Help Stefan CampaignCeltnet WebInfo eZine
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
In This Issue
- Window on the Web
- Featured Article:
Four Questions to Ask Before You Look for Affiliate Programs - Classified Ad Board
- Comment
- Business Tip
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Window on the Web
Many sites and affiliate programs have also been jumping on the World Cup bandwagon, using this sporting event to promote new products and promotions. However, unless you have a very responsive target audience it's probably too late to do much that's World Cup related by now. What this event does reveal is the importance of planning for any big calendar event. If you're going to make any big push around a major sporting or calendar event then you'd better start planning at least two months in advance, putting the required web pages and applications needed in place before drawing-in the indexing engines and beginning your marketing campaign.
Dyfed
Editor/Publisher
Email me @ editor@celtnet.org.uk
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Feature Article
Four Questions to Ask Before You Look for Affiliate Programs
by Matt DeAngelis
Ive been receiving emails from people asking for my advice on which affiliate programs are the best, who pays the most and most often, and many other basic questions. Id like to answer those questions on this forum, but I can only type so fast.
I went out this weekend looking for content that I could publish here temporarily while I got down to writing. I had a hard time finding unbiased content. Most of the so-called reviews out there are infomercials, and thats not what I was looking for with this blog.
So youre going to have to bear with me. Ive been looking and learning and reading and talking, and Ive got a lot to say. I just need the time to write it down, and I will, starting tomorrow. No, really I will.
In the meantime, you need to ask yourself this are you ready for an affiliate program, or Internet Advertising in general? I put together four questions you should ask before you embark on your affiliate program or any Internet advertising.
Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you enbark on your affiliate program, I am going to review two concepts that I use often here on Affiliateblog. The first is what I call the macro view of your Internet presence:
Incoming visitors -> Internet Presence < - Sales or Actions
You are really running two campaigns with your Internet presence -- the first campaign is concerned with getting visitors to the site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to get those visitors to do something. That something may be just to spend more time at your site, or it may be to sign up for something or buy something.
The other represents the process of Internet advertising:
Impression -> Click -> Action
Most affiliate programs pay publishers in the last part of the process, the Action. Ill be using both of these concepts in my questions. So here we go
1. Do you know enough about your visitors?
There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. While some affiliate marketing hubs are experimenting with context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners and banner rotation on affiliate sites, YOU will be the one to decide what kind of products and services you want to offer your visitors. This seems like a minor detail, but it is a major factor in your success.
If you havent already, take a look at the stats for your web site over the past month or so. Where do your visitors come from? Have you paid for Google, Yahoo or other search engine traffic? What are the keywords that people used to get to you?
More complex and specific search terms tend to result in more immediate conversions, while broader search terms may result in sales later. If people get to your site using what you believe to be broad search terms, you need to be sure that the cookie life (the amount of time that passes between someone from your site visiting the affiliate merchants site and the sale) is long.
Do you have textlinks or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of the visitors from those sites? Have you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on which you advertise and asked him or her about their visitors?
Do you know the websites? Have you visited the sites that advertise on the same sites as you? When you investigate all of these things a profile of the visitors to your site should begin to emerge.
Which search engine brings you the most traffic? If its Google, the user is slightly more apt to be male, and in the middle (of MSN, Yahoo and Google) as far as propensity toward buying something (42% more likely than the average user). Theres a terrific article on marketingvox.com if you want to see more details. You can also find some interesting demographic info on the major search engines from AQABA.
You should pay particular attention to the domains of your visitors. If you have a lot of AOL traffic for example, you should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35 or older (77%) and married (62%).
If you have trouble with textual representation vs. graphical representation (as I do), there is a terrific product called VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. The text is represented as pictures (buildings, people, buses for the search engines, etc). You can see it here. Disclaimer: I am a VisitorVille affiliate.
After all this you should be able to sit down and come up with the profile of a typical visitor. This profile should hopefully include estimates of age, country of origin, education and income.
Try to think like your visitors. Try to anticipate their interests and the products and services they might want to purchase. Affiliate programs raise the bar from PPC your payment comes at the end of the Internet marketing process (the Action) rather than at the beginning (Impression or Click) like Google Adsense or Doubleclick. You need to apply more brainpower to the process, and youll make more money if you do it right.
2. Is your site perfect?
Youre asking someone to buy something from your site. If the pages have sloppy html code, broken links or instability from a bad Cascading Stylesheet, it makes you look cheesy. Weve all been uncomfortable buying something off a cheesy website. You dont want to be that website.
Lets start with the html code. Are you sure there are no errors in it? Have you used an html checker like the one at W3C? I find mistakes in my code all the time. Unless you check your code on several browsers in several resolutions you might not catch an error. The validator will. If you use Cascading Stylesheets you should also visit the CSS Checker.
Speaking of validators, you should check your links often. W3.org also has a link validator.
The site should also be optimized for search engines, be easy to understand and navigate, and should have a sitemap for people (and spiders) to find their way around. You should have had ten of your closest friends take a look at the site and give you their feedback, and you should always listen to unsolicited comments from users with an open mind and place value on them. If someone takes the time from their busy day to send you an email about your site, they feel strongly about it and you should take a close look at what theyre talking about.
Understand that if your Incoming Visitors campaign is not working right, youre wasting your time with your Sales or Action program.
3. Do you know what kind of ads youre going to use, and where the ads are going to go?
People have been ignoring banners for ten years. Thats why they shake and make sounds (someday Ill tell you about the screaming match I had with a creative director the day we put out the first talking banner ad) to try to get your attention. Where you put it on the page is going to make a huge difference. Briefly banners need to go somewhere the eye naturally rests (next to the masthead, near the navigation, at the bottom of the page).
Placement of any ads is a huge part of getting them noticed or clicked.
A lot of people (including me) believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and be close to the same in text size and color as the text. You need to surf around and look at where people place their ads, and you need to figure out where you think they would work on your site.
If you plan to create pages for some of the products you endorse (a great idea), you need to figure out how prominently you want to place the advertising. Most people wont buy something if they believe youre shilling for a particular company. They will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service. You need to figure out how to keep the distinction.
4. Whats your hunch on the right kind of offers for your site?
I ask this question a lot. Now that you have a better idea of the demographics of your visitors, try to decide on which action you think they would be more apt to take pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or even pay-per-click (hard to come by) on your site.
If you have a general interest website that gives away free stuff its probably going to be difficult to sell people products from that website. It might be smarter to try to get them to sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers that target the age group of your site rather than offers that target a specific interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket sales or only leads. Leads get the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require less of a commitment.
Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you can come up with. Then you can go out and find the different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, try to put different ads in similar spaces on the same pages, and see how they do.
Get your questions answered and youre ready to take the plunge into affiliate marketing.
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About the author:
Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.
Classified Ad Board
Is your ad out yet? Subscriber and co-op ads are listed on the Classified Ad Board. The board is refreshed every issue with a new batch of ads.
Comment
Internationalizing your Pages
Internationalization is one of the buzz-words of the web today; though nobody seems to really know what this term means. Despite this, the internet is a truly international marketplace. You website copy can be read by anyone anywhere and your ads can be targetted to anyone. This is one of the big advantages of Google's Adsense system that serves localized ads based on the surfer's IP address. For most people this is the addres of their ISP or internet service provider. As IP adresses are determined by one of four international organizations it's actually possible to map an IP address to a country. In my IP to country conversion page I tell you precisely how to do this.
Armed with this information you can detect spoof IP adresses very easily as well as converting the IP address to the country of origin. Once you can do this you can begin to deliver ad content based specifically on where a surfer is coming from. In this respect the Symantec affiliate program is excellent (as is the eBay program) in that it provides distinct ads for several different countries.
Now comes the point at which I have a beef with several advertising programmes which serve US-specific content. I've applied to a number of these and have been turned down every time (because my domain is a .uk domain). Obviously the advertisers don't get the whole principle of the internet and certainly aren't aware of what someone with a little nouse and a modicum of programming skill can achieve (I'm assuming that this isn't an issue of nationalism and locality).
Personal gripe over, the truth is that the ability to determine a surfer's country of origin is a very powerful tool in the armoury of any internet marketer. You can deliver advertisements targeted to your visitor specifically and you can even develop applications such as my eBay misspelling search tool that relies on determining a surfer's country of origin to provide the appropriate version of the tool for them.
Business Tip
When to Publish
It may surprise you that this eZine is published on a Tuesday (rather than a weekend). After all, much of the content is written on the weekend — why not publish immediately. The real reason for this is the responsiveness of readers and it's a secret that you can learn for your own website.
In examining visitor and click-through rates for my own website I soone discovered that my best visitor numbers (and the most responsive visitors) were actually arriving mid-week with Thursday being my best day. Saturday was OK, but Sunday was completely hopeless. I then started some research on the web and it turns out that the empirical findings from my own site are supported by other studies as well. In fact, it emerges that Tuesday is the day people are most likely to read your copy and investigate your offers after the weekend as it represents the point of maximum alertness after the weekend.
