I have been receiving emails from people asking me for advice on which affiliate programs are the best, who pays the most and most often, and many other basic questions. I would like to answer those questions on this forum, but I can only write so fast.
I was out this weekend looking for content that I could post here temporarily while I got down to business. I had a hard time finding unbiased content. Most of the so-called reviews out there are infomercials, and that’s not what I was looking for with this blog. So you’re going to have to put up with me. I’ve been watching and learning and reading and talking, and I have a lot to say. I just need time to write it, and I will, starting tomorrow. No, I really will.
In the meantime, you have to ask yourself this: are you ready for an affiliate program or Internet advertising in general? I’ve put together four questions to ask before starting your affiliate program or any Internet advertising.
Before I get to the four questions to ask before embarking on your affiliate program, I’m going to review two concepts that I use often here at Affiliateblog. The first is what I call the macro view of your Internet presence:
Inbound Visitors -> Internet Presence Click -> Action
Most affiliate programs pay publishers in the last part of the process, the Action. I will use both concepts in my questions. So here we go…
1. Do you know enough about your visitors?
There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. While some affiliate marketing centers are experimenting with contextual affiliate banner posting and banner rotation on affiliate sites, YOU will be the one to decide what kind of products and services you want to offer your visitors. This seems like a minor detail, but it is a major factor in your success.
If you haven’t already, take a look at your website stats for the last month or so. Where do your visitors come from? Have you paid for traffic from Google, Yahoo or another search engine? What are the keywords that people used to reach you? More complex and specific search terms tend to lead to more immediate conversions, while broader search terms can lead to sales later on. If people come to your site using what you think are broad search terms, you need to make sure that the cookie lifetime (the amount of time between someone from your site visiting the affiliate merchant’s site and the sale ) is long.
Do you have text links or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of those sites’ visitors? Have you talked to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites you advertise on and asked about their visitors? Do you know the websites? Have you visited the sites that advertise on the same sites as you? When you investigate all of these things, a profile of your site visitors should start to emerge.
Which search engine brings you the most traffic? If it’s Google, the user is slightly more likely to be male, and is in the middle (of MSN, Yahoo and Google) in terms of propensity to buy something (42% more likely than the average user). There is an excellent article on marketingvox.com if you want to see more details. You can also find interesting demographic information on the top AQABA search engines.
You should pay special attention to the domains of your visitors. If you have a lot of traffic from AOL, for example, you should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35+ (77%) and married (62%).
If you have problems with the textual representation vs. graphical rendering (as I do), there’s a great product called VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. Text is rendered as images (buildings, people, buses for search engines, etc.).
After all this, you should be able to sit down and create the profile of a typical visitor. Hopefully this profile will include estimates of age, country of origin, education, and income.
Try to think like your visitors. Try to anticipate their interests and the products and services they might want to buy. Affiliate programs raise the bar on PPC: your payment is made at the end of the internet marketing process (the Action) instead of at the beginning (Impression or Click) like Google AdSense or Doubleclick. You need to apply more brainpower to the process, and you’ll make more money if you do it right.
2. Is your site perfect?
You are asking someone to buy something from your site. If pages have sloppy html code, broken links, or instability due to a bad cascading style sheet, it makes you look cheesy. We’ve all felt uncomfortable buying something from a cheesy website. You don’t want to be that website.
Let’s start with the html code. Are you sure there are no bugs in it? Have you used an html checker like the one from W3C? I find bugs in my code all the time. Unless you check your code in multiple browsers at multiple resolutions, you may not catch an error. The validator will. If you use Cascading Style Sheets, you should also visit the CSS Checker.
Speaking of validators, you should check your links frequently. W3.org also has a link validator.
The site should also be optimized for search engines, easy to understand and navigate, and should have a sitemap so people (and spiders) can find their way around. You should have had ten of your closest friends check out the site and give you feedback, and you should always listen to unsolicited user feedback with an open mind and value it. If someone takes time out of their busy day to send you an email about your site, they’re convinced and you should take a close look at what they’re talking about.
Understand that if your inbound visitor campaign isn’t working properly, you’re wasting time with your Sales or Action program.
3. Do you know what type of ads you are going to use and where the ads are going to go?
People have been ignoring the banners for ten years. That’s why they move and make sounds (someday I’ll tell them about the screaming match I had with a creative director the day we put up the first talking banner) to try to get their attention. Where you place it on the page will make a big difference. Briefly: Banners should go somewhere the eye naturally rests (next to the header, near the navigation, at the bottom of the page).
The placement of any ad is an important part of getting noticed or clicked.
Many people (including me) believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and be roughly the same size and color as the text. You need to navigate and see where people are placing their ads, and you need to figure out where you think they would work on your site.
If you plan to create pages for some of the products you endorse (a great idea), you need to determine how prominently you want to place the advertising. Most people won’t buy something if they think you’re paying for a particular company. They will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service. You need to figure out how to maintain the distinction.
4. What’s your hunch about the right kind of offers for your site?
I ask this question a lot. Now that you have a better idea of the demographics of your visitors, try to decide which action you think they would be most likely to take: pay per lead, pay per sale, or even pay per customer. click (hard to find) on your site.
If you have a general interest website that gives away free stuff, it will probably be difficult to sell products to people from that website. It may be smarter to try to get them to sign up for a free product newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers targeted to your site’s age group rather than offers targeted at a specific interest. You may be looking for smaller ticket sales or just leads. Leads take the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require less engagement.
Try to think of four, five, six, or fifty ways to break this all down, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you can think of. You can then go out and find the different offers that might attract your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, try placing different ads in similar spaces on the same pages and see how they do.
Get your questions answered and you’ll be ready to jump into affiliate marketing.