If you are starting an online business, one of the most important things you can do is to learn from the mistakes of others. Recognize that not all advice is necessarily good advice, especially if the tips are carried to the extreme. Habitually seek out multiple opinions.
As an Internet marketer, you have probably come across pre-built sites that incorporate several streams of potential income. Sometimes those prospective income streams will even appear on a single page within that site. You should wonder whether this approach, which seems so efficient on the surface, really makes sense.
We know that eventually each visitor to your site is going to leave. The key to successful Internet marketing is to get them to leave in the manner that maximizes your revenue. All paths out of your site, or off a given page of your site, are not equal. On a single page and within the site as a whole, your design, your content, your navigation system, and every element should be designed to get your visitors to leave you using that single method that is most beneficial to you.
In a retail or wholesal site, you want them to leave only after they have stuffed your shopping cart full of your products and completed the check out process. The last page on your site that they see should be your “thank you” page. All of the other time they spend in your store should be directed toward getting them to that page.
If you want them to purchase an affiliate product, you want them to get off your own site only by clicking the link to your affiliate. With contextual advertising, you have a similar purpose in that you want them to click one of the ads as they exit. However, the ways in which you assist your visitors in deciding how to exit your site is very different in affiliate marketing from the method you implicitly use in making an ad click the attractive option.
Your job as an affiliate marketer is to convince your visitor that this affiliate’s product can meet the visitor’s specific needs. You highlight those needs with your copy and point out the ways in which the product is particularly good at what it does. You know the product well and can write specifically with that in mind.
You don’t know (in most cases) what products or services are going to be offered on the contextual ads that are placed on your site. Indeed, those ads will change frequently. In your copy and design, you must meet the expectations of the visitor who came to your site with a purpose. At the same time, you must let them know that your content has not answered all the questions that they should be asking. Hopefully, one of the ads that appear on the page while your visitor is there will seem to provide answers to the needs that your content has stimulated within the visitor, so that she or he will click on it.
So mixing potential revenue streams on the same page and, I believe, on the same site, means that you are working against yourself. You don’t want your prospective customers putting your product into a shopping cart and then disappearing from your site to pursue an affiliate product or by clicking on an ad. Instead, consider eventually building three sites (but not all at once). Work on your own product site. Find products that are complementary with your own product and endorse those on a separate site. Finally, if you feel you must, build a site for contextual advertising. (Personally, I would prefer to put the articles in a potential contextual advertising site into either my product site or affiliate site to draw visitors to the virtual locale where I could make a bigger profit, exchanging dollars for the cents that I would make with an ad click.)
I do offer a caveat to my admonition about mixing purposes within the same page or site. There are two types of pages on which you know that your visitors are likely to be one step away from leaving. One is your thank you page. The other type is your link directory. On your thank you page, you may wish to offer information about an affiliate’s product that is related and complementary to the purchase they just completed. If visitors are within your link directory, chances are that they are looking for an alternative to your site. You might as well offer them some contextual ads.If you are moving a business onto the web or beginning a new Internet venture, plan to develop various ways to generate income. However, just make sure that those income streams don’t work at cross purposes.
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