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