Affiliate marketing strategies for an established football forum site?

[theitgirl]

Hi guys,

I'm working with a colleague who runs the following website:

The Football Forum - More Than Just A Game

I've been persuading him to have a go at some affiliate marketing for a while now so he's started by adding some Adsense ads to the pages.

However, after a week the results are disappointing.

He gets about 150,000 unique visitors a month.

So I’m about to suggest some other options to him but I wanted to ask your advice first.

Do you think optimising the Adsense ads is the way to go, or, should we perhaps focus more on marketing actual products?

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

I’ve been harping on about how marvellous AM is so I want to try and get it to work for him

[hero]

Hi Helen,
the adsense, great as it is in bringing in the revenue, it does shout that it's paid advertisement. With a site such as yours, "discreet" advertising would be much more effective - you can recommend merchants, products, sites within your posts. For example, you could promote UKSoccershop and their products and be paid commission for every sale generated. You could even create a shopping area on your site promoting either a single merchant or a variety of them.
I would be happy to discuss this further with you, please don't hesitate to give me a shout

[chrismockford]

Hi Helen,

I would definitely reccomend the world of AM to your friend.

I know that there are lots of merchants particularly on buy.at that are really keen to work with sites with such targetted traffic as this.On a merchant side we have programs such as Sky and Setanta Sports which are a great fit for a football based site.

It would be good to have a chat with your friend to see how we could work with their site - please feel free to get in touch on the details below

Cheers

Chris
Senior Affiliate Development Manager
buy.at
02072998393

[renamecor]

how about starting a thread on their site promoting discount voucher codes for relevant programs such as uksoccershop ?

Just a thought, I'll go back to sleep now

[Paulzie]

Up until last year I looked after a football message board. 30,000 visitors a month, 1,000 active members a month. It was run as a hobby rather than to earn money.

Originally I introduced affiliate banners such as Expedia, Lastminute, Toffs and stuff like that. It took quite a bit to keep the banners up to date and it got very tedious. Merchants would email you saying you need to update banners to the new ones, new tracking codes and I got fed up with all that (why they couldn't just update the graphics I'll never understand). I basically signed up to everything I thought would be relevant - sadly very few produced clicks or income and most eventually were disabled. Stuff that should have performed just didn't - like Toffs and UKSoccershop.

When the board moved on to it's own server costs went up quite a bit, so I looked at Adsense. Took a few months for the income to start coming in, but today it still generates half the running costs of an expensive dedicated server.

There's also text links to travel companies, text links to football type merchants, ebay and amazon. This produces about a quarter of the remainder. I also offered some users the opertunity to advertise directly on the board which produces the final quarter of the running costs.

So my advice would be to stick with adsense a few more months longer and a few text links.

In my opinion it wasn't worth the time and effort to keep the banners up to date. Discount codes - it takes time and effort to look out for these codes but might be worth it.