The cookie ensures that if the visitor ‘belongs to’ or was ‘referred by’ a link from your website, that you will be credited with the affiliate sale should that visitor return to the affiliate site within a given timeframe and make a purchase. Generally cookies may last any amount of time, called the cookie length.  These lengths vary, but are typically 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. And if you are still wondering about the term cookie, it is just a snippet of data that is automatically placed on a visitor’s website and it is totally harmless.

As an astute affiliate marketer, one of the items that you need to evaluate anytime you are considering joining a new affiliate program is the cookie length of that program. The longer the length, the more time a visitor has to return to the affiliate site and make a purchase for which you will receive a commission. Naturally, it is wise to choose affiliate programs that have cookies that last a long time. Some programs even offer lifetime cookies.

Generally, I like programs that offer lifetime cookies, however there is one downside to only joining affiliate programs that offer lifetime cookies and that is, assuming you are not the first affiliate to refer a particular visitor, you may be sending visitors to the program that have already been referred by or ‘belong to’ someone else. This could be especially true if the program that you are promoting is particularly popular. So there is a downside to only choosing programs that offer lifetime cookies that you should be aware of.

On the other hand, some prgrams offer very short cookies and some do not even tag the visitors you refer at all. In most cases, these types of affiliate programs should not be promoted. It is widely known that visitors often do not make a purchase on the first visit to a store (or in this case an affiliate website) so why refer them to a website that will not give you credit when they return to the site to make a purchase at a later date. It is just bad affiliate marketing to even waste your time promoting such programs.

Finally, there are different ways cookies may be manually deleted by the user so even ‘lifetime’ cookies may not necessarily last forever. Choose a good combination of affiliate programs that integrate well with your content and select programs to promote that offer varying cookie lengths. After you have achieved some success and made some affiliate sales, you will be able to tell which programs are working best for your site and which types of cookies work best with your visitors. Anyway, just remember the old Sesame Street song, “C is for cookie…” the next time you are perusing affiliate programs to join and think about this article from KillerIncome.net when it comes to selecting which affiliate programs you ultimately decide to promote on your website to ensure that you select a good mix of programs offering varying cookie lengths.

If you enjoyed this article and find the posts on KillerIncome.net useful and informative, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

CTR is calculated by dividing the number of times a user clicked one of your affiliate links (or banners etc.) by the number of times that particular link was served (called impressions). For example, suppose you have placed a banner advertisement on a website and that banner was served one thousand times (1000 impressions) and clicked on ten times (10 clicks). The resulting Click Through rate (CTR) would be 10/1000 = .01 and since CTR is usually expressed as a percentage, just multiply .01 x 100 = 1%. One important thing to remember is that CTR is calculated based on number of clicks even if those clicks all came from the same visitor!  Even still, in order to increase your affiliate earnings one of the first things you want to do is increase your CTR.

According to Value Click Media, ”a typical CTR (for a banner ad) is 0.5% (1 in 200).” This means that there is one click for every 200 impressions. Looking at MY Match.com CTR (for Match.com affiliate advertisements placed on WebPersonalsOnline.com) in the above image, you can see that the CTR I achieved for April was 20.67%, just over forty times the typical banner ad CTR! Clearly these results weren’t achieved using banners alone. Let’s take a look at another statistic from April for WebPersonalsOnline.com to see if there is even more to the story.

The next screenshot breaks down the 20.67% CTR to the two types of advertisements used to achieve this click-thru-rate, Banners and Searchboxes.  If you analyze the CTR for each type of ad, you’ll see I was still able to achieve a CTR greater than 5% for my banners (over ten times a typical banner CTR of .5%) and a whopping 52.44% CTR for my Searchbox advertisements! This CTR is almost one hundred and five times

better than the typcial banner CTR of .5% (according to Value Click Media). Certainly, there is more to earning real money as an affiliate than simply placing some banners on your website. Let’s analyze how I achieved such a high CTR.

My banner CTR of over 5% is pretty good. I achieved this by using non-standard size banners and also by embedding 300×250 size banners into many of my articles. Also, in addition to the standard 468×60 size banner that is common on many web pages, I also used 728×90 sized banners (sometimes called leaderboards) and vertical 160×600 sized banners, also known as skyscrapers. By using non-conventional sized banners and experimenting with embedding banners directly in my articles, as well as keeping the banners highly targeted to my visitors, I was able to achieve a CTR better than ten times the typical banner CTR.

But the real story is the 52.44% CTR I achieved by using Searcbox ads. The Match.com affiliate program (through Linkshare) offers convenient SearchBoxes that affiliates can embed directly into their web pages. These Search Boxes contain my affiliate URL so that whenever a visitor uses one of these search boxes on my online dating site to browse the profiles of Match.com members, I get credit for the referral.

The CTR is so high because the visitors to my site are all interested in online dating and checking out the photos of single men and women on Match. Although I’d like to think everyone is coming to my website to read the in-depth articles on internet dating and relationships, my goal as an affiliate is to get them to Match.com so I get credit for the referral. I use a Search Box centered in the upper-middle of each of my articles on WebPersonalsOnline.com and this appeals to the curiosity of my visitors. And, hey, it’s free to look. I imagine most of my visitors never read any of my articles all the way through and that’s fine with me!

So, what can you learn about increasing your CTR from my ‘case-study’? First, typical banner CTR is very low. This is generally for conventional sized banners placed in typical spots on the web page. You can improve your banner CTR simply by experimenting with non-typical banner sizes and placements. Second, look for affiliate programs that offer more than the simple banner ot text-link affiliate links. Specialty links, such as the Seachbox described above can totally annihilate the typical Click Through Rate(s) achieved by most affiliates using conventional linking methods. The search boxes work especially well for online dating sites because eveybody wants to see what the members look like, who are the good-looking guys, how many hot girls are there on the site, who are the newest members etc.

So, just remember to try different things, experiment with different linking options and try to find affiliate programs that give you many different link choices for getting your visitors to the affiliate website. Experiment, experiment, experiment and analyze the results you are getting to see if there is aanything you can do to improve those results. To be a successful affiliate does not require rocket science, but it does require a little testing, experimentation, and analysis.

Technorati Tags:  CTR, how to increase CTR, affiliate marketing, increase affiliate links CTR, CTR analysis, how to improve CTR, affiliate CTR

WebPersonalsOnline.com
This is my online dating site. I have had it for about a year and a half.  I got started with internet marketing in the online dating arena and so it continues to hold a special place in my heart. I started this site from scratch and developed it completely myself using FrontPage. It is mainly an affiliate site of Match.com, Yahoo Personals and sites in the Friendfinder affiliate network, along with some niche dating sites. It’s unique selling proposition (and I use that term loosely ) is that, unlike other dating affiliate sites, it is not merely a review of the big affiliate sites nor is it just a buch of links pages to other dating affiliate sites. This site is chock full of original online dating content created by yours truly. Does it make any money and how much? You’ll have to come back in a day or so after I post my first Income Report in which I will break down the earnings of all of my sites (including this blog) and review what I am doing right, the mistakes I have made, and what I can do better in order to bring my online earnings up to the next level.

FreeMusicVideos.net
The name pretty much sums up what this site is all about. Visitors can watch free music videos. I purchased this site about one year ago mainly because I thought the domain name, although long, was pretty valuable compared to what the seller was asking for it. Since it came with a fully developed site, that was just a bonus.  The site is developed in wickedly sick PHP that is so far above my head it’s not funny. I do know *some* PHP as you’ll see from the next site in my network. The site makes use of RocketProfit and CD Universe affiliate programs, as well as Adsense. I don’t do anything to this site, users just copy and paste the music video codes into the MySpace or other social networking pages and the site gets a link back each time this is done.

Concerts.ws
The third website in my network is Concerts.ws. I did not start this site from scratch, but I have done some development on it myself and it is much larger now than the few pages it was when I bought it. Again, I liked the domain name so I bought it from the seller who had thrown up a few pages to get some Adsense earnings. This site has been kind of  a pet project for me and I used it as a testing ground to expand my knowledge of PHP development.  All of the subpages on this site (save for the few the original owner developed) are based on a PHP page structure I created. New pages are added pretty fast simply by adding the artist’s details to certain required fields in the artist’s database. This is my first database-driven site using PHP and, although it does not have a Content Management System (CMS) like all of us lazy fools have here on our fabulous WordPress sites, it has been invaluable as far as learning exactly HOW database driven sites are developed using PHP. I just think it’s so cool to be able to go into the database, add a few required fields and out comes a page like this–>Chris Daughtry Concert Tickets, which took me all of five minutes to produce. I can feel some basic PHP posts coming to satisfy the nerds (like me) in the audience. I use Adsense and the TicketsNow affiliate program to monetize this site. Read my next post to see how much this site makes.

MusicGearPlus.com
This website is pretty much a ZZOUNDS Affiliate Site, although I do have some Adsense on it. I purchased this site about one year ago and just don’t have time to devote to it. The site is a database driven PHP site that integrates nicely with the musical equipment feeds from ZZOUNDS.com, but I really never promote it and it is still sitting with a PR0 on it due to my lack of attention to it. I may be unloading this site in the near future as I devote more time to this blog, Concerts.ws and another site I have in development. This site really needs someone who can write great reviews of the musical equipment that it is advertising. I do play guitar and bass, but I don’t have the time to review new musical products and post in-depth reviews and the site is definitely suffering due to this.

39j.net
Basically, this site is a paid link directory site that runs on a script the name of which I can’t remeber off the top of my head. It also has some Adsense on it. Since I had not been promoting this site recently, I decided to sell it and it has, in fact, recently sold. You may be wondering how much it sold for and I’ll tell you…in my next post in about a day or so when I post my first ever monthly income report. Come back then to read all the gory earnings details of my online empire.

So that’s it. Those are my affiliate sites. Since I have recent sold 39j.net and will probably try to unload MusicGearPlus.com next month, my intention is to continue to develop WebPersonalsOnline.com, this blog of course, and I really want to expand and promote Concerts.ws because I think that site has a lot of potential.  There certainly is a lot of competition in the online dating and concert ticket sites, but I was never one to let that stop me from trying my hand at making money in those areas and I still think that if you have a good site, a unique idea and promote, promote, promote you can earn money in in the more ‘saturated’ niches online.

For example, suppose you have a blog that spans many diverse topics.  Ideally, you may want to get general advertisers to this type of site, but until your traffic reaches a certain level, that just might not be possible.  An alternative would be to promote many different affiliate programs and try to integrate each different program with the different topics of your diverse posts.  For example, you have a post about health and fitness, you find an affiliate program or programs related to that topic and you mention them within that specific post.  You have another post about your pets and you offer pet-related products through an affiliate program in that post. You get the idea. 

The key, as I mentioned previously in my post, Affiliate Marketing for Beginning Bloggers is to promote affiliate programs that are related to the subject of your website (or in this case each indivdual post since the post topics are so diverse) and integrate these into your content. In this scenario, I do not think it would be feasible to try every different affiliate program prior to adding the program’s links to your site because there are just too many different topics covered and, as a result, you will be using many different affiliate programs throughout your site.

In the case of a site that is a little more focused, like this blog for example, where many of the post topics focus on building profitable WordPress sites, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Affiliate Marketing it is a little easier to narrow down the range of affiliate advertisers being promoted to simply the best ones that I have found related to each of the specific categories on which this site is focused.

You should be able to see from the 125×125 banner ads to the above right, as well as from my other posts, that I am currently promoting HostGator Web Hosting, Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, GoDaddy Domain Registration and Revolution WordPress Themes.  Each of these programs complements the main focus of this site, integrates extremely well with the posts I have written thus far, and should be extremely beneficial to any of my visitors.  But the question remains: Have I tried each of the products and/or services being offered by the affiliate programs I am currently promoting on KillerIncome.net?

I am currently hosting this blog using HostGator Web Hosting and I host each of my other websites (except for WebPersonalsOnline.com) with HostGator, as well.  They are reliable, affordable and have excellent customer service. I use and fully endorse them.

I am also a big fan of Aaron Wall and his SEO Book. I think this book is one of the most valuable resources for learning Search Engine Optimization and Aaron really practices what he preaches.  I am using many of his techniques on this blog, as well as my other websites.

In addition to website marketing, I also am an avid collector of domain names. While I use several different Registrars, GoDaddy is one that I particularly like because you can find some excellent domain name registration bargains there and their website and domain management area is very user-friendly. As you can see, this program also fits in well with my site content, as well. After all, the first step to starting any online business is registering a domain name. Some of you may know that GoDaddy also offers web hosting, in addition to domain name registering. I do not use GoDaddy web hosting and am not at all familiar with the quality of their web hosting solutions so I do not endorse GoDaddy’s hosting services on this site.

Finally, you may have noticed that I am not currently using a Revolution Custom WordPress Theme on this site and yet I am promoting them. I think that their themes are some of the most attractive around and I would eventually like to use one of their themes on this site.  As a new WordPress blogger, I was not comfortable paying a couple hundred dollars for an upscale theme until I was comfortable changing my default WordPress theme to a custome theme and became more familiar with running a WordPress site.  It is my intention to upgrade my theme eventually and Revolution is where I will purchase my new theme.  My goal is to first earn the money from this blog prior to ‘treating’ myself to a high-end custom theme for this blog.

So, what do you think? Is it necessary to test each affiliate program’s product or service before adding their links to our sites? Is it wrong to advertise the products of a program that we are not currently using? Can you think of examples like the one mentioned above where it just may not be feasible to test each affiliate program? Anyway, this was just something that was on my mind and I wanted to present it in a post.  Thanks for reading.

RSS readers, while certainly loyal followers of a blog (or the blogger) they patronize usually come by because they are interested in what you (or I) have to say. This is nice, but in most cases, especially in the case of ‘general topic’ blogs, the subscribers subscribe because they are entertained by the blogger. While there is certainly nothing wrong with that, these visitors are not ending up at their blog(s) of choice because they are looking to fill a need, they generally wind up at your blog (or my blog) to see what we have to say or to be entertained by us.

You might be saying to yourself, “So what if my visitors are not coming by to fill a specific need, they’re still visitors and the more visitors (i.e. traffic) I have, the more money I’ll make.” Unfortunately, there is a slight flaw in that logic. If you are an affiliate marketer, you especially want people visiting your blog or website who ARE looking to fill a need. Why? Because these are the people who are most likely to become customers of the affiliate program(s) you are promoting because you will wisely choose programs that are going to fill the specific needs of your visitors. One of the first things to realize about affiliate marketing is that one of the ways to determine which program(s) to promote is by asking yourself how people are getting to the area of your site in which you are promoting these programs.

That might sound a little bit like, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” But it is very important.  If you can understand the need that visitors have who wind up on a certain page or area of your site, then you can promote affiliate programs on that page or area to fill that need. This is incredibly important because the combination of understanding the needs of your visitors/offering affiliate programs that solve these needs is one of the keys to successful affiliate marketing online.

So where does organic search engine traffic fit in and why is this type of traffic generally better than repeat visitors (RSS subscribers)? As I mentioned above, RSS subscribers may be visiting to hear what you have to say or be entertained by you. They come by certainly because they find our posts useful and probably do derive some benefit from them. However, they are not usually trying to fulfill a specific need and therefore are not as susceptible to our affiliate offers. That means the conversion ratio we can expect from our RSS subscriber traffic is typically much lower than from our other kind of traffic – the organic search engine traffic.

This is easy to understand by looking at a quick example of how the ‘internet search process’ works.  Suppose a typical internet surfer is thinking about starting a WordPress blog like this one. This person realizes that they will require hosting for their new WordPress blog and decides to enter the search phrase ‘reliable hosting solution for WordPress blogs’.  If you think about the keyphrase the surfer just typed in, you may notice something interesting.  They are looking for a hosting provider for the new WordPress blog they are contemplating (this is their need). Lo and behold, one of the first pages that shows up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is one of my former posts where I talked about installing WordPress using Fantastico and discussed hosting providers that offer this nifty little script and endorsed the Web Hosting Service that I use for this blog, as well as some of my other sites. I am basically offering a solution to this person’s ‘problem’ or need and they will probably at least check out the hosting company I recommended.

Think about that visitor for a moment. They found this site by performing an Internet search via a search engine, wound up here because I discussed a potential solution to their problem (i.e. their need), and are much more likely to become a customer of the hosting affiliate program I endorsed than my typical RSS subscriber who comes by to ‘see what’s going on’ or ‘for entertainment’ or to gather some ‘general affiliate marketing ideas’. It is no secret that the organic search engine visitor is potentially a much more profitable customer than a blog’s everyday RSS readers. This person may never subscribe to my RSS feed.

In addition to this, RSS readers may stop subscribing if your posting frequency decreases because, to maintain these everyday visitors, it is usually necessary to provide them with new material on a pretty consistent basis. Contrast this with a timeless post that ranks well in the search engines and draws hundreds or even thousands of potentially new customers every month. Now, there is no doubt that your RSS subscribers can become customers of your affiliate programs, but once they are, then what? The lifeblood of any affiliate marketer is the ability to consistently bring in new customers to the programs she endorses. What’s even worse is when all of the blogs within a certain niche promote the same affiliate programs and your RSS subscribers are simply a subset of the RSS subscribers of one of the more popular blogs in your niche and have ALREADY become customers of the affiliate program being endorsed by you THROUGH the affiliate links of someone else!

Finally, your RSS subscribers may become conditioned to seeing your ads or not clicking your links simply due to the fact that they LOOK at your same pages day after day and week after week. Simply by serving your pages in front of a fresh new visitor you have increased the likelihood of one of your advertisments or promotions succeeding. And where do we get fresh new visitors from? That’s right, organic search engine traffic!

It’s interesting to me to see the valuation metrics placed on blogs, especially within a niche, and what’s a little ‘not right’ is the fact that the blogs with the highest RSS readership base are valued the highest. When, in my humble opinion, this type of visitor is the 1) least likely to stick around if the blog is sold (i.e. loyal to the blogger not to the blog), 2) the least likely to become a customer of affiliate programs being endorsed by the blogger, and 3) the most difficult to maintain (i.e. it’s usually necessary to post quite frequently to keep this visitor coming back).

Compare this to the typical organic search engine visitor who 1) Visits because they have a need to fill that your site, or a program being offered on your site, just might fill, 2) is more likely to use a product or service endorsed on your site to fill that need, 3) does not require daily posts to attract, and 4) will still end up on your blog even if it ends up being sold because of the great SERPs your posts have achieved.

So, what kind of traffic would you prefer? The Organic Search Engine Traffic or the RSS Subscriber traffic? You can clearly see which type I prefer. Naturally, having BOTH types of traffic is the most desirable result and I certainly do not think it is necessary to sacrifice one for the other. But I want the traffic that will most likely convert and the type that I do not have to become a slave to my blog to maintain. WHat kind of traffic do you want?

Probably, aside from this blog, the site that I devote the majority of my current time to is my online dating site WebPersonalsOnline.com. Although I’ve mentioned previously that I – at this time – do NOT earn Killer Income online, my dating site is probably the site of which I am most proud and is my highest earning active affiliate site. I will provide a full earnings report to include a breakdown of each of my website’s earnings, including this blog, once the month is over and at the end of each subsequent month going forward.

Many people feel that there is too much competition in the dating niche and that it is ‘impossible’ to rank for competitve keywords without spending a bundle.  WebPersonalsOnline.com ranks #13 out of over 8 million for the term ‘online personals’ and also has decent rankings for several other mildly competitive dating and personals related search terms.  That is FREE search engine traffic. The site has a Google Pagerank of only 2, but it still manages to pull in approximately 70-80 unique visitors per day.

I realize that 70-80 visitors is not a lot, but I believe it is a good foundation from which to expand.  I have only been developing the site for the past 6-8 months and have not really worked that hard on it. It makes me a little money, traffic is gradually increasing and it’s Alexa rank is slowly getting better (although it still kinda sucks). The site earns money through affiliate programs, mainly those of Match.com, Friendfinder, and Yahoo Personals.  I also promote several niche dating sites in key areas on that website and these have been well received by my visitors thus far. Ultimately, I would like to expand to take on private advertisers, but the site must grow a lot prior to this.

So what magic am I employing to achieve rankings for competitive keywords in Google and a whopping 70-80 visitors per day? Really no magic at all.  My efforts include simply writing fresh, original content and performing link exchanges with other sites in the online dating niche.  I do only manual link exchanges, the kind where you submit your website to another via a form or the kind where you kindly email the webmaster and request an exchange. I have a knack for writing dating articles uniquely suited to the search terms I am targeting, but do not use any sophisticated tools, such as Keyword Density Analyzers or anything like that. You can check out my latest original article, the Ten Most Common Online Dating Mistakes that online daters make.  Ultimately, the keywords I am targeting with that article are: ‘online dating mistakes’, ‘dating mistakes’, ‘pitfalls of online dating’, ‘avoiding online dating mistakes’ etc.  None of these keywords is incredibly competitive, but I believe each should bring in a little traffic.  We’ll see once the article gets indexed.

You might think that all of the above is a lot of work – and it is, but what I found is that it takes some good old fashioned elbow grease to achieve any type of success online.  So whether you are trying to earn money by blogging or with an affiliate site like mine or by using a combination of the two techniques, what I have found is that there is really no shortcut (assuming you do not have connections to some very prominent sites that you could have link to you) to achieving success online. It just takes patience, time and hard work.

One common mistake I see with many new blogs that contain otherwise good content is the lack of ability of the blog owner to promote affiliates related in some way to the blog’s topic or niche.  One of the keys to actually making an affiliate sale is the ability of the marketer (you) to provide offers that are related in some way to the topics your blog covers.  Although not mandatory, simply doing this will automatically condition your reader to be more inclined to take advantage of whatever affiliate offer you are currently promoting.  Let’s talk about how to do this and then I will show you some examples of how I do this right from this blog.

I will start with a story.  There is a small blog I read occasionally that talks about health, wellness, nutrition and personal well-being.  Some of the posts are pretty good.  This blog promotes smorty, pay-per-post, sponsored reviews and the like.  Well, yeah it’s a blog and other blogs promote these programs.  However, just because it’s a blog does not mean this blogger must promote the same programs she sees on all of the other blogs.  The blogs I see that successfully promote the aforementioned programs are larger blogs, many of which do sponsored reviews and are well known for doing these types of posts.  They are blogs that make these types of posts part of their niche.  Naturally they do well with these programs!

I suggested to this blogger that she find some affiliate programs from among all of the Linkshare or Commission Junction programs that are related to her niche (health, wellness and nutrition) and promote these programs instead.  Why would this be a better option?  Because the people reading her blog are interested in health and wellness and mainly find her blog by doing health and wellness related searches.  These visitors are already ‘pre-qualified’ or ‘conditioned’ as I mentioned above to take advantage of offers related to health and wellness.  Know your visitors and how they find you, then offer them something they might be interested in purchasing.  Definitely not rocket science.

A second and maybe even more costly mistake I see many beginning bloggers make is not integrating affiliate offers into their content – at all.  It is pretty much common knowledge by now that offers integrated into content have a much higher conversion rate than offers that are made available only through banners and buttons on a site.

So do the following

1) Find some affiliate offers that are related to your blog’s topic or niche.

2) Promote these offers in several different ways, but make sure to integrate these offers in your content.

So how am I doing this on KillerIncome.net? After about a weeks worth of posts, I simply looked at the direction they were taking.  The majority of my posts have been WordPress related and I discussed items such as custom WordPress themes.  I found a WordPress theme affiliate program called Revolution WordPress Themes and, as you can see, I just integrated them into my content and I have their 125×125 banner in my ‘Advertisers Area’ in my right sidebar.

As part of my series on optimizing your WordPress blogs for the search engines, I discussed WordPress setup and, naturally, hosting.  I said to myself, hey I really like my Web Host, they have a ton of features that facilitate WordPress setup such as Fantastico, let me see if they have an affiliate program.  Sure enough they did and I am now a proud HostGator affiliate, as well.  This is great because I host my blog with them so it is an easy program to endorse.

So what other programs am I planning on promoting? Since the majority of my posts thus far have been on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it would only make sense that I find some SEO related programs to promote, as well. This will be my next order of business and by the time many of you find and read this post I will have probably started promoting at least one affiliate in the search engine optimization area.

It’s really as simple as finding programs related to your niche and integrating their offers and affiliate links directly into your content.  If you can also demonstrate how this particular program or offer can help your visitors in some way, you have all the ingredients of a successful affiliate promotion and will be well on your way to making your first affiliate sale.  Good luck!