Category: Ad Placement
An Affiliate Marketing (True) Fairy Tale
Posted by Matt Van Atta in Ad Placement, Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices Friday, 23 February 2007 14:36 1 Comment
Once upon a time, an affiliate marketer had a website on which he promoted a $25 product via an agreement with a merchant.
One day, a potential customer entered the affiliate marketer’s website and looked around. Reading the website content about the product, the customer was sold. Clicking on the affiliate’s link, the customer purchased the product from the merchant, and the affiliate marketer received his commission. And they all lived happily ever after.
And the next day, it rained.
Okay, that last line may come from a smart aleck (guilty as charged). But it raises the question: “What’s next?” You don’t want the customer to be a “one-hit wonder,” buying the product and never entering your website again. You may have more to offer the customer than just the initial product you sold, or the customer may need to purchase the product again down the road. Plus, your affiliate agreement may allow you to receive commissions for all purchases made by your customer within, say, 30 days.
Regardless, you need to provide enough incentive for the customer to revisit, and to make additional purchases on, your website. Enter the concept of upselling.
Upselling involves offering a higher-priced product or service to a customer who has already purchased through your website. Other sales circles define upselling as the act of convincing a customer to purchase a more expensive product than the one the customer originally considered. But that definition focuses on hard-selling new customers and, in my opinion, potentially turning them off.
Upselling in affiliate marketing involves selling a low-price product now and a higher priced product later. However, it’s more than that. Beginning with that initial sale, you are developing a sense of trust with the customer through the effective delivery of content and services. You are building a relationship.
Through that one sale, you receive information about that customer that could help in developing upsell possibilities. It could involve the customer’s interest in information related to the initial product. Or, you could discover the customer’s potential willingness to receive that content from you in the future. That content could take the form of a follow-up email or a viral report, for example.
In order to keep your customers interested in and willing to spend money on what you have to offer, upselling the affiliate marketing way is a great approach. For more about upselling and how to apply it successfully to your affiliate marketing efforts, I heartily recommend Anik Singal’s article on the subject in the October 2005 issue of Affiliate Classroom magazine.
Move Over AdSense, I’m Taking Exit39!
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Ad Placement, Affiliate Marketing Tuesday, 5 December 2006 21:24 4 Comments
Sometimes I’m glad I read the news. And today, I’m glad I read a small post on the 5 Star Affiliate Program blog. Here’s why…
While trying to find a new template for my blog today, I lost the coding for the Google AdSense ads that were in my sidebar. This got me to thinking, why do I have those ads on there anyway?
The answer, because this month I made 70 cents by having them there. OK, so 70 cents is better than nothing, and I made that money because people left through an ad that they found interesting.
However, if you’re NOT running a site that is set up to specifically make money with AdSense ads, you might want to rethink your Marketing strategy. How else could these people leave your blog or website?
They might have left through a link that was listed on your blogroll and ended up buying something from one of the companies you represent as an affiliate? Certainly that commission would be more than 70 cents! I digress. The only reason I bring this up is because so many people tout Google AdSense as the greatest way to make money. It’s never been that way for me; I really don’t make much on any of my sites with those ads. But now there’s a new kid in town. It’s called Exit39 – it’s what I read about today.
If Exit39 works the way it says it does, you can replace your Google AdSense ads with rotating datafeed ads in the sidebar or footer of your website or blog. If you’ve worked with datafeeds before, you know that when an affiliate uses a datafeed, it is coded with their affiliate number. You won’t get paid pennies for a click; you’ll get paid dollars for a sale!
The cool thing about Exit39 is the rotation. You could conceivably load up a bunch of products from the datafeed into your sidebar, and every page view would pull up a new set of products. That means that while people are surfing your site, they will see different products on each page.
There are a limited number of companies participating in the program right now, but this looks like very good news for affiliate marketers. I’ll give it a try and let you know how it works.
