If you’re a small business owner, an affiliate marketing program is a fantastic opportunity to make a lot of money without having to have a lot of capital or overhead costs. And if you have a web page, affiliate marketing is a great way to make quick cash without adding a lot of extra work.
But just because you find a popular webpage to promote your product or the right product to promote on your page, doesn’t mean it’s going to work. In affiliate marketing, it’s all about the link. The kind of link you use and what you link to are going to make all the difference.
Here are the most common methods of linking for affiliate programs:
Photo Courtesy of Paul O’Connell
– Text links These are a good way to put links on your site because they stand out, but at the same time, still look natural and don’t have the appearance of an ad. When you have a related word in your text, just embed a link in the word to a product or website. But if you overload your text with links, it will become unreadable or just annoying.
– Banner Links These are ads that are usually at the top or side of the page. They can be plain, but are often catchy to try to get the attention of the reader.
Just remember that people who surf the internet a lot see hundreds of banners in a day and ignore pretty much all of them. If you’re going to make advertisement banners, make something that’s going to stand out and get you noticed. The more clever and unique, the better.
– Search Box Most people are familiar with search boxes embedded in a website that will do a Google or Yahoo search of the web. You can embed search boxes that will do this type of search, but search a marketer’s webpage instead of the whole internet. That way people can search an affiliate marketer’s website, sometimes without even knowing it. And they can find exactly what they’re looking for, even if the marketer has thousands of products.
Just because they’re linking to an affiliate marketer, doesn’t mean all links are the same. The link depends on what the affiliate and the vendor want. Here are the most common options:
– Website main page This is better if you’re selling services or simply looking for business connections rather than selling specific products.
– Specific product This is a good idea if you have one product that is expected to make high sales and pertains directly to the website it’s linked from.
– Vendor Storefront If a vendor sells a variety of related products, this is a great idea. If there is more variety in the products, you may be better off using a search box instead of a direct link.
I personally use my own website www.verarecommends.com to hold all of my product recommendations. Just remember that links aren’t everything; you still need quality products and a popular webpage to make money on sales.
I agree with you that most of the people ignore banner ads because it’s really very common to be seen in many blogs, so the banner must be very unique in term of design, and the most important factor will be the relevancy of the banner in the blog, this increases the click through rate of the banner as well.
Nice post indeed Vera! 🙂
Regards,
Lee
Thanks for that.. Been a while snice I was last here.. almost forgot all about the site 🙂
my bad
Thanks for sharing best methods of linking for affiliate programs. These ideas are important to market my small business
I like the idea of the search box. I knew this could be done, but I never thought of using it in this context. Nice idea.
That’s absolutely right. Basically, there are two different kinds of websites for which we affiliate marketing using the SEO techniques. They are
1.E-commerce websites(marketing and sales)
2.other websites that provide information.
SEO is much required for informative websites. So, choose yours are put the effort.
We also generally encourage people to put up a page on their website just for “partner” or “affiliate” companies, and politely request that the partner company do the same. For example, we include a logo and brief description of each company: http://openrain.com/partners.
Affiliate program is really good opportunity for make a lot of money without investment. Thanks for good information.
Thank you for these very useful tips… Good thing google landed me here in your site..
Looking forward for more 🙂
Kim
I prefer using the text links method. Usually I will compress the URL, so it looks much cleaner, compared to standard URL.
Till then,
Jean
From my limited experience, text links seem to work better than any other ways described above.
I also prefer text links for marketing affiliate products. I find it is the best way to seamlessly integrate such ads into content. Some of the more advanced linking styles are also very effective. To make the most money, it is best to test different types of links that are at your disposal. For certain niches you may find that different types of links perform much better than others.
I really also like the idea of the search box. I knew this could be done, but I never thought of using it in this context. Nice idea.