Monetizing A Site via Affiliate Sales – An Introduction

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There are many ways to monetize a web site, and I’ve previously outlined the most common in my post titled, “10 Methods of Earning Online Income with Definitions Included“. If you haven’t yet read that post, and would like a refresher course in site monetization methods, I recommend reading it at some point.

The first method listed in that post is CPA (Cost Per Action), which for most people, describes the act of earning commissions from referred affiliate sales. The process goes something like this:

• You refer a user to a product or company via a link on your site.
• That user purchases a product from the company.
• That action (the purchase of the product) earns you a commission from the company.

I’ve made a considerable percentage of my income over the years from affiliate sales in my own affiliate marketing home business. I’ve also discovered along the way that some affiliate sites will make bupkes (i.e. NOTHING, NADA, NO MONEY) while others will generate nice levels of income. There may be many reasons for a site to fail when trying to monetize via affiliate sales. Let’s take a look at a few now.

A Few Reasons Sites Make No or Few Affiliate Sales

• The products promoted aren’t in demand (perhaps because no one needs them, or the product costs too much, or the product is of poor quality).
• The products promoted are in demand, but aren’t of interest to the site’s visitors.
• The affiliate links or ads are overlooked by the site’s visitors.
• The site doesn’t get enough traffic.

Now let’s think about ways to overcome those problems.

How To Make More Affiliate Sales

Obviously, the first thing you’ll want to do is decide which products you’re going to promote on your site. You’ll want to keep a few basic things in mind.

1. Any products you recommend should be of interest to your site’s visitors. In other words, the products should be very relevant to your site’s niche. If you own a site about fishing, you won’t want to recommend products related to knitting. While a few of your visitors might have an interest in both knitting and fishing, it’s unlikely that someone reading an article on a fishing site will click on a link or ad for a knitting product.
2. Once you’ve found some products you’d like to recommend to your users, make sure those products are of good quality, and represent good value to your users. Reject products that are of poor quality or are overpriced.
3. Don’t be afraid to recommend products. Don’t feel as though you have to hide the recommendations. Place the links and ads in areas of the site that will not be overlooked by your visitors. If they don’t want to click, they won’t, and that’s ok, but make sure they at least have the option. Make the recommendations obvious.

Those three aspects are fairly easy for you to consider and control, and they cover 3/4 of the problems listed above. In all three cases, you’ll want to periodically test new products, or new ad placements, but the point is that you have ultimate control over each of these elements.

So what about that last problem I mentioned above? The site doesn’t get enough traffic. Well that’s a much broader issue, and one that you don’t always have complete control over. It would take a lot more than one blog post for me to cover all the things that can affect a site’s lack of traffic. Of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t tackle a portion of that problem right here and now.

One of the best ways a site can receive traffic is through search engines such as Google. Unfortunately, Google isn’t always fond of sending traffic to affiliate sites, so a huge chunk of traffic might not flow to your site if you aren’t careful. That’s what we’re going to discuss now.

Let’s be clear. Google doesn’t hate all affiliates like some people might want to believe. Google does, however, want to provide their users with good results, and sending users to a site that has no original content, or “added value”, isn’t something they want to do. A couple of terms you should familiarize yourself with are:

Thin Affiliate

A thin affiliate is an affiliate site that is really just a cookie-cutter site that offers no unique, valuable content. Think of it this way. If all you have on your site is the same affiliate product information as a thousand other affiliate sites, what makes yours worthy of being included in Google’s search results? Answer: nothing.

Value-Added

What makes an affiliate site something more than just another thin affiliate? Added value. A value-added site offers unique content beyond the product information provided by the sellers that adds additional value for its users. A value-added site might offer reviews or product comparisons, or just your own thoughts and opinions about the products. If a site has real content – real worth – that takes the site beyond a cookie-cutter, thin affiliate filled with duplicate content – then the site has a much better shot at ranking well in Google and other search engines. And of course, the better it ranks for many phrases, the more traffic your site is likely to receive.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is this:

• Create a good site.
• Fill it with unique, useful content that you create.
• In addition to all the good, unique content that you share, add some relevant, useful, affiliate products into the mix. Within a blog post or article, recommend a product (using an affiliate text link) that is relevant to that topic. Also show ads for other related products that you feel comfortable recommending.

Now What?

We’ve only just scratched the surface of affilate marketing in this post. Future posts are going to focus in on some more aspects, and we’ll look at some tools and strategies in more detail. Stay tuned. I’ll be posting those very soon.

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Tags: affiliate site, Cost per action, CPA, Online Income


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   [...] Monetizing A Site via Affiliate Sales – An Introduction | DazzlinDonna Disclosure: Affiliate links may be used within this post for products I recommend. They in no way affect my judgement of said products, nor do they affect the price of the product. Tags: .htaccess, affiliate sales on your site, URL shortening Share and Bookmark This Post [...]

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