Figure 5.3AppCraver provides reviews of iPhone apps, giving it plenty of opportunity to put up affiliate ads. One appears at the top of every review, while other graphic ads line the right side of the page. The left side leads to accessories available from the site’s affiliate store.
Strategies for Affiliate Success
When you’re earning money with CPC ads, the strategy is simple. Write good content that attracts readers. Put up ads that match your content. Place those ads in prominent positions, and optimize them so that they look like content. Bring in the traffic, stand back and wait, and you should find that the KaChing starts to happen all by itself.
It’s an amazing thing.
Earn on a CPM basis, and the strategy is even easier. Just bring in lots of users. Focus your efforts on traffic generation, and those CPM ads will add a little extra to your monthly income with no more effort.
When you’re looking to add affiliate income to that revenue, though, the strategy is a little more complex. Success relies on the following factors.
THE RIGHT CHOICE OF PRODUCT AND MERCHANT
We’ve already seen how important this is. The merchant has to be trustworthy if the journey from page to cash desk will be smooth and obstacle-free. Top merchants understand that their trustworthiness has a value, and they often cash in on it by paying lower affiliate rates. If you feel that your users would think twice before buying from a merchant they’re not familiar with, then it’s worthwhile taking a little less from each sale but earning more through a greater overall sales volume.
When it comes to choosing the product, the safest bet is always to promote items that you know and believe in. You’ll be able to offer them to your readers and feel that you’re delivering something valuable. That’s priceless.
Alternatively, you can offer a class of products, such as iPhone apps, gardening tools, or computer games. Create a web site that allows you to talk about lots of different models within that class, and you’ll be able to use the affiliate ads as high-paying alternatives and additions to your CPC ads. That can be a useful strategy, too, especially for review sites.
Of course, whichever of those two strategies you follow, the products you offer must suit your audience. There’s little point in showing an affiliate ad for a high-priced, high-commission product to people who aren’t interested in buying it.
MAKE RECOMMENDATIONS
Sites that rely heavily on affiliate links, such as review sites, tend to be hard to build. They have to be planned deliberately: You have to know which products you want to write about, how you’re going to write about them, and where you’re going to source the affiliate links from. Usually, you’ll want to make things as easy as possible by using as few merchants as possible. That will make the implementation easier, the stat-tracking clearer, and it’s also likely to give you higher commissions as you sell more products for your merchant.
Placing occasional affiliate links to products you’ve used is always going to be easier. You won’t need to create a dedicated web site, and you won’t have to struggle to create reviews of products you haven’t tried.
Whenever you use a product that you know your readers would like to use, you can write about it on your web site. You don’t even have to create a dedicated blog post. Just mentioning it in a post you were going to write anyway can still generate sales.
In fact, that sort of casual approach often looks more natural, conferring even greater trust.
You can make this a regular event. If you find, for instance, that every time you recommend a product, you earn around $500 in commissions, then you can make that $500 a regular part of your income by making sure that you include a similar recommendation once a month. You wouldn’t want to do it too often, because your conversion rate for each recommendation would fall—users will always have a limited budget—but every few weeks should be enough to give your income some reliable additional revenue.
It’s the recommendation that’s key here.
Affiliate advertising is unusual in that advertisers don’t mind if you actively promote their products to your users. In fact, because they only have to pay you if your users actually give them money, they’ll want you to push their products. The large merchants even have dedicated affiliate managers whose job includes offering tips to help with promotions. When a monetization system gives you that much independence and that much influence, it’s a shame not to use it.
In general, the more intensely you recommend an affiliate product, the greater you can expect your conversion rate to be.
Those recommendations can come in all sorts of different forms. The most effective is always to say, “I’ve used this product, and it worked wonders. You should use it, too.”
When you use this approach, bring it to life. Explain what brought you to the product, describe what it does, and point out several features that have really impressed you.
Here’s an example of a short post for a recommended affiliate product—and a model—that you can use on your own web site:
Now I Know Where I Am
I always try to be punctual. I calculate how long it will take me to reach a destination. I leave with plenty of time for traffic jams. And I’m not afraid to stop doing whatever I’m doing—even when I’m in the flow—to make sure that I’m not late.
But I also have absolutely no sense of direction. It doesn’t matter how many times I check the map, I’m practically guaranteed to make at least one wrong turn. Last week, for example, I had to take a parcel to
