If you see a book, a gadget, or a tool that you’d like to buy, you can just write a post telling people about it. Include an affiliate link, and some people will click through and pay.
Clearly, the conversion rate will be lower than it would be for a product you can recommend personally or one that has been created by someone you can recommend personally, but you should be able to generate a few sales and give yourself a little extra income.
The number of sales you generate though will also be affected by its placement, our next topic of discussion.
PLACEMENT
I first saw the potential of the Internet when I realized that moving my ad units from one place on the page to another sent my click-through rate through the roof. Content was important, of course, but it was how I implemented the ads that had the most immediate effect on my returns.
It’s no surprise then that placement and implementation have a massive influence on affiliate earnings, too.
When you’re working with ad units, there’s a lot to experiment with. You can play with the color schemes and fonts. You can try different keywording to see which terms bring up the best ads. And you can use various sizes to see which are most likely to attract readers’ eyes. It’s a process, and although there are now guidelines that make the testing stage shorter than it used to be, you can still expect to spend a few weeks trying out different strategies to see what works best on your site.
For affiliate ads, it’s all much simpler.
Text links outperform banner ads, and links worked into the content outperform links placed in navigation sections.
The difference is remarkable, and it really does prove that simplicity is best. At least one blogger has found that simply swapping his affiliate banner ad for a text link increased his click-throughs by 60 percent. Others have seen even more dramatic improvements with equally simple changes.
Big merchants like Amazon offer a giant range of different types of ad units (including contextual versions that try to read the content on your page and offer products to match, such as AdSense). They’re all very neat and snazzy, but rarely do they perform as well as simply linking a key phrase in the content to the product and including your affiliate code (Figure 5.4).
Figure 5.4Amazon offers a giant range of product links, banners, and widgets to attract users and win sales. But recommended text links will always do best.
The reasons are pretty clear.
First, a text link looks natural. A banner ad looks like an ad, so although it’s more likely to be seen than subtle hyperlinked text, it’s less likely to be clicked. Users feel that they can happily ignore ads, but when the publisher has taken the effort to link directly to a web site, that link appears to be recommended. It looks like additional information to the content on the page, something that’s worth reading.
The text around the link also leads users to click. It puts the product in context and raises curiosity. Having read about the product, the user is likely to want to click through and see the product itself.
Text links also make for cleaner Web pages. Instead of a page filled with flashing graphics that serve mostly to drive users away, the user will be able to see a page designed primarily to serve content. The ad will be embedded inside that content.
That doesn’t mean that affiliate graphic ads never pay. In fact, while you can expect your text links to dramatically outperform affiliate graphic ads, the best strategy is often to combine different methods to increase the chances of winning click-throughs and sales. In the sample post I provided earlier for example, I would expect most of the affiliate sales to come from the text link containing my affiliate code. However, I would also use an affiliate image of the product to illustrate the post.
I’m going to want a graphic element there anyway to attract eyes, so using an affiliate ad from Amazon or even linking an image with my affiliate code provides one more way for users to learn more about the product—and gives me another chance to generate a KaChing.
It’s also possible to place affiliate ad units on the page. Just don’t expect them to generate more clicks than a conventional CPC ad unit while earning money only for those that convert into sales. In general, that’s more likely to happen on sites such as AppCraver, ones that discuss products.
The position on the page isn’t as important as it might seem, either. When you’re using Kontera, you’ll want to put some effort into ensuring that the ads aren’t sent down to the bottom of the page where no one will see them. But Kontera gives you no direct control over which terms are linked. When you’re inserting your own affiliate links, you get to choose where to put the links and more important, you get to write the text that surrounds those links.
Affiliate advertising gives you complete control.
Clearly, placing the affiliate link on the last word on the page is always going to be a bad idea, but it’s unlikely to matter whether it appears in the first, second, or fifth paragraph—provided the preceding text has generated enough interest and enough enthusiasm to persuade readers to click through.
SEND AFFILIATE E-MAILS
Spam has caused a huge amount of damage. According to Ferris Research, the global cost in lost productivity caused by unsolicited, unwanted e-mails was an incredible $130 billion in 2009. All that time spent deleting e-mails and flicking through folders looking for lost messages adds up.
It’s no surprise then that those offers of herbal pills and fake watches have had an effect on legitimate direct mail
