Perhaps you are planning to begin an online business. If so, you need to be sure to avoid the mistakes made by others. Recognize that not all advice is necessarily good advice, especially if the tips are carried to the extreme. Habitually seek out multiple opinions.
As a marketer, you have probably come across pre-built sites that incorporate several streams of potential income. Sometimes those prospective income streams will even appear on a single page within that site. You should wonder whether this approach, which seems so efficient on the surface, really makes sense.
We know that eventually each visitor to your site is going to exit your site–and that’s fine. The key to successful Internet marketing is to get them to leave in the way that maximizes your revenue. All paths out of your site, or off a given page of your site, are not equal. On a single page and within the site as a whole, your design, your content, your navigation system, and every element should be designed to get your visitors to leave you using that single method that is most beneficial to you.
In a retail site, you want them to leave only after they have stuffed your shopping cart full of your products and completed the check out process. The last page on your site that they see should be your “thank you” page. All of the other time they spend in your store should be directed toward getting them to that page.
If you want them to purchase an affiliate product, you want them to get off your own site only by clicking the link to your affiliate. With contextual advertising, you have a similar purpose in that you want them to click one of the ads as they exit. However, the ways in which you assist your visitors in deciding how to exit your site is very different in affiliate marketing from the method you implicitly use in making an ad click the attractive option.
Your job as an affiliate marketer is to convince your visitor that this affiliate’s product can meet the visitor’s specific needs. You highlight those needs with your copy and point out the ways in which the product is particularly good at what it does. You know the product well and can write specifically with that in mind.
You don’t know (in most cases) what products or services are going to be offered on the contextual ads that are placed on your site. Indeed, those ads will change frequently. In your copy and design, you must meet the expectations of the visitor who came to your site with a purpose. At the same time, you must let them know that your content has not answered all the questions that they should be asking. Hopefully, one of the ads that appear on the page while your visitor is there will seem to provide answers to the needs that your content has stimulated within the visitor, so that she or he will click on it.
Each form of generating income requires a different approach to your content. Any given page must have only one primary objective, if you are doing it well. Remember, though, that many of your visitors will visit more than one page on your site by following your navigation. If they encounter one page that praises your own product and another that advocates your affiliate’s product, all you are doing is adding to your visitor’s confusion and probably delaying any decision to purchase. Instead, then, I advocate multiple sites in order to have multiple streams of income. Do not try to build them all at once. Determine which option has the greatest (and quickest) potential cash flow in your niche. Begin with a site that builds that income stream whether it is to sell a product, endorse and affiliate product or deliver contextual ads. You can create those other sites, later.
I do offer a caveat to my admonition about mixing purposes within the same page or site. There are two types of pages on which you know that your visitors are likely to be one step away from leaving. One is your thank you page. The other type is your link directory. On your thank you page, you may wish to offer information about an affiliate’s product that is related and complementary to the purchase they just made. If visitors are within your link directory, chances are that they are looking for an alternative to your site. You might as well offer them some contextual ads.
