Affiliate Program Primer
Many webmasters think of affiliate programs only as last ditch attempts to make money. They serve affiliate program banners as defaults after exhausting the ad networks, make little money on them, and decry affiliate programs as poor earners. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The most successful affiliates usually don't even use banners, instead they integrate affiliate links within their content, and sometimes the affiliate link is the content. These people can make more off affiliate programs than off advertising, much more. However, it takes a lot of planning to be successful at affiliate programs, and I'm going to show you how to do it.
All of this advice is also true for advertising, as affiliate programs are really just advertising with a different pay scheme.
To find out what your visitors are interested in you can ask them if you run a forum or survey. You can also monitor your site logs and look at what pages they view on your site and how they get there.
So the first step to affiliate program success is to understand what your visitors are looking for, and pick a program based on that. Don't choose a program based on which programs you feel are most related to your content, choose a program that will help your visitors reach their goals of the moment.
Choosing an Affiliate Program
The most important thing with affiliate programs is to choose the right one. I don't mean choosing the one that offers the biggest commission, because a big commission won't mean anything if you never make a sale. You need to choose the right program for your users, and that means understanding your visitors. You must be able to answer the question: "Why do people come to my Website?" If you answer "to get information", think again. You need to know why they want that information: you need to know their motivations.
Why do people come to your site? Think long and hard on that question, it may seem simple but in reality it is very tricky. If you ran a video game cheats site you may say that people come to your site because they are interested in video games. That would be wrong. Sure people who visit your site are interested in video games, but that's not why they visit your site. They visit your site because they are looking for cheat codes.
Would you think that people that go to a classic literature site are interested in classic literature? The fact is, they aren't. Most of them probably hate classic literature. So why do they visit the site? They're students, they're working on homework.
An affiliate program selling video games would do okay on the video game site, and a program selling books might make a few bucks on the literature site. However, if you want to make good money off affiliate programs you need to use programs that will help your visitors reach their goals. In both of the examples listed above that means you need to help your visitors cheat. Obviously if you're looking up video game cheats you want to cheat at video games, selling a product that helped you cheat would something that would interest your visitors. And of course students often want any help they can get, especially when they have a paper due the next day, so an essay affiliate program would perform very well.
Affiliate Program Presentation
The second step is to present your affiliate program effectively. Many people will simply place a banner or button for an affiliate program on their site, and nothing more. Not surprisingly, this isn't the best way to go about things. Banners and other advertising units no longer perform very well, so it's important to present your affiliate links in a different way.
You can use plain text links anywhere on your site. If you put them near your content users will be more apt to read them. You can also make the affiliate program your content. If you offer reviews on books for instance you can prominently include a link to purchase the book you are reviewing. The more actual content associated with an affiliate link, the better it will perform.
Users have grown accustomed to advertisements, and have trained their eyes to skip over them. If you make your affiliate links look like advertisements, they won't get as much attention as they might if you formatted them like you do your standard content. So use descriptive links, and include reviews where possible. If you take the time to provide more information about your affiliate link, your visitor might take the time to click on it. |
发表于 2005-3-22 23:22:22
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