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- HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR AFFILIATE PROGRAMS (Part 1 of 3):
The short answer: think creatively!!... Find your own unique
niche... And track your experiments to see which work best (if well
enough isn't good enough for your purposes).
But
let's back up a bit first. Initially, you'll have some setup to attend
to. You'll have to spend some time selecting, then downloading,
links/banners and placing them on your site, and so forth... Rest, if
you need to! When you have the energy, face the next step:
making your affiliate program/s come alive.
CHOOSING AFFILIATE I.D.s:
One little
point that can make a big difference... When you're invited
to choose your own affiliate "I.D.", use a word or phrase that's
descriptive of your business or, better yet, of the affiliate program
itself (i.e., the product or service you're promoting).
You might
think that it makes sense to choose some word you happen to like for
your I.D. (as you might with a password). I did that at
first... And now I'm stuck with it! (I wish someone
had given me that excellent advice I just gave you.)
...Because
oftentimes, that I.D. is used as part of your affiliate
coding - which may be visible to those clicking on your
link. And you might as well make use of every chance you get
for impressing on people the validity of the link they're clicking
on... Hence the choice of keywords that reflect back
something about the link's object.
This is
comparable to choosing a descriptive domain name rather than using an
undescriptive business name for your URL. For
instance...
I've used the excellent software "Postmaster Express",
which allows one to set up unlimited autoresponders from one's own
computer (it's also superb as a contact management database).
Since I figured I'd be emphasizing the autoresponder feature of this product,
doesn't the affiliate URL "http://www.post-master.net/rs/autoresponder"
look reassuring? - especially since the company's
chosen domain name doesn't explicitly describe that aspect of the
product. If I
had chosen the name of my favorite something-or-other for the I.D.
instead of "autoresponder", I would have lost that chance to influence
my readers to go ahead and click on that link.
...Nor does
it hurt that my context-sensible I.D. made the link look less like an
affiliate link! If people happen to take that for a
subject-related subdirectory of the affiliate site, so much the better.
Sometimes
you don't know enough to think ahead (sigh). ...Learning from my
mistakes is a lot of what this website is about!
INSERTING AFFILIATE LINKS:
You
can normally put in whatever you want as the link that's visible to the
site visitor (like this) and use the special affiliate-coded URL link in the HTML
coding. But...
Most
affiliate clearinghouses have very complex affiliate links, and with some, each
element of them must be put into your pages exactly as
given... And sometimes the offerings might not coincide precisely with
what you'd like to show. So you'll have to rethink how to use the
affiliate link on your site. (Some companies don't even offer a
basic company name link, which is a little annoying! - I don't at all like being coerced into
displaying their endorsements as though they were
mine - hmmph.
Nor am I at all grateful for having a company's link show only the
domain of their affiliate clearinghouse or affiliate program software.)
If
you are also (or instead) using a banner image, you must link that
to the same specially-coded URL (again, you might have to accept the
affiliate company's version only). (The image actually links from a
specified point on your webpage to the image file itself, which must be
in the same directory on your computer as the page it is to show up
in... Likewise, it must be in the same directory on your webhost's
server.) After
setting up the links, you would then reload your pages to your
webhost's server, uploading any image files separately as well (in binary
format, if there's a choice).
If you use a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what
you get") HTML editor to create your webpages,
BEWARE!!! A low-level editor may very well change the HTML coding
you think you are diligently copying exactly. (Even unto changing it after
you've carefully added it to the HTML source code... The next time you
open the file in your editor, there it goes again!)... And you
may not get credit for the click-throughs.
Look
for deletions of phrases, changes in word order, changes in
capitalization... Your editor may be translating code into its own
standards - it will all work, because there are
different ways of coding; but the affiliate clearinghouse won't be able
to track what they need to record the links from your site with their
computer algorithms.
When
this is the case, the only way to absolutely ensure that the coding
isn't changed is to add the HTML coding directly to
your notepad. (Meaning, don't get into the notepad from
your WYSIWYG editor, but call it up directly from your desktop, or
wherever it resides on your computer.) ...Then upload the file to your
webhost's server before you ever try to view that page again from
within your editor. In other words, this is all a big fat hassle (!)
unless your editor makes it possible to "wall off" selected code.
Having
very little money at my disposal, or time to learn HTML, I had used
Netscape Composer (years ago) to create my first site's webpages. With
more than one affiliate link on a page, I found it just too difficult
to keep track of what was going on and ended up buying an editor because it could "arrest" changes to added codes (this
is called "supporting absolute positioning").
However,
the switching from one editor to another cost me much time in fixing
the other things that went awry (HTML head
information missing, the wrong drive being listed in the links, ".htm"
pages instead of ".html"... sigh!). I'm here to tell you that, if you
possibly can, it's much better to do it right in the first
place!
Some
non-HTML-damaging WYSIWYG editors popular in 2010 are DreamWeaver (from
Adobe - expensive), Fusion (from NetObjects - half as much), and
Kompozer (free open source software from Mozilla - and very similar to
MicroSoft's erstwhile FrontPage editor, which I used happily until
upgrading my PC beyond it).
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AFFILIATE LINK MASKING:
Okay,
there's a way to avoid having to worry about how the affiliate link
comes across; and I've saved it until now, because you won't
necessarily want to use it (or might not want to use it everywhere)
- there are, again, issues that might crop up later on to make you wish
you'd known enough to think things through a little more
thoroughly. (ESP would sure come in handy sometimes, wouldn't
it?)
But,
first we'll talk about link masking ( to differentiate from "cloaking", which can refer to
hiding a page from the search engines)... You can
use another link that automatically loads your affiliate link into the
clicker's browser - and a simple way to do this is via a "redirect
page". The main advantages to doing this might be: - 1) People won't be able to "steal" your affiliate link by just typing
the merchant's domain into their browser, or by substituting their own
affiliate ID for yours in hopes of purchasing the product at a
discount.*
- 2) People won't know that it's
an affiliate link (i.e., they might think it could,
at least, be just another page of information on your site) and
therefore wouldn't be so apt to shy away from what they might perceive
as advertising. [Aside: Ahh...
perhaps this sort of cut-throat competitiveness in the world of savvy
affiliates might encourage you to select a niche where "nicer" people
thrive? Really, there are already so many
webmarketers marketing to webmarketers... Look for your
special niche! - targeting non-marketers?]
- 3) You can shorten
long URLs (which is especially useful for including them in email messages,
where a long URL may not fit on one line, making the clickable portion
incomplete - or in something like Twitter "tweets", where you're limited to a certain number of characters).
(*Note
that this whole problem of link stealing arose from the ubiquitous
practice of replacing the affiliate ID portion of ClickBank links, and that ClickBank eventually offered a solution... in that links that are taken directly from their website are given a masking "scramble-coding". But, if you take the link from a merchant's
website affiliate page, it will be the stealable one. To solve this
dilemma, you could then go to the ClickBank merchants list and - quite
laboriously, usually - look for the listing and get the scrambled link
there... But don't bother with that! - use the page with the "HopLink Shield" all on its own: and enter the ClickBank vendor's ID ["nickname"] plus your own.) This
"mask link", as I think of it, can be any
URL - and if simply shortening is your goal, you can use one of the
services such as TinyURL or BudURL to do this. (There are several
others - but not all offer tracking and the right kind of redirects. See this article by SEO guru Danny Sullivan for more information on options and issues.) NameStick
is a service that has a different twist on link cloaking... It
allows you to choose a separate domain name to use for one or more
specific affiliate links (you can set up unlimited sub-directories, if
that makes sense in your case). The cool thing about this is that
search engines do spider these "mini-domains" and can view the
customizable meta-tags that help with ranking. Another nifty
aspect is that your
domain stays in the SE address bar, not the affiliate link or even
the merchant's domain - so there's a better chance that a visitor who
leaves and comes back to buy will do so through you. NameStick is very handy for those who don't want to set up their own websites! (You even get email accounts and forwarding.) But -
what affiliates with websites usually use is a link that includes their
own existing website domain name... The premises being that
A) they want to hide their affiliate link; B) the more times people see
your domain name, the better, as far as psychological impact goes - it
gets "branded" into their consciousness; and C) if
your domain contains a keyword that's emphasized on the page where the
link is, this will help a bit in your search engine ranking for that
page. You would create a special page or subdirectory for the
mask link, and this would transfer the clicker to the affiliate-coded
URL.
Going
back to my Postmaster Express example, I could choose to "house" the
redirect link page on this site and simply set up a redirect page for
it... whose URL might be
"http://www.AffiliatePrimer.com/autoresponder.html" (or
".../postmaster.html", if I already had a page about
autoresponders I'd used that word for). Or I could set up a
subdirectory whose URL would be something like
"http://www.AffiliatePrimer.com/autoresponding/" or
"http://www.AffiliatePrimer.com/pm/", if making it shorter outweighed
the desire to use a meaningful keyword.
If you'd
like to go ahead with masking some or all of your affiliate links (and
your webhost doesn't offer an automated link masking feature), here's
the simplest way to take advantage of it: This HTML-type (as
opposed to CGI and Java script versions) redirect page creator - "META Refresh Creator" - is free and easy to use: http://www.webpage-tools.com/refreshtool.asp Or you can see how to create the
basic HTML page yourself here: http://davesite.com/webstation/html/chap15.shtml
- see the "Auto-refreshing" section of the tutorial. (The
page will appear blank - the information goes in the HTML header.)
However,
against the possible advantages of this practice I would place some
possible disadvantages...
- You've
got to keep track of what you've decided to call the phony pages or
subdirectories - so you can use the same masked link the next time you
want to refer people to that affiliate product. If you're
doing this for a lot of affiliate links, it really adds to the
complexity of your webmastering task. (And if you add too
many such cool tricks to your webmarketing efforts, you might wake up
one day and realize that you're overwhelmed - I speak from experience!)
- If
you have more than one website, do you use different
mask links for each site, or the same one for all your sites?
Using a link for another of my sites on this one
could add to my readers' awareness of my other site, and would be of
some use in terms of adding to its link popularity... but is it
appropriate to "water down" the attention paid to this site while
you're reading here? And if you ever decide to back out of
one of your websites, let's hope it's not the one you chose to use as the
host for all your redirection pages! But if I set up
redirection pages for all my sites, that really
adds to the tracking complications.
- Do
you choose to use redirection links in your ebooks? If so,
you'd better hope that you never wish to get rid of the site you host
your mask links on (or to change the pages around in it). Ebooks can be around forever,
even when your site is no longer existing - or belongs to someone else,
who has deleted your pages... or changed your affiliate IDs to
his. If your links suddenly don't work, the ebook has lost
value to the person who owns it and might want to use it again (God
forbid that it's a viral ebook that this person is passing on to others
for you!).
- If
your own domain name is already long, adding meaningfully-named
pages or subdirectories is going to make it really
long! - which is cumbersome. (But the tiny URLs don't add this sort of value to your site.)
- Some older browsers that may still be around
don’t support the auto-refreshing command, so a viewer could get
"stuck" on the redirection page. (You could always include a
direct link on the redirection page as a back-up if you're worried
about this.)
- The
search engines reportedly don't like totally automatic redirection
pages - i.e., where the timing is set to zero seconds... unscrupulous
people used them to scam searchers who thought they were going to one
site but were willy-nilly being diverted to another. If you
mask your links with an HTML "auto-refresh" page (the easiest way), you
must set the delay for at least one second. And hope that the
search engines won't take a dislike to that!
- While
many websearchers these days may be familiar with redirection, others
may be a little put out at the itsy bit of deception
involved. If your site caters to old-hand webmarketers, fine;
if not, the whole endeavor to psychologically manipulate your clientele
may actually not be worthwhile if it detracts from your overall effort
to establish yourself as a trustworthy adviser.
So, you'll
likely want to do some considering about what your future
plans might look like before deciding on whether or not to mask your
affiliate links. (Certainly for now, there's no need
to do so - that gives you time. :^) Many webmasters do choose
to use redirect links just so as to prevent link theft (though this is far less of an issue than it used to be)
- and some feel
that this can definitely be financially rewarding (e.g., internet
marketers marketing to other internet marketers). Others won't
want
to be bothered with the rigamarole!
If you're
the kind of person who is interested in pursuing that kind of detail in
order to maximize your affiliate success, this next section may be for
you as well...
AFFILIATE TRACKING - TRACK YOUR
RESULTS/EXPERIMENT FOR BETTER RESULTS:
There
are a couple of major aspects to affiliate tracking/experimenting, each
of which is solved by a nifty bit of software I can recommend.
The
first thing to wonder about is how people are getting to your site...
That wondering is answered by "The Ultimate Link Tracker" (free with
Ken Evoy's "5 Pillar" affiliate program sign-up, at the SiteSell
site). This
will tell you precisely what web-based effort led to your getting that
link - i.e., where the person who eventually came to your website came
from... Email? Another website's links page? A web classified ad? A
search engine? This will give you guidance in adjusting your efforts to
get people to your site.
(The
Ultimate Link Tracker software, originally sold elsewhere, was adapted and enhanced when SiteSell
produced Site Build It!,
the fantastic theme-site-building, webhosting, domain-name-registering
service that has been making waves on the web for years now. Great tracking and
help with pay-per-click SEs are just two of the many usually-expensive
features that Site Build It! brings to webmasters
in one inexpensive, integrated package. In fact, SiteSell keeps adding
more and more powerful features, without charging extra for any
of them. If, after reading about SBI! on
the site, you're interested in winning a free Site
Build It! site, there's often a monthly sweepstakes.) (...Not to mention that SBI! 2.0 [a once-again revised version, for no more money] includes a fabulous,
easy, and fully automated means of turning your site visitors into true
Web 2.0 participants - and writers of content for your website! ...Which means fresh content without
the work of blogging - as well as more pages of interest for your site
- both of which lead to better search engine ranking! This is an
incredible development - do check it out.)
Another,
similar, way to track your advertising efforts is via affiliate program
management software. No, you don't need to operate an affiliate program
to make use of it!... You can just use a cheap version to code each of
your ads (including affiliate links) with an affiliate ID number. SimpleAffiliate
is a good basic program that used to be sold for $67US and is, at time of writing, now free. Whether or not you want to use it as affiliate program management software (see
"Setting Up an Affiliate
Program, Part 2"
for information on some other options), it's just fine for this purpose. (If you don't want to
position yourself for the free form of tracking
above!)
Once
they're there, you're interested to know which
affiliate links are attracting the most people... You should be
able to glean this from your webhost's activity logs - but obviously it
would be a whole lot nicer to have it all parsed out for you by a
program designed to do this. Look in search engines under "ad
tracking" for such software.
Site
Build It! also tracks CTR ratios for the links
placed, or ending up, there. Even if you are already hosted
somewhere else, you might think of switching to SBI
in order to take advantage of its array of add-on components. ...I did!
- and I was very happy with the results. SBI
is an especially good choice for the first year or two of hosting, even
if you decide later on to transfer to a different vendor - because it is
so good at "training you up right" as a webmaster, and at bringing
traffic to your door.
[By the way, expert affiliate
(and other) marketer Michael Campbell has some excellent advice more loosely
related to "tracking"... See his article "Top
10 Tips To Avoiding Affiliate Program Glitches" for warnings
largely about monitoring affiliate merchants' tracking of you.]
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