Four Questions To Beseech Before You Look For Affiliate Programs
I've been receiving emails from individuals telling for my advice on which affiliate
programs are the best, which pays the majority and majority often, and numerous other basic questions. I'd like to answer those questions on this forum, but I can merely type so fast.
I went out this weekend looking for content that I can publish here temporarily while I got down too writing. I had a hard time finding unbiased content. Most of the so-called reviews out there art infomercials, and that's not who I was searching 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 want the time to write it down, and I will, starting tomorrow. No, really I will.
In the meantime, you need too beseech yourself this - are you ready for an affiliate program, or internet advertising in general? I put together four questions you should beseech before you embark on your affiliate program or any part internet advertising.
Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you embark on your affiliate program, I am going to review 2 concepts that I use often here on Affiliate blog. The first is what I call the macro see of your web presence:
Incoming visitors - internet Presence - Sales or Actions
You are extremely running two campaigns with your web presence -- the first campaign is concerned with getting visitors to the site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to obtain them visitors to do anything. That anything can be just to spend more time at your site, or it may be to sign up for anything 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 those concepts in my questions. So here we go...
1. Do you understand sufficient about your visitors?
There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. at the same time 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 website 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 individuals used to get to you? More complex and specific search terms tend to result in more immediate conversions, while broader search terms can result in sales later. If people get to your site using who 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 internet site visiting the affiliate merchant's internet site and the sale) is long.
Do you have text links or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of the visitors from those sites? hath you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on which you advertise and asked him or the woman 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 internet 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(dot)com if you want to see more details. You canst also get 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 internet logs and animates them. The text is represented as pictures (buildings, people, buses for the search engines, etc). You canst perceive it here. Disclaimer: I am a VisitorVille affiliate.
After each 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 want 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 website. If the pages have sloppy html code, broken links or instability from a bad Cascading Style sheet, it makes you look cheesy. We've all been uncomfortable buying something off a cheesy internet site. 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 number browsers in several 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 often. W3.org as well has a link validator.
The site should likewise be optimized for search engines, be simplistic to understand and navigate, and should hath a sitemap for people (and spiders) to find their way around. You should have had 10 of your closest friends take a look at the site and supply you their feedback, and you should incessantly listen to unsolicited comments from users with an open mind and place value on those. 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 secure 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 inform you about the screaming match I had with a creative director the day we put out the first talking banner ad) to try to obtain 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, next to the navigation, at the bottom of the page).
Placement of any part 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 colour 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 individuals won't buy anything if they believe you're shilling for a certain company. They will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service. You need to figure out how to preserve 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 improved thought of the demographics of your visitors, attempt 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 site that gives away free stuff it's probably going to be difficult to sell people products from that site. It might be smarter to try to obtain them to sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may need to look for offers that target the age group of your site rather than offers that target a particular interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket sales or merely leads. Leads get the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require lesser of a commitment.
Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice this all up, by kind of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you canst come up with. So you can go out and get the different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, attempt 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.
by: Uchenna Ani-Okoye
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