People sent emails asking for my recommendations on the finest affiliate programs, who pays the most and most frequently, and many other common issues. I wish I could respond to those inquiries on this forum, but my typing speed is limited.

This past weekend, I went out in search of material that I could share here temporarily while I started writing. Finding objective content proved to be challenging. Most “reviews” on the internet are actually infomercials, which is not what I intended for this blog. You’ll have to be patient with me as a result. After some intense research, I have a lot to say. I simply need the time, which I will have started tomorrow. I won’t, I swear.

Are you prepared for an affiliate program or Internet advertising in general, you must question yourself in the interim. I came up with four inquiries you ought to make before starting an affiliate campaign or any other online advertising.

The Affiliate Programs’ Ideas

I’ll discuss two ideas that I frequently utilize on this site before I get to the four questions you should ask before starting your affiliate business. The first is what I refer to as your online presence from a broad perspective:

Arriving visitors, an online presence, and sales or other actions

With your online presence, you are running two campaigns: the first, continuing campaign, is focused on bringing visitors to the site. The second effort aims to persuade those guests to act. Spending more time on your website, signing up for something, or making a purchase could all be that something.

The second illustrates how online advertising works:

Impact – Click – Act

The Act, the final step of the process, is where most affiliate programs pay publishers. Both ideas will be used in my questions. So, let’s begin…

1. Are you familiar enough with your visitors?

There are tens of thousands of affiliate marketing initiatives available. You will be the one to choose the kinds of goods and services you wish to provide your visitors with, even though some affiliate marketing hubs are experimenting with a context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners and banner rotation on affiliate sites. This may seem like a small point, but it will have a significant impact on your success.

Check out the statistics for your website for the last month or so, if you haven’t already. What countries are your visitors from? Have you purchased traffic from Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine? What search terms did visitors use to find you? Broader search keywords may lead to sales later, whereas more intricate and precise search terms typically produce more immediate conversions. The cookie life—the amount of time between a visitor from your site viewing the affiliate merchant’s site and the sale—must be long if visitors to your site arrive via what you consider to be general search phrases.

Other things to ponder

Do your other websites contain text links or other advertisements? Do you have any information about the demographics of those sites’ visitors? Have you discussed their visitors with the webmaster, owner, or manager of the websites on which you advertise? Do you know where to find them? Have you been to any of the websites that advertise on the same websites as you? When you investigate each of these issues, a profile of your website’s visitors ought to start to take shape.

Which search engine drives the most traffic to your site? If it’s Google, the user is somewhat more likely to be male and middle-of-the-road (among MSN, Yahoo, and Google) in terms of their likelihood of making a purchase (42% higher than the typical user). If you want to see additional information, there is a great article on marketingcharts.com.

The domains of your visitors are something you should pay close attention to. For instance, if you receive a lot of traffic from AOL, you should consider that the majority (77%) of AOL users are married, and 62% are 35 or older.

However, following all of this, you ought to be able to sit down and create the profile of an average visitor. It would be ideal if this profile included estimates for age, origin nation, education level, and income.

Consider how your visitors could feel. Consider what they might be interested in and what goods and services they could need. Affiliate programs set a higher standard than PPC because they pay you after an action (rather than at the beginning after an impression or click, as with Google AdSense). You must put more thought into the process, and if you do it correctly, you’ll earn more money.

2. Is your website flawless?

You’re requesting that someone make a purchase from your website. It makes you appear amateurish if the pages have shoddy HTML coding, broken links, or instability due to a faulty Cascading Stylesheet. We’ve all felt awkward making a purchase from a tacky website. That website is not who you want to be.

Starting with the HTML code, shall we? Are you certain there aren’t any mistakes in it? Have you ever used a W3C-affiliated HTML checker? I continually uncover errors in my code. You can miss an error unless you test your code on several browsers and resolutions. The validator will do. Visit the CSS Checker as well if you utilize cascading stylesheets.

In relation to validators, you ought to frequently examine your connections. A link validator can be found at W3.org.

Moreover, the website should also include a sitemap for users (and spiders) to use to navigate, be simple to grasp and be optimized for search engines. You should always listen to uninvited remarks from users with an open mind and place value on them. You should have asked ten of your closest friends to check out the site and offer you, their views. If someone takes the time out of their busy day to email you about your website, they care deeply about it, and you should listen carefully to what they have to say.

Recognize that your Sales or Action program is a waste of time if your Incoming Visitors campaign isn’t performing as intended.

3. Do you know what kind of advertisements you’ll run and where they’ll appear?

For ten years, people have ignored banners. To try to catch your attention, they shake and make noises (someday, I’ll tell you about the screaming match I got into with a creative director the day we released the first talking banner ad). The placement of the item on the page will be extremely important. In a nutshell, banners should be placed where the eye naturally rests (next to the masthead, near the navigation, or at the bottom of the page).

Any advertisement’s placement plays a significant role in whether it is seen or clicked.

In addition, many people, like me, think text adverts should appear at natural breaks and be roughly the same color and size as the content. You must browse around and see where other people place their advertising in order to determine where you believe they might work on your website.

Therefore, you must decide how prominently you want to display the advertising if you intend to establish pages for some of the things you recommend (a terrific idea). If they think you’re promoting a specific business, most of them won’t buy anything from you. They will make a purchase from a person they think is genuinely endorsing the good or service. You must learn how to maintain the separation.

4. What do you think the ideal offers should be for your website?

I frequently ask this question. With a better understanding of your visitors’ demographics, try to determine which action on your site you believe they would be most likely to take pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, or even pay-per-click (hard to find).

Besides, it will undoubtedly be challenging to sell customers things from a general interest website that offers free stuff. Instead of looking for offers that target a specific interest, it could be wiser to try to persuade them to sign up for a free product newsletter from one of the affiliate networks. Alternatively, you might want to hunt for deals that target the age group of your site. You might only be interested in leads or sales with lower ticket sizes. Leads move the user to the last step in the advertising process chain while requiring less dedication.

However, try to come up with four, five, six, and fifty different methods to break this all down, whether it be by action kind, sale or lead type, or any other manner you can think of. After that, you can search for other offers that might interest your customers. Try to position various ads in comparable areas on the same sites when it comes time to post them, and then see how they perform.

After getting your questions addressed, you’re prepared to start using affiliate marketing.

Do you want more? Check out my blog for money-making ideas before 2022 ends.

For other personal finance and side hustles, you can also check out my YouTube Channel: Ron Yates.