You’ve got the content (Chapter 1). You’ve created a business plan for your site (Chapter 2). You’ve learned how to drive traffic to your site (Chapter 3). You’ve optimized your site for search engine placement (Chapter 4). Now, where’s the money?
This chapter explains how to make money from your website by having your site work as a virtual “sales rep.” You become a sales rep for another site, often called a merchant, by becoming an affiliate, sometimes called an associate, of the merchant.
With affiliate programs, your site provides links to a merchant’s site. You make money if—and only if—visitors you send to the merchant’s site make purchases. If this sounds easy, it can be. You don’t need to stock inventory or worry about fulfillment, shipping, and returns. And you still make money—sometimes very good money—when the product sells. Best of all, the visitor doesn’t necessarily need to make a purchase right away.
However, selling on the Internet is very competitive; there are always multiple avenues for a consumer to buy anything. Furthermore, there’s nothing to stop consumers from bypassing your site completely and going directly to the merchant. You’ll only be successful with your affiliate links if the goods provided by the merchants you are associated with are relevant to the content of your site. Specificity also helps. There must be a good connection between your site content and specific offerings of the affiliated merchant.
This chapter explains the different kinds of ad programs, how affiliate advertising works, and how to work with affiliate aggregators—everything you need to know to make money with affiliate programs, provided your sites draw traffic that will click on links to your affiliated merchants and that this traffic converts into actual purchasers.
Affiliate programs differ from most other advertising approaches: to make money, your traffic has to generate actual sales. This important distinction has implications for your website content and design.
It’s worth going over the three primary approaches to making money via advertising with your web content so that the underlying distinctiveness of the affiliate advertising approach is clear.
The three most common ways to use advertising to make money with content on the Web are:
Affiliate programs pay you a sales commission when someone who clicks through a link on your site to an advertiser’s site actually buys something from that advertiser.
You are paid a fee when a sponsored ad (either banner or text) is displayed on your site. Sponsored ads are often called CPM—short for cost per thousand page impressions—ads because they are paid for on a CPM basis.
For more information on CPM ads, see Chapter 6.
Contextual advertising is primarily text-based advertising that appears on web pages where there is a contextual relevance as determined by automated software. Contextual ads are often called CPC—short for cost per click—ads, because that is the basis on which they are paid.
For more general information about contextual advertising, see Chapter 6. Google’s AdSense is the best-known CPC program. Working with AdSense is explained in Part II.
From your viewpoint—that of the publisher of content on one or more websites—what you probably really care about is how much money you can make from each kind of approach to advertising. Of course, that depends on a great many variables, and there are ways to maximize the yield from each kind of advertising program. It’s worth experimenting to find out which kind of advertising works best with the specific content on your site (and the kind of traffic your site draws). It’s also the case that many content sites carry all three kinds of advertising.
The key conceptual difference between the three kinds of advertising is what a visitor to your site has to do to make you money. It’s a spectrum.
One way to look at this is by the amount of action required on the part of your site visitor, from most to least:
The visitor has to actually get out a credit card and make an online purchase from the advertiser’s site (if not right away, then within a designated amount of time).
The visitor has to click the ad to surf to the advertiser’s page (but does not have to actually buy anything).
All that has to happen is that the ad is displayed on your page.