Maybe the single most important part of running an affiliate website is understanding how people find your site and how to make your site stick out among the billion or so other sites on the Internet.
If you’ve been using the Internet for more than an hour or two, chances are you know what a search engine is. Websites like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com have developed into multi-billion dollar corporations in the last ten years.
Using search engines is extremely simple. You just go to the site, type in what you want to find and click enter. But how can you make sure that your site will be found? As it turns out, it’s all about the keywords.
When a site like Google or Yahoo searches the Internet to come up with results from a web query, it takes the number of keywords on a site into consideration. It also takes particular keywords or phrases into account, too. If someone is doing a search for “Book about Rolling Stones,” a site that has that phrase or a phrase similar to it 10 times is going to come up higher than a site that only mentions it once. That’s why its so important to incorporate keyword text into your web content so that when someone does a search for, say, “Oolong Tea from China” and that just happens to be what your site sells, your site comes up high on the list, not buried on the bottom.
The trick is to incorporate these keywords or keyword phrases into your web content, and still have your content make sense. This is a super-tricky obstacle to get around. The best advice I can give is to simply read around and see what other affiliate marketing sites have done. Remember, your content is a huge part of your site. If people don’t stay on your site for a minute or two reading your content, they will never, ever click on any links you have and buy any products you’re selling. You must find the balance between a heavy use of keywords and well-written text.
Knowing how to use search engines is a big part of affiliate marketing. You can have the best content, the most timely links and the best product in the world and you won’t do a lick of business unless people can find you. Learning the art of search engine optimization (SEO) and incorporating keyword text into your affiliate website may seem tough, but it’s the difference between making a few bucks here and there and making it big in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing has quickly become one of the most popular and the most effective ways to advertise on the Internet. The premise of affiliate marketing is very simple.
Affiliate marketing is a “pay for performance model” in which an affiliate webmaster is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, or sale provided through his efforts. The affiliate earns a commission based on a certain value for each exposure (CPM), visit (Pay per click), new customer (Pay per lead), sale (Pay per sale or Revenue Share Percentage). So, basically, an affiliate webmaster works on promoting a product or a service from the affiliate programs of his choice. The affiliate webmaster usually uses text links, banner ads, articles and other promotion methods on his own website in order to send traffic to the website he is promoting.
A company, let’s say eBay, goes to another web site and asks them to place a banner or link to eBay on their site. Every time a user clicks on that eBay banner and visits the site, the owner of the original site (the webmaster) gets a commission. In this particular example, the affiliate has been paid on a “Pay per click” basis. It’s as simple as that.
The history of affiliate marketing goes back to approximately 1994 with the trailblazing music website www.CDNow.com. They were, as far as most people know, the first site to pay other sites for directing Internet traffic to them. Internet giant Amazon.com soon caught on and became the site most associated with affiliate marketing. Today, the practice of affiliate marketing is used by essentially every major web site in the world.
Why affiliate marketing?
One of the reasons that affiliate marketing has proven to be so popular is that it is completely based on performance. In most cases, the company doing the advertising doesn’t pay a single penny to the site that is carrying their ad unless there is evidence that Internet traffic has been driven to the advertising site. There are, however, other ways of doing affiliate marketing.
Some advertising sites have paid the site hosting their link based not on the number of times an original IP visits through the link, but on the number of times the banner ad was “seen.” This method presents a whole host of problems since things like hit counts can be forged and there is no way to insure that just because someone visited a web page that had your logo on it that they even saw it or if they did, that they even knew what it was.
Other methods of affiliate marketing include paying only when a link is followed AND some kind of transaction takes place. This can be tough on the site hosting the link because the attention span of the average Internet user isn’t long enough in most cases to follow a link and then either complete a purchase, or fill out a form of some kind. The conventional method simply pays a host a commission for every time an original IP is directed to their site.
In a matter of only a few years, affiliate marketing has become one of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to a site. Since, in most cases, both the advertiser and the host profit from the set up, there is no reason to believe that affiliate marketing won’t be a dominant advertising method well into the future.
One of the great things about the Internet is how it works as a complete reference. The encyclopedia, the dictionary, the White and Yellow pages and even maps have all become antiquated with the invention of the Internet. How can this help you, the new affiliate marketer? It’s easy. The big money in affiliate marketing is found in niche marketing.
Before we get into it, what exactly is niche marketing? Niche marketing is marketing to a particular group instead of the public at large. Now, on the surface, this sounds a bit strange. Don’t you want EVERYONE to buy from your website? Of course you do, but making a site that appeals to everyone and writing web content to sell your product that appeals to everyone is impossible. That’s where niche marketing comes in. You pick a product, say, Hickory Farms meats and cheeses and you do your best to market these products. When you take on a niche product, you have to ask yourself a series of questions.
Who is going to buy my product?
Well, if you’re selling Hickory Farms products, chances are you won’t be selling to many teenagers. Your market is going to skew older, so you want to write copy that is going to appeal to an older audience. Hold off on the slang, the off-color jokes and the pop-culture references.
What benefits does my product have?
In this case, Hickory Farms is a company that has been making quality products for generations. You can play up the history aspect, you can play up the quality aspect. You can even play up the holidays aspect, since they are a company that always seemed to peak during the holidays. Every product out there, every single one, has a list of benefits you can highlight. Make sure you know them and make sure you tell your customers all about them.
Do I know enough about this product?
Do I know enough about this product to write new, interesting content about it every few weeks? This is the BIG question. If you’re passionate about Hickory Farms and you love their products, then you should feel confident that yes, you can write a new article about their product line every few weeks. If you agreed to participate in an affiliate program only because the commission was high and you don’t know thing one about the product you’re selling, you might want to rethink your choice.
While niche marketing may sound a bit odd on the surface, it really is the way to go. Making your site focused and concentrating your energy on a particular group will make it seem more legitimate and you can count on better business in no time flat.
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