Shai gives some good tips on hope to Make The Most Out of Affiliate Programs:
‘1) Provide good reasons for readers and visitors to keep coming back to your site where you have your affiliate links. Or, if you primarily promote via email, make sure that you give readers and subscribers a lot of reasons to keep opening and reading your emails. It’s just so much easier to delete things nowadays! Just deliver great content, provide user interaction, come up with clever contests… the possibilities are endless.
2) Maximise your visibility. Working on your site’s promotions and SEO is important. If you can’t do it yourself, or if you have limited knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO), then make sure that you get advice from people who know more than you do on this matter. Always remember that the more people who find your site, the more chances you have in showing your affiliate products….’
One tip I’d add to her great list is to keep your affiliate programs as relevant to your blog’s content as possible.
The success of Adsense contextual text links is that they ads usually match the content of the site so well. At times you’ll be reading about a particular product and then see an ad for it – the naturally thing to do is click.
Often bloggers don’t take this same principle and put it into practice with their affiliate programs. They just leave a generic button on their side bar and don’t make any effort into increasing its relevancy to their site.
The best performance I’ve ever had from an affiliate program is when I’ve managed to be blogging about something and then find an affiliate program that matches it well and have placed links to it inside or at the end of the content (with appropriate disclosure statements). Perhaps the easiest program to use with this strategy is Amazon which has so many products that can be linked via picture or text deep within your site and not just on your sidebar.
For instance on my digicam site I have links to the actual products that I write about on many of my posts on cameras. This does take some effort to set up but is well worth it.
These thoughts are nice, but especially for contextual things on personal sites it becomes difficult. I think the best thing for a site like mine would be to maybe have advertisements pertaining to what I like, ie Amazon links to products I like, and then blog about why I like them to get others interested.
Google does a horrible job of handling Ads on pages with more than one topic, (again ie, my blog) so the Clickthrough is really low. (less than a percent)
Affiliate marketing isn’t contextual David. It’s up to the merchant to provide unique creatives that can help your specific blog convert. And it’s up to the affiliate to do their very best to promote those creatives.
Otherwise, it’s not going to work. Bloggers have a lot to learn about this game, but nobody is blaming them. They got into this to write, not make money. Well, 98% of them anyway.
I totally agree with you Jim, and I know I personally have lots to learn before I could ever get close to where I want to be with my blogging (money wise, I’d like to be able to write about technology, my life, the city I live in and whatnot and have that writing pay for the hosting and the domain atleast).
I think that there are lots of ways to make money from Affilite programs, but I don’t have the knowledge, probably the readership as of yet, nor the time to do the research and marketing that it takes to really get things rolling.
I have seen some sites have some really great sponsorships that go perfectly with their blog, and I have seen other sites have odd sponsorships that just don’t seem to fit. How do you find a good company, willing to pay good money for niche blogs?
And do you think Adsense and Amazon are NOT the right kind of Advertising to be done on personal blogs that range in topics?
If I could find a company like ATI (video card maker) or NCIX (computer store that I always buy from) to sponsor my blog, and give me press releases on new products and whatnot, I’d write about them, I’d make sure their ads were prevalent on my site, but again, readership numbers are what are important, and most personal blogs don’t have the readership required to get more topic-specific affiliate programs.
What I have, which is a kind of ‘halfway house’ when I don’t want totally generic links but can’t or don’t want to deeplink to a specific program, is to take advantage of my blog software (WordPress) “custom field”. Basically on any post I can either drop in some affiliate ‘code’ which is then displayed at the end of the post, or I can set a keyword called ‘amazon’ and type in a search term, which then is displayed as a text link to the relevant category on Amazon. It works, so long as I remember to add the keywords! Otherwise, it just displays a generic link. Maybe that’s a semi-automated way of doing it if you use the same affiliate program, and then just add specific links (maybe in or at the end of your article) if you want to recommend or promote an individual product.
Thanks for the recognition and recommendation, Darren.
Your additional tip is actually Tip #3 – Choose your affiliates carefully! It’s always best to have targeted affiliates. For example, if you run a site/newsletter/weblog on “Spas” — then try to promote spas and spa-related affiliates only. :-)
This seems true, David, though most of my search engine traffic comes to specific pages which contain only one article. This is where it works better (IMO)