Affiliate marketing news and opinion from Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit.
There’s a fascinating article at Business 2.0 under the banner, What’s Next.
The article, The Merchant of Margaritaville, by Dan Shoeffler, introduces readers to the wild idea of bidding on terms in pay per click search engines to drive traffic through affiliate links.
The author teases with, “While the pay-per-click strategy requires you to front some ad money, the returns can be tasty.”
Pretty fresh idea, if only I hadn’t written about it back in the 90’s, natch.
I hear a lot about ‘mini’ sites and ‘content’ sites. One camp says, you need content – the other says whip out 1-4 pages and move on. I’m new at affiliate marketing as a business, so I’m totally lost. On my new site, I started just wanting to share information with people in my niche, make a little money and do something else. Now I feel like I’m chained to a mountain.
These are certainly two different approaches to affiliate marketing. In my opinion, it depends on your long-term plans.
If you intend to stick around and regularly add new, unique content to your site, I think that’s your best bet for success with affiliate marketing.
I don’t personally subscribe to the approach of trying to make a quick hit and moving on. These mini sites, in my opinion, are just another way to game the system. They are often composed of repurposed content of little value.
They might get picked up by the search engines if the creator stuffs their keywords just right, but this is not a long term strategy.
Create a site or sites about your passions and interests, and update freqeuntly. Also, add an e-mail newsletter opt-in to gather e-mails of people interested in the subject and communicate with them regularly (including related links to affiliate offers).
Think of banner ads as the spice in your affiliate diet. Sprinkle them around, but for a heartier helping of sales, you’ll need something more solid! Learn to give your visitors longer, more descriptive pre-sales text. Revamp your affiliate advertising using these simple steps:
Pull the Reader in
To convince your audience that your text is worth reading, make your first sentence or two very interesting. Make a bold statement, say something seemingly ridiculous, or appeal to your prospect’s emotional side. Then, tie this grabber in with the rest of your copy.
Introduce the Product
What is the product you’re advertising? What does it do? Directly after your grabber, give a compact explanation of your product. Keep this explanation short, while still being very clear. This should still be a very short section of your text.
Explain the Product’s Significance
What will it do for me?
By writing your own copy, you can directly target your unique audience. Make the most of this opportunity! Clearly explain how your readers will benefit from this product.
No one knows your audience like you do. Suggest a variety of product uses just for them, and give examples. This is the time for details – make this section long and rich.
Tell the Reader to Make a Purchase
You’ve come so far – you’ve laid out exactly what the product is and how it will help your unique audience. Now, seal the deal – tell your readers to purchase the product! Include your affiliate link in this section.
This step may sound strange, but it’s necessary. Often, people hear about a product and are genuinely interested, but fail to actually make a purchase. A clear call to a simple action cuts down on buyer ambivalence. Don’t be pushy – just change your verb tenses to the imperative. Instead of:
“If you think that you fit this profile, you might want to think about buying this product.”
Say: “Click here to order an account today.”
Drive Sales – Use Long Copy
If you don’t feel ready to write long copy yourself, ask your affiliate program manager for help! Many companies release well-written articles by respected authors that you can reprint free of charge.
The novelty of the Web is wearing off. People online now are busy. Surfers won’t make a purchase unless you make a great case for what they’ll get out of it. And you’re not going to do that with just a banner ad.
Beka Ruse fights spam as the Business Development Manager at AWeber Communications. Ad tracking, live stats, and a strict anti-spam policy. Automated E-Mail Follow Up From AWeber.
The following is what Gerry Graham of 4 Adjustable Beds, 4 Lift Chairs, and 4 Wheelchair Lifts & Ramps had to say in response the the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing?
We are a small Internet sales and marketing company. Current revenues are $2.4 million. We sell mobility products to the handicapped over six specialized websites.
Approximately 80% of our business comes through our 800 call center. The other 20% is from online orders.
We are in the process of initiating our own affiliate program because it appears to us to be the only viable way of creating “traffic” to our sites with any degree of control.
Standard search enging rankings are lucrative when you have them. However, as has been recently the case, the “Google dance” or the Yahoo shuffle can play havoc with traffic and therefore earnings.
Our strategy is to develop an affiliate program with high quality business related partners who will send us traffic. In turn, we will compensate them amply.
We hope the result will be excellent partnerships and happy customers with less dependence on the fickleness of standard SE rankings.
In the past, articles have frequently asked CEOs and CMOs what the future holds for affiliate marketing. These have pretty much been the sole voices of the future.
I’d like to hear some different voices – how about the opinions of the people in the trenches of affiliate marketing? What do you think is going to happen in the future for affiliate marketing?
There are no right or wrong answers – just your unique opinions. The author of any response that is published at affiliatetip.com or affiliatesummit.com will receive their choice of one of the following:
Submit your opinions about the future of affiliate marketing at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=281531467120
I was pouring through my logs this morning, and I was curious about the locations of visitors to my affiliate marketing related sites.
Taking a look at the visitors to affiliatetip.com, affiliatemanager.net, and affstat.com, an overwhelming portion of the traffic came from the U.S., as one might expect.
Next up were Canada and the UK respectively. Rounding out the top five were Australia and Japan. Below is a list of the top twenty affiliate marketing countries, not officially, but as reported in my logs.
Q: Do you know where I can find information on the size of the industry and general information, or a positive article on the state of affiliate marketing?
A: There are a number of resources where you can find information and statistics on affiliate marketing. MarketingSherpa and Internet Retailer routinely publish coverage of the industry.
Also, you can read case studies, editorials and articles on affiliate marketing at ReveNews.
Additionally, I collect and publish statistics on affiliate marketing once a year. The report is called AffStat.
Gratis Internet, the creator of the wildly successful FreeiPods.com campaign, has been named the eighteenth fastest growing company in the U.S. in Inc. Magazine’s prestigious 2005 Inc. 500 ranking. Last year, Gratis was ranked 95th in the Inc. 500.
Gratis operates a network of Web sites through its proprietary free payment method called FreePay, including freeiPods.com. The FreePay network of 12 Web sites hosts advertising offers from a variety of companies including Citibank, Blockbuster, Columbia House and BMG.
When a visitor to a Gratis site becomes a lead through one of the affiliate links, Gratis is paid by that advertiser for delivering a customer lead. Using those revenues, Gratis pays for the items it gives away, which include iPods (of which Gratis has given away more than 20,000 in the last 16 months), flat screen televisions and monitors, designer handbags, Xbox 360s, digital cameras and more.
The 2004 revenues for Gratis were $20.5 million, representing three-year growth of 2,350 percent.
Rob Jewell, CEO of Gratis Internet, will be on a panel at Affiliate Summit 2006 about the future of affiliate marketing.
According to a post at ThreadWatch, TradeDoubler is going to make an IPO in November 2005.
TradeDoubler is a European affiliate network featuring clients such as American Express, Bose, Domino’s Pizza, iTunes, and Yves-Rocher.
According to ThreadWatch, TradeDoubler will release 45% of shares in their IPO scheduled for November 8th.
Q: Can having a lot of affiliate links on a site hurt it’s rankings? The site is doing well now, but I’m worried if I add affiliate links, the PR will drop and I’ll also lose ranking in search engines.
A: Let me preface this by saying that I am not a search engine expert by any means. That said, it is my understanding that having a large imbalance of outbound links to inbound links can harm your Google PageRank.
Back in June, word got around that there was a criteria guide for the Google checkers called the Spam Recognition Guide for Raters.
This guide identified sites with lots of affiliate links as Thin Affiliates, as described in this passage:
Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. A site certainly has the right to try to earn income; we’re attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission-earning middleman.
The guide identifies a page that features links with any of the following domains as a possible Thin Affiliate: qksrv.net, bfast.com, myaffiliateprogram.com, webmasterplan.de, and zanox-affiliate.de
As far as I can tell, the search engines will penalize you if they determine you are essentially running a banner farm with the sole function of redirecting consumers through your affiliate links.
But if you provide some added value to the user’s experience, it’s doubtful the search engines will have a problem with you.
Take a look at clubmom.com and fatwallet.com. Both sites have an abundance of affiliate links, as well as Google PageRanks of 7 (according to the Google Tool Bar).
Another thing these sites have in common is that they both have thriving communities and unique value propositions.
Offer up something unique and useful and you should be fine.