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Example 1: http://www.gain-weight-muscle-fast.com
The first site we're going to look at is a nice example of an affiliate site promoting affiliate products with a smattering of Adsense. It's quite a large site with a lot of things going on inside it.
When you first look at the site it seems like information overload: Where should I go, what should I read first? But if you click around the site and read the articles you'll see that eventually all roads lead to the product review pages, or to affiliate programs directly.
In this site they're promoting weight-gain programs on one page, and health supplements on another page.
Let's take a look at the weight-gain program reviews page.
At the top of the page the affiliate has a box displaying the "5 Star Weight Gain Programs".
Clicking on the product name takes you directly to the merchant page through the affiliate's link.
By the way, he's stopped most of his affiliate links being displayed in the status bar when you hover over them by using a small piece of javascript. This makes the link more attractive to nervous clickers who might be scared away by the complicated looking URL, and also helps to prevent link hijacking.
If you don't directly click through to the merchant site, you might choose to read the affiliates "short" or "full"reviews. The short reviews appear further down the same page, while the full reviews have a whole page to themselves.
The reviews for the recommended products are understandably glowing (these are "five star" products after all), and naturally include the affiliate's affiliate link.
So how much is he earning from these links? If you click on "No Nonsense Body Building" you're taken through to the merchant site. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see a link to the affiliate program page.
If you can dodge the popup box and wade through the sales pitch for the affiliate program, you'll see that they pay 75% commissions on the product, which costs between $77 and $107.
If you go back to the reviews page and click on one of the other top-reviewed products, "The Truth About Building Muscle" there doesn't seem to be an affiliates link at the bottom of the page. However if you were paying attention when you clicked, you would have noticed that you were redirected to the merchant's site through a ClickBank link.
So if we go to ClickBank and visit the Marketplace we should be able to find this product. Type in the keyword "Muscle" and you'll see all the usual suspects right there at the top of the page. The top three products for muscle building are all featured in this affiliate's " recommended" list. You can see that for "The Truth About Building Muscle" this affiliate is earning 51% of the sale price, which works out to be $39.95 for the affiliate for each sale he refers.
If we go back to the affiliate's program review page, you'll see that further down the page the affiliate lists products that don't get the five-star seal of approval. He also provides links to reviews of these "not recommended" products which explain why they're not recommended. Reading his reviews, it does indeed sound like he knows what he's talking about. His reviews are credible, and seem unbiased. Good! Most of them don't seem to have affiliate programs, and he hasn't bothered to link to them through affiliate links.
So why would an affiliate review products if he doesn't get anything out of it?
Firstly, it makes his other reviews look credible. Simply listing a whole bunch of products that are "really great" seems a little unbalanced.
Secondly he's able to attract people who are searching for those particular products in the search engines. If they search for those products they might end up on one of his review pages, where they would read his negative review of the product. "Oh dear," they might think. "Thank goodness I didn't buy that... what a huge mistake that would have been! Well if this program is no good, what are the alternatives?"
Fortunately the affiliate has anticipated this response, and placed a number of his high-earning "five star" recommended products at the bottom of the page. Readers of the review can click through to his favorable reviews of these products, or simply go through to the merchant site directly. This is pretty clever.
If we get out of the reviews section now and take a look at one of the articles on this site you can also see that this affiliate is also earning money through having Adsense ads on his site.
(You can tell these are Adsense ads because they say "Ads by Google" down the bottom there.) You'll notice that the ads are pretty relevant to the content on the page. That's all automatically worked out by the ad network, which in this case is Google.
If we go back to the home page and scroll to the bottom of the page you can also see that the affiliate has a signup box for his "Get Big" ezine.
This twice-monthly publication is apparently full of "informative articles, a question and answer section, site updates and more." I'm thinking this affiliate will either use this ezine as an additional place to promote affiliate products, or he will use it to get his readers back to his website by providing snippets of new articles with a "read more" link. By getting readers back to his site he's able to expose them to more promotions.
Example 2: http://www.jiffyspanish.com
The next site we'll look at is one we visited in the last lesson. It's a search engine optimized site that appears on page 1 of Google's search results for the very popular search term "Learn Spanish".
One of the first things you're hit with when you visit this site is a popup box that offers you a package of free online lessons. All you have to do is enter your name and email address.
The affiliate has also given these lessons a dollar value -- "Valued at $37, but yours free!" -- People love thinking they're getting a great deal, so adding dollar values to things that might never even be sold as individual products is a very common tactic for internet marketers.
This "free lessons" offer is variation of what we saw in the last site: It's a newsletter signup box. By offering people something concrete (free lessons), as opposed to something vague (for instance, "our informative newsletter") you essentially reduce people's anxiety about signing up for something.
This is why you'll see so many "six-part mini-courses" littered around the internet. Not only is it a mini-course as opposed to a newsletter, but the visitor only needs to commit to six lessons, as opposed to potentially unending subscription. If you can lower the perceived commitment involved in signing up for something, you'll find that people are more willing to give you their email address.
So what happens when you sign up for these free lessons?
This affiliate will probably send out a Spanish lesson every day or every couple of days for a set period of time. The lessons will probably direct the reader back to the website so that he or she can be exposed to more promotions and affiliate ads in addition to their "free lessons". Then, once the reader has received all the free lessons, they will likely be added to the affiliate's "regular" newsletter list. Unless they unsubscribe they will receive occasional news or promotions from the affiliate, but less frequently than with the lessons. If this affiliate is smart he will continue to provide good content to his list and not just use it as a vehicle for pushing affiliate products. You need to give your readers good reasons to open your emails and not just send them straight to the trash folder.
If you close that box and look on the front page you can see that right away the affiliate has launched into affiliate product reviews. He's written a glowing review for Rocket Spanish at the top of the page, and given it five stars.
If you hover over the "Visit Site" link you can't tell right away that it's an affiliate link because it points to a page on the affiliate's website. If you visit that page, however, it will automatically and instantly redirect to the merchant site through the affiliate link. This is a very popular technique, not only because it looks less artificial to a nervous clicker, but also because it can help prevent link hijacking.
So how much will this affiliate earn if I buy Rocket Spanish through his link? Let's find out.
If you click through to the Rocket Spanish site and scroll to the bottom of the page you'll see a small "affiliate program" link. If you click this link you'll be taken to a page of information about the affiliate program. You can see that Rocket Spanish sells for US$99.95, and affiliates earn 75%, which works out to be $68.59 per sale. Not too bad!
Back to the front page you can also see that the affiliate has reviewed two other "Learn Spanish" products. Both of these also have affiliate programs. If you click on the "Learn Spanish Like Crazy" link and scroll down to the bottom of the page you'll see a link to the affiliate program where it says " powered through ClickBank". You can see that Learn Spanish Like Crazy pays similarly to Rocket Spanish: 75% of $97, which works out as $67.13 after ClickBank extracts its own fee.
So that's where the money is coming from, but how is this site appearing so highly in the search engines when there doesn't appear to be much content on it?
If you go back to the JiffySpanish site and scroll to the bottom of the page you'll see that despite first impressions, this affiliate does actually have lot of content on his site.
There are a number of free Spanish lessons, and each page has the "Top Learn Spanish products" displayed down the bottom and a box about the "Free lessons" newsletter list on the left.
This affiliate might have chosen to create lessons based on popular search terms, but it's also possible that he's just trying to boost his "relevance" in the eyes of the search engines by having a lot of content appropriate to a "learn Spanish" or "Spanish lessons" website.
Analyzing the "desired action" and the flow of traffic through an affiliate site
Affiliates should be gently directing people towards the action which makes them the most money
When you're looking at affiliate sites like this one, and indeed when you're planning your own affiliate site, ask yourself what it is the affiliate is trying to make you do. (Or what you want your visitor to do.) What is the desired action that the affiliate is pushing for? Do they want you to read their articles? Sign up for their newsletter? Click on their ads? You'll often find yourself being gently directed towards a certain action in one way or another. This will be what the affiliate determines to be the course that will eventually get him or her the most money!
In this case we can see that the affiliate is promoting his newsletter list very heavily. It appears as a popup when you first visit the site, so he obviously wants you to sign up for that before you do anything else.
Once you've either signed up for the newsletter or closed the box you're presented with his recommended Spanish products. He's ranked Rocket Spanish as the best product, so that's the one he really wants you to click through to.
Learn Spanish Like Crazy is the next best option, although according to his review it apparently pales in comparison to Rocket Spanish.
Pimsleur comes in third but, again, can't be recommended over Rocket Spanish. So you can see that he really, really wants you to click through to Rocket Spanish. I'm guessing that Rocket Spanish is the most lucrative "learn Spanish" product for this affiliate.
Once you've reached the bottom of his reviews there's that newsletter signup box again. Just in case none of those reviews tickled your fancy, he doesn't want to let you leave without at least giving him your email address. (Don't forget that these lessons are valued at $37, and they're yours for FREE!)
He's put a lot of effort into getting you to his site in the first place, you're not escaping so easily!
So what about all those lessons he's provided?
While he has provided a lot of content on this site, it's not where he wants you to go if you happen to arrive at his front page.
How can you tell? He's shoved the links to all his content in the ghetto, way down at the bottom of his page, where a lot of people won't even see them. What this affiliate is saying is that if you happen to arrive at one of his content pages because it appears in the search engines, fine. He can promote to you there.
But the page that he thinks converts to sales the best is the review section of the front page. He's also obliged to link to his content pages from his front page so that the search engines can get through to the content.
Of course all this is assuming that the affiliate has even considered these things! Sadly, a lot of affiliates don't put much thought into how their visitors flow through their sites, so they're not able to make the most of their traffic.
Adsense Sites
So far we've looked at two sites that are primarily set up to make money from affiliate programs. The next couple of sites we'll look at are set up primarily to earn money from cost-per-click context ads like Google Adsense.
To refresh your knowledge, you might remember that context ads earn you money for each person who visits your site and clicks on the ads. The ads are automatically generated by the ad network and you insert them into your site just by pasting a small piece of code. The biggest context ad network is Google Adsense, so a lot of people will use the word "Adsense" when they're really talking about "context ads" in general.
Sites that earn money primarily from these context ads do so by capitalizing on either high traffic in that particular market, or high revenues for clicks. (Of course the best situation would be to have a high traffic market with high paying ads. If you can find one of those markets and rank well for it... even better!) Here are three ways your site could earn $40 a day through context ads:
500 clicks @ $0.08/click
125 clicks @ $0.32/click
20 clicks @ $2.00/click
One site earning money off low-paying Adsense ads but high traffic is http://www.haircutadvice.com. The "hair styles" market has a huge number of people searching on it each month, but relatively little in the way of affiliate activity because there aren't many high-paying affiliate programs for this market.
You might ask why there are few good affiliate programs for such a popular topic. Well, when you think about it, people searching for "hair styles" just want hair style pictures and advice, really.
Not only that, but they don't want to pay for anything.
They consider that this information should be free. If there's nobody willing to pay money for things in this market, there aren't going to be many products with affiliate programs. This also means that the Adsense ads for this market don't pay a huge amount either: There's not enough competition to drive the prices up, and no justification for paying a large amount.
But this site still manages to earn a modest amount each day, purely because it's built around such a highly searched for topic.
You can see that this site has a lot of content and a couple of sections with ads in them, with a telltale "Ads by Google" note at the top.
You can have a maximum of three ad blocks on each page of your website.
The ad blocks on this site have also been styled so that they blend in with the rest of the site and don't sit there screaming "I'm an advertisement!". You can also put pictures next to the ads to make your ads look more appealing, so long as they're not misleading.
This site also promotes a couple of affiliate programs as well, but not very heavily.
Blog Site
A lot of people consider a blog to be an extra "something" you tack onto the end of your website, but there are many affiliates out there running blogs as their main affiliate site. Instead of creating articles, they write blog posts. Over time these can build into quite a large body of work.
One good example of this kind of affiliate marketing is http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
The author of this blog earns money by:
Discussing affiliate products
Rather than simply writing reviews or pasting ads on his site, he uses his blog to discuss affiliate products that are newsworthy. In this format the news takes center stage, while the affiliate link becomes secondary. See this example of a blog post where he discusses AWeber.
(Take a closer look here)
Sure, he recommends AWeber, but it's not the primary purpose of the blog post. Often in the course of discussing things related to internet marketing, you need to mention products that just happen to have affiliate programs.
The author of site also earns money through other activities which wouldn't typically be classed as "affiliate marketing" since they're not pay-for-performance, but we'll take a look at them while we're here:
Writing reviews for ReviewMe.com
This is review writing with a twist. While this affiliate might write reviews with an eye to promoting affiliate products, he also earns money by writing reviews through ReviewMe.com. This site matches reviewers (often blog owners) with people wanting their product or website reviewed.
The person receiving the review pays an amount of money to ReviewMe.com depending on the "price" of the review, which is determined by the quality and popularity of the reviewing site. For a lot of sites looking for reviews, the cost of getting reviewed might well be less than the cost of purchasing a link from a popular website. For the reviewer... well... they get money. And adding reviews to their site gives them content.
Placing text-link ads on his site through Text-Link-Ads.com and through private text-link campaigns and banner campaigns
Text-Link-Ads.com is kind of a cross between traditional link buying and selling and ad networks like Google Adsense. Text-Link-Ads.com acts as a go-between for publishers and link-buyers: You insert a snippet of code into your site and Text-Link-Ads essentially sells space on your site.
The ads appear on your site, and you get half the amount that the person buying the link pays. Unlike Adsense, this isn't a cost-per-click ad system: You get paid regardless of whether anybody clicks on the link. This is because the primary reason for buying a link through Text-Link-Ads.com is to gain a link back to your site to help your search engine optimization efforts.
On the other hand, private ad campaigns are simply private arrangements between the site owner and another site: You link to me, I pay you. This could be arranged on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
I admit that I've cheated a little with this particular site analysis: The author of this blog has conveniently written an article covering this subject himself!
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey ... -online-blogging-2/
Lesson summary
In this lesson you've seen five different affiliate sites earning money through a variety of methods:
Product reviews
Newsletter subscriptions
Context ads (like Adsense)
We've also seen a couple of methods of making that wouldn't traditionally be classed as "affiliate marketing":
Selling ad space on your website
Joining link-brokering networks like Text-Link-Ads.com
Writing reviews through review brokering sites like ReviewMe.com |
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发表于 2009-1-15 21:26:43
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