KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (24 page)

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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

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This is one of the great things about adding affiliate links to a web site. Not only do you get to reward the creator of a product you like, you get to bring some real benefits to your users—and make money out of it, too. Perhaps the best place to look for products to recommend then is on your shelf and on your desk.
 
If you’ve bought something and enjoyed using it, then recommending it to the readers of your web site should be a breeze.
 
As with any rule, this one tends to be broken.
 
There are plenty of web sites making good money with affiliate links that lead to products the publisher has never heard of. My site
DealofDay.com
has plenty of affiliate links leading to products I’ve never tried. But the site isn’t personal, and the range of goods on offer makes it clear that these links aren’t recommendations. The site is offering opportunities, and the users are free to decide whether they want to make the most of them (
Figure 5.2
).
 
Figure 5.2
My
DealofDay.com
web site offers deals from thousands of retailers. These deals don’t come recommended, but they do give shoppers a chance to pick up bargains-and this gives my site plenty of opportunity to earn affiliate income.
 
That creates a whole new kind of opportunity for publishers. If you write about products, however broad the range, you can still make money from affiliate links. The strategy here is mass marketing rather than niche marketing. Instead of promoting one carefully chosen product to people you know will like it, you offer lots of different products to a wide range of people and hope that there’s enough variety to please everyone—or at least enough to give you a decent number of sales.
 
Sites like these aren’t easy to create. They’re also difficult to market. When you have a broad selection of products, all you can do is make them available. You can’t push them directly to buyers, because no one will believe that you’ve used every product you’re promoting. Even review sites, a useful way to add lots of affiliate products to a web site, can struggle a little here. If you write a negative review, no one will want to buy the product. You’ll have killed your own commissions. But if you only write positive reviews, you’ll kill the credibility of your site, something that’s even more serious.
 
That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Review sites that focus on a specific niche can generate very good revenue and supply plenty of opportunity to offer both helpful content and profit-generating ads.
 
AppCraver (
www.appcraver.com
), for example, is a site that provides short reviews of iPhone apps. The reviews each come with an affiliate link that leads to Apple’s iTunes store, where readers can make a purchase. (Apple pays 5 percent commission for each sale.) But that’s not the only way the site monetizes those reviews.
 
In fact, it’s likely that most readers will decide to purchase directly from their iPhones rather than downloading first to iTunes and then moving the app to their mobile devices. So AppCraver offers an alternative way to turn users into cash. In addition to linking to apps, the site also runs a store that sells iPhone accessories. That store is operated as a separate site, but ads for specific products also run on the side of the page next to the reviews themselves (
Figure 5.3
).
 
When it comes to choosing products, you should find that being selective and recommending items you’ve used and loved should deliver high returns. It is also possible to build a site, such as a review site, that offers affiliate links to lots of different affiliate products. Just don’t depend on those affiliate links alone to deliver all the KaChing the site can bring.
 
Figure 5.3
AppCraver provides reviews of iPhone apps, giving it plenty of opportunity to put up affiliate ads. One appears at the top of every review, while other graphic ads line the right side of the page. The left side leads to accessories available from the site’s affiliate store.
 
Strategies for Affiliate Success
 
When you’re earning money with CPC ads, the strategy is simple. Write good content that attracts readers. Put up ads that match your content. Place those ads in prominent positions, and optimize them so that they look like content. Bring in the traffic, stand back and wait, and you should find that the KaChing starts to happen all by itself.
 
It’s an amazing thing.
 
Earn on a CPM basis, and the strategy is even easier. Just bring in lots of users. Focus your efforts on traffic generation, and those CPM ads will add a little extra to your monthly income with no more effort.
 
When you’re looking to add affiliate income to that revenue, though, the strategy is a little more complex. Success relies on the following factors.
 
THE RIGHT CHOICE OF PRODUCT AND MERCHANT
 
We’ve already seen how important this is. The merchant has to be trustworthy if the journey from page to cash desk will be smooth and obstacle-free. Top merchants understand that their trustworthiness has a value, and they often cash in on it by paying lower affiliate rates. If you feel that your users would think twice before buying from a merchant they’re not familiar with, then it’s worthwhile taking a little less from each sale but earning more through a greater overall sales volume.
 
When it comes to choosing the product, the safest bet is always to promote items that you know and believe in. You’ll be able to offer them to your readers and feel that you’re delivering something valuable. That’s priceless.
 
Alternatively, you can offer a class of products, such as iPhone apps, gardening tools, or computer games. Create a web site that allows you to talk about lots of different models within that class, and you’ll be able to use the affiliate ads as high-paying alternatives and additions to your CPC ads. That can be a useful strategy, too, especially for review sites.
 
Of course, whichever of those two strategies you follow, the products you offer must suit your audience. There’s little point in showing an affiliate ad for a high-priced, high-commission product to people who aren’t interested in buying it.
 
MAKE RECOMMENDATIONS
 
Sites that rely heavily on affiliate links, such as review sites, tend to be hard to build. They have to be planned deliberately: You have to know which products you want to write about, how you’re going to write about them, and where you’re going to source the affiliate links from. Usually, you’ll want to make things as easy as possible by using as few merchants as possible. That will make the implementation easier, the stat-tracking clearer, and it’s also likely to give you higher commissions as you sell more products for your merchant.
 
Placing occasional affiliate links to products you’ve used is always going to be easier. You won’t need to create a dedicated web site, and you won’t have to struggle to create reviews of products you haven’t tried.
 
Whenever you use a product that you know your readers would like to use, you can write about it on your web site. You don’t even have to create a dedicated blog post. Just mentioning it in a post you were going to write anyway can still generate sales.
 
In fact, that sort of casual approach often looks more natural, conferring even greater trust.
 
You can make this a regular event. If you find, for instance, that every time you recommend a product, you earn around $500 in commissions, then you can make that $500 a regular part of your income by making sure that you include a similar recommendation once a month. You wouldn’t want to do it too often, because your conversion rate for each recommendation would fall—users will always have a limited budget—but every few weeks should be enough to give your income some reliable additional revenue.
 
It’s the
recommendation
that’s key here.
 
Affiliate advertising is unusual in that advertisers don’t mind if you actively promote their products to your users. In fact, because they only have to pay you if your users actually give them money, they’ll
want
you to push their products. The large merchants even have dedicated affiliate managers whose job includes offering tips to help with promotions. When a monetization system gives you that much independence and that much influence, it’s a shame not to use it.
 
In general, the more intensely you recommend an affiliate product, the greater you can expect your conversion rate to be.
 
Those recommendations can come in all sorts of different forms. The most effective is always to say, “I’ve used this product, and it worked wonders. You should use it, too.”
 
When you use this approach, bring it to life. Explain what brought you to the product, describe what it does, and point out several features that have really impressed you.
 
Here’s an example of a short post for a recommended affiliate product—and a model—that you can use on your own web site:
Now I Know Where I Am
 
I always try to be punctual. I calculate how long it will take me to reach a destination. I leave with plenty of time for traffic jams. And I’m not afraid to stop doing whatever I’m doing—even when I’m in the flow—to make sure that I’m not late.
 
But I also have absolutely no sense of direction. It doesn’t matter how many times I check the map, I’m practically guaranteed to make at least one wrong turn. Last week, for example, I had to take a parcel to the post office. (My sister just had a baby and B. wants to send her one of her quilts.) I must have been there a hundred times since we moved here but, sure enough, I took a wrong turn and ended up on the highway heading in the wrong direction. I’d like to tell people that I’m always at least 10 minutes late because my life is so busy, but the truth is that it’s because I never know where I am.
 
Last week, I finally gave in. I admitted that I’m hopeless and boughta GPS system. It’s great. I went for the Magellan RoadMate 1470. So far, it’s working great. The graphics are much easier to read than I expected them to be. The voice is clear and far less annoying than listening to the kids say, Are we there yet?” And it hasn’t once directed me into a river.
 
If you’re geographically challenged like me, then you should get one. You might be able to finally get places on time.
 
 
 
There are a few points that you want to note before creating an affiliate-supported post like this. First, it’s personal. It’s filled with all sorts of little pieces of information that say something about the writer. The article doesn’t just say the writer went to the post office, for example. It also says why he went and what was in the parcel. That brings the reader into his life and builds a personal connection. This isn’t an ad; it’s a friend telling another friend what he’s been up to lately.
 
That’s the kind of communication that leads to sales.

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