Make Your Mark with Affiliate Marketing

Advanced Affiliate Marketing on the Lifehacker Network

The Lifehacker.com.au site, an internationally popular blog that provides "tech tips to help you at work and play," is part of a network that includes Defamer (celebrity, gossip and pop culture from Australia and Hollywood), Gizmodo (the gadget guide), and Kotaku (blogging games, news, gossip, cheats, opinion, design, prediction). This network uses a combination of advertising and affiliate marketing to generate revenues.

Says Cameron Curtis, the network's Australian Commercial Director, "Affiliate partnerships offer one of the more exciting growth opportunities for our network. Given that there are some similarities between the audiences on our sites, we promote some affiliates across the network as a whole. Of course, each of our sites also has a very specific content skew. So if there's a partner that's appropriate to, say, gaming, but not to software productivity, then we'll limit the partnership to the site that's most relevant."

The Lifehacker team gains affiliate partners in three key ways. Some prospective partners approach the team, having assessed the sites, content, and audiences. The editorial nature of the site's content also exposes team members to the products and services of organizations that could make likely affiliate partners. Finally, the network's sales team actively identifies and pursues partnership possibilities with likely partners, usually for both affiliate marketing and display advertising opportunities.

Affiliate offers are promoted throughout the site. One key partnership is promoted through a dedicated display unit on the left of the Lifehacker page, which is depicted in Figure 2. Says Cameron, "Get Price Direct is a site that visitors can use to search for the best price and outlet for a certain product. This particular module is designed so that the products promoted differ to suit the site on which the module is shown." So, for example, when the module is displayed on Kotaku, it might show products relating to gaming, hardware accessories, or peripherals. The same module appearing at the same time on Defamer might feature fragrances, beauty products, or entertainment units

However, this isn't the only form of affiliate promotion the network employs. Historically, the network's users haven't taken favorably to the inclusion of affiliate links within blog posts themselves, so the team has had to innovate to successfully integrate affiliate offers on the network. Figure 3 shows an integrated promotion for HTC that was used recently on the Gizmodo web site.

Now, this content wasn't presented as a standard post on Gizmodo. "We tag the standard editorial posts that focus on this type of handset technology, so that readers can click through to this type of advertorial-style post," Cameron explains. As you can see, this post is tagged as an advertisement, so there's no confusion -- readers know exactly what they're looking at. "These clearly marked posts offer users the chance to learn more about the product, and even to purchase the HTC handset."

The post is written in a slightly restrained version of the site's usual chatty style, and it includes various links that take the user to more detailed information on the product's features. Clearly, the advertising on the page reinforces the product's branding and further promotes the offer being presented. For Gizmodo and the other sites in the network, this has proven to be a very coherent style of promotion that succeeds without annoying or misleading users -- and it's exactly that open, honest approach which has helped the network build a loyal userbase around the world.

Creating a Monetized Site: An Alternative Approach

If you're already comfortable with the basics of affiliate marketing, and you'd like to try something different, this alternative approach can be a great way to maximize your revenues for the same amount of effort you'd put into monetizing an existing site.

With this approach, rather than beginning by looking at potential audiences, and working from there, your first stop is affiliate programs. Here's the basic process we'll use:

• Assess the available affiliate programs.
• Conduct keyword research.
• Formulate a site plan.
• Create a site around the affiliate program.
• Join the affiliate program and launch the site.

Assessing Affiliate Programs: Finding a Product

You already have an idea of the affiliate networks you like, so your first step is to visit those affiliate programs and access their lists of the best-paying merchants. ClixGalore, for example, provides a listing of what it describes as "Top Performing Programs" -- those that have paid the most, on average, to their affiliates in the last month. Other programs provide similar lists. Review them closely to get an idea of which programs perform best. Of course, you'll want to consider their rates, the cookie expiry period, and the basis for payment, as well as the other elements we discussed in the section called Choosing Affiliate Networks, Businesses, and Products.

Check the Affiliate Approval Rate!
Some of the programs that appear to have really strong EPC, or earnings-per-100-clicks, figures, but if you look a little closer, you may notice that their affiliate approval rates are not as high as some other programs. This can help to explain the reason why the average earnings are so high with that merchant: the merchant may well be particularly selective about the types of sites it will allow onto the program, choosing those are extremely well suited to selling its products. If you're interested in joining such a program, it'd be a good idea to contact the merchant in advance of building your site, if you can, to try to ascertain exactly what they're looking for. You can then shape your site specifically to meet those needs.

The result of this assessment will be a handful of programs that you feel have the potential to be particularly lucrative. You may choose to apply to join those programs on the spot, but most networks require you to have a site ready to roll -- one that the merchant can review with a view to its suitability for the affiliate program in question. But before you race off and start talking to developers (or developing the site yourself!), you need to make sure that there's a suitable niche to which you can market the products you've chosen.

Keyword Research: Finding a Niche

The next step in this process is to identify a niche that wants the product you're going to try to sell, and of course, the way to find that niche is through keyword research. Again, the idea here is to start with broad keywords and work to narrow down the alternatives, honing in on keywords that are both relevant to your product and well searched, but which have little (or at least manageable) competition.

The key here is to identify keywords that are used by searchers who are ready to purchase; the problem, of course, is that the keywords that are most obviously related to purchasing the product are likely to be the focus of considerable competition. You must search, continually refining your searches, to find the ideal mix of keywords that's particularly appropriate to your niche.