Forum Moderators: skibum
Inspired by recent threads I've decided to start reasearching a good affiliate program. I have a couple of questions for the pro's.....
Many thanks guys and girls...
Nick
I'm no expert on this topic. But I have researched it over the last year or so. Haven't done any affiliate related stuff though (FWIW), and have no interest in or association with the resources below (other than as a visitor to their sites).
Three sources I think would be helpful to get you started:
www.cj.com They list many affiliate programs. You can see what type of affiliate deals are available. I don't know if they still have their "affiliate U" forum or not. From their home page, click on publisher and then look at the companies running affiliate programs, which cj refers to as advertisers.
www.affiliatehandbook.com has a good variety of interesting links. My impression is some of the stuff is dated, and the site has slowed quite a bit since the dot.com fallout, but worth a read.
www.clickz.com has an affiliate section with past articles. This too has "slowed" quite a bit with the dot.com bust, IMO.
Keep in mind a lot of what you read will suffer from two ills, among others. First, the stuff is often dated; i.e. "pre-dot.com fallout" era applicable stuff. Second, a lot is basically marketing copy disguised as information to lead you to a "report" or "program" offered for sale.
Again, FWIW, my take is the reality of the affiliate marketplace has gone thru a lot of changes in the last year or two, mostly for the worse for affiliates -- but that's just my read as a non participant (so far).
I suspect those in the other thread who stressed the importance of researching and selecting the company ones does affiliate marketing for was right on -- else I suspect one risk getting paid little or nothing if one picks the wrong merchant or deal.
Hope the above helps.
Take care,
Louis
I can suggest 2 possible approaches :
The first is the classical way, often suggested as a good starting point. Take a subject that you are interested in and build a web site around it. Interspersed throughout the site work in textual links to relevant affiliate products. Don't use the banners supplied by the networks such as CJ but write recommendations of particular products. If you believe in the products that you sell then you'll be more convincing. Keep adding content to the site and do all of the normal SEO things such as getting people to link to you. I'm sure that you know all of those SEO type things anyway.
The other approach is very different and earns me a living so details are going to be a little sketchy. Find a product or service that a huge proportion of the population has or feels compelled to buy. Examples would be mobile phones, credit cards, banking, insurance, hotel bookings, airline bookings etc. Build a simple one, two or three page site that has a link to each of between 3 and 10 providers (all affiliate links of course), with a short write-up of each company and the attractions of its product or service. Ensure that the site that you build is totally search engine friendly, don't worry how it looks to the user, they will be searching for a product not a pretty site where they can't find what they are looking for. The idea of having similar products from more than one supplier is that hopefully the user will compare three or four of your offerings and will buy from one without leaving your site. If you were promoting only one supplier's product the user would be very likely to click away looking for another quote, and even if they couldn't find anything better they will have forgotten where they saw the one that they want to go back to. Believe me on this point, I've been there.
Now there is a big problem with promoting this type of site and that is until you've built up some degree of link popularity, maybe from other sites that you've built on a similar topic, it's going to be very difficult to gain good search engine rankings. I'm afraid that you're going to have to get your credit card out and buy some PPC clicks, which immediately brings us to another stumbling block in that the main PPC engine, Overture, hates affiliate sites and it will be a continual battle to get any listings accepted. If you find a foolproof way then do please sticky me with the answer !!. Some of the subjects that I mentioned such as banking, credit cards etc have very high click costs so you absolutely must keep a very close eye on the figures. Affiliate sites are the easiest of sites to measure ROI (return on investment). It is normal to receive a statement of sales from the merchants that you are promoting, and it is very easy to see how much you've spent with PPC engines in that time. In other words there is absolutely no excuse for not being sure that you're making money, and it's the easiest thing in the world to test slight changes that you make on the web site or in the wording of your ads.
Finally, whichever method you decide to adopt, don't blindly sign up for programs from the big affilaite networks such as Commission Junction. For the type of products that we're talking about in the second part of the above discussion, many of the providers are household names and a number of them will run their own affiliate schemes, often with better rewards to the affiliate. I remember reading of an affiliate scheme on a network, went to check on the web site and the products being offered, and found that they ran heir own in-house affilate scheme offering exactly double the 7.5% being offered by the network.
Incidentally, the site in my profile has nothing to do with my affiliate activities, it's just my hobby !!.
Sounds too simple, Ross. Isn't that what's sometimes referred to as brochure sites?
I honestly don't know. It sounds derogatory but I've never heard the term before.
One minute I'm running a legitimate business....next I'm looking over my shoulder for the SEO style police !!. I'm just recovering from a severe beating for defending ZEUS, now I'm cornered again. Is it simply your general dislike of affilate marketing or have I broken some unwritten rule ?
Fantastic responses, my thanks!
Couple of things to add:
I notice one member here does posters. I did a google search for interests sake and found it to be very competitive. If I were to go for something like that (i wont though) would it be best to just aim at 'posters' and hope that people will find me on page 3 of the SERP's or to target 'old movie posters' and get on page one for that term?
What's the considered opinion?
Nick
Why? I don't know, but I suspect the average surfer is a chronic ditherer and will explore a larger site forever while postponing the decision to buy. A smaller site doesn't give them this escape route, it forces a decision to buy or leave - and if you've just hit all the right sales buttons on your 3 page site, they often make the right decision :)
> aim at 'posters' and hope that people will find me on page 3
Nick, opinions vary on this but my own strategy is to focus on just a few key terms, however competitive. If I aim for 'widgets' I may well end up on page three for that single word, but I'll be pulling in traffic on plenty of terms that include widgets, often in highly obscure phrases that I would have never thought of targetting.
The other plus point of these mini sites is that I don't need to be quite such an all-rounder in that there's no need for amazing graphics, I don't need to produce 500 web pages on the subject of credit cards and I don't need to be the best copy writer in the world. Obviously some skill in any if the above will help, but much more relevant than all of those are the skills in SEO, picked up right here in Webmaster World !!
That's the point most often overlooked when affiliates-to-be get $$-fever. If it isn't competitive, there's no money in it. Which is why the pro-level affiliates I know devote more time to SEO than anything else (and why they hang around at wmw rather than marketing sites).
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As for the type of sites, I tend to build massive "dredge" sites rather than the small ones. The advantage I've found with that approach is stability. The disadvantage, as mentioned above, is the low conversion rate when weighed on a per-page or per-unique basis.
Be wary of sites that are built around the sole purpose of teaching you how to be an affiliate. They are usually out of date and/or simply trying to get you to sign up as their second tier, or simply sell you something. (You don't need to buy anything to figure out affiliate marketing.) I'm not one to read articles by some guy earning a salary for being a writer, I'd rather learn from the guys in the trenches.
Read, read, and read forum posts, ask questions whenever you can formulate them.
Strong affiliates aren't going to give you everything they know up front, with good reason. It takes time, experience, and a lot of work.
Here is a post from over a year ago with some tips on getting started:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I tend more to try merchants offering higher commissions on higher ticket items. Since I have some confidence that I can gain good SE rankings for a given page, I'll pick a merchant and put up a few pages and wait to see how well their site converts. I stay away from PPL and CPM for the most part.
If it converts well, and I get paid regularly, I'll beef up my efforts on behalf of that merchant. I've just identified one that I'm going to push because I've seen good results over the last six months. I'll spend a few days adding a dozen or more additional pages targeting that merchant's products. Then I'll wait to see how those pages do while I move on to something else. Down the road, I'll again evaluate what's happening with that merchant. If its still positive, I'll add more pages and so on and so on.
Its a little like farming. You're like a share cropper. The merchant lets you use their field and you plant and wait. If it succeeds, the merchant pays you percentage of what's sold from your crop yeild. The field is expandable.
Like I say, its all experimental. Keep experimenting, and you're bound to find some rewards. Just bear in mind, not all experiments pan out. But some will pay off handsomely.
