The Dirty Truth About Affiliate Links
They don’t work in traffic exchanges! Most affiliate links are not designed nor optimized for the massive amounts of traffic coming from hit exchanges. This alone should be enough for you to stop advertising them!
I recently posted how Aweber rejected traffic exchanges. They simply could no longer handle the massive amounts of untargetted traffic that was coming their way. Their site was designed for people who had interest in what they had to offer. The idea here is to sell the service before giving out your link.
This is one of the reasons why so many people keep saying “the money is in the list”. That’s because when you have a list, you can talk about a product and get people interested. Then when they click that link they are already curious about it, and the sales page just needs to complete the sale.
Recommendations are part of the process of making a sale. When you stick your referral link into a traffic exchange you are skipping over a big part of the process. There’s a reason the big timers can make so much money from their list: They have a relationship.
So before you go and stick that affiliate link into a traffic exchange think about making a splash page.. Or even better, build your own list! Then you’ll be able to recommend multiple products to the people who subscribe, rather than being limited to the offer you have on your splash page!
June 6th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
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June 7th, 2008 at 9:53 am
[...] The Dirty Truth About Affiliate Links [...]
June 7th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Excellent post Tim, and it could not be more true than this. Its the dirty sad truth. Well its dirty and sad if your not promoting in the right way. Like all advertising mediums you have to use methods and tactics that work for that partiular medium, and on traffic exchanges thats splashpages and sqeezepages.
June 7th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I add affiliate links and so far I have had no response now I know why,
Thanks for the info
June 7th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Your newsletter makes good sense but as a newbie I don’t know where to start. I have a blog page and I have an autoresponder for capture but I don’t know how to merge it with my blog. Where will I get stuff to give away?
Please reply.
June 7th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Ray,
Sometimes they value of what you bring is information. Tim does an excellent job with that in his Blogs, newsletters, tool box and exchange! If you need more info I would be glad to guide you,
Thank you,
Paul
June 7th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
thanks for the info, now I just will have to figure out how to build my own list on my own
June 8th, 2008 at 3:14 am
Tim, this is so true, When I found out I stopped promoting affiliate links, and now only promote through my AR,
It needs people like you to inform others who have no idea about this..
I spent thousands of hours promoting others and not me.
Keep posting this great info
Anne
June 8th, 2008 at 5:11 am
I agree totally Tim
(and not just because I am the StartXchange Support guy)
Like many newbies, I started just putting up the company pages, and yes got some signups, but I was encouraged to try making my own signup pages, and soon found I was making pages that were ranked on the top pages of search engines - sometimes I was doing better than the official pages!
Now I try to always use my own pages, and I have a ‘list’ but it is a micro list - it is people I have sold designs to, worked with, and they know if I recommend something, that I believe in the product and not just because it is a ‘make (me) money quick scheme’.
This is the essence of relationship marketing - credibility - if people believe you are genuine, then your list is worth more than if you have a public list of hundreds that you bought/subscribed to.
sorry Tim, I’ll shut up now, or I’ll be accused of writing my own article :)
DeHawkinz
June 9th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Ray
I have a blog page and I have an autoresponder for capture but I don
June 10th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
As an avid traffic exchange surfer I love stumbling across a well designed splash page, form this article and what I’ve learned from promoting affiliate programs a well designed Splash Page is imperative.
At one point I was aggressively promoting one affiliate program by advertising the affiliate page directly, but the program did not allow me to contact my large and ever growing downline.
Now I made good money with them, but if I used a capture splash page instead, I could have sent out offers of help and proof as to how well I was doing.
I’m going to learn how to build a capture splash page and advertise that and not leave myself open be left out in the cold by any affiliate programs any more.