Text Links vs. Banner Ads

As an affiliate manager, I'm often asked, "Which convert better: text links or banners?" At first glance, the most obvious answer it text links. Glancing at a report or statistics will reveal that most of the time text links do convert better than banner ads.

However, there's more to the story than just that. I believe it has to do with how text links are used as opposed to banners that contribute greatly to the higher conversion / success rate. Consider for a moment how text links are employed as opposed to banners.

Let's first take a look at how text links are commonly used. The greatest use of text links comes from product data feeds. These product data feeds employ the specific product name as the text link. Of course, any shopper who is looking for a specific product, sees the product name, and then clicks the link will have the highest possible conversion chance. If a visitor knows what they want, and has already made up their mind that they WILL be making a purchase, then closing the sale becomes a far less challenging task. I discussed this a bit further when examining effective affiliate landing pages.

Another common use of text link: they are placed into the body of a webpage. Content is built around the text link. It much easier to built a value proposition, or tell a story when you have content build around a link then it is to tell that same story with just a banner/picture with a short tag line.

In comparison, consider how banners are commonly placed. Either at the top of a web page, or along the sidebar. Experienced web surfers have already trained themselves to know, banners placed in these spots (especially the leaderboard banner across the top of a page) are trying to sell them something, It's quite easy to automatically tune out to those messages.

The common perception: text links lead to information, banners lead to a sale pitch. Now, this is not to say that banner cannot be an effective tool in promotion. Just don't expect to put up a page and slap a bunch of banners up and expect to have any success. Build up some content, tell a story through that content that appeals to your visitors wants.

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Affiliate Marketing: Outsourcing (OPMs) is More Cost Effective Than Hiring In-House

According to Shawn Collin's Affstat Report the average salary for an in-house manager is $50,000 a year and up. Now, factor in health and other benefits, desk space, infrastructure, those costs rise significantly. To support an in-house affiliate manager, a business must plan to spend at least $70,000 - $90,000 in overhead. If the in-house manager decides to leave the company, all of the knowledge and the relationship history usually walks out the door with the manager.

Additionally, it may be difficult to find an experienced affiliate manager within a specific geographical area. Some larger organizations leave the affiliate program in the care of a junior level marketing staffer. This can be a mistake with lasting consequences. A well run affiliate program can be responsible for 10-20% or more of overall company revenue. Likewise, with the advantages of added revenue and reach, there are dangers in not carefully managing an affiliate program. Brand messages may be damaged and revenue from other channels pillaged via malware and parasiteware.

Most OPM firms charge either a flat fee plus revenue share, or at least a monthly minimum revenue share. Generally the monthly minimum of flat fee is between $2000-$5000 a month.

Now also consider the other benefits an OPM brings: experience, relationships, knowledge, and stability. An OPM has established working relationships with many if not all of the top performing affiliates. They've built a history of performance, and generally an affiliate will know the style of any certain OPM such as does the OPM have a stance against parasiteware, or are they accessible?

In relation to the experience benefits, the cost savings strongly favor an advantage to outsourcing an affiliate program. Focus on the business, do what you do best, and leave the success and growth of a well-managed experience program to experts who are focused on growing your business.

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Affiliate Links vs. Adsense

Mark over at 45n5.com asks a very common question we hear; which is better, having Adsense on a page or utilizing affiliate links? My advice would be that it completely depends on the type of page you are designing. If it's a topic that people are gathering information, or doing some research, then Adsense would seem to fit.

One of Mark's commenter's noted that they had a luxury homes page up where affiliate links didn't do very well, however Adsense earned quite a bit of money. This would make sense, as I don't imagine many people would click on an affiliate link and make any purchase related to luxury homes just from a website.

Now, if you are designing a page targeting people who are in a buying mood, well this is where the affiliate links become very powerful. If you design your site as a funnel, directing people to make a purchase through affiliate links, this should be more effective than simply putting up Adsense ads. If you have a page with a bunch of informational content and articles, then try out Adsense. Give people something to click on in their search for more information.

In either case, if one isn't working out well for you, nothing other than a little effort prevents you from trying out the other.

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Dominating a Niche in Affiliate Marketing

David Wilson made a post over at Social Media Optimization (a blog I frequently visit now that AMWSO has started offering social media consulting services), talking about the approach used by one SEO for reputation management, I felt that many of the same principles can be applied to affiliate marketing toward dominating the search results for a particular niche. Why be satisfied with simply achieving a high search engine placement for particular keywords. Why not aim for owning 5, or 10 slots, and target that consumer from many angles to definitely make a purchase through your affiliate links.

If you have a site or page targeted toward particular key words within a niche, do you have a Squidoo page to compliment your main landing page?  Have you set-up a blog on a different domain, or a blog hosting service? How about a Myspace page, or Hubpage, or Wetpaint Wiki or PBWiki?

Build up some support pages, interlink them, and dominate the search results in a particular niche.

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Duplicate Content Search Engine Penalties and Affiliate Marketing

Many merchants who run affiliate programs make available content for their affiliates to use on affiliate sites. A common question / concern asked of AMWSO is if this content is being distributed to all affiliates, and multiple affiliates are using the content, will this incur a search engine penalty?  It's a question asked of us both from the merchant perspective, as they redistribute content on their own pages, and also from the affiliate perspective, since the affiliates want to use that content.

First, having a page considered as a duplicate does not earn you a penalty in the search engines. Search engines aim to retrieve the best result for any given search, so if a page is considered a duplicate, it is simply filtered out of the results for that particular search query. Your site and domain do not receive any penalty once this happens. To quote from one source written by SEO expert Jill Whalen:

Reprinting someone's article on your site is not going to cause a penalty. At best, your page with the article will show up in a search related to it; at worst, it won't. No big deal either way.

If you are really concerned about duplicate content, and your objective is to get those pages with the content ranking in the search engines, then Webconfs.com provides an excellent article with tips how to get around the duplicate filters. Steps suggested are as simple as writing a brief editorial around the content, or simply changing the page structure around.

For the merchants out there, don't let the fear of duplicate content filters dissuade you from providing valuable content for your affiliates. After all, these affiliates are working to drive that traffic to your site in the end.

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What Does OpenSocial Mean for Affiliate Marketing?

Within tech circles, there is a huge amount of buzz swirling around the Google OpenSocial initiative. Google has partnered up with Myspace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Oracle, Bebo, Ning and a host of others (however not Facebook yet) in support of an open API for social web mini-applications. What the OpenSocial initiative is really about is providing a common API, or common language for application developers to write mini-applications for the various OpenSocial participants.

What are the advantages or uses of applications?

Using mini-applications/apps/widgets, companies / affiliates can now efficiently extend their website experience to existing communities on popular social networks.

What are social networks?

An existing network or community where friends or people of similar interest share.

Facebook was the first social network to open up their API for application development. Applications sat on top of the Facebook platform, and were accessed and used by users through their Facebook profile pages. There are a few affiliate approaches with applications; from Social Shopping Mall which allows users to share / clip and use coupons through the app to iBought which allows product recommendations and purchases through the app.

The OpenSocial API takes the Facebook concept and transforms it to an open standard accessible to any social network. Now with the OpenSocial APIs, application writers can write one application and have it run on a variety of platforms, thereby opening up exposure to even more users. One interesting side note about the OpenSocial participants, Oracle, SalesForce and LinkedIn have chosen to join up, thereby leading one to believe we'll be seeing many more business related applications in the future.

I have listened to some affiliates complain that they've tried to market on Myspace or other social networks with very minimal success. The initial attempts were flawed; making a profile, adding as many people as possible as friends, and then trying to push a marketing message out to these people. This approach didn't fill a need or solve a problem. Now with the opportunity to be creative and innovative, and write an application that can fill some need or solve some problem, marketers have a  new world of opportunities before them.

Will this be the gateway to instant success, or lead to fast millions, probably not. We are potentially riding the very beginnings of a shift. A shift away from traffic being driven by open searches through search engines on the open web, to more defined niche based traffic coming through user selected applications and widgets. Why not be prepared for when this potential shift picks up furious momentum?

If you are a merchant, do you have a social web strategy? If not, one potential way to dip your foot in the water is through your affiliate program. Partnering with value adding affiliates who are already building social applications can give your business and products exposure to the social web while minimizing your risk with the new medium.

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Holiday Affiliate Campaign Preparation

Well, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Thanksgiving, they are all almost here and of course this means lots of consumer buying. For affiliate marketers, it means lots of site work, deal preparation, and testing. This is often times the busiest time of year, but for good reason, since it's usually the most profitable time of year.

Are you looking for help or guidance as to what you should be doing to prepare your affiliate business for the holidays?  Take a look at this Holiday Season Tips article prepared by the folks over at Share Results for some ideas and tips.  Some other ideas for niche research for the holidays can be found over at 5StarAffiliatePrograms.com

Many of the AMWSO merchant partners offer some revenue supercharging bonuses and consumer sale campaigns, so sign up for the AMWSO Affiliate Program News feed to get the latest breaking promotions and affiliate program news.

According to the Linkshare Holiday 2007 Trends reports, the top reasons people shop online during the holidays are:

1. Find discounts
2. Save time
3. Compare prices
4. Gift ideas

Free shipping is the most highly favored promotion according to consumers. followed closely by sales.

If you're still looking for ideas, don't forget to reach out to your affiliate manager. You affiliate manager is an excellent resource for ideas and help, and is all to often not thought of as an asset to be utilized when searching for help and ideas.

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AMWSO will be at Ecomexpo

EcomExpo starts on Tuesday and the AMWSO team will be represented in force. This year, AMWSO is a gold sponsor at Ecomexpo, and we will have our own booth. The booth will be staffed throughout regular business hours with all of the lead affiliate managers representing all of the AMWSO managed affiliate programs.

Ecomexpo is a great venue (virtual expo) to really talk about business and start to build relationships with companies and individuals. Of course it cannot completely replace the social aspects one gets at a real world conference, but since it's virtual it really focuses the attention to specific business matters. A very good mix of disciplines will be represented, from affiliate marketing to SEO to lead generation and to contextual advertising. There will also be many presentation sessions on a variety of online business topics, which are all free during the Expo (October 9 through 11). Once the expo closes, one must pay for a pass to the Ecomexpo university to have access to the sessions and panels.

Whether you have a business selling goods and/or services looking for ways to promote online, or you're a publisher / affiliate looking for new partners to promote or ways to monetize your site, Ecomexpo is well worth checking out. Also, please do stop by the AMWSO booth and say hi!

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OPM Firms as a stabilizing force..

The thought of "Corporate Stability via OPM Firms" had never crossed my mind, but the other day one of the AMWSO team came to me and said: "My contact at the clients end is leaving for a new job, he introduced me to his replacement last night, 4th one in three years."

And that's when it struck me: I looked over all our corporate clients and sure enough, every one has had at least three changes in staff and management in the time we've worked with them! So that's three chances for:

• Knowledge to be lost.
• Down-time for training up new staff.
• Lost continuity with affiliates.
• Lost contacts and relationships.
  
• And more I am sure.
  

I never really saw OPMs as a "stability" factor in large firms before, but looking at their high turn over rate of staff, it becomes obvious that many firms rely on their outsourced partners (of any kind really) for stability, just as much as they do for their professional skills. An OPM firm can provide continuity in the area of expertise, like for example, AMWSO does for the affiliate channel. It’s a very solid value-add factor which I hadn’t really thought about until now.

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Pre Coded Video via RSS Feeds...

It's late and it's the weekend, and I should be in bed, my eye sight is kinda blured, but the truth is there in front of me... I've managed to put a Gaiam video into the LinkShare RSS and have it spit out the other side pre-coded with the affiliate link... and I've played with the content, updated it, changed it and generally mucked around and it's still working, still updating in real time and still tracking perfectly. You can check out the sample I threw together here. It is rough and ready. Or log into LinkShare and grab the raw feed Gaiam (TEST) from the RSS section.

And I must admit when the LinkShare RSS for merchants email arrived in my mail box on April 1 I thought it was some ones idea of a really poor joke... especially when I logged in and couldn't find it.

As it turns out I've been able to plug our own custom RSS feeds for merchant news direct into the LinkShare system with no fuss at all and now I have Video. I shouldn't, but there was nothing else to do at 2 am this morning so I thought I'd have a crack at it before breakfast.

So now it's working I better work out how we can put this to the best use.

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Retailers not paying smaller commissions

A recent article from Internet Retailer, based on the recent 2007 AffStat Report, would have us believe that commissions are going down... to which I'd like to offer a more realistic reason for why the reports shows a drop in merchants that pay high commissions.

When the report first started the merchants that took part in the AffStat Report were more the larger merchants, with larger programs and larger pay outs. Over the past few years more and more merchants have participated in the report leading to a lot of middle sized and smaller merchant programs adding their data. This simply means that the results have tilted from a bias towards large merchant data towards a more balanced spread of affiliate programs from all types and sizes of merchant.

Commissions are not going down, there are just a lot more mid sized affiliate programs around today and they are not paying $5,000 a month to their top partners... not yet anyway!

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AMA 2007 ... same time same place next year.

I was all very exciting at the AMA 2007 Vancouver last night as I managed to put yet more faces to more names, faces to Avatars, faces to voices and well you get the picture. My Third AMA event and certainly the largest of the three events with over 100 people coming in from all over Canada, the USA and the affiliate marketing power house nation of Thailand.

Speeches were kept short and sweet by the sponsors and then it was straight into diner and chatting. And just like last year, given 5+ hours to meet people I think I managed to spend time with only 20 folks... Better go for an all day event next year Ian... a day of skiing in Whistler followed by an evening of networking (for those that survive the cold) !

Anyway I blew my speech, while talking about what I call "The Pause" I suffered from "The Pause". For those who are lucky enough not to suffer from this dreaded affliction I'll explain... it comes at three levels

1. You see some one you are sure you know, online you'd have time to type "Hi" "how are you" and stumble through a good 2 minutes of text while your brain tries to remember who you are chatting with, but back in the real world you brain stops functioning for 2 minutes while your fingers search frantically for the key board to give itself time to remember who it is you're chatting with.

2. You see some one you know and after the "Hi" you really feel you need to say something deep and meaningful, instead you manage to mumble "brb" and then realize that there is no where to go and sit there hoping they'll fill the pause for you

3. While talking to a group of people you phase out as you brain starts to multi task and before you know it you've suffered from a lack of memory, stopped talking and that's usually just as well because no one really had a clue what you were talking about.

.... yea nasty! I managed to suffer from it all last night :) Next year I'm taking my lap top and if anyone wants to chat they can message me on MSN :D

So anyway it was great to see, meet and chat with lots of great people (no I'm not going to list names else I'll forget someone and that'll cost me unending grief) , had a wonderful time and hope to see everyone (and more) again next year!

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AMA 2007 : Canada Rules, when it's not raining!

Yes Canada let me in again. And this time there wasn't even a queue at the immigration section either. "Bonjour, have a nice stay.." of course then I got to the baggage collection way to fast and had to wait half an hour for my bags.

What i did notice during my brief passage through immigration was another case of superlative Canadian customer service. The the line over from me a family from Taiwan were discussing their visit to Canada with the immigration official. They spoke no English and she spoke not a word of Chinese, but through careful patient friendly sign language and pointing everything was sorted out and no one lost their temper or got the slightest bit excited... Yup, even at the gateway to the country those Canadian manners were in action.

Yesterday I made a valiant effort to buy some more RAM for my Sony Laptop, so dashed out into the streets to go shopping...and for the first time in 3 visits to Vancouver it was raining. I was ready for the cold, I was ready for snow, I was not ready for rain... it was icy cold and wet. That might sound like obvious, but back home rain is warm and you don't notice being wet. I think my total shock at the rain being cold must have shown as people were giving me a wide berth in the streets. I'm not sure if it was the wild eyed panicked look of a man on the verge of freezing to death or the fact that I was clutching my laptop case to my chest as if my life depended on it, probably both...but I certainly got plenty of room... didn't find my RAM either! Though the Sony shop was very apologetic and gave me directions to somewhere that might...if it's not raining later today I'll give it a shot. :)

Tonight we have small gathering of folks with Missy, Brian, Forrest, Brook, Alex and more getting together for a pre event huddle and a few cups of really hot chocolate!

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Baghaus Launched on ShareaSale

Launched just last Thursday on the ShareaSale Network, - AMWSO’s newest partnership with designer inspired handbag retailer, Bagahus.com.

We’re all very excited to be working with Baghaus, as the owner Jason has an excellent grasp on what affiliate marketing is, and is always open to recommendations. A fine demonstration of this followed a thread started by an affiliate over at ABestWeb regards potential leakages from the site. Jason understood the concerns raised by the knowledgeable folks at ABW and removed the offending items almost immediately. This is why I know we’ll all benefit from working with such a clued-up and open minded merchant ;-)

This program benefits from having two managers, Dave Oliver and myself Patrick Goodfellow, and we can be reached at affiliates@baghaus.com.

Dave, what don’t you chime in and let potential partners know why promoting Baghaus will be a financially sound idea….

Cheers,

Patrick Goodfellow

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