Testing affiliate advertising

[DarrenC]

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Last April I wrote a controversial blog post about affiliate advertising in travel, it received a lot of comments. The title didn’t help, but my rant was aimed at those sites that are created with no content or no use other than a page full of affiliate banners.

Interesting Im #1 in Google for ‘travel affiliate sites’ and gets decent traffic.

Anyway..

Call me a hypocrite, but I’m thinking about dipping my toes in affiliate advertising, primarily because I am struggling to get travel companies to advertise direct with me through traditional advertising methods.

I’m writing some pretty damn good content, and I’ve generated media attention.
Now I need to start earning some revenue, especially since traffic is good, and I have spent the last two years building the blog.

Initially, I want to test this out for a few months with two 140 x 140ish pixel ads, in the sidebar of the blog.

Do companies offer this size ads?
Which are the best affiliate networks?
Does anyone have any tips to get me going?
What do you think Google's opinion is of affiliate advertising?

Thanks for your assistance

Darren

[morleymouse]

Hi Darren,

Im bias in so many ways but thought id say hi, noticed its your first post, and what a great site and im a regular reader.

My initial thoughts are 2x banner blocks wouldn't really generate revenue. Banner space is what companies looking for branding or a presence look for and hence why they pay an up front fee. With your traffic though you might get a few sales.

With the content your site has you could easily work in some affiliate links and generate a nice income without feeling like you've sold out For example you mention review sites quite a lot, Holiday Watchdog has an affiliate programme via Affiliate Future that you could replace the standard link with an affiliate one. This is the type of approach Money Saving Expert takes and they flag affiliate links with a * after the anchor text to let their users know.

Your still giving the same service but making some money for yourself as well.

Once you get into it you'll realise a lot of the companies you mention on your blog actually have affiliate programmes or there are companies that could compliment your content.

And for your q's:

Do companies offer this size ads?
Off the top of my head I dont know, but id imagine any would be more than happy to knock you one up

Which are the best affiliate networks?
Its personal preference. Have a look on them all and get to know them, its free sign ups on all (bar Affiliate Window) so theres no risk to get to know how they work, how to get links, what merchants they have etc.

Does anyone have any tips to get me going?
As above really. You've got traffic in the right vertical, sell in context and you'll be seeing sales in no time

What do you think Google's opinion is of affiliate advertising?
Depends on the site. Some it hates, some it loves

[Chris Clarkson]

Hi Darren,

welcome to the Dark Side!

As usual everything Dan says is right on the mark.
except this bit..

For example you mention review sites quite a lot, Holiday Watchdog has an affiliate programme via Affiliate Future

If you think you'd like to add sunshine.co.uk to your blog, let me know and we'll sort you out with some banners / search boxes / whatever.

I will add in my own opinion Affiliate Future are the best network for travel.

[tinfoil hat]
Use a redirection script to avoid having any affiliate links in your pages, just in case Google really doesn't like affiliate marketing
[/tinfoil hat]

Cheers

Chris C

[tbp]

I agree with the others, in that banners don't really work well. I do use them on my sites, but do much better from working links into the content.

I think people are starting to suffer "banner blindness", as they are so commonplace now they don't stand out, and a lot of people don't notice them. On top of that, there are firewalls and programs around which actually block banners.

By all means put banners on your site, but don't rely on them solely, relevant affiliate links in your content will do much better.

[DarrenC]

Dan and Chris thank you for your experienced advice.

I'll do some research over the weekend but I was wondering what your thoughts on this placement:

On this post (sorry I've removed clickable link because I haven't checked the forums T&Cs yet!)

travel-rants.com/2008/01/08/will-airlines-charge-obese-passengers

At the top of the comments above 31 responses...

Or is it a case of trial and error?

Chris, could you expand on the redirection script?

Thanks guys.

[DarrenC]

By all means put banners on your site, but don't rely on them solely, relevant affiliate links in your content will do much better.

This scares me a little.

I don't like the idea of adding affiliate links within my content, as I'm not sure how readers would react and the situation with Google and links scares me even more, for various reasons which I won't go into here.

[Chris Clarkson]

Chris, could you expand on the redirection script?

Where you add affiliate links or banners, rather than have the href containing the network link, create your own "out" links. Then have a db of every link, I'm sure there's probably some plugin out there that does this.

So links would appear on your site as www. bla bla .com/out.php?link=1 for example.
out.php would then lookup the links db for link id 1 and redirect to it.


Chris C

[DarrenC]

Ah okay, of course.

Yes, I am sure there's a wordpress plugin that does that.

I'll look into that.

Thanks Chris.

[DarrenC]

@ Chris / Anyone.

Has anyone used this?

PHP Affiliate Jump Script - How to create an Affiliate Link jump script in PHP

I don't want to annoy the search engines so would I have problems using this?

I've read alot about how the likes of Google hates affiliate ads, that it's putting me off.

Darren

[morleymouse]

Hi Darren,

haven't used that particular set of scripts but the basics behind it are likely to be the same just with a fancy interface to add links.

<?php

if ($id == 1) {
$deeplink = "http://www.google.com";
}

if ($id == 2) {
$deeplink = "http://www.aol.com";
}

if ($id == 3) {
$deeplink = "http://www.yahoo.com";
}


header("Location: $deeplink");

?>

If you save that as out.php and upload it you can link to it with an ID out.php?id=1 and it will redirect to google, change id=1 to id=2 and it will go to aol. From there you can add as many links as you want into the out file.

To hide them further add the rel="nofollow" tag to the out.php link.

Google doesn't hate affiliate sites, google just doesnt like crap websites

[DarrenC]

Dan,

Thanks

Much appreciated, I'll get that set up tonight.

[TSMBULGARIA]

How about Quick Search Forms instead of links or banner, regarding let's say selling travel? Do you think it will work out? There is this whitel label affiliate program at travelaffiliateprogram.net that allows you to customize a quick search form and place it on my website. Will it be effective?