Four questions before you look for affiliate programs
I've been receiving emails from people asking for my advice on
which affiliate programs are the best, who pays the most and
most often, and many other basic questions. I'd like to answer
those questions on this forum, but I can only type so fast.
I went out this weekend looking for content that I could publish
here temporarily while I got down to writing. 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 bear with me. I've
been looking and learning and reading and talking, and I've got
a lot to say. I just need the time to write it down, and I will,
starting tomorrow. No, really I will.
In the meantime, you need to ask yourself this -- are you ready
for an affiliate program, or Internet Advertising in general? I
put together four questions you should ask before you embark on
your affiliate program or any Internet advertising.
Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you
enbark on your affiliate program, I am going to review two
concepts that I use often here on Affiliateblog. The first is
what I call the macro view of your Internet presence:
Incoming visitors -> Internet Presence < - Sales or Actions
You are really running two campaigns with your Internet presence
-- the first campaign is concerned with getting visitors to the
site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to get
those visitors to do something. That something may be just to
spend more time at your site, or it may be to sign up for
something or buy something.
The other represents the process of Internet advertising:
Impression -> Click -> Action
Most affiliate programs pay publishers in the last part of the
process, the Action. I'll be using both of these 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 hubs are experimenting with
context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners 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 the stats for your web
site over the past month or so. Where do your visitors come
from? Have you paid for Google, Yahoo or other search engine
traffic? What are the keywords that people used to get to you?
More complex and specific search terms tend to result in more
immediate conversions, while broader search terms may result in
sales later. If people get to your site using what you believe
to be broad search terms, you need to be sure that the cookie
life (the amount of time that passes between someone from your
site visiting the affiliate merchant's site and the sale) is
long.
Do you have textlinks or other advertising on other sites? Do
you know the demographics of the visitors from those sites? Have
you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on
which you advertise and asked him or her 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 the visitors to your site should begin
to emerge.
Which search engine brings you the most traffic? If it's Google,
the user is slightly more apt to be male, and in the middle (of
MSN, Yahoo and Google) as far as propensity toward buying
something (42% more likely than the average user). There's a
terrific article on marketingvox.com if you want to see more
details. You can also find some interesting demographic info on
the major search engines from AQABA.
You should pay particular attention to the domains of your
visitors. If you have a lot of AOL traffic for example, you
should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35
or older (77%) and married (62%).
If you have trouble with textual representation vs. graphical
representation (as I do), there is a terrific product called
VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. The
text is represented as pictures (buildings, people, buses for
the search engines, etc). You can see it here. Disclaimer: I am
a VisitorVille affiliate.
After all this you should be able to sit down and come up with
the profile of a typical visitor. This profile should hopefully
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
purchase. Affiliate programs raise the bar from PPC -- your
payment comes at the end of the Internet marketing process (the
Action) rather than 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're asking someone to buy something from your site. If the
pages have sloppy html code, broken links or instability from a
bad Cascading Stylesheet, it makes you look cheesy. We've all
been uncomfortable buying something off a cheesy website. You
don't want to be that website.
Let's start with the html code. Are you sure there are no errors
in it? Have you used an html checker like the one at W3C? I find
mistakes in my code all the time. Unless you check your code on
several browsers in several resolutions you might not catch an
error. The validator will. If you use Cascading Stylesheets you
should also visit the CSS Checker.
Speaking of validators, you should check your links often.
W3.org also has a link validator.
The site should also be optimized for search engines, be easy to
understand and navigate, and should have a sitemap for people
(and spiders) to find their way around. You should have had ten
of your closest friends take a look at the site and give you
their feedback, and you should always listen to unsolicited
comments from users with an open mind and place value on them.
If someone takes the time from their busy day to send you an
email about your site, they feel strongly about it and you
should take a close look at what they're talking about.
Understand that if your Incoming Visitors campaign is not
working right, you're wasting your time with your Sales or
Action program.
3. Do you know what kind of ads you're going to use, and
where the ads are going to go?
People have been ignoring banners for ten years. That's why they
shake and make sounds (someday I'll tell you about the screaming
match I had with a creative director the day we put out the
first talking banner ad) to try to get your attention. Where you
put it on the page is going to make a huge difference. Briefly
-- banners need to go somewhere the eye naturally rests (next to
the masthead, near the navigation, at the bottom of the page).
Placement of any ads is a huge part of getting them noticed or
clicked.
A lot of people (including me) believe that text ads should be
placed at natural breaks and be close to the same in text size
and color as the text. You need to surf around and look at where
people place 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 figure out how prominently you want
to place the advertising. Most people won't buy something if
they believe you're shilling for a particular company. They will
buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or
service. You need to figure out how to keep the distinction.
4. What's your hunch on 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 on which action
you think they would be more apt to take -- pay-per-lead,
pay-per-sale or even pay-per-click (hard to come by) on your
site.
If you have a general interest website that gives away free
stuff it's probably going to be difficult to sell people
products from that website. It might be smarter to try to get
them to sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the
affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers that
target the age group of your site rather than offers that target
a specific interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket
sales or only leads. Leads get the user to the end of the
advertising process chain, but require less of a commitment.
Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice
this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any
other way you can come up with. Then you can go out and find the
different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it
comes time to place the ads, try to put different ads in similar
spaces on the same pages, and see how they do.
Get your questions answered and you're ready to take the plunge
into affiliate marketing.