The thing I hate most about affiliate marketing is that its very slow and sometimes miserable process. For example I used to be big affiliate for Adidas using the BeFree network, but it was really not the best thing I ever experienced. The main problem was that I was supposed to used static (I don’t mean animated but one product/service only) banners or text links and each time they change their product line or make a new promotion I had to change everything manually on all websites and this simply sux! Yep I couldn’t take it and I gave up.
Fortunately for all of us, Text-Link-Ads came out with a new product/service targeted at affiliate marketers like me. This affiliate network is extremely similar to the Google AdSense as it is keyword targeted, but has some really nice flexibilities that the big G does not want us to use:
- You can choose your own products from all products in the network and even select your own ebay userid or favorite store. This gives you the advantage to choose what to put instead of hoping that the mighty G will know you your website is all about
- You can place AuctionAds advertisements wherever you want and as many as you want. Currently there is no restrictions on that (heh I haven’t red the TOS but I assume so.>
- AuctionAds is wonderful solution that works perfectly in addition to AdSense. In fact, visitor think that you’re actually selling all those things and its a great cover-up for MFA website or addition to your blog.
I want to share also something else with you that I did recently and I got really impresses and motivated me to write this post.
I have a website dedicated to the sport of Freestyle Wrestling and its a really big website with more than 400 professionally written articles. This website became authority for a lot of wrestling keywords and is ranked top 10 for most of the thing I bothered to help it rank well. The average daily visits are about 500-1000 and they are mostly interested in the news that I post there.
The first type of monetizing that I tried with this website was total failure. I put AdSense, but nobody bothered to click on the ads. Not that the location of the ads was bad, but the website was so stuffed with content that nobody bothered to click the ads and instead continue reading more articles. This trend ended up with extremely poor conversion rates with about 1.26% CTR which is very very low.
Then somebody gave the the great idea to put a page called “wrestling gear” on the same website so that people interested in such things can click there and see a page stuffed with wrestling gear AdSense. Yes that helped me increase the CTR to 5.6% which is still quite low as most wrestling store advertisers pay as much as $0.04 cents per click. I desperately needed some good solution to increase the magnetization of this website!
Two weeks ago I received this promotion newsletter from Text-Link-Ads for their new program called AuctionAds and from curiosity I signed up and started testing. I’m always a bit scared of introducing drastically new publisher networks so I decided to test-drive this new ads on my wrestling news website as I don’t have anything to loose there. The first day I got really nice CTR of 12% to 15% which was a ground breaking record for that particular website. The unfortunate thing was that affiliate publishing does not count clicks but only actual sales and that sucked a bit because the first day I didn’t get any money and I was about to give it up.
The funny thing was that when I checked the stats two days later I found out that the first day I sale, but the way ebay works is that I receive the fund few ways later and that was awesome! It is so good! Now I get average $1.4 to $1.6 per click! Yes I measure my success in clicks as an average of all the money earned from affiliate sales divided by the number of clicks. This is quite a big increase compared the the previous $0.04 PPC from AdSense.
I guess this example should try to give you a good idea of how you can monetize your website by adding simple “online shop” page to your website and placing some AuctionAds or similar Affiliate Program.
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