EzSEO Newsletter # 22
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Hi All
Hope everyone had a romantic Valentines Day yesterday. Today I want to start to have a look at a serious issue for affiliate marketers. If you are not into affiliate marketing, then either ignore today's newsletter, or get into affiliate marketing and make yourself a second income (which can rapidly become your first income ;-)).
Before I get started, I just want to thank those of you who purchased my eBook Battle for the Top 10. I would appreciate feedback when you have a moment. Any upgrades will be announced in this newsletter and you just need to keep a record of the download page you were directed to when you bought it. All updates will be there. If you have lost that info, e-mail me and I'll send it on to you.
This week:
1. Affiliate sites - promote products or merchants?
2. Are Anti-Virus programs & Firewalls stopping your commissions?
Continued Next week:
What can be done to protect your affiliate commissions?
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1. Affiliate sites - promote products or merchants?
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One of the questions I frequently get asked is whether you should promote individual products on your web sites, or stick with just promoting the merchants.
You see a lot of affiliate sites on the web that have hundreds of individual products listed by topic e.g. Valentines Gifts (with a list of 10 different valentine products to buy), Plus size swim suits (showing 10 swim suits you could buy) etc. These are examples of sites that use individual product links.
At the other extreme you will see sites that have a Valentine Gift page with some pre-sell text that recommends merchant X for chocolates, merchant Y for teddy bears and so on.
Their plus size swim wear page has Merchant A, Merchant B & Merchant C listed as recommended suppliers of plus size swim wear.
Which type of site is better - individual products or recommended merchants?
I have used both, and as far as conversions go, I found individual products convert more visitors into customers.
HOWEVER, there are huge downsides to using individual products.
1. Products are frequently removed from the inventory of the supplier and these products need to be removed from your site or you will have broken links that do not go anywhere.
Often the merchant does not tell you that the product has been removed and you end up having to wade through hundreds, if not thousands of links on your site to check which ones need upgrading. You DO NOT have time for this and your sites will become quickly out of date and sales will fall off.
The exception to this problem is if you have access to the merchant datafeeds (text files provided by the merchant that are updated often and include the entire inventory together with URLs for picture, sales links, description etc) and the skills required to create data driven sites. You can then keep these sites up to date easily.
2. The second major downside is to do with Ad-blocking software. You will understand this after we look at the next topic of this newsletter. Before that, let's consider recommended merchant type sites - the type that James Martell uses on his hugely successful sites.
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If you do not have a copy of James Martell's Affiliate Handbook and you want to learn affiliate marketing, there is not better manual.
It certainly is not the cheapest, but it is the best, and it works.
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Well, the downside (from my own testing) is that recommended merchant links don't convert as well as a good product link, but the upside is that if a merchant does not convert very well, you can always just swap them for another and experiment to see what works. If you promote the same merchants on lots of pages, you can replace a merchant in one go on all pages with well designed Server Side Includes (covered in earlier newsletters and also a bonus chapter of my eBook - Battle for the Top 10).
So, overall, sites promoting merchants take much less maintenance. However, the downside of sites like this is that you do need to write pre-sell copy. For those of you who do not know what that is, pre-sell copy is the text you write on your pages to tempt your visitors into visiting a merchant through your link. The best book I have read on creating effective sales copy is by Maria Velosa.
Be aware that this eBook will be withdrawn sometime this year and you will be able to buy it in the shops (at a cheaper price). What I love about here book is that she tells you first about traditional sales copy as it has been done in the real world - newspapers, TV etc, and then goes on to tell you how and why the Internet is different. How you need to create your sales copy differently for an Internet market. It really is an eye-opener and one I highly recommend you get when it is available in the book shops.
The beauty of a site built with your own pre-sell is that your site is unique. It may take longer to create, but it is one of a kind.
Think for a moment about the text on your web pages if you use the default merchant affiliate links with text written by the merchant (like product descriptions or merchant pre-sell). Your site will have the exact same text on your page that hundreds of other affiliate sites also use (read last weeks newsletter again and see what I say about the Google patent to find duplicate content). In the long run, sites built using your own pre-sell will be around when product based affiliate sites have long since disappeared from Google.
Obviously the choice is yours, but I am leaning towards recommended merchant style sites in all new sites I build. There are occasions obviously when you will use product links e.g. you want to sell a particular "hot" product. However this should be the only product on the page, and you should write your own pre-sell copy.
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2. Are Anti-Virus programs & Firewalls stopping your commissions?
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Earlier this week, a customer who had bought and built her first site using SEO Website Builder, wrote to me saying that the affiliate links on her site were invisible. Not only could she not see them on here home computer, but also on her computer at work. I looked at her site and saw the links without problem. I thought about it and then it hit me. Anti-virus programs and firewalls. Do you have them installed? Which ones do you use?
A lot of people go with Norton for both Firewall and Anti-Virus. Both of these software programs include Ad-blocking features which I believe are turned on by default. What this means to you is your affiliate links will not show up on your site to anyone who has these programs installed and set to block ads. That is a lot of people and a lot of lost customers.
I asked the lady who had written to me if she had a firewall and anti-virus program installed and told here to disable them. On doing so, her affiliate links re-appeared (note that these we not banners, they were text links provided by Commission Junction). It seems that the culprit was not actually Norton, it was McAfee.
Imagine the world's two most popular anti-virus solutions both blocking your ads on your site. Any of your site visitors with these on their computer are completely unaware of the affiliate links on your web site because they cannot see them. If they cannot see them, they cannot buy and you don't make a commission.
I personally have seen a big decline in affiliate commissions from my product only affiliate web sites. Is it possible that the huge media attention given to viruses, worms & hackers has driven all my visitors to install software to protect their computers, but at the same time makes my affiliate links invisible? I think so.
There has to be a way to prevent these anti virus & firewall programs blocking our links. Fortunately there is, but it does take some work on your part. The only problem is you have to deal with each affiliate link individually and if you have a product based web site, that can mean "fixing" hundreds or thousands of links only to find that next month, several need to be changed because the merchant doesn't stock them anymore. This is another good reason to go the recommended merchant route.
Now, sorry to do this to you, but this newsletter is long enough already and the technique I want to discuss is big enough to take up a whole issue on its own. I will tell you next week of a great way to protect your affiliate links from these ad-blocking software programs.
Hope you have a good week. Until next Sunday...
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