How to create a very effective affiliate marketing site
December 1, 2008
Affiliate based websites come in many different forms, but most essentially have one common goal: to get the user to click on a affiliate link. Once a user clicks on a affiliate link, most affiliate programs give a cookie on the user’s computer for 30 days at the minimum. Sometimes a person doesn’t buy from the store for days or even weeks later, but we get credit for those sales down the road because of this tracking cookie left on their computer. If you are getting many clicks everyday, someone from the group is bound to convert to a sale, even if it is not directly after visiting your affiliate link that day.
The most common types of “thinly veiled” affiliate marketing sites I see are; review sites, coupon sites, price comparison, and shopping malls. All of these sites give the impression they are informative or quality sites, but they are really nothing more than doorway pages with window dressing for affiliate links.
How are users fooled into not noticing it’s nothing more than a thinly veiled affiliate site? You have to remember, most internet users are not webmasters, so they don’t think like us. When they go to a website they usually don’t think about how a website is making money or understand how affiliate links work. Sometimes they just don’t care, even if it is because some may find the review or price comparison your site gave them, actually helpful. Now you can’t just slap up a website and expect a high click through rate, you still have to put some work into your site, if you want to maximize the clickthrough rate.
The first thing you should do for your affiliate site, is cloak the affiliate links. This makes them look like legitimate urls, that encourage users to click on the link. Normal affiliate links are usually very long and ugly and not inviting to clicks. Some affiliate programs automatically use cloaking techniques built into the link code, but usually you can make better ones by cloaking them yourselves. Cloaking links work especially well for review sites, where users have less of a tendency to click on affiliate links if they feel the review was “bought”.
The most important thing a affiliate marketing site needs to do, is try to make their site as professional looking as they can. This can be done by having a professional design and using a content management software such as joomla, wordpress, etc. You also should be adding many things, such as an about page, user registration, newsletters, blogs, forums, etc. Even if most of it is superficial, overall it gives the impression of a professional and quality site, even if most of it is just visual fluff. Most users won’t look deep enough into your website anyways, so all that matter is you have it there. The average users looks no more than 2 pages into a site and hopefully after that, they will click out from a affiliate link on your site.
