Which Comes First, the Chicken or the Ad?
There are certain issues that you’ll wrestle with every day in the affiliate world, and one of those is advertising. Or, more accurately, if you’re using the correct advertising to make as much as you can from your traffic.
I don’t have much love for the word “monetize” (don’t get me started on other less than concrete buzzwords like “sticky,” “eyeballs,” and “scalability”) but it’s a nice shortcut to describe what affiliates do. You transform traffic to your sites into clicks on certain ads and links. Do it well and you’ll make much money. Do it poorly and you won’t.
The difficulty, though, is that it’s not just a matter of getting traffic and slapping up ads. It can be that easy, in rare instances, but usually it’s not. Typically you’ll need to accumulate targeted, focused traffic that is exposed to integrated ads, links, and products that your focused traffic is inclined to be interested in.
In plain English (and much more simply), you’ll make lots of money advertising mortgage products and services if your traffic is composed of people actively looking to buy a house. Those same ads for mortages will make you jack squat if your traffic is looking for naughty pictures of Britney.
That’s the first level of thought related to ads on your affiliate sites. Once you match up your content with on-topic, related advertising, you get to the second level, which is how the ads are integrated into your site.
Backing up a bit, one common issue that lots of new affiliates wrestle with is when to include ads in their sites. Do you have ads from Day 1 or do you wait until you build some traffic to incorporate ads? Do ads annoy and scare off users that might otherwise hang around your cool, useful site? Should you wait until you get search traffic to start integrating and optimizing ads?
There’s no defnitive answer, but I leans towards including ads and tightly integrating them into the site from Day 1. You’ll have your own learning curve as far as learning how ads work, which programs to use, how to build product links, etc., and the sooner you get on the curve, the better.
There’s also a flip side to not subjecting users to ads in the early days, as you’re prone to piss some of them off later when you flip the switch and all of this obvious advertising suddenly pops up. If the ads are always there, from the first time they hit the site, they tend to simply accept ads as a fact of websites these days.
As far as integrating ads into your site, to some degree it’s a matter of personal choice and determined by the type of site you have. I’m not going to go into all the specific cases and factors, especially when what works for one site might never work for another.
In general, lean towards text ads if you can, as they almost always outperform image ads such as banners. We’ve all become slightly conditioned to subconsciously ignore banner ads on website, as they’re obviously ads, they’re generally the same size and appear in the same general locations, and we’re usually interested in reading the actual content, not the ads.
Thus the beauty of text ads, as they’re embedded in the text and hard to ignore. More importantly, they’re often mistaken for navigational links, so they tend to get clicked much more often than other ads. Yes, I know, slightly sneaky, but your goal isn’t to be nice and informative; your goal is to be nice, informative, and profitable. If you have to sacrifice one of those three elements, ditch nice and stick to informative and profitable.
The more tightly and seamlessly your ads are integrated into your site, the more money you will make. Your goal is to have an informative, content-rich site that is narrowly focused, with a layout that makes it difficult to distinguish from ads, content, and navigational links.
If you’re using Adsense, customize the color and background of your ads so that they blend into the background of your website. Consider using different Adsense formats in different locations, taking into account your navigational links, post format, and other factors.
Problogger.net is a good example, epsecially the Adsense ads just above the first post on the main page. Those look just like navigational links, and they’re topics that someone wanting to make money from blogging would be very inclined to click on. If the format was instead the larger Adsense ads, with the advertising text and URL included, they’d very obviously be ads and wouldn’t get clicked as much as they do when people mistake them for navigational links.
If you’re using third-party affiliate programs that provide you with banners, don’t just use the first one you see. Try to run ads that blend into your site and, in some cases, adjust your layout and design to the ads you want to run. In the past I’ve built entire sites around ads that I wanted to try out, with the layout and design (and content, to some extent) dictated by the ad itself.
Ads are a necessary evil in the affiliate world, so the sooner you make your peace with them, the better.
Which Comes First, the Chicken or the Ad? and related information can be found in Adsense, Getting Started