This is a short post with some research I’ve been doing into affiliate sites. Not much information to add other than I wish I started these sites and I wish I’d bought uswitch in 2006.
I can’t see auto generated shopping sites having much value since they rely too heavily on Google but the others are going from strength to strength. Confused.com has even been able to switch away from getting paid for sales and now gets paid for every quote instead!
Making money affiliate marketing is great fun, especially when some companies give really big commissions.
For some reason getting lots of small commissions just isn’t the same as getting one really big one. If you sign up with buy.at and promote Sky Digital this month they give you the standard £90 per sale as well as a bonus of £250 if you make one sale and £500 if you make 10 sales.
That means my first sale last week was worth £340 (707 USD).
Update: According to Andy it seems they messed up a redirect which seems like a good enough reason for them to lose their pages to me.
Shoemoney and his readers are speculating about why Widget Bucks got banned from Google so lets take a look at what went wrong.
First of all it has nothing to do with the fact they link back to their site from the widget. Almost every widget in the world links back to the parent site and nobody else is getting banned. So what if the site says people can’t remove links, people are entitled to ask for a link when their content is used on a third party website. You don’t see Google banning photographers who ask for links as a credit.
If we look at the pages still indexed it seems that some Flash files are still present so the whole site hasn’t been hit (yet).
Luckily Yahoo gives us the answer right away, all the links to Widget Bucks have the users referrer id in them so there are thousands and thousands of pages with exactly the same content being indexed.
Sometimes Google can figure this out but when the site has so many incoming links combined with a non-standard affiliate link structure it was just too hard.
All Widget Bucks needs to do is set a cookie when somebody clicks on a referrer link and then 301 redirect the user to the main widgetbucks.com homepage and they will be back in Google within a few weeks.
Yesterday Dan Thies left the following comment on a post from last week:
Thanks, Matt… and the TLA affiliate link in this post makes me suspect the real reason for this particular piece of link bait was not to enlighten the issue.
My initial reaction was surprise that somebody I’ve never met, or even had an email conversation with, would publicly question my motives for making a post. Later on my thoughts turned to the age old rule that for every person who states their opinion there are 100 more who thought the same but kept quiet.
The comment has had me thinking a lot about how bloggers make money and whether any monetization strategies are considered ethical anymore. Bloggers who include Adsense within posts are sometimes criticised but not always for ethical reasons. Using Adsense is fine by me but what happens when a search marketing blog running Adsense writes about the current state of the “mesothelioma lawyers” SERPS?
Is using Adsense any different to affiliate links? If my post about Text Link Ads had included Adsense and triggered a PPC ad for TLA would that be any more ethical than the affiliate link? Some of you might be thinking that Adsense offers full disclosure but bearing in mind 99% of web users don’t realise Adsense units are paid adverts is this relevant? Is their any difference apart between them apart from the method by which the publisher gets paid?
Conclusions
Personally I don’t mind if a blog has affiliate links, banner ads and Adsense as long as its well designed, easy to read and most importantly has something worth reading. However, what I think doesn’t matter as much as what everybody else in the blogosphere thinks.
Affiliate links in the content area of posts are hated by some, tolerated by others and not noticed by most. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the links myself even before spending today thinking about the issue. In future the posts on BlogStorm will be an affiliate link free zone.
What do you think? Do affiliate links undermine credibility? Do sites write posts just to add affiliate links? Do sites write posts to target high paying Adsense terms? Does any of this matter as long as you enjoy the blog?
Geotargetting specific adverts, affiliate offers or content pieces is one of the most efficient improvements you can make to your website.
Spend an hour installing and configuring your geotargeting script and your revenue can increase dramtically.
Geotargetting is simply the art of showing different content to your visitors depending on which country they are from. For example if I have an affiliate offer that is only available to customers from the UK I know that it will be useless to US visitors. Using my script I will direct US visitors towards a similar product on Amazon or eBay.
Advertising networks such as DoubleClick and Adsense allow advertisers to target specific countries resulting in larger CPM payments and greater ROI for the advertisers so it clearly makes sense for you to do the same.
Other useful applications would include allowing advertisers on your site to target traffic from a certain location or to stop Yahoo Publisher Network ads showing for international users.
The first step towards installing your geotargetting script is to visit Maxmind and purchase a downloadable GeoIP database for $50. This database allows you to match up your visitors IP address to their country.
Once you have the database you will need to upload it to your site, I suggest keeping it outside your root directory or renaming it in case other people try to use it. The database file should be called geoip.inc.
Next you will need to add the script below to the top of each page on your website. If you have a main database connection file included already you could just add it to this.
Now we have stored the country of the visitor in a $country variable that can be used on each page of your site. To make use of this simply add the following code to your pages:
Most of the top affiliate marketing experts redirect outgoing links. Some use a tracking script to track click volume but the main benefit is that your visitors are not immediately aware that the link is an affiliate link and the search engines don’t see that your site is just an affiliate site.
There are loads of affiliate link management scripts on the market but I’ve never seen one that was simple so I decided to release my own ultra simple version.
This script will create links in the format www.yoursite.com/go/amazon.php
My recent attempt to rank for the term “Giles Wareing” on Google is going quite well, I’m at number 4 just after Amazon and The Guardian.
The only problem is that this search term has sent no traffic whatsoever despite Hitwise telling us it was the number 2 search term sending traffic to Amazon in the UK during July.
Lets see if you can figure out why this is happening, answers in the comments please. If nobody gets it right I will tell you next week.
Hitwise posted yesterday about the top UK traffic sources to Amazon. One of the top keywords was “Giles Wareing” so this post is a fun experiment to see if I can rank for “Giles Wareing” on Google and beat Amazon.The reason people are searching for “Giles Wareing” is to buy a copy of The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club
Starting a new website from scratch is the most difficult aspect of internet marketing. If the site is the online home of a bricks and mortar company you can normally leverage the reputation and contacts of the business as well as a large marketing budget to kick start the process. These luxuries are not usually available when we launch an affiliate site.
Choosing a niche
The golden rule is to choose something that you are passionate about or, at the very least, knowledgeable about. Ideally you should already read some of the blogs in the niche and know the names of the editors. If you try to start from scratch in an industry you know nothing about you will find it hard to build any traction.
Make sure you have browsed the marketplace at sites like Commission Junction and Trade Doubler to see what programs are available and what sort of CPA they pay.
Building the site
Unless you are good with php you probably want to start your affiliate site using WordPress. For the first few months you really don’t want to be worrying too much about monetizing the site – all you are going to be doing is link building. Make sure you have things like unique titles and meta descriptions on your pages and you really can’t go too far wrong with WordPress.
After a few months you might find you need something more flexible so you might be able to move away from WordPress or to have a mixture of normal php pages and WordPress pages on the site.
I would recommend removing date stamps from url’s as they might make visitors think your offers have expired.
Design
To make your affiliate site appear trustworthy you need to have an eye catching logo as well as an appealing design.
If you’re using WordPress then it’s best not to worry about the design for the first few months. Download one of these themes and the site will look stunning right from the outset.
Marketing
Most of the ideas you might have for your affiliate site have probably been done before. Unless something is truly revolutionary it is very unlikely that you will achieve any press coverage. A new website for your local shop might be able to get a mention and a link from some local websites but this won’t happen for your affiliate site so you need to think slightly differently.
Try ideas such as offering awards to various businesses or reviews of products and services. Many companies have press sections on their websites where they link to sites that mention them. You will need to appear very authoritative to pull this off.
Link building
Assuming you have added some useful tools and a blog to your site and chose your niche wisely it should be quite straightforward to launch a linkbaiting campaign. Adding some cool content and tools to the website and promoting them everywhere you can in the first few months will dramatically reduce the time it takes for your site to rank and you will reap the benefits of having a solid, natural link profile.
Initially you will need to gain some PageRank to make sure your new site is indexed. The best way to do this is submit to directories such as Yahoo, Business.com and a few others.
Images
If you have chosen a niche full of interesting products you need to use images of the products in your pages and blog posts. The use of images makes your site appear legitimate and encourages buyers. Images also allow you to get lots of traffic and links using Google Images.
It’s much harder to use images to your advantage in niches such as insurance or mortgages so you might need to consider this when deciding.
Adding your affiliate links
Until you add some affiliate links your site probably just looks like a normal WordPress blog. The key thing to remember is that until you start getting traffic from the search engines you won’t make much money from affiliate marketing so you may as well not include the links.
People who find your site via social networks and RSS feed readers are far less likely to want a new mortgage than the user who typed in “new mortgage” into Google.
The key with affiliate marketing is to pass your links through redirects to make them look like normal links. This results in more clicks from your human visitors as well as making sure Google doesn’t see that your site is full of affiliate links. Luckily there is a good WordPress plugin for adding and tracking your affiliate links.
Where to put your links
If you fill your pages with affiliate links the visitor will probably not click on any of them. I recommend using a couple of links per page along with some “Buy Now” buttons. Keep testing the layouts, click rates and bounce rates to see what works well for your site. My favourite trick is to add an affiliate link such as “Top Sellers” in your navigation bar.
Geo targetting
If the affiliate program you are promoting only sells products to US residents you are not going to earn any commission from people in the UK. The solution is to install something like the Maxmind IP to Country database for $50. This allows you to send US visitors to your standard affiliate program and foreign visitors to another.
If you can’t find an appropriate place to send the visitors simply use the Auction Ads Url Converter to send the traffic via Auction Ads to eBay.
Make it look real
If you want to sell gadgets, for example, it really helps your conversion rates if your site looks like a gadget shop. Visit the leading retailers in your niche and make sure your site is laid out like theirs. Most users are still new to blog layouts and prefer to be faced with a standard online shop. You need to strike a balance between appearing too commercial and struggling to attract links and losing conversions because your site looks like a blog.
Simon Nixon, the founder of moneysupermarket.com, is set to reap up to £126.6 million when the price comparison site floats on the London Stock Exchange later this month, valued at between £841 million and £1 billion.
What a lot of people might be pleased to hear is that even sites this big are well into basic SEO and link buying.
They buy links from several members of the DP forums and use article submission to get greate rankings. Check their links here.
Starting a new website from scratch is the most difficult aspect of internet marketing. If the site is the online home of a bricks and mortar company you can normally leverage the reputation and contacts of the business as well as a large marketing budget to kick start the process. These luxuries are not usually available when we launch an affiliate site.
If you have chosen a niche full of interesting products you need to use images of the products in your pages and blog posts. The use of images makes your site appear legitimate and encourages buyers. Images also allow you to get lots of traffic and links using Google Images.