Affiliate Marketing – How to Legally Make Money Selling Someone Else’s Stuff
Affiliate marketing allows anyone to market a company’s products in order to earn a commission from sales that are referred by their website. But what provides an advantage for a website when there are thousands of others that are doing the same thing? The blog entry “How to Succeed In Affiliate Marketing Business?” provides tips for developing a successful affiliate marketing website. They suggest targeting a niche market instead of being too broad in the products being sold in order to convince visitors of the author’s expertise on the subject. The site should also contain information that is relevant to the products that are being offered; such as product reviews and suggestions for product use. A website should also stay in touch with visitors to keep them coming back, this can be done through an email newsletter or by offering an RSS feed.
The post “Askvertising and the Future of Online Advertising” coins the phrase “askvertising” to describe when websites ask visitors to click on their affiliate marketing in order to help support the site. This raises a good question, how can you expect website authors to be impartial and trustworthy when their livelihood is made by people clicking on the affiliate advertising? The blog entry compares asking people to make their purchases through a site’s affiliate links to a church or charity asking for donations. The difference is that this type of donation cannot be made unless the visitor has decided to purchasing something from the (or one of the) affiliate websites. This provides more of an incentive for the website to encourage people to make purchases, especially on the products that earn them high commissions.
So how does an affiliate website gain the trust of visitors? The blog entry “Offer True Value to Gain Affiliate Marketing Success” suggests that the website author show that they are familiar with the product and that they have tried using it. Some suggestions of how this could be done are by posting photos of themselves with the product or using it, write about the benefits and disadvantages of the product focusing on its use, and talk about or show the outcomes of using the product. So for example a digital camera review could show familiarity with a camera by having photos of the camera with a hand for scale comparison, photos taken with the camera, and explaining how the controls on the camera worked compared to other brands and models.
Choose Your Ads, Truly Interactive Advertising
Internet advertising has been moving to ways that encourage the viewer to look at and ideally respond. Interactivity that allows viewers to choose what happens is a powerful form as it brings a lean back medium and gets the user involved to transform it into a bring forward medium.
When I was a kid I loved the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books that allowed you to read multiple stories with different outcomes for the main character by choosing different actions and going to the appropriate page. Video ads that allow users to choose what happens also allow marketers to track what audiences want to see from advertisements and can then apply it to their non-interactive offerings, as mentioned in the “Choose Your Own ADventure” post about a related topic of choose the ending ads in movie theatres through text messaging. An online example of this type of video format, although not an ad, is “Choose Your Own Adventure – Election ‘08” from Panda Smash and Break.com which allows the viewer to decide what happens when Barak Obama and John McCain randomly meet at a beach.
Another option for allowing viewers to choose advertising is by having settings that allow users to let online ad companies know what products they are currently interested in so that ads on all sites run by that advertising intermediary could be tuned to the set preferences. The entry “Choose Your Own Advertising” on the Techdirt blog mentions this as a progression for the simplistic thumbs up and thumbs down advertising rating that sites like Facebook have in place to give users some say on what type of advertisements they see.
The Punk Marketing blog entry “Choose your own ad on Hulu” looks at the video site Hulu allowing users to choose between a few pre roll ads on the videos they watch. The problem lies in the fact that there are a limited number of ads to choose from. This means that users who frequently watch videos on the site will be forced to watch the same ad multiple times regardless if they are interested in it or not. Although this is allowing users to interactively choose the ad they watch the lack of choices makes them less valuable than ads driven by the previous technique of using user set preference to choose what ad is displayed.
Geo-Targeting – Narrow Can Be Better
As described in the blog entry “Geo-targeting: how to localize global business”, geo-targeting is narrowing the focus of an online ad campaign from everyone to people in a specified geographic area. Using this feature of pay-per-click advertising campaigns limits who views the ad to people from the area or who include the area in their search terms. Targeting advertising geographically allows visitors to find sites in their target area more easily than if they are bombarded by options from around the world. An example of who might use this is a ski and snowboard shop in Whistler who wants to target people in the area and people who are planning to visit the town.
What types of websites can make the best use of geo-targeting? The previously mentioned entry lists four types of websites that can benefit from this technique: small bricks and mortar stores, service businesses that serve a specific area, regional businesses with bricks and mortar locations, and large organizations looking to drive business in certain areas. The article “Is Geo Targeting Just For Local Businesses?” recommends that geo-targeting be used for more than just bricks and mortar stores because it is also beneficial for sites that cater to specific geographic markets or that want to increase visitors from target areas. Targeting campaigns to areas where a target market lives can increase the return made on the advertising investment compared to non-targeted campaigns.
How do you go about setting target areas your advertising? The post “Broaden Your Advertising Horizons with Geo-Targeting” advises gathering data through analytics and previous orders in order to decide which regions to target. Once the regions have been decided on setting up separate campaigns to monitor how each area responds is essential in order to have comparables. Like non-targeted advertising campaigns it can take time to get the correct mix so testing different campaigns and different areas is essential in order to find a combination that works.
