Affiliate Marketing Tips

Tip #1: Learn About Your Product
A great key to effective promotion is to actually get involved with the product! When you try out OneGreatFamily, it will spark an excitement about genealogy work that you can share with your visitors. OneGreatFamily is unique from other programs because it allows the whole world access to one huge "human family tree." As updates are made, everyone receives the benefit. In fact, many people find that much (or even all) of their research has already been done for them! If you would like to learn more about OneGreatFamily, you can read the full description on the OneGreatFamily website: http://www.onegreatfamily.com/LearnMore/

Tip #2: Interactive Links:
Many different link types are available to you as a publisher. The most common choice is the banner ad. These images are placed on your site and allow visitors to click on the image to go to the advertiser's site. Another traditional ad type is text links. These links can be placed on your site either separately or, more effectively, within the content of your site. Placed in context, these links can be extremely effective. Other types of links are highly effective but seldom used. Interactive links, for instance, provide some form of interactivity. To find interactive banners, login to www.cj.com.

Tip #3: Using the 5 "W's" in Good Site Design
Your home page is the most important page on your entire website. The content not only needs to be "catchy" but you have got approximately 5 seconds to draw visitor's attention to the content of your site. There must be an incentive for a visitor to stay. A good home page answers all of the "W" questions:

- who (is the site for),
- what (do you offer),
- where (your geographic area),
- when (if it is time-related, ie. an event, or hours opened),
- and why (why choose your services), providing the visitor with useful information about your organization, product, service or event.

If you look at your home page and it does not make you want to stay on the site, you need to rewrite and redesign it. Ask 3 people who are not familiar with your website (like your Mom) and ask them to tell you if they can answer the 5 "W's". Based on their answers, you'll know where you have to start editing. Get more clear and you'll get more visitors and more sales! Please visit http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=7606 to view this entire topic thread. There is more advice on what else makes a good homepage.

Tip #4: Build Your Opt-In List
More and more surveys and studies show the power of relevant, requested email marketing. If you can write one article a month, bundle it with other content from your site, and place targeted advertising inside - you've got yourself another great stream of income, and an effective way to communicate with your audience. Does your site have a newsletter? Does your newsletter work for you? Do you have a signup box featured prominently on every page? If you worry about what to say in a newsletter, take a look at your website. What new things have you added? What are you planning on adding? You can also sign up for newsletters from your competition - they can be great sources of ideas. Every newsletter is another great opportunity to integrate marketing messages. Look for promotions from your merchants that are particularly timely or relevant. Text links in email can be the very most effective advertising of your entire marketing mix.

Tip #5: 3 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website
The biggest challenge for all websites is getting more traffic. We realize that everyone needs help with this. This is a great article I found that lists a couple of great ideas you can do to get more visitors to your site.

1. Writing Articles: Writing articles can improve your traffic by improving link popularity. You can send articles to websites that publish articles. They link to you as the source. Then, Google (one of the main search engines) gives your site more relevance in searches because you have a lot of sites link to you. Hence, you have higher "Link Popularity" - a key metric for ranking higher in Google searches. Every article is automatically full of keywords that potential visitors search for in the search engines. Also, when you publish many articles about the topic of your business, your visitors will see you as an expert in your business are, giving your site credibility.

2. Pay-Per-Search Engines: Another way to boost traffic to your website is by purchasing keywords from one of the pay-per-click search engines or directories. The pay engines offer many advantages to website owners including:

• If you have a brand new site with little or no visibility and no link popularity, the pay engines are a way to get started fast while you wait for your standard search engine marketing efforts to kick in.
• Pay-per-click engines are ideal for holiday promotions, special sales, or to jump start slow engine traffic.
• With the pay engines, you have instant visibility in whichever search engines display those results. You choose your rankings, depending on how deep your pocket book is. If some of your keywords aren't performing, you can choose other ones.
• Purchasing keywords is certainly easier and less time consuming than optimizing your pages. You can target your audience based on the keywords you choose.

Most Web sites have multiple target audiences, so pay-per-click keywords are a way to reach each of those target audiences. To see which Search Engines feed which, take a look at this helpful chart: http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginechart.pdf

3. Learn How to Maximize Your Website For Better Search Engine Rankings: To successfully rank highly in the search engines, the words on your webpages should never be an afterthought but a major investment in your search engine optimization campaign.After your keyword research, writing search-engine-friendly copy should be the very next step in your optimization campaign. For noncompetitive keyword phrases, the writing on the page alone can often bring in high rankings without any other special coding and Meta tagging. Once you've become familiar with the ins and outs of SEO writing, you'll be ready to focus on your Title tags, Meta tags and all the other SEO goodies available to you.

Tip #6: Usability Features Will Increase Sales
Providing your visitors with important usibility tools (example: search boxes) on your site will do two things that will increase your conversion rate: First, it preps them before they enter your partner site to be ready to purchase. They are further along in the sales process before they come to the OneGreatFamily site, for example, and so they are more likely to sign up. The second benefit to providing your visitors with usability features on your website is that you are providing them with unique information specific to them. This will allow your site to become more sticky - meaning visitors will visit your site again because of the value you are providing. If the tools you provide can be tailored to their specific interests, they are more likely to come back and use them over and over again.

Tip #7: Text Links 101
More flexible than a rotating banner ad. More informative than a skyscraper. Able to weave in context messages and powerful calls to action. Look, on that successful affiliate page! It's a bird. It's a plane. No. It's a text link! Okay, they may not be the answer to all of life's problems, but a well-worded text link can go a long way toward increasing your earnings from your website. Powerful wording and relevant offers can have enormous impact on your performance. A poorly worded or obscure text link won't encourage anyone to click. Certain key words are just about guaranteed to increase your clickthrough rates - 'save' and 'free' are great examples. Including a store brand name helps convey a sense of trust. And mentioning the specific product that a link will take visitors to helps pre-sell them on the product before they land on the page to buy. We've set up a variety of text links for you to use, accessible from the CJ "get links" interface, but those are really just starting points. Once you've placed the links in your page, you are free to experiment and customize the message to fit your audience. For instance, you can create links about specific products, even if there is no way to link directly to them. (Of course, you should still write to the affiliate manager and ask for a link to the product!) And try experimenting with your links. Test different wordings for a week, and see which one works the best. Different links will perform better on different pages, but if you use links with emotionally grabbing keywords and a clear call to action you will always outperform your lackluster competitors.

Tip #8: Ad Placement: How to Do Better With What You've Got
So you've redone your titles, meta tags, and h1 headers to match the latest trends in search engine optimization. You've got links to all the right sites, and a whole bunch of links all pointing back to you. You've got the world beating a path to your website. What are they doing once they get there? It's a safe bet that most of them aren't clicking on the banner ads you've placed on your site. Even if your ads are targeted and relevant, fresh and zippy - people are just increasingly used to ignoring animated appeals to their id and ego. A great way to combat that malaise is innovative ad placement. Remember Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark?" Totally blind, she could still get around her house just as well as any of us. She learned where all the furniture was and how to move from room to room without ever bumping any of it. But if anyone had ever moved her furniture or dropped something in the middle of the living room floor, she would have run right into it. (In fact, if you've seen the movie.!) People visiting your website are kind of like that. They know, intuitively, where the banner ads go - across the top, down the left, in all the usual places. And visitors know how to move through your website without ever bumping into the ads. Increasingly, high-profile sites are placing ads in the middle of articles and other non-traditional places. Take a close look at Yahoo! News articles or newspaper sites. Ads that break up the margins or sit in context with text flows seem to "pop" more, catch the eye, and win clicks. So if you want people to notice your ads, drop them in the middle of the living room.