At some point of time, you’ve built up your site and have search engine optimized it well, have awesome usability and are getting strong traffic and conversion numbers. Well, then you start thinking about getting more traffic.
There’s a variety of ways to do that : PPC, Social networks advertising, link building and Affiliate marketing. We’ll discuss how you can use affiliate marketing by utilizing the tools that these networks provide to direct converting traffic to your website.
The big affiliate players include CJ.com and Performics. Online Ad networks include Advertising.com or Adbrite or Adify. Some of the big behavioral targeting players include Boomerang, Doubleclick and Criteo. Here are some tips on how to optimize your experience with those tools :
1) Relevant publishers : Ensure that you choose the most relevant publishers for your advertising. These should be web properties that are focused on your target audience. Publishers will vie for your attention and ask that you publish your ads on their web properties. Don’t ! Only choose publishers who have websites closely linked to your business in terms of the audience they’re aiming their message at, their demographics, how closely your ad blends with their website (you can develop your ad to match their site but at a possible cost of brand erosion!)
2) Reporting : Can use your own ad server? What kind of reporting features are available? How strong is the reporting? What benefits is this external tool bringing to the table?
3) Availabilty of Ad inventories & Positioning : This ties in with point one! What kind of inventories are available? Are they the quality sites that you want or just plain junk? Positioning of the ads is key (Where on the publisher site will your ad be placed? Is it a common partner page or on their home page? This is important information that you need to find out.
4) Ad box sizes : Naturally, the bigger the box, the better is your attractiveness. Right? Wrong! In today’s Web 2.0 world in-your-face advertising is so passe and you insert huge banners and ridiculous skyscrapers at your own risk. Go for more compact sizes like 468 X 60 or at the most 300 X 250.
5) Contextual targeting of the ads : This is critical. If your ads are not being contextually placed then you could have a problem as the better is your ad placed in range of your target audence, the stronger is the relevant traffic to your site.
6) Behavioral targeting – Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the web pages they have visited or the searches they have made on a website, to display certain advertisements to the user. DoubleClick and Boomerang do this for sure. Ensure that you have something like this turned on as successful execution of the same will results in more qualified traffic to your site.
In the end, all activities on affiliate networks should be carried out keeping in mind that this is an avenue that works well only with mass marketed products and not niche categories. If you’re a niche market player, you might find a couple of publisher sites that could get you some leads but in the end, affiliate marketing is most successful when it is a volumes game.
I was searching on yahoo for affiliate companies when I came upon your site. You gave me some great ideas here, I’ll be sure to watch for more info from you. Thanks a million!
Coreen, You’re welcome. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
I agree on what you wrote about affiliate marketing. Quality of affiliates is more important than mere quantity. It’s a challenge to wade through the spam to identify solid partners. in any case, this was a good read. I’ll be following your blog with great interest. Best, Candice
Thanks Candice! I’m glad you enjoyed the article.