Make Your Mark with Affiliate Marketing

Start with Your Target Audience

When you're dealing with an affiliate product, it's easy to become so focused on the product itself that you forget about the people you're trying to sell it to. This is a particular trap when you're writing presell copy and ads that aim to focus on what the product offers.

But in all your efforts, start with the target audience. You selected this affiliate product primarily because you thought your target audience would like it, after all. So make sure you have a strong idea of who these people are -- their demographic, psychographic, purchasing, and other relevant characteristics -- before you begin. Then, ask yourself the following questions:

• What need do my target audience members have that could be met by this product? A single product can meet different needs for different people. For example, our astronomy site users may be particularly interested in the Gallery Prints offering from the affiliate merchant Astrographics.com, because they happen to be the types of people who like to display prints and pictures around their homes or workplaces. They may also find the Calendars section of the Astrographics site of particular secondary interest -- it's another way to have the planets on your wall!
• In what specific ways does the product meet that need? A single product can meet different needs, and it can do so for different reasons. The Astrographics print products meets our target audience members' needs, for example, because of the quality of their production. Our target users aren't the kinds of people to want to tack a poster to their wall -- they're more likely to want the kind of professionally mounted, well-presented photo-quality product that Astrographics does so well. Perhaps our users are part of the "now" generation, who want to have their purchases immediately. Again, Astrographics specifically meets that need by shipping custom-framed prints within a week -- this'll be a hit with our particular target audience.
• How does the product exceed the expectations of my target audience? Does it provide additional or secondary benefits to particular audience members? Every product must meet a basic need if it's to be considered by your target audience. But if you're to present a really compelling sales proposition, you'll want the product to do more than just the basics -- ideally you'll want it to go beyond what users thought they wanted, to provide additional benefits that are perhaps unexpected but welcome. For example, as mentioned above, the Astrographics site offers custom framing. They do so using only handcrafted mouldings and clear Plexiglas glazing. Wood and matted metal moldings are available, and the prints can be ordered in a huge range of sizes. So if our site visitors started reading about the prints expecting to have to frame them themselves after receiving their orders, this information will likely far exceed those original expectations.
• How will my target users search for this solution through search engines? Now that you have an idea of how the product will meet, and exceed, the basic and secondary needs of your target users, you can think about the state of mind users will be in when they begin to look for these kinds of products online. We've already identified a few keywords that have real potential through Wordtracker, but we'll want to optimize our content for more keywords than we've selected so far. And, as we know, the more specific the keywords, the more targeted -- and potentially qualified -- the audience is likely to be. So, for prospective users of our astronomy site, we could look at incorporating terms like "planet photos," "astronomy prints," and so on into our keyword list, if they offer sufficient opportunity in the search engines, as well as using the selected terms in our PPC ads and presell page.

Keep your target audience in mind as you prepare your PPC campaign -- target them with your ad text and keyword selection, and prepare your presell page to meet their information requirements, answer their questions, and present the product as one that suits their individual needs.

Choose Keywords Carefully

Above, we looked at the process by which you could identify keywords around which to create an affiliate site, using your audience as a base, and ensuring that quality, highly targeted affiliate products were available for you to on-sell to those visitors.

The choice of keywords is critical in attracting the right audience both to your site, and through your PPC advertisements. You must try to ensure that the keywords you choose really do reflect the terms commonly searched for by your target audience. Make sure also that the terms for which you optimize both your presell page and your ads reflect the points the target audience members have reached in the decision-making process. For instance, there's no point optimizing a page of our astronomy site for the key phrase "buy astronomy telescope" if that page targets backyard astronomers who are as yet unfamiliar with the different types of equipment they'll need, and therefore haven't done the research they'll naturally want to do before buying a telescope.

You may already know that the four stages through which a prospect moves toward purchase are as follows:

• awareness of a need
• interest in potential solutions
• desire for a preferred solution
• action to obtain the solution

It's important to work out which stage in this process the people you're targeting have reached, and to ensure that the keywords you've chosen for the site's content optimization reflect that. There's no point optimizing your ads to catch the eyes of searchers who are ready to buy a particular solution, and then, on your presell page, shifting back to the need-identification stage. Make sure the keywords you've chosen reflect the needs of the customer, and are matched by your content.

Optimize as Much as Possible on Keywords

Once you've worked out who you're targeting, and which keywords will reach that audience most effectively, make sure you optimize your site's content to promote those keywords. While the PPC side of the equation may bring in much of your traffic, taking the time to carefully optimize the content itself will increase your organic search traffic, and overall revenues.

Perhaps, in your assessment of where your audience members are in the prepurchase decision-making process, you identified that you wanted to meet the needs of users in both the interest and desire stages. You might have decide to create separate pages to meet the information requirements of these different user groups, optimize the content heavily for the keywords appropriate to that group, and then target separate PPC campaigns for each page. The page designed for those with an interest in potential solutions will lead visitors to the page designed for those with a desire for the affiliate product you offer. That page will move visitors to the point of action, and provide them with the opportunity -- through your affiliate link -- to take that action.

Keyword optimization is critical if a strategy like this is to work, and is central to the success of your campaign even if you're only targeting users at the point of action.

Treat the Campaign as If It's Your Own

You may feel a tendency to see your work on affiliate programs as work for someone else. After all, it's not your site the user are buying from, and there's not much you can do about the actual sales pages, right? It would be best to leave the difficult thinking to the affiliate marketer ... or will it?

The truth is that your PPC and affiliate efforts will almost always be more successful if you put in the effort you'd put into promoting your own site, services, or products. Remember: this campaign is yours, even if the product it's selling isn't. Think creatively and passionately about what you're doing, and invest the time to make the campaign successful.

Organic Search Optimization ... and More

As I've hinted above, the other issue which will have a huge bearing on the success of your affiliate site is how well you've optimized it for search engines. The way some pundits talk, you'd be forgiven for thinking that organic search wouldn't be very important to your site's success, but consider for a moment what would happen to your commissions if your affiliate site achieved a place somewhere in the top three results on the SERPs for your keywords.

Throughout this discussion, I've emphasized the importance of selecting keywords that match your target audience's needs with your content and the solution with which your site is affiliated. Writing keyword-optimized content and planning PPC campaigns around those keywords is just one piece of the puzzle. Consider also other techniques -- link building, cross-promotion with other sites, and so on -- that will help you draw new members of your target audience to your site, and continue to increase your site's reach.

Similarly, make sure you take the time to regularly review users' paths through your site, entry and exit pages, responses to your content, and so on. This is the only way you'll really come to understand which aspects of your work are succeeding and which are not. It's the only way you'll learn what your target audience likes, what they respond to, and what they want. And once you have that information, you'll be well on your way to having the means to improve your profitability on a continual basis.

Affiliate Issues

As with advertising networks, a number of issues can arise with affiliate programs and networks: Here's an outline of the common issues, along with some advice on what you can do if you find yourself affected by them:

• The network declines your application to join.
• You expect successfully monetizing your content to be easy.
• The network bans you from its service.
• You don't get paid your earnings.

Each of these issues was covered in detail in Chapter 6, Monetizing Your Content, so I won't go over them here again. Instead, here we'll focus on two issues that relate specifically to affiliate programs.

You're Accused of Affiliate Spamming

Affiliate spamming is the term given to affiliate web sites that replicate too closely the web site of the affiliate marketer. Sometimes, affiliates with little imagination decide that, instead of creating unique presell content themselves, it would be less work to simply replicate the affiliate marketer's own content, page layout, and design. This approach is basically a copyright infringement, and most organized merchants will advise specifically against this in their terms and conditions.

That said, as you create your presell page or site, you might find yourself relying fairly heavily on the content of the affiliate marketer's site -- especially if the product is complex, or new to you. Such reliance may lead your site to be deemed affiliate spam by the affiliate marketer.

Spam's Other Flavors
Another practice which is often termed "affiliate spam" is the mailing of unsolicited promotional emails by an affiliate touting the virtues of a merchant's product. Such a practice is, obviously, not conducive to friendly merchant -- affiliate relations and is in fact illegal in many countries. Just don't do it!

If you're accused of affiliate spamming, your only option -- assuming you want to remain affiliated with that advertiser -- is to rectify all the problems that the advertiser identifies with your presell content. Go back to the section called Preselling Affiliate Products and recreate your content using those points as a guide, and make sure the advertiser is happy with your revisions before you publish them to the Web.

The Program Isn't Tracking Your Generated Sales Properly

This was much more of a problem in the bad old days than it is now, but it can still occur, so it's worth mentioning.

Back at the start of this chapter, we mentioned that merchant sites place cookies on the computers of visitors you send their way, and those cookies indicate that you referred the visitor to the site. The whole idea behind this tactic is that it improves your commission potential. For many products, the user may need time to consider the merchant's offer before they buy -- they may not buy immediately, though they may bookmark the site for future reference and, potentially, use it to make a purchase.

The problems with this technique, which is ubiquitous in the world of affiliate marketing, are varied and many, though they tend now to pop up only occasionally. Run a search on "affiliate programs", "tracking problems" and you'll find countless discussions, blog posts, and reports that show just how tenuous this facility can become. The introduction of new technology associated with affiliate sales (like this instance of checkout update involving Google), and the upgrading of existing services or technologies (as occurred with eBay's US affiliate tracking in early '07) can have severe and far-reaching implications for affiliates. The Google checkout issue occurred at Christmastime, and though it was rectified swiftly, it still impacted upon countless affiliates' commissions at that critical time.

Of course, the other age-old, inescapable issue with cookies is that a large percentage of users are estimated either to delete or clear their cookies on a monthly basis, or to have their computers set not to accept cookies at all. Back in 2005, this percentage was estimated at around 39% by JupiterResearch, but in 2007, it was suggested that a figure around 30% might be more accurate.

Given this situation, it's not a bad idea for you to keep an eye on the levels of traffic you send to merchant sites through your affiliate ads. How can you do that? Well, the first stop is your site statistics package. Some -- but not all -- packages will tell you the most popular URLs on your site, most popular exit pages, and/or sites to which your users went when they left yours. This information can give you a rough idea of the number of users you send to your affiliate site, but even if your stats package offers these counts, it's not likely to offer you the kind of detail you really want.

The techniques for specifically tracking the traffic you send to merchants from your site hinge on the careful use of redirects. Also known (confusingly!) as go pages, and affiliate jump pages, a redirect isn't actually a page -- it's a process by which a user's path from one URL to the next is changed -- usually without him or her noticing. You can use redirects on either the client or server side, but the upshot is the same: you end up with a nice, neat, trackable URL that you can use consistently throughout your site's pages, and your users, at most, notice the slightest of lags between clicking the link on your site and the loading of the page they requested. Of course, the real benefit of this redirect file is that you can add tracking code to it so that you can keep a close eye on the exact number of users who load it in the process of accessing the merchant's site. You can then compare these details with the statistics your affiliate network or merchant provide you, to ensure that you're getting credited with the traffic you send. (For a straightforward description of this process, see Ben Cook's Blogging Experiment article.)

If you believe you're experiencing problems with a merchant's or network's tracking capabilities, your first stop should be the support area of the merchant or network you're using. (You could also have a look at the organization's corporate or technical blog, if it has one.) If you can't find any notices of service problems of the kind you're experiencing, get in touch with the merchant or network, and explain the problem as you see it. If that doesn't bring you any joy -- perhaps they simply say that you haven't generated as many sales as you think -- asking for opinions in a discussion forum like SitePoint's Advertising Sales and Affiliate Programs area is a good way either to get assistance understanding the issue, or finding others who use the same service and may or may not be suffering the same problem.

Summary

There's much talk -- and many expensive ebooks -- about the challenges, difficulties, and value of "insider information" associated with affiliate marketing. I hope this chapter has revealed to you that most of the secrets are in fact common sense, and that with a little research and forethought, you can enjoy the same levels of affiliate success as those "pros."

In these pages, we learned how to track down potential affiliate programs and networks, and how to assess their suitability for our own sites. We focused heavily on the more profitable approaches to affiliate marketing: creating presell content, or dedicated affiliate sites, to help prepare and prequalify the users who click on our affiliate links. We discussed the processes involved in creating compelling, credible presell content, and ensuring that a dedicated affiliate site meets the precise needs of the audience members it's targeted to, via PPC advertising and keyword selection, as well as some more generic, but very helpful, promotional tactics. Finally, we explored the key issues affiliates face in their day-to-day engagements with merchants, and discussed some ways to overcome potential problems.

If you have a passion for the close targeting of a particular niche -- if you want to really make your site's users happy, and you love striving to meet their needs -- affiliate marketing may well be an arena in which you can excel. There's definitely money to be made through affiliate programs, so don't be shy. Get out there, get affiliated, and start reaping the rewards!

That's it for this chapter, which was excerpted from The Web Site Revenue Maximizer. Check out the full table of contents for this kit, and don't forget to download a PDF of this chapter, along with two others, to read offline.