Make Your Mark with Affiliate Marketing

Formulating the Site Concept

Once you have a product and a target audience, you need a tool to bring them together: your web site.

With this approach to affiliate marketing, you literally have a blank slate in terms of the directions in which you could develop your site. But one thing's certain: you'll need a decent site concept. Gone are the days in which you could slap up a single-page affiliate "site" that simply funneled users through to the merchants with which you were affiliated and call it a day. Google says that it requires "relevant and original content, transparency, and navigability" of the landing pages it indexes. So, you'll need to do some thinking about the kind of site you're going to create.

As an example, let's imagine you've decided to become an affiliate of a herbal tea merchant that sells teas from all around the world. You could promote these teas through a reviews site, a herbal tea information site, a simple online store, a tea-focused blog ... the list goes on.

How can you narrow down your options? Easy: look at your niche audience members, and let them dictate the type of site you build. For example, let's say you've identified that the people in your target audience are interested in the health-giving qualities of herbal teas, and like to share their herbal teas with others (after all, tea drinking is often a social event!). This would suggest to you that a personal approach could be the way to go with your site -- word of mouth, recommendations, and so on, are likely to resonate with these audience members. This realization might seem to indicate that a blog or review site could be a good option. But if you're setting this site up purely as a business venture, and have no real interest in herbal tea yourself, you'll likely need to hire someone who is to write your content -- an expense that may quickly become unviable. You probably won't want to have to constantly update the site with content you have no interest in, either.

If you look at the merchant's site, you may find that it offers affiliates a lot of information on the teas it sells -- that's going to make your job a lot easier. You could easily repurpose, or rewrite, some of this content to suit your readers' expectations and needs. You decide to provide an information site that explains the benefits of the different individual herbs, as well as a small online catalog that links through to the merchant's site. You know the audience will appreciate a personal touch, so you decide to write personal introductory copy for each information page on the site, and provide chatty, but direct promotional copy for each product in the catalogue, as well as giving the business a human name like Tessa's Teas. Maybe an electronic newsletter that highlights a different tea (perhaps one that's on sale) each month will be both easy to create -- thanks to the merchant-provided copy -- and effective in drawing users back to your site.

As you can see, the idea here is to create a concept for selling the product you've chosen to the audience you've identified. The merchant's site may well give you some hints as to what works with the audiences they're targeting, but you'll have to look specifically at your target niche members to devise a site concept and plan that will suit them specifically. A target audience that's purchasing tea in the hope of alleviating an ailment will be attracted by a different type of site than will an audience that likes experimenting with the flavors of different teas.

Once you've devised the concept for your site, plan its structure, making sure that each page leads logically to purchase. In preparing your sitemap, think about the state of mind your users will be in when they arrive at your site, and what they'll want to do: will they want to read detailed information? Will they know what products they're interested in? Will they have something in mind that they specifically want to purchase -- and purchase without delay? Your audience and keyword research will give you a strong indication of how to structure the site and its content, and where to position your affiliate links.

Creating the Site, Joining the Program, and Optimizing

Once you have a sitemap, you can create the site and present it to the merchant in your request to join the affiliate program. If your request is declined, do what you can to find out why -- a few small tweaks and your site may be accepted. Once it's up and running, of course, the way you promote the site will have a significant impact on its revenues. With sites like these, it's often best to build a site that will largely run itself, and focus your efforts on promotion and optimizing the process by which users are drawn through to the affiliate site -- after all, that's where the money is to be made! As affiliate expert Kieron Donoghue explains in the example below, promotion becomes much easier when you have a good affiliate site.

Creating an Affiliate Site the Alternative Way

Broadbandguide.co.uk is an affiliate site created by veteran affiliate marketer Kieron Donoghue, who runs UKOffer.com, and blogs about affiliate marketing at http://www.here.org.uk/. The site's homepage is depicted in Figure 4.

Broadbandguide.co.uk is a comparison site that provides users with at-a-glance comparisons of the plans and offers provided by UK-based telecommunications companies. So, although Kieron used the process we've outlined here to create this particular affiliate business, he had to be slightly less selective than he may have been otherwise. "Since I was creating a comparison site," he says, "in order for it to be of real use to users, I had to include all broadband affiliate programs rather than choosing a select group."

Of course, most affiliate marketers would pick and choose only the best offers for their sites. So how did Kieron get around the issue? "I display them in a manner whereby the programs that offer the highest CPAs and/or the best conversion rates are featured more prominently than the other programs. Sometimes you know which programs will convert best -- let's say a certain provider is offering a product that's 50% cheaper than the rest of the market. You know it will convert well, so you promote it accordingly." And for those times when you can't predict conversions? "Those programs need to be displayed and tested on your site so you can see how they convert," Kieron says. "You can change the layout and so on once you have some statistical sales data to analyze. As offers and promotions change, it's worth switching the layout of the site to promote the best-performing merchants. Last month's top performer can easily be knocked off if another merchant launches a better consumer offer."

In assessing affiliate programs for a new site, Kieron looks at a range of factors, including cookie length and commission rates. "Next, I look at the sites themselves. It's amazing how many affiliates never do this! I look to see what their prices and offers are like, and if they're competitive." This point is crucial: if a merchant is offering a 20% commission level, and the market average for that segment is 10%, the merchant's program might seem like an attractive proposition. But if their prices are 50% more expensive then conversions will, of course, suffer. "I also check to see if merchants display phone numbers on their sites, because that'll cause leakage." With this research in hand, Kieron has a good idea of how well the different programs in that niche will perform.

From there, it's a matter of creating, launching, and tweaking the affiliate site. As Kieron explained in this blog post, he now takes a slightly different approach to creating affiliate sites than he used to. "When Google decided to ban straight affiliate pages a few years ago, I was forced to look at alternative ways to make money from affiliate programs. I decided to put more resources into building full sites that could stand up on their own, rather than light affiliate pages."

These whole sites include a range of basic information that any site should carry -- a privacy policy, sitemap, contact us form, and so on -- as well as information that's original and relevant to users, as stipulated by Google's landing page and site quality guidelines. This approach has had an unexpected benefit: as Kieron explains, "Where my old landing pages had offered little or no benefit to the user other than pushing them off to the merchants I promoted, I now build full sites, like UKoffer.com and Bingo.org.uk, and they do well in the natural search results. That's great, I'm not used to getting traffic for free!"

Tracking Your Affiliate Clicks
Tracking clicks to the affiliate links you include on your site is essential if you're going to calculate the ROI of your efforts. Some of the big networks and in-house programs make this very easy -- they offer a way to tag the individual links that you include in your pages, so that you can track the success of each link in generating sales. For example, Commission Junction offers publishers a sid parameter that can be appended to their tracking URLs, and will display as a separate column in the commission detail reports. As a publisher, you can use this parameter to identify which affiliate pages, or even which of the ads you're running on the search engines, lead to sales.

Building a whole site that meets the search engines' guidelines is obviously essential to your success, but what other techniques can you use to optimize your affiliate site? Well, I'm glad you asked! The next section applies to those of us with affiliate sites -- no matter which approach we used to create them. Let's learn the finer points of optimizing affiliate sites now.