Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you enbark on your affiliate program, I am going to review
two concepts that I use often here on Affiliateblog. The first is what I call the macro view of your Internet
presence:
You are really running two campaigns with your Internet presence -- the first campaign is concerned with getting
visitors to the site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to get those visitors to do something. That something may be just to spend more time at your
site, or it may be to sign up for something or buy something.
There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. While some affiliate marketing hubs are
experimenting with context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners and banner rotation on affiliate sites, YOU will be the one to decide what kind of products and services you want to offer your visitors. This seems like a minor detail,
but it is a major factor in your success.
Do you have textlinks or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of the visitors from those
sites? Have you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on which you advertise and asked
him or her about their visitors? Do you know the websites? Have you visited the sites that advertise on the
same sites as you? When you investigate all of these things a profile of the visitors to your site should begin to
emerge.
You should pay particular attention to the domains 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 or older (77%) and married (62%).
If you have trouble with textual representation vs. graphical representation (as I do), there is a terrific
product called VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. The text is represented as pictures
(buildings, people, buses for the search engines, etc). You can see it here. Disclaimer: I am a VisitorVille affiliate.
After all this you should be able to sit down and come up with the profile of a typical visitor. This profile should hopefully include estimates of age, country of origin,
education and income.
A lot of people (including me) believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and be close to the same in
text size and color as the text. You need to surf around and look at where people place their ads, and you need to
figure out where you think they would work on your site.
Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you can come up with. Then you can go out and find the different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, try to put different
ads in similar spaces on the same pages, and see how they do.