If you’re an affiliate, trying to earn a buck or two from affiliate programs, you’re likely to be concerned about all the “death of the banner news.” Well, take heart. Banners aren’t the only way to promote an affiliate program, and if you’re creative and take advantage of other marketing tools merchant sites provide you, you can do quite well for yourself.

One great aspect about managing affiliate programs for your own site is that you’re the best person to know your site’s audience and what they’re looking for, and you can use this information to better position your affiliate links. Unlike ad serving networks that only deliver banner ads and which pay you minimally per click or per impression, with affiliate programs, you can elect which and where to place affiliate links that most benefit you.

In an effort to make affiliate programs more and more attractive to their affiliates, merchants are coming up with more and more tools and solutions. As a result, both merchants and affiliates can make more money because the affiliate programs work to drive traffic, sales, and therefore affiliate commissions.

Below we’re going to provide you with some examples of proven “alternative” ways to promote affiliate programs using new tools and means that go way beyond the typical banner ad. As a disclaimer, I would like to say that this newsletter, and none of our Web Ad.vantage newsletters are designed for the purpose of promoting affiliate programs as we describe below. We are simply providing the information and education.

Advertorial

One of the most powerful ways of promoting an affiliate link to your web audience is by “disguising” it as content. For example, if you run a site dealing with pets, write an article about certain pet products with affiliate links for each product to the merchant page.

Wayne Porter of Affiliate Help describes this technique as “fluid inventory”: appropriate contextual advertising deployed in unusual places. This can take place in articles, pop-up windows, auto-responder replies, sig files, and so on.

Sales and Discounts

Offering information about online sales and discounts is not only beneficial to your audience, but can also be beneficial to you as an affiliate. This may take more time than setting up general affiliate links, but can be well worth it. For example, DealofDay is an online couponing and discount site that publishes online sales and coupon codes with affiliate links to those merchant sites.

Creating New Sites

One trend that is emerging among affiliates is actually creating sites that mirror or describe the merchant or product that they are promoting and then optimizing those sites for search engine key words. One example of this is a site called Stupid-Cupid.com, which is solely a page that is constructed for the OneAndOnly.com online matchmaking site.

Newsletter Ads

Why restrict yourself to only promoting affiliate links on your site when you have a newsletter? The only problem with this is that most affiliate link URLs are fully of tags and numbers, which would stick out or be too long for a newsletter. Instead, set up pages within your site which re-direct to affiliate URLs and use those shorter web page URLs in your newsletter.

Before we close with some referral links, let’s open up this discussion to some of the creative, successful ways YOU might have worked your affiliate program. If you do, I’ll publish them in a future issue of this newsletter, and you’ll get some free site promotion out of it for yourself!

So, here are some resources to help you squeeze more out of your revenue-generating affiliate links:

Affiliate Tips
CashPile
AffiliateWorld

For more information on affiliate programs and affiliate program management companies, please visit our Tip Archive.

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