Web Earnings

One key aspect of an affiliate website is ensuring that every area is monetised as well as it possibly can be. This doesn’t mean stuffing as many adverts and banners as you can onto a page (as some people seem to think), but is more about selecting the right mix of banners and ads for the page.

When a person visits a webpage, they do so for a reason. It may be to view a product or to read an article. As an affiliate it is important that after they have finished with your page, you present them with an appropriate call to action so that they can take the next step in their journey (and you can earn your cash). Take a price comparison site for example. This site will list products by certain criteria, eg price, size, user rating etc and allow the user to click the product to see further details. From the product detail page, the user will then be able to click the product to visit the merchants site, but what if after visiting the information page they decide this isn’t the one they want after all, is it easy for them to navigate back? Are they presented with suitable alternatives? Or are they simply going to click off and look elswhere.
 
The common thing in affiliate marketing is to complement the page with adsense advertising but although this is probably the easiest thing to do, it certainly may not always be the best. If you have little content on the page, the ads returned may not be relevant and you may find that the cpc that you are receiving is less than from other solutions. Another problem for UK advertisers is that the payments are calculated in $ so exchange rate factors may see you losing out, and of course for small advertisers, the customisation options of adsense can be limited.
 
As an alternative, you could feature a large ‘call to action’ to return to the search page or view alternatives, or alternatively, use the space to capture email addresses for mailings of future updates or new products. There are also a number of other publisher solutions that may be able to offer better branded solutions than google. Miva offer branded publisher solution through affiliate future (sign up for an account and click on business services in the merchant directory to find the Miva program). They offer branded search boxes and targeted contextual advertising which can easily be integrates into your site. The advantage over Adsense is that earnings are calculated in £ which is much better for UK advertisers. Also, you will have access to an account manager via affiliate future so contact is much easier.
 
The complementary ads should be placed in such a way so as to not detract from the main content or divert the users attention, but simply to act as an alternative if the user is not interested in clicking on the main focus point of the page. Remember, if your page doesn’t offer that alternative, the visitor will look elsewhere

A common mistake people make when integrating adsense into their sites is poor positioning which can seriously reduce click through rate and earnings.

Different people have different reasons for adding contextual advertising to their sites. Some do it to complement the existing content on their pages, some do it to earn revenue to pay for hosting and general costs of maintaining the site, and some people build the sites with the sole intention of making money from the adsense.

Whatever your reason – you need to position your ads correctly on the page. Having your ad right at the bottom where it will never be seen or far away from your content will mean that people won’t click. You need to have your ads positioned above the fold (so it will display initially when the page loads up, without the user needing to scroll down). If you are looking for a high click through rate, you should place your ads in the body of the text, so that they blend in, such as at the top of directory listings, or directly underneath  the header so that the users eyes are drawn towards the ad when they first see the page.

A common practice on article driven sites is to position the content unit in the middle of the article with the content continued below, or to feature a skyscraper ad directly next to the article. Not only does this increase click through rates but also delivers ads to the user while they are reading about the topic and you don’t get much more contextual than that!

You do need to consider however that when the user clicks the ad they will be sirected to another site, so if you are trying to retain visitors then contextual advertising such as adsense is probably not the way to go!

How to Generate Inbound Links

Inbound links is one of the more important factors that Google and other Search Engines take into account when deciding where your site should rank for any given key phrase. The quality of the links is very important as well as the theme of the site the link originated from, the ‘trust rank’ of the site that the link originated from and a whole host of other factors.

The best way to attract inbound links to your site is to feature interesting and informative content that people will want to link to from their sites or blogs. ‘Link Bait’ is the name given to content that attracts links. Although linkbaiting sounds like something that is pretty black hat, it’s actually just the term coined for content that naturally attracts inbound link.

For example: The Energy Fiend Website managed to get a link from AOL’s homepage with their Caffeine Test tool. And the Subservient Chicken is perhaps the best example of linkbait, generating thousands of links within days.

Perhaps the best proof that linkbait works is that I am linking to these sites whilst writing a post about linkbait! Matt Cutts wrote a nice post about link baiting which in itself of course, is link bait!

This article in itself may prove to be link bait – someone else whilst writing a blog post might want to link to a page that explains what linkbait is and hey presto, I’ve caught a link!

The fact is – if your site is just like all of the others in the sector then why should people link to you rather than your competitors? You need to give them a reason to link to you. Interesting tools and informative content are things that you should be thinking about, basically, something that you think people would want to read.

If you take this site for example. I would like to rank well for Online Marketing related keywords and phrases, so I would ideally like links from good quality sites in this sector. I therefore want to introduce content to the site that will draw links from such sites, such as SEO tools, maybe some informative content about online marketing, or a directory of affiliate programs .

Link Baiting should be your first thought when trying to generate inbound links, it’s free and relatively easy, All you need is a little imagination!

Reciprocal Links

Now these don’t carry as much weight in Google as unique inbound links but can be useful in ensuring your pages get crawled on a regular basis and if done in the right way, can also generate visitors, yes that’s right, real people!

In the past I have used Link Assistant quite effectively. This tool automates some of the process of link building but still allows enough flexibility to be useful. This tool will crawl the internet looking for potential link partners, you can then filter them based on certain criteria and search for information on the sites. You can then send out personalised emails to each partner. Link Assistant isn’t just good for searching link partners but helps you build up a good idea of your competition, and related sites that you could be looking to form other initiatives with. You can download a trial version of Link Assistant and try it out to see if it will work for you before you buy

Buying Links

Purchasing links is a common way of increasing the number of inbound links to your site. Google does now however devalue the weighting of inbound links that look as if they have been purchased, which includes site wide links and links that don’t look natural. There is also speculation that link sin the body of the text of a page carry more value than links in footers, headers and sidebars so my advice would be that if you are buying links, you shouldn’t just look at potential SEO value but also the number of visitors that you may be able to get from those links. This way if the SEO value doesn’t materialise, you should still be able to benefit in increase visitor numbers directly.

You may find that you are approached by companies offering to sell you hundreds or thousands of inbound links. My advice would be to avoid such companies like the plague! This sort of black hat SEO will not work. I receive 7- 8 of these phone calls every week. Common sense tells you that if a product is any good, they wouldn’t need to resort to cold calling to try and sell it!

Now more than ever before, web publishers have a vast array of tools at their disposal to help them make money from their site visitors. Online companies are willing to pay you for qualified visitors that you can deliver from your site. If you are looking to make money from your site, then you should take a look at the following options.

Google Adsense

By putting Adsense links on your site you can make money every time a visitor clicks on one of those links. When you set up an Adsense account you create a piece of code using a simple online interface that will automatically generate the code to add to your page. The links will then be created based on the content of the page so your visitors will only be directed to relevant products and services. We use Adsense to monetise this site. 

 Kelkoo

Kelkoo will pay you for referring visitors to their site.  Once the visitor is directed to their site, you can earn every time the visitor clicks on a merchant. As most visitors to comparison sites click on more than one merchant, promoting Kelkoo means that you can earn multiple times for each visitor. Kelkoo use TradeDoubler to manage their partner program. Sign up to the Kelkoo partner program on TradeDoubler here to start earning.

Miva

In the same way as the Google Adsense, you can publish targeted ads through Miva on your site. Using Miva differs slightly from Adsense in that it is a less automated process – you will be contacted by an account manager who will draw up a proposal based on how to best optimise the traffic from your site. Miva also offer more advanced options such as exit traffic optimisation and ad units completely customised to your site. You can sign up to the Miva program through OMG here

Shopping.com

Shopping.com is a price comparison site (similar to Kelkoo) – you can earn money by referring visitors to the shopping.com site through a wide range of baners and search boxes. You can customise your links to fit into the theme of your site and earn up to 25p for each click. Sign up the Shopping.com partner program through TradeDoubler here .

Affiliate Programs

Most online merchants offer affiliate programs which allow publishers to earn commission for every sale generated form a visitor referred by that publisher. By signing up to an Affiliate Network you can choose the specific merchants that you want to feature on your site that you think your visitors will be interested in. Commission rates vary but you can generally earn higher percentages when you refer more sales. Sign up to networks such as TradeDoubler , Affiliate Future and Affiliate Window today and choose the merchants you would like to feature.