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Affiliate Programs Can Be A Real Waste
Written by: Mike LaTaff - on November 24th, 2007
If you have a website, chances are high that you have used Commission Junction (CJ), and let me guess, you didn't make any money for months of promoting their banners (?) Well, unless you're an experienced webmaster or just lucky, chances are rare that anyone ever make real money from CJ. It's similar for other affiliate programs online. Any new website owners may soon realize that affiliate success is a real challenge, if not impossible. Consider how much time you spend to apply for sponsors, copy and paste their banner or text links onto your website(s). It's a pain on the neck. To make it worse, those sponsors don't stay forever, they quit! And you're put into a dilemma: either spend more time to remove those links, or continue promoting them for free.
If you still wondered why, then keep in mind that if your website(s) don't have enough traffic, don't bother. Sponsors expect to partner with sites that generate at least 1000 visitors daily in order to make a business relationship. That thousand visitors may be costly to get, but they in turn may give you only about $10 (yes, ten US dollars!). Here's how. If you're lucky to get about 5% click-rate, then only 50 of those thousand visitors will click on your banner. Then let's say your conversion rate is 4% (worse in most cases), then only 2 of those 50 will buy something. There you have it, each purchase is averaged $5 commission, so you'll get $10 for the day.
If you're a new website owner, try put a counter on your main page and see how many visitors come to your site a day. Surprisingly, most websites can't even have 100 visitors a day, even with pay-per-click campaigns. That's why there's no much hope for the banners. Furthermore, most Internet users nowadays are very wary of banners. Ask yourself, how often do you really click on a banner, let's say, at CNN.com site? We all understand the whole purpose of banners out there is to sell us something that most of the time we don't need it. So unless you change your strategy on affiliate links, it's next to impossible to profit with affiliate programs
Yes, I emphasized the term unless above, because I myself have grown out of my long-time affiliate failure to get into the profit zone. There're tricks to get the most out of your hard-to-get traffic. The first trick, also the most important principle of online marketing, is that you got to target your market very well. In other words, you must focus on certain type of products or services that may be of best interest to your visitors. That's how you can substantially increase click-rate AND conversion rate.
For example, you have a website or blog with a travel topic. It's not productive to put a banner or text link for stock trading on that site. You must assume that most visitors to your site have a purpose, and that purpose is looking for something related to travel. So it's a common sense to advertise travel-related products or services such as low-price airfares, travel agents, or affordable hotels or car rentals.
The second trick is, as mentioned before, to avoid excessive banners. I never meant to say you should get rid of banner altogether. Actually, you should use both banners and text links, preferrably embeded within context. As your visitors turn away (avoid) banners, they will be more focus on any links within the text area. There you have it, a click can change everything! I will continue with more tricks and tips on the next article.
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From SuperRichList.com
From SuperRichList.com
