Questions and Concerns Before Working on Affiliate Programs

Do you know and understand your visitors?

There are a lot of affiliate programs available online. You need to decide the kind of products and services offer for your visitors.

Take a look at the stats for your website or blog over the past few months. Where do your visitors come from? What are the keywords that people used to find your website or blog? Complex and specific search terms tend to result in immediate conversions, broader search terms result in sales later. If people find your site using broad search terms, you need to be sure that the cookie life is long.

Which search engine usually brings you the most traffic? If it’s Google, the user is slightly more apt to be male, and in the middle as far as propensity toward buying something.

You should pay particular attention to the age of your visitors. If you have a lot of AOL traffic for example, you should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35 of age or older (77%) and married (62%).

Try to think like your visitors and put yourself in their position. Try to anticipate their interests, products and services they might want to purchase. Affiliate programs raise the bar from PPC — your payment comes at the end of the Internet marketing process rather than at the beginning like Google Adsense. You need to put in a lot of thoughts into the process and you can make more money if you do it right.

Is your site good enough or perfect?

If the pages have sloppy html code, broken links, and instability in most of the time, it makes you look cheesy. Customers or visitors will not feel comfortable buying something off a cheesy website.

Let’s start with the html code. Make sure there are not errors. Use an html checker like the one at W3C. Check your code on several browsers in several resolutions. Check your links often. W3.org also has a link validator that you can use for FREE.

Website and blog should also be optimized for search engines, easy to understand and navigate, and should also include sitemap for people to find their way around. Get your friends to take a look at the website or blog and provide feedback, advice and opinion. Listen to unsolicited comments from users with an open mind and place value on them.

Do you know what kind of advertisement you are going to use?

People tend to ignore banners. That is why banners are design to shake and make sounds to get attention. Where you put the banners on the page is going to make a huge difference. Banners need to be place at location where the eye naturally rests.

Placement of any advertisement is an important part of getting customers or visitors noticed or clicked.

Many people believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and should be the same in text size and color. You need to surf around and look at how people place their ads. Figure out where to place the text ads so that it works best on your website or blog.

If you plan to create pages for some of the products you endorse, you need to figure out how prominently you want to place the advertising. Most people won’t buy if they believe you’re shilling for a particular company. Customers usually will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service.

What is your hunch on the right kind of offers for your website or blog?

If you have a general interest website or blog that gives away free stuff, it is probably going to be difficult to sell products from that website or blog. It might be better to get visitors sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers that target particular age group rather than offers that target a specific interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket sales or only leads. Leads get the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require less of a commitment.

Try to come up with several ways to slice this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other ways you can think of. Then you can find different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it is time to place advertisements, try to put different advertisements in similar space on the same pages, and see how they work.