Three easy words: type of traffic

Are your visitors browsers or buyers? With Adsense and other programs that pay you per impression or per click, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to care what your visitor does after clicking the ad. Do they buy the product or not? It doesn’t matter– you’ll get paid either way.

With affiliate programs the obvious difference is that it matters what happens after the visitor clicks on the ad. It isn’t enough to have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) you must also have sales conversions after the clicks. Does the visitor purchase the product or not? Your income depends on that purchase. So what can you to do make sure the visitor does buy from the advertising merchant? Two things:

1) Pre-sell: since you are marketing a certain product or retailer with your affiliate links, you already know what products will appear in the ads. That is a huge advantage over Adsense and other “blind” ad servers that try and pick out what works best on your site. As an affiliate marketer, you choose the products to sell. With that advantage, you can pre-sell the visitor on the products. Make it natural! Nothing is worse for conversions than obvious over-the-top sales copy. You’ll have much better results with a mild, friendly sell pushed lightly on your visitors. Become their friend and tell them that you’ve had trouble with other products in the past, but this one is excellent…. [insert affiliate link here]

2) Change your type of traffic: target buyers and not browsers. With Adsense, and ole web surfer will do– the less savvy the better. However with affiliate marketing you need traffic that is ready to buy. They should have a credit card (this makes age important) and be one step from using it. How do you get buyers? Target buying keyphrases…

buy [productname]

discount [productname]

[productname] reviews

cheap [productname]

[productname] free shipping

Combinations like that indicate that the visitor is ready to buy. Perfect for an affiliate marketer.

For website owners doing affiliate marketing or selling their own goods, generic contextual advertising such as Google Adsense should be an afterthought and not the focus of a site. Today’s review is an example of someone who aims to sell products online but they start mucking it up by sending users offsite through Adsense. I received a request from a Digital Point user, SFOD_D223, to review his site: Wares4Life. I didn’t ask for much information on it since if I’m going to tell someone how to fix their site, I better be able to figure out how it works and doesn’t work right now.

It took me a moment to figure out exactly how this site intends to make money:

The main feature greeting the first time visitor is the Google Adsense for search box! Is this a made for Adsense nightmare? No, I wouldn’t bother typing about one of those. It turns out this site is either a wholesaler or works through a dropshipper to find closeout goods and then markets them online. If the user does manage to scroll down on the index, they are faced with a nonsensical mashup of goods– everything from a decorative lamp with scrollwork and cherubs… to a pizza baking stone… to a home phone that looks like a cell flip phone. I was still puzzled as to what this site was trying to be.

I’ve never been a fan of huge online malls. If your name doesn’t start with Ama and end with Zon, I wouldn’t advise wasting your time trying to sell all things to all people from one site. If the user doesn’t recognize your store brand right away, the next best thing is to be specialized merchant that offers only a specific range of goods– that specialization imparts some degree of trust.

However, In an effort to fix what we have instead of start all over, I’ll offer up this quick blockup of what an mall site might look like:

The four columns of items (or even down to three columns) give visible separation and allow you to classify them into categories. Show that you have more lamps and more home lighting accessories. Show that you have other kitchen gear and a section for more baking items. This gives the impression of lots of stock rather than just a few items of random selection. And speaking of random selection, vary up the home page. Any programmer should be able to give you a solution in PHP or javascript that allows you to rotate what images and what items appear on the index. I don’t necessarily advocate rotating them on each page refresh but you do want to update them perhaps once a day.

The major thing I want to address about this site and the mockup is the simple point of wasted space above the fold. ‘The fold’ is a newspaper advertising term that refers to what people see without having to unfold the paper. On the browser– what does the user see without having to scroll down? With the current site, all they see is stock photography and a Google search box. That is a certain invitation to LEAVE the site as quickly as possible.

Get your products above the fold. Minimize the waste of space in the header as this is the most important part of your page. Above all, stop giving people a reason to click off of your site– you’re there to sell products, not push Adsense!