Advantages to Affiliate networks vs. In House Programs
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008Affiliate marketers generally like to use affiliate networks, but sometimes there are some good affiliate programs that are independantly run by the website themselves we call “In house”.
The major advantages to using affiliate networks compared to in house programs is usually the following:
1) The Ability to congregate multiple affiliate earnings together as one balance. Most affiliate programs have a minimum payout balance, which is hard to reach if you are using many different programs on moderate to low traffic sites.
2) Convenience of joining multiple affiliate programs. Instead of looking around the net and having to go through a registration process for each one, joining new programs is very convenient in affiliate networks.
3) Compliance & Tracking. When a affiliate program is in house, you have no way of knowing it actually has a profitable history or if they are even tracking your earnings. Before joining a affiliate program in most affiliate networks, you can see their profit history by looking at their EPC earning rates. EPC is calculated as the average dollar earnings made per 100 user clicks by all affiliates together in the program. Most affiliate networks, will also make sure each program is actually tracking sales, although Shareasale is by far the best in showing affiliate marketers when they track compliance and the only one that shows a merchant’s uptime history.
4) Security. Instead of giving sensitive personal and banking information to some small independant affiliate programs who you don’t know from adam and may be risky, the big affiliate networks can be trusted with this sensitive information.
How To Cloak Affiliate Links
Thursday, September 4th, 2008If you plan on maximizing your affiliate earnings, you will have to take the extra time to manually cloak your affiliate links. Affiliate links are usually very long or strange looking, making them less inviting to clicks. Most internet users will click on a affiliate link, but there are some visitors that are less likely to click on it. If you have a review site, you will quickly turn off a visitor if every review has a nice little referral link at the end of it. Webmaster or affiliate orientated sites, should especially have all of their affiliate links cloaked because the visitors are more web saavy and even less likely to click on affiliate links.
Affiliate networks like Commission Junction (CJ) and ClixGalore, can do the cloaking of the link automatically. They use a mouseover javascript command to display the real normal url form instead of a affiliate link, when a user hovers their mouse over the link. In Internet Explorer the CJ link works correctly in cloaking the real url, but the Clixgalore link provides a blank. In Opera, Firefox, and Netscape browsers, the CJ and Clixgalore cloaked link both are shown as the full affiliate link, not something we want. Linkconnector affiliate network does the best cloaking automatically, with their special “naked url technology”. They make the links look normal in all browsers, but unfortunately linkconnector is a small affiliate network with not many affiliate programs. Another option is using a free online url shortening service such as Tinyurl, but those links look strange (ex: tinyurl.com/gn25vsa) and might even be more likely to turn off a user from clicking.
The best alternative is to do the cloaking yourself. One way you can do it is through redirects with the htaccess file. The problem with this is you need a real web host and it only works on certain web server configurations. You can also do html redirects, which make the link look like another page on the site. Although, you wind up creating many html pages, for each affiliate link, I find it encourages clicks because each link has a .html extension at the end. This usually makes them think it’s another page in your site.
To implement it, create a html page with the following code, replacing the example.com url with your affiliate link.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.example.com”>
</HEAD>
</HTML>
So if you have a affiliate site named Express you can name the html redirecting page as Express.html and then on your site the link will be http://www.yoursite.com/Express.html instead of the affiliate link. This url looks a lot nicer than an affiliate link and it looks like it could be another page on your own site! When a user clicks on the link within a couple seconds, they will automatically be taken to the affiliate page.
Make sure you add a nofollow tag to the link to your html redirect page, as search engines don’t really like html redirects. Also, it is important to make sure your affiliate network merchant allows redirects. In Commission Junction it has to explicitly say that in the section where you cut n paste the ad code. URL redirects work ok for all Shareasale and Clixgalore merchants, just make sure you don’t change the image tag in the Clixgalore or Commission Junction code because that tracks impressions for their fraud detection system.
Where to find good Affiliate Programs
Sunday, January 27th, 2008Finding good affiliate programs can be difficult because you have to find a website you can trust for reliable information. One website I have always relied on for finding new affiliate programs is affiliatetips.com. They have been around for years and are a quality site for finding the best affiliate programs. You can compare affiliate programs in 20 different categories of affiliate programs. What I like about affiliatetips.com is they just don’t list a bunch of affiliate programs, but they actually give each one a very thorough review. For example, look at their Education affiliate programs section where they order each one based on their score. They use 7 different points to rate it on. They also list what kind of traffic you can promote it on, pros and cons, and other important details. Affiliatetips.com also includes other resources such as news, articles, and book reviews.
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