by Comm, Joel
Figure 5.1 Amazon’s Associates program lets you offer any of the company’s products in a huge range of different ways... for a commission of up to 15 percent. In practice, the commission is usually much lower.
Put an affiliate ad from Amazon on your site, and the trustworthiness of the merchant isn’t an issue. The only remaining challenge will be whether you can persuade your users that the product is worth buying.
You can spend a huge amount of time browsing affiliate networks in your search for the perfect merchant for your site. You can lose hours comparing commission rates, reading reviews from other sellers, and trying to second-guess the kind of service you’ll get from the merchant’s affiliate manager. But when you’re using affiliate products as an additional sales channel to complement your other methods of generating a KaChing, the most important factor will be the ease with which you can move users from browsers to buyers. You want to make sure that there are as few obstacles as possible on the way to the cash desk. That means choosing a merchant you believe will be familiar to your users and one with whom they’re used to doing business.
Usually, that’s pretty clear. If you want to promote a book on a topic related to the subject of your article, then it’s likely that Amazon will be the most trusted retailer. Things get a little more complex when you have a real choice between similar outlets offering competing affiliate programs. Photographers, for example, can now earn a little money by submitting their images to microstock sites, which license them to publishers in return for a fee. Each of those sites has an affiliate program that reflects the sorts of users it needs most. iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com), the most popular microstock site, pays a one-time $10 bounty for new customers and nothing for new photographers. BigStockPhoto (www.bigstockphoto.com) pays $5 for new photographers and 35 percent of the value of the first sale for new buyers. Dreamstime (www.dreamstime.com) has the potential to be the most lucrative of all: It pays affiliates 10 percent of what referred photographers earn and what referred buyers spend for up to three years.
It might seem that Dreamstime’s affiliate program offers the best deal. But if photographers don’t feel that Dreamstime will sell their photos, then they won’t sign up. And if buyers don’t feel that Dreamstime offers them a wide enough selection of pictures, then they won’t buy any.
When that happens, affiliates earn 10 percent of nothing.
Similarly, a site with content aimed at photographers, but has very few images for buyers wouldn’t make much money promoting iStockphoto, which pays nothing for new photographers.
These sorts of choices turn up across different fields. Amazon’s Associate program is very different from that offered by Borders or the one offered by Barnes & Noble. While Borders pays according to a performance scale that tops out at 8.5 percent, Barnes & Noble pays a flat 6 percent. Amazon, with its front-page 15 percent boast, actually makes the choices even more complicated by offering two different kinds of affiliate programs: The company’s Performance Fee structure has a scale that starts at 4 percent, and although it can reach 15 percent for some goods, it’s unlikely that many “associates” would see those returns; the Classic Fee structure pays a flat 4 percent, significantly less than the affiliate would have earned for the same sale had he or she signed up with Barnes & Noble.
However, as a Barnes & Noble affiliate, that person might struggle to make the sale. Affiliates earn a commission only for online sales, and those are more likely to come from Amazon.
While it’s easy to compare the details of different programs, without knowing the click-through rates of different programs and which kinds of audiences generated them, it’s always very difficult to say which program would suit your site best.
Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to stumble toward the best option for your site. The first is to test out different programs. That will take awhile, but it’s the only way to know for sure which program delivers the best results in practice.
The second way is to benefit from the experience of other publishers in your field. Lee Torrens, for example, is a microstock photographer whose blog Microstock Diaries (www.microstockdiaries.com) offers advice for other photographers looking to increase their picture sales. He also provides reviews and overviews of the site’s affiliate programs so that photographers with web sites can add to their earnings through referrals as well as image sales. His site has become a major resource for photographers hoping to earn a little cash—and it helps them choose the right affiliate programs for their site, shortening their testing times.
You should find that this sort of information is available in many fields, and if it isn’t available in yours, you know what to write your next blog about.
Choosing the Products that People Want
If assessing merchants and comparing programs can be a bit of a head-scratcher, choosing products should be a breeze.
The rule is: Choose products you know.
We’ve already seen how vital trust is in a successful affiliate program. When you feel confident that your users will get some real benefits out of using the product, they’ll pick up on your enthusiasm. They’ll also understand that every time you’re offering a product for sale, you’re not just doing it because you want to make a buck. They’ll believe that you’re doing it because you love using the product and that they’ll love using the product, too.
This is one of the great things about adding affiliate links to a web site. Not only do you get to reward the creator of a product you like, you get to bring some real benefits to your users—and make money out of it, too. Perhaps the best place to look for products to recommend then is on your shelf and on your desk.
If you’ve bought something and enjoyed using it, then recommending it to the readers of your web site should be a breeze.
As with any rule, this one tends to be broken.
There are plenty of web sites making good money with affiliate links that lead to products the publisher has never heard of. My site DealofDay.com has plenty of affiliate links leading to products I’ve never tried. But the site isn’t personal, and the range of goods on offer makes it clear that these links aren’t recommendations. The site is offering opportunities, and the users are free to decide whether they want to make the most of them (Figure 5.2).
Figure 5.2 My DealofDay.com web site offers deals from thousands of retailers. These deals don’t come recommended, but they do give shoppers a chance to pick up bargains-and this gives my site plenty of opportunity to earn affiliate income.
That creates a whole new kind of opportunity for publishers. If you write about products, however broad the range, you can still make money from affiliate links. The strategy here is mass marketing rather than niche marketing. Instead of promoting one carefully chosen product to people you know will like it, you offer lots of different products to a wide range of people and hope that there’s enough variety to please everyone—or at least enough to give you a decent number of sales.
Sites like these aren’t easy to create. They’re also difficult to market. When you have a broad selection of products, all you can do is make them available. You can’t push them directly to buyers, because no one will believe that you’ve used every product you’re promoting. Even review sites, a useful way to add lots of affiliate products to a web site, can struggle a little here. If you write a negative review, no one will want to buy the product. You’ll have killed your own commissions. But if you only write positive reviews, you’ll kill the credibility of your site, something that’s even more serious.
That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Review sites that focus on a specific niche can generate very good revenue and supply plenty of opportunity to offer both helpful content and profit-generating ads.
AppCraver (www.appcraver.com), for example, is a site that provides short reviews of iPhone apps. The reviews each come with an affiliate link that leads to Apple’s iTunes store, where readers can make a purchase. (Apple pays 5 percent commission for each sale.) But that�
�s not the only way the site monetizes those reviews.
In fact, it’s likely that most readers will decide to purchase directly from their iPhones rather than downloading first to iTunes and then moving the app to their mobile devices. So AppCraver offers an alternative way to turn users into cash. In addition to linking to apps, the site also runs a store that sells iPhone accessories. That store is operated as a separate site, but ads for specific products also run on the side of the page next to the reviews themselves (Figure 5.3).
When it comes to choosing products, you should find that being selective and recommending items you’ve used and loved should deliver high returns. It is also possible to build a site, such as a review site, that offers affiliate links to lots of different affiliate products. Just don’t depend on those affiliate links alone to deliver all the KaChing the site can bring.
Figure 5.3 AppCraver 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 the post office. (My sister just had a baby and B. wants to send her one of her quilts.) I must have been there a hundred times since we moved here but, sure enough, I took a wrong turn and ended up on the highway heading in the wrong direction. I’d like to tell people that I’m always at least 10 minutes late because my life is so busy, but the truth is that it’s because I never know where I am.
Last week, I finally gave in. I admitted that I’m hopeless and boughta GPS system. It’s great. I went for the Magellan RoadMate 1470. So far, it’s working great. The graphics are much easier to read than I expected them to be. The voice is clear and far less annoying than listening to the kids say, Are we there yet?” And it hasn’t once directed me into a river.
If you’re geographically challenged like me, then you should get one. You might be able to finally get places on time.
There are a few points that you want to note before creating an affiliate-supported post like this. First, it’s personal. It’s filled with all sorts of little pieces of information that say something about the writer. The article doesn’t just say the writer went to the post office, for example. It also says why he went and what was in the parcel. That brings the reader into his life and builds a personal connection. This isn’t an ad; it’s a friend telling another friend what he’s been up to lately.
That’s the kind of communication that leads to sales.
That’s also why the post is lighthearted. It doesn’t list all of the product’s features, and it doesn’t even say it’s the best GPS system on the market. A review might do that, but when you’re recommending a product that’s worked for you, you won’t know whether it’s th
e best or just good enough.
All you can do is talk from your own experience, and your experience is that it was good enough for you. That’s your advantage, and it’s something that a post like this makes the most of.
If you’re going to use this post as a model for regular, additional affiliate income on your web site, start by building context. Explain what led you to make the purchase so that the product’s solution to your problem is clear. Make a few positive comments about the product. Don’t go overboard (unless you really do believe that it’s the greatest thing since the spam blocker). Just say what you like about the product the most.
Finally, end by suggesting that people who are like you—and that should be most of your readers—go out and buy one, too.
It’s an approach that’s subtle, easy to do, and doesn’t make your users feel as though they’re getting a hard sell. It won’t turn you into an overnight millionaire, but it should deliver conversion rates of perhaps 1 to 2 percent.