Are You Giving Away Free Advertising with Affiliate Links/Buttons?

This is a guest post by Anita Campbell, the Founder and Editor of Small Business Trends.

After you’ve had a website or blog a while and it starts to get some traction, you’re bound to be contacted by companies wanting you to join their affiliate program. They ask you to put affiliate links, banners and graphics on your site.

At first you may be flattered, thinking, “I’ve finally made it. Somebody thinks my website or blog is important enough to become an affiliate.”

But try it a few times. Soon you will start to wonder if it is a good idea to give in to flattery and join all such affiliate programs so willingly.

My own experience with affiliate programs is mixed. I’ve had one that I consider a success (free business magazines at TradePub.com). I’ve tried a dozen others that were duds — big zeros. And I’ve had a couple that I would call merely OK – steady but pretty small numbers (such as Amazon.com Associates).

I believe in affiliate programs. But I also think you must work hard to assess an affiliate program’s chances for success before jumping in. Every readership is different. Know your audience! What appeals to one audience may be a complete waste on another.

In each case when I tried an affiliate program that failed, mainly it was because the offering did not suit my audience. For instance, my audience are heavy seekers of information. They tend to like credible information products, like trade magazines. I have also had luck with carefully selected products such as a small business newsletter and signups for webinars.

However, I have never had much luck pitching gadgets, such as smart phones or digital cameras or printers. It’s just not that kind of audience.

I even once tried an affiliate program where you send in your old mobile phone and get paid – you don’t have to spend a dime and actually get money back! (Cellforcash.com) I thought for sure that would be a big hit. Sadly I was mistaken. My audience just doesn’t try out new phones that often.

On a different kind of site, such as a cell-phone discussion forum or mobile gadget blog, that turn-in-your-phone program might have been wildly popular. But not on my general business site!

What’s the downside of picking the wrong affiliate program? Besides wasting time and not making your asset (your site) work for you to earn money, another big issue is that you are actually giving away free advertising space. Those affiliate-vendors are having their ads displayed on your site, but not paying you CPM rates for the privilege. It’s a good deal for them. Free advertising and all they had to do was send an email and create an affiliate program and offer a couple of banners. Can you blame them for wanting as many affiliates as possible? More affiliates = more free advertising across the Web.

By giving away some of your ad inventory for free, you are devaluing the rest of it. Can you really expect an advertiser to pay good ad rates, knowing that affiliates get the same for free?

Plus the more offers and ads you try to cram into a site, the less impact each one makes. When pages are too cluttered, readers are faced with confusion and quickly get overwhelmed. Blogs have a tendency for the sidebars to collect lots of bling and junk. Don’t ask me how it happens – it just does. It’s like dust bunnies under the bed – no one knows where they come from. They just appear after a while.

That’s why I periodically go through my sites and delete stuff from the sidebars. Then whatever ads and offers I want to promote hard can stand out better.

Some website owners have requirements for affiliate programs. They require that each sale or conversion yield X dollars (or Euros or whatever currency). For instance, one person I know will not sign up for any affiliate program that pays under $20 per conversion.

In my case, the dollar amount per conversion is only one factor I look at. For instance, with the free magazine offer I use, one reader may sign up for 4 different magazines and white papers, and later may come back and sign up for 2 more when he receives the follow-up email. Altogether that one customer may be worth $20 to me, and I would have missed out had I insisted that EACH conversion yield $20.

Be sure also to choose affiliate programs consistent with the brand image you want to convey and that you believe in. I am not comfortable with an aggressive style of selling. Others are. The style I want to cultivate is one of being a resource of high-quality, valuable information and offers – there when they need it, but not always pushing something in their face. So that means I look for offers that are mainstream business.

For instance, I was approached to offer a new website platform that requires paying a rather hefty monthly payment for the software. But I feel that WordPress is top of the line for building websites, and why should I try to convince my readers to go with something way more expensive and not as good? Especially when those who buy the system are encouraged to try to sell it to others – it sounds a little too much like a multi-level marketing scheme. And what if that program doesn’t deliver, and the reader concludes that he or she was snookered after paying a lot of money? That would affect how he or she thinks about my brand.

So, choose carefully. In my next article, I offer 7 tips for choosing an affiliate program that is right for your blog or website.

About Author:

Anita Campbell is the Founder and Editor of Small Business Trends (http://smallbiztrends.com), a blog and website serving small business owners and entrepreneurs.

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