Make Your Mark with Affiliate Marketing

Optimizing Your Site for Affiliate Sales

You can just slap a few affiliate ads on your site and hope that people see them. You can even change their placement or presentation -- techniques we discussed in Chapter 6, Monetizing Your Content. But to really make the most of affiliate opportunities, there are a few approaches that you can't go past. The first is to presell the affiliate products you offer. The second, which builds an extra layer onto your preselling efforts, is to use PPC advertising to drive your affiliate promotion. The third is to expend the effort to promote your site -- even if it's built solely for the purposes of selling affiliate products -- as you would any other content site. Let's investigate these techniques now.

Follow the Guidelines!
As I mentioned in the previous section, meeting the search engines' content and other requirements for affiliate pages is essential if your site is to succeed in being listed in the SERPs. The Google Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines page explains exactly what this search engine expects to find in a good affiliate page; check the various search engines you're targeting for their specific requirements.

Preselling Affiliate Products

As we saw in the previous section, the usual story with affiliate products is this: you sign up for the affiliate program, add the link or advertisement to your site, and send visitors off to the affiliate site, hoping they'll buy. This is all well and good ... but there are a number of ways you can help to boost the likelihood that those users you send off to an affiliate site are qualified, and ready to buy. Preselling is the key.

Essentially, preselling involves the creation of content that helps to ensure that your users are primed and ready to purchase by the time they reach the affiliate site. We could presell through our ordinary page content (for instance, writing so graphically about Saturn, and the amazing experience we had viewing this planet, that by the time they've read our content they want to see it for themselves, and buy the resources that will help them do just that), by providing -- or writing our own -- review content (which could be included on a web site or in a newsletter), by simply writing a promotional page that explains the product's benefits and features to users before they head off to the affiliate marketer's site, and so on. Once users who visit your presell content digest that information, then show an interest in purchasing the product you're promoting, they'll represent truly qualified leads rather than potentially interested parties who may or may not be ready, or have the capacity, to buy.

Successful affiliate preselling content usually achieves these goals:

• It includes a strong headline that captures the attention of audience members and hints that the product may be a solution to their needs.
• It promotes the benefits of the affiliate product, explaining what it will deliver to your users, and why that's important.
• It includes a prominent, compelling call to action that will prompt users to click through and purchase the affiliate product.
• It doesn't reflect too closely the information or design of the merchant's own site.

They're the basics. But there's one key point that's critical to the success of your presell: if you don't want it to sound like just more advertising hype, you'll need to personalize it. Personalization provides credibility, and if your users find they can rely on you, they'll be more likely to view your recommendations as must-have products.

Using Testimonials and Reviews

One way to provide credibility is to include testimonials for the product, but if you can't find a customer testimonial, think laterally. In the case of our astronomy site, for example, a line as simple as "It's the most popular astronomy magazine on planet Earth" provides a subtle testimonial for one advertiser we've chosen -- Astronomy magazine.

Another option is to include in your site's newsletter, blog, or articles, a "Product of the Week" section in which you can review the products with which you're affiliated. Of course, you're thinking: "But won't that just look like I'm only promoting the products I get cash to sell?" The answer to that depends on your execution. If you believe in the product, say so -- you could even say something in your review along the lines of "I'm so impressed by this beginning astronomy software package that I've decided I'll help the creator sell it." Perhaps you'll frequently review products that you're not affiliated with, to indicate that your opinion is balanced, and your ultimate goal is to provide valuable advice to readers. Perhaps your reviews of affiliate products will also include some negative aspects -- small points that won't matter to your target audience -- to again create a perception of balance.

In short, the way you write your review will make the difference between it being a success and an embarrassment, so take the time to think creatively about how you can write reviews that meet both your needs and those of your audience members. An example of an affiliate presell page which successfully uses review content to promote the products it presents is shown in Figure 5.

Using Samples

You could also consider using samples or images of the product -- whatever you feel is needed to generate a desire to purchase within your target audience. That's why, for each of the planets in the solar system, the profile we include on our astronomy site will include an image of that planet, along with a link to purchase similar images from Astrographics, our astronomy imagery affiliate marketer. Perhaps we shouldn't rule out getting access to online demos of astronomy software, either ...

Do You Have the Right?
As you prepare your presell content -- be it a single page, a newsletter article, or an entire site -- make sure that you have the rights to reproduce every piece of content you use. If you write all your own content, this won't be a problem, but when it comes to imagery, or reproducing content (features lists, technical explanations, and so on) from your merchants' sites or collateral, make sure you ask for permission in writing before you use the content. Many merchants encourage the reuse of their content by affiliates, but may place restrictions on the way you present it, for example, or the specific content you use. Taking a collaborative approach with the merchant should help you avoid legal issues and the potential for being suspected of affiliate spamming, which we'll discuss in the section titled Affiliate Issues

Offering Freebies

You may also consider offering your own freebies or bonuses to users who purchase the product with your affiliate link. A little added incentive can go a long way, not just towards making users feel like they've got a bargain, but in building a sense of loyalty to your brand. But this technique isn't just about incentive. If you're prepared to offer something for free to users who purchase a particular product, that again increases that product's perceived credibility. You're effectively saying, "It's so good, I'll personally forfeit something in order to give you another reason to try it." And that can be very, very reassuring.

For example, imagine that our astronomy site encourages users to purchase a book of sky maps from one of our affiliate parters. For every customer who forwards his or her purchase confirmation email to us, we throw in a discounted or free subscription to the SMS-based astronomy event news service that our astronomy news site offers.

It's important to take care with this technique, though -- too many messages can become confusing, and overwhelm your users. If that happens, they'll just close their browsers, or head off to another site, and you lose face in the process. So take care to make cross-promotional offers clear, and to offer them at the right time (when you've qualified the user as having an interest in the products offered) and in the right context -- namely one that gives you the chance to clearly communicate your offer.

When it comes to preselling affiliate products, you have free range. Be as creative as you like; test different approaches for the same product and monitor the results to see which works best for you. Preselling can make a big difference to the sales of the affiliate products your site offers.

Using PPC to Drive Affiliate Sales

So far, our discussion has focused on your site -- its users, its structure, and the products and merchants with which you choose to affiliate it. These issues are all critical to your success as an online affiliate. But once you create, hone, and align these aspects, there's one more step you can take to really make the most of all that work: promotion.

Once you've created a great site, you'll want it to attract as many users as possible, and to do that, you'll need to look at a range of mechanisms. When you created the site, you optimized it for organic search results, but there are other techniques you can use. The most common, and frequently the quickest to implement, monitor, and hone, is PPC, or pay-per-click, advertising. We discussed PPC advertising in Chapter 6, Monetizing Your Content from the point of view of the publisher, so we'll assume here that you have an understanding of how advertising networks function, and what their potential pros and cons are.

To use PPC advertising to drive your affiliate campaign, you need to switch from the role of publisher to that of advertiser. The process isn't complicated: you create some advertisements for the affiliate product in question, make sure your affiliate presell page content is optimized around keywords that correspond to the search terms for which you want to have you ads appear, and bid for ad placements alongside the keyword-relevant search results. The searchers see your ad alongside the results their search produced, click on that ad, and arrive at your presell page. They take it in and, assuming they find it compelling, they click from there through to the affiliate marketer's site where, we hope, they take the action that will generate income for you.

The key is, of course, to ensure that the money you spend buying clicks doesn't exceed the commissions the campaign -- and your presell page -- generate. You'll need to monitor your campaign costs and affiliate commissions closely, comparing PPC ad clicks with generated actions to ensure that the ratio is strongly in your favor.

This Is Not Affiliate Arbitrage!
If you read about PPC arbitrage in the section called PPC Arbitrage in Chapter 6, Monetizing Your Content, you probably won't be surprised to hear that affiliate programs are also frequently targeted for the same exploitation. Affiliate arbitrage is similar to PPC arbitrage, though the process need not actually involve a publishers' web site at all.

In affiliate arbitrage, affiliate publishers bid for a given keyword through Google AdWords and create an ad to appear in the right-hand pane on Google SERPs for that keyword. The ad they publish contains their affiliate link, so when Google users click on the ad, they're taken direct to the merchant's web site, not that of the affiliate publishers.

This practice has been actively discouraged by Google, but in February 2008, Yahoo announced that after six years of working with Commission Junction to resolve the issue, it is now allowing publishers to link direct to affiliate marketers. It will be interesting to chart the effects of this policy change on the search advertising and affiliate market spaces in the coming months and years.

Though the process itself is fairly straightforward, you can use a number of tactics to boost the success of your PPC campaign. Let's take a look at them now.