DesignSmarts: The Real Scoop on Site Design and Effective
Affiliate Links
What exactly is this affiliate program stuff?
Companies/organizations need surfers to visit their sites. One
way they can drive traffic to their site is to create an
affiliate program.
As an affiliate, you promote advertisers' Web sites on your
site, and when you bring customers to them, you get paid. There
is many ways an affiliate program can be run. In general, some
affiliate programs pay each time a visitor clicks a link from
your Web site to theirs, some affiliate programs pay only when a
sale is made. Amazon is one example of an Affiliate program.
Sell a book for them from your site and you make a commission.
Sounds great right? Yes, it is a pretty sweet concept. However,
you must very strategic in how you use them. I have wondered
across a great number of sites that have:
A) Great design - Clean cut, easy to look at. B) Interesting
main focus - Something that would intrigue me & make me want to
read on. C) Something useful to offer - A product or service
that can really benefit me. D) Affiliate links littered all over
the place - It's kind of like your waiter bringing you your
favorite dish with ten pounds of wet garbage slopped on top.
End Result: I, like many other visitors, leave your site. You
the site owner, are sabotaging your site and sending traffic
away!
Josh's 2 Step, No Fail, Sure-fire way of making affiliate links
work for you:
1. If you want an affiliate link to be effective you must place
ones with relevant information in your site. For example if you
have a miracle juice link on your Internet business opportunity
site, it just won't make sense. Besides, the link will get very
little traffic because people find your site looking for that's
right, Internet business opportunities. Not only will irrelevant
links sit there like "duds", they also take away from the great
information your have on your site as the main focus.
2. Don't over do it! Limit your affiliate links in respect to
your main content (ie. If your affiliate links take up more room
then your main content, you have way too many).
Why? At Worldprofit, when we design the Ultimate Home Business
Package we only recommend three affiliate links in the home page
design. The reason for this is because:
a) We don't want the surfers to become confused b) We don't want
the site to become cluttered c) We want the surfer's to trust
your site d) We don't want the site to be too long When a page
is too long (and looking crowded) the surfer usually won't read
it all and many miss out on the important info intended for them
to read.
So what do you do if you have fantastic affiliate links that are
relevant to your site, but you just have way too many? I have a
couple easy solutions:
1. Create additional pages just for your affiliate links. 2. If
you have a Worldprofit Malls plugin (included in the Ultimate
Home Biz Pkg, http://www.worldprofit.com/uhbp/) you could place
affiliate links in there by category! This is a great solution
because you can fill your malls up with some great info & divide
it all up by specific category! You could set up unlimited links!
End Result: You have all of the affiliate links you want, your
site is neat & organized, you have raised the value of your
Malls plugin because it is getting much more traffic and you get
more streams of income!
If you would like some affiliate programs to join, you can visit
a site called linkshare.com that has affiliate links organized
in specific categories. Also check out,
http://www.trafficcenter.com/main/ap.htm