Using Affiliation as a Mass Promotion Tool

There are Hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs out there that you can choose from and all of them are claiming to be the best. Some of them will give you the impression that all you have to do is implement their banners and links and wait for the money to start rolling in. This CAN be the case at times, but this scenario usually only applies to very large sites that have massive web traffic already. For most of us, being a successful affiliate requires a little more work than that!

When you are selling your wares through a website, you will be needing as much help as you can get and that is why affiliation is such a good deal. It gives you and like companies the chance to market your wares in more than one spot. As the marketing affiliate, it is your job to get you and other companies together to do it. Most affiliates use their own sites and combine marketing strategies with others. Your website is likely not geared toward one thing in particular so affiliate’s who come in will gain a lot more from your services.

As the variety of goods and online services offered over the Internet has grown at an incredible rate over the last few years, and in response, so has the competition. Web site visitors need to have a very good reason for clicking on a link or banner. In most affiliate programs, you are offered a wide variety of banners that you can place on your site; all of them will be effective in getting attention from your target audience.

If you can gather a click through rate of at least 2%, then you are doing very well. It has been my experience, that highly colorful and picture filled banners do not perform as successfully as their simpler counterparts. The main reason for this is the time it takes to download it. If a banner is the last thing to load on your page and the banner ad is excessively byte "heavy", by the time it has loaded your visitor may already have scrolled down the page already and miss it entirely.

Heavy banner ads can also slow down the loading of your pages, or even some of the critical elements of your page and you can lose your visitors altogether. This is why A graphically rich banner can also confuse the actual message because the artwork and marketing blurb can be imbalanced. For these reasons, I would recommend that banners you implement be no more that 15kb wherever you possibly can.

Banners that have a lot of animation in them, such as rapid flashing, are also something to consider very carefully before setting them up. While these do achieve high click rates, they are also highly annoying to the average visitor. If you do decide to implement this form of banner advertising, you have to use it very sparingly.

Whenever you begin selecting any form of advertising that requires graphics you should try and keep the theme of your site in mind. In general, while graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch a visitor’s eye, it shouldn't be to the point that everything else on the page is ignored. Whenever you can, you have to make sure that all banner ads or advertising that you use uses a link that opens in a new window. That way, if a visitor does choose to visit one of your advertisers it is easy for them to return to your page and review what they actually came to your site for.

A lot of companies are now offering their affiliates the options of using pop up and pop under ads. However, the fact is they annoy most visitors and are usually closed before they even have a chance to load by automatic program blockers. It is for this reason that you should use pop-unders instead and preferably those that only display once per visit. I will talk more about pop-unders in a later section