to manually share it to social media with social media buttons
Sharing buttons of social media
  1. This is the classic sharing buttons of social media.
  2. There is many social media buttons that you can configure to enable at the end of your blog post.
  3. This allows users to easily share your blog to any social media.

Build your WordPress for SEO

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a buzz word and trend in the past. It is still very relevant now and the approach to SEO is now ubiquitous. Here are some simple tweaks and know-how basics SEO for WordPress.

  1. WordPress and major content providers are SEO friendly. You do not really need setup anything to “enable” SEO.
  2. SEO is now language independent and Search Engine can link the same context to different spelling like Optimization vs Optimisation.
  3. Do try not to slang too much in your language, Search Engine is not really there hor (slang)!
  4. Choose device independent themes that are user friendly and mobile friendly. Usually, these themes are SEO friendly to allow Search Crawlers, Bots or Spiders in.
  5. If privacy is your concern, it it best to set entire site to private or else Search Engine can easily “crawl” any page.
  6. Write for interest or be relevant. SEO is just a technique to drive organic traffic. It is not intended to make users return to your website.
  7. Modern Search Engine can now detect fraudulent links, contents, fake keywords and even scams sites. If you are using SEO for monetary purpose, this may not be a good move.
  8. For advanced users who wants the good old webmaster SEO control, you can still get your WordPress sites verified easily with Google Search Console or Bing, Pinterest and Yandex.
  9. If all these tips are too overwhelming, you may look out for some step by step book like SEO 2020 Learn Search Engine Optimization With Smart Internet Marketing Strategies: Learn SEO with smart internet marketing strategies.

SEO is no longer a technical domain that only a few can master. The growth of SEO shows the value that a domain can evolve to be user friendly and ubiquitous. I will expect machine learning domain to be in similar direction to let us focus on the essentials more than figuring out how to implement it.

Pilot 👨‍✈️ Testing with WordPress

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

WordPress can be a quick pilot platform to try out various tools and technologies before embarking on a startup business or to fund your hobbies. Below is a simple list of what pilot testing you can do in your WordPress website.

  1. Content creation
  2. Self branding with personal Domain name.
  3. Setup Google Analytics to analyse web traffic
  4. Build your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
  5. Using WordAds to monetize your website.
  6. Setting up Amazon Affiliate Program
  7. Creation of personal website with WordPress Premium Plan
  8. Connecting your website to social media.
  9. Install plugins (Only with business plan and above).

Review in Setting up Amazon Affiliate Program

~ Danny Kwok ~ 2 Comments

The thought of joining Amazon Affiliate Program never really crossed my mind until I read that it is part of the recommended popular affiliate program to monetize WordPress beside using WordAds. In short, I am curious to give it a go to see how it will work out in this blog.

Amazon Affiliate Program Singapore
  1. Go to Amazon Affiliate Program. Remember to choose the right country. In my case, that will be in Amazon Affiliate Program Singapore.
  2. Sign up using social media or create your own account. For instance, you could use Gmail.
  3. Update your blog URL and details.
  4. Update your bank information for payment purpose.
  5. Update your tax details as required for your country.
  6. Once done, search for the product and “Get Link”.
  7. You can copy the Amazon URL and paste it easily into your blog links.

To my surprise, all the registration and updates take less than an hour. It is a seamless process and very easy to do. If you want more advanced information, you can check out some of these books to level up your Amazon Affiliate Program

Overall, it was a no brainer to activate Amazon Affiliate Program. So, I highlight recommend you to give it a test drive. I will be checking back in half a year later to see how well the affiliate program fare for me. Stay tuned!

How to monetize on your WordPress website with WordPress Premium Plan WordAds

~ Danny Kwok ~ 2 Comments
WordPress: Tools > Earn
  1. A plus point of WordPress Premium plan is the easy setup of WordAds from WordPress menu to monetize your website and blog content.
  2. Do take note that menu Earn cannot be view from mobile application of WordPress.
  3. In WordPress web version, Go to Tools > Earn.
  4. There are a few earning options. One of the easy ones is WordAds.
  5. You can enable WordAds at “View Ads Dashboard”.
  6. Fill in the mandatory settings and the ads are automatically shown in your web version.
  7. For other Ads options like Google AdSense, you do need to upgrade to WordPress Business and eCommerce Plans.

How to setup Google Analytics in WordPress using WordPress Premium Plan

~ Danny Kwok ~ 2 Comments
WordPress: Tools > Marketing
  1. It is very easy to setup Google Analytics in WordPress with Premium Plan once you realise the steps and below steps show you the fastest way to set it up.
  2. Therefore, you are recommended to upgrade your WordPress to Premium Plan, which cost about USD$11/month.
  3. Create and setup your Google Analytics account. It is free with basics features.
  4. Now, you do not need the tracking ID and code if you are familiar with Google Analytics with a next generation of Google Analytics called Google Analytics 4.
  5. In place of the missing tracking ID, you can see a new concept called Data Stream and measurement ID (G-XXXXXXX) once you setup the Google Analytics property.
  6. Create both a Google Analytics 4 property and a Universal Analytics property.
  7. Choose Google Analytics 4 property, go to Data Stream and view measurement ID.
  8. Copy the measurement ID to be used for WordPress later.
  9. In WordPress web version,
    • Go to Tools > Marketing > Traffic > Google Analytics.
  10. You will find a text box called measurement ID.
  11. Paste your measurement ID there.
  12. Viola! Integration of Google Analytics to WordPress is now completed.
  13. Wait for a day for the data to be send to your Google Analytics account.
WordPress: Marketing > Traffic
WordPress: Traffic > Google Analytics Measurement ID

How to setup up your new WordPress site

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment
  1. Create your site and select a WordPress domain name e.g. dannykwokcy1@wordpress.com
  2. Select a theme.
  3. Upgrade to a WordPress paid plan like Personal or Premium Plan if you want to link your personal domain name to your WordPress site.
  4. Update your site title and tagline.
  5. Update About yourself.
  6. Update your Home page.
  7. Create an email that use your custom domain and automatically forward to your email account e.g. contact at dannykwokcy dot com.
  8. Link your social media to your contact page.
  9. Decide on your contents focus and start writing!
  10. If you are still overwhelmed, you can check out the traditional book with a beginner guide to WordPress.

Creating a personal brand with WordPress and your personal domain name

~ Danny Kwok ~ 2 Comments
  1. Select a top level (TLD) domain in the domain name registar (.com, .sg, .org). Different TLD comes with different cost and conditions.
  2. Start domain name search. e.g.
  3. Buy a domain name with either WordPress or Domain Name Registrar e.g. GoDaddy
  4. WordPress must be upgraded to Personal or Premium Plan to use personal domain name.
  5. You can skip step 3 as WordPress provide a free custom domain for a year with the paid plan.
    • I prefer buying direct from Domain Name Registrar as there are discounted rates.
  6. Create your WordPress site and link WordPress to your domain name,
    • Select Manage > Domains > Use My Own Domain
  7. Go to your domain provider site and point your name servers to:
    • ns1.wordpress.com
    • ns2.wordpress.com
    • ns3.wordpress.com
  8. For GoDaddy Site, go to My Domains > Domain Settings > Manage DNS > Change custom namservers.
  9. Wait for 1hr to 24 hours for your domain name to be propagated across the world.
  10. Test your domain > dannykwokcy.com. It will link to your WordPress if the nameservers are updated correctly.
Total Cost
Cost TypeMonthly (USD)
Domain Registration (5 years)$0.9
WordPress Premium Plan$11
Total$11.90
Monthly Cost of Personal Site with WordPress