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One of the first things you should learn when getting started as an affiliate is how to spot other affiliates.
Affiliate marketing can be a subtle thing. Most people using the internet are unaware that it exists, but it’s the reason behind a lot of the content on the internet.
Once you start to spot affiliates you'll realize exactly how pervasive affiliate marketing is, and it'll start to give you ideas for your own affiliate business.
Spotting Affiliates In Paid Search Listings
One of the places where affiliates are most obvious is in the paid advertisements on search engines like MSN, Yahoo and Google.
These affiliates will be promoting their websites through these advertisements, paying for each person who clicks on the ad.
The idea is that the money they earn in affiliate commissions is enough to pay for these advertisements, with a bit left over. Because they're having to pay for you to visit their site, you'll find that they're a little more to-the-point than affiliates who don't have to pay for their traffic, but more about this later! For the moment it just makes them easy to spot!
To begin your affiliate hunt, choose a topic. I'm going to use "learn guitar" .
Now look at the search results in Google. The ads along the right hand side of the page are "sponsored listings", otherwise known as paid advertisements.
Depending on what you search for you might see ads in this list that have been placed by merchants themselves rather than affiliates, but just from skimming this list I can say that most of these ads look like they've been placed by affiliates.
Tell-tale signs are any mention of reviews... and then there's the old favorite "Don't buy anything until you've read these reviews!"
These are really obviously affiliate ads. We'll click on one just so you can see an ad in action... It's another affiliate favorite, "Guitar lesson scams".
Nobody likes to be scammed, and everyone loves a scandal, so a lot of advertisements use this "scam" hook to get people clicking. As we will do ourselves!
(To take a closer look, go to http://www.smartguyreviews.com/guitar.html)
This site looks like it's a giant review site, not just built specifically to target this market. I bet they have reviews on products in all sorts of affiliate markets, but we'll just look at this page here.
At the top of the page they have a summary of the reviews. They've given a number of affiliate products ratings out of five stars with a couple of brief points. If the visitor clicks on this link they'll be taken to the merchant site through the affiliate's affiliate link. These brief reviews at the top are a good way to grab people who are just looking for products to research and don't want to spend time reading reviews.
If you look a little further down the page you'll see the "full reviews" of the products.
All links to the product are affiliate links.
Let’s make it clear here that clicking on an affiliate link isn't harming the visitor in any way.
The affiliate has simply helped them to find a product they were looking for. They don't end up paying any more for the product than if they bought directly from the merchant.
The only difference between clicking on an affiliate link and a normal link for a visitor is that usually a cookie will be placed in their browser to say "This person came from this affiliate's link".
This helps the website track affiliate sales, and means that if the visitor comes back to buy at a later date the affiliate will still earn a commission.
Spotting Affiliates In Natural Search Results
So that's an obvious example of an affiliate site. Not all affiliates choose to promote their websites through paid advertisements, however. A lot of affiliates rely on traffic that comes from normal search results in the search engines.
We call these search results "organic" search results, or "natural" search listings. You'll also hear people talking about SERPs, which is short for "Search engine results pages".
For those of you who are new to these terms, the difference between natural search results and paid search results is that with the natural search results your listing is free, but you have a lot less control over how and where your website appears.
The natural search listings are the sites that the search engines deem to be most relevant to the particular search term, ranked in order of relevance. The problem for webmasters is that we never really know what the search engines are thinking, all we can do is guess and try to make our websites look as relevant as possible.
This gives rise to a whole area of internet marketing called Search Engine Optimization, which we cover in other parts of Affilorama. But for now we can look for affiliate sites that seem to be doing well in the SERPs for the term "learn spanish".
It can be a little more difficult to spot affiliates in the natural search results because they tend to be a little more subtle than in the paid search results. We've got a few here which look like they could either be affiliates or merchants selling their own lessons. I know that StudySpanish.com is a merchant site, but the others could go either way, so you'd have to go into them and have a peek. I can, however, see one here which definitely looks like an affiliate site.
The listing here reads "Below, you'll find our reviews of the top Learn Spanish software..." -- there's that "review" thing again -- a sure sign of an affiliate!
If you take a look at the front page for this site you can see that it seems to follow pretty much the same formula as the last page we looked at.
A whole bunch of reviews with ratings, and all links will be affiliate links. I'm thinking that since this is an SEO site there must be more content here... and you can see that if you scroll to the bottom of the page there are a bunch of links to lessons, vocabulary, pronunciation and so on.
If you click on "Common Spanish Phrases" you're taken to a page with a lesson on building Spanish phrases. And here go those recommended products again!
Let's find another affiliate site in the natural search listings. I'll do a search for "Cat training" in Google.
Now, because I'm familiar with this market I know that PerfectPaws.com is a merchant site. You'd see this if you clicked through... they produce and sell their own books on pet training.
About.com looks like it could be an affiliate site, but they actually appear to earn most of their money through people paying to advertise on their site. Most of the other sites are merchant sites selling their own cat training guides, but CatFactFiles.com is an affiliate site.
You can see down the left hand side that they're promoting a number of cat training ebooks.
You can tell they're affiliate products because if you were to click on them you'll be taken to a completely different site, and also because if you hover over the links you'll see in your status bar down the bottom of your browser that the link looks a little convoluted, with hop.clickbank.com in it.
That means that the products come from Clickbank -- an affiliate network. You can also see some ads on the side (which also show hop.clickbank.com when you hover over them). This site doesn't seem to offer any reviews: They simply have a "recommended" column and some ads.
Lesson Summary
In this lesson you’ve learned:
How some affiliates are making money in a few different markets
One deriving traffic from paid search listings.
Two from the natural search listings.
A few things you can use to spot obvious affiliate sites:
Sites comparing and reviewing products are often affiliate sites
Sites promoting products or services they did not create are often affiliates
"Reviews" "ratings" "learn the truth!" "scams" etc, often indicate affiliate sites. |
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发表于 2009-1-14 18:13:43
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