Affiliate Marketing – or How to Make Money Selling Things for Someone Else!

Current Position

The revenue from Google Adsense adverts is unpredictable but is unlikely to provide sufficient income to allow us to meet our £1000 target income by the end of 2011. We therefore need to find other ways to generate some further income from the site. When we re-vamped the site in January we added 4 recommended books to each page on the site. These were linked in to the U.K. Amazon Affiliate Programme which meant that every book bought through that route would generate a 5% commission. So far so good – registering and setting up on the site was simple. Amazon generates the code and it is easy to cut and paste it on to the relevant pages.

Since we went live on 1st January 2011, we have generated a grand total of  £0.87p!

This is a dreadful performance, and indeed it has only been over the last few weeks in February that we have generated even this amount. So why is this performing so badly – wish I knew!

So What are the Issues?

I think there are basically 2 issues:

1. insufficient numbers of visitors to the website
2. the books we are recommending are either not attractive enough, or there is too much choice! (although this is a bit counter-intuitive often when individuals have to think too hard about choosing, they just avoid it!)

The numbers of visitors to the site we are continuing to work on and we will see how this has changed when we look at the metrics at the end of February. Therefore the easiest thing we can do to try to improve affiliate marketing performance is to change the way we present and recommend books.

I have now removed the block of 4 recommended books from each website page, and replaced this with a single recommendation of what we think is the best book in the category. This recommendation is supported with a review of the book in question and a graphic of the cover which links to Amazon. Have a look at the bottom of the Absence Management page as an example.

Given performance so far I don’t have very high hopes for this Affiliate programme, but I’ll keep playing about with the format on the page to see if we can’t improve it.

Next Steps..

The next step in Affiliate Marketing is to look at how we can link to some other products which are likely to generate some income. The difficulty with that is firstly finding a suitable affiliate programme, and then choosing a suitable product to advertise. More on that in the next post..