Frances – Product Selection

“I am new to affiliate marketing and want to design a parent/kids site around affiliate sales. How do I figure out which kinds of products have the higher commission rates – e.g. musical instruments pay more than electronics?

Is there anything else I should consider when designing my site.”

Dan

Hi, Frances, how are you?

Here’s one way to figure out how much you could make from a particular product:

1. Pick a product you may want to sell
2. Figure out a rough average price for the product
3. Find a few merchants selling it (who have affiliate programs)
4. Check their commission rates

[Multiply the average price by the commission rate, and you have the amount that you’ll make per sale of the product.]

5. If they give you the information, have a look at their average ‘conversion rate’ (the percentage of people who see the product on their site who then go on to purchase it).

[Multiply that percentage by your ‘amount per sale’ number, and you have a very rough idea of how much you’ll make for every visitor you send to their site.]

6. Figure out how much traffic you think you can get to your site each month, and a percentage of that traffic that you think you’ll be able to send on to the merchant.

[Multiply those 2 together to give you a rough figure for how many visitors you’ll send to merchants each month. THEN multiply that the ‘amount you’ll make per visitor’, and you have a rough figure for how much money you could make per month if you advertised that product.]

A lot of this will be finger in the air stuff, but the more you do it the more you’ll get a feeling for it.

Hope that helps & sorry for the extreme use of the word ‘multiply’!

Dan

Carl – Datafeedr

“Have any of you guys had experience in using datafeedr?

If you have stayed away, why was that?

What do you recommend out of Datafeedr, popshops or ECU?

Thanks

Carl”

Lammo

Hey Carl.

First of all, let me say that I have a vested interest in this as ECU is our baby – That being said I believe all three are truly outstanding products that actually serve quite different purposes, and I’d have no hesitation in recommending any of them.

You haven’t said in your question what it is you want to achieve – Are you looking to quickly knock up sites from datafeeds? Monetise existing content with relevant products? All three products will to one extent or another enable you to populate an affiliate site with products courtesy of merchant’s product feeds. The main differing factor between them is exactly what you’re expecting them to do for YOU, and the level of technical knowledge you may have.

Obviously if you’d like to know more about Easy Content Units and what it can do for you, I’d be more than happy to walk you through the system and demo just how simple it is to use. Just give me a shout on john@easycontentunits.com.

QUESTION 1 – H1 TAGS

Tom asks the Docs:

“The homepage of one of my wordpress blogs shows my most recent posts. I have altered the template so the title of each post is an <H1> tag.

I have given the home page it’s own title, description, and keyword data.

I’m not too bothered about the blog ranking for it’s own name, so is a homepage H1 really necessary? If so, is it possible to implement an H1 for a homepage showing only recent posts in wordpress?”

From a document structure point of view it is logical on the homepage that the site title is the h1 tag, I would then place your individual post titles (on the homepage) as h2. On the individual post pages have the post title as the h1 tag, these are the pages you want to rank.

QUESTION 2 – LINK CLOAKING

Richard asks the Docs

“What a great idea this site is.

My first question is:

Is it best to cloak outbound affiliate links from my website. At first I thought it was – and so I used a great WordPress Plugin called WP-Affiliate. The idea was to cloak the links so search engines didn’t know they were affiliate links – but then the links just show up as errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

So my question is – should I cloak outbound affiliate links or not?”

Yes always cloak them as there is software out there that looks for affiliate links and blocks them.

I’m not sure of the specific error you’re encountering. Generally I’d say as long as your site has good content and adds to the user’s experience it probably won’t be too much of an issue for Google that you have affiliate links. You may want to keep doing it anyway though as affiliate links are a bit ugly and can be offputting for the user to see.
 
QUESTION 3 – LINK TEXT

Brian asks the Docs:

“Newbie question: Does it matter if I edit the text in a text link? Will the clickthrough still be credited to my account?”

Yes as long as you use the correct affiliate link it doesn’t matter if the text says click here, buy now, more info etc..

Hi Brian.

This wouldn’t affect the tracking on any system I’m aware of. The only issue to bear in mind is that a merchant may only want to used approved copy for text links and if so this should be clear in their terms and conditions.

Editor’s Note

Hope that clears up your questions Tom, Richard and Brian, and if anyone else has something to add, we’d love to hear from you – just scroll down and leave a reply! Cheers.