Posts from — May 2008

This is a guest post from AffiliateTips.com, a great resource for articles like this one and an affiliate directory with reviews on programs in all segments – like education affiliate programs.

As with any type of business, succeeding in affiliate marketing requires having access to information about your audience and your sales results. However, the affiliate reports generated by merchants and networks are often incomplete, which can seriously impair your ability to track your progress and make improvements to your affiliate marketing strategy.

While much of your competition relies on the reports provided by their affiliate networks, wouldn’t you like to have the competitive edge? Web analytics are the key to generating the vital information that you need to achieve real and lasting results in affiliate marketing.

What Is Web Analytics?

Web analytics is the study of website user behavior. The data used to track this behavior is gathered in a number of different areas, including the total number of site visitors, page views per session and link click-throughs.

Why is it so important to assess this information? By looking at how customers utilize your website, you can customize your content and marketing strategy to appeal to your target audience. This can dramatically improve website traffic, affiliate sales, online branding and overall profits.

Important Web Analytics For Affiliate Marketers

While the various statistics you choose to track depend largely on your business goals, there are a number of different data sets that you shouldn’t overlook. Fortunately, much of this information is relatively easy to understand, even for the novice statistician. As you develop your web analytics strategy, be sure that you understand the following numbers:

Total Page Views

This number provides important information about how many times your website was visited over a specified time period. Typically, you will want to keep a careful eye on daily, weekly and monthly traffic totals. Don’t be alarmed to notice major differences in total page views from day to day, week to week or even month to month.

However, use this information to establish traffic benchmarks and set goals for future traffic. When it comes to affiliate marketing, more traffic is usually better. If your numbers are low, start focusing on marketing strategies to attract new visitors to your website.

Entry Points

In addition to knowing how many views your pages received, it is also important to understand which pages served as “landing pages” for your site. Never make the mistake of believing that all visitors use your home page as a starting point. Optimize every page on your website to serve as a basis for exploring the rest of your site and for promoting your affiliate marketing offers.

Page Views Per Session

The number of pages each visitor looks at per visit is an important indication of the “stickiness” of your website. Essentially, your goal should be to keep viewers on your site in order to promote your affiliate offers. If web analytics reveal that your page views per session are low, focus on linking between related content on your site and improving navigation in order to motivate users to remain on your site.

Improving Your Affiliate Marketing With Web Analytics

Of course, web analytics will accomplish little, unless you learn how to use them effectively to benefit your affiliate marketing. In many cases, this may require a bit of experimentation on your part in order to find strategies that work best.

After you identify a potential problem using your web analytics program, start making changes to a few select pages. Then spend some time tracking the impact of those changes. This may take some time, but the information you gain will prove invaluable both now and down the road.

When I resurrected this blog at the beginning of this month, I decided to redesign the whole site from the ground up. One, I wanted a fresh start. It feels good to have a new design. If you don’t like the way your blog looks why would you want to put your efforts into it? I also wanted to ensure that this new theme would be better from a monetization standpoint also. Who doesn’t like more money?

In my search for a new template, there were a few key things that I was looking for. If you decide to change your theme too, make sure the following is true if you want to grow your blog and make more money!

Make sure your RSS button is visible

Until you have thousands of pages indexed by Google (and even when you do), your best bet for having an active organic blog is by having an active community of subscribers. The best way to grow this is by consistently promoting your RSS feed. Throw it in people’s face…

Subscribe to my feed!

…you can also accomplish this by having a subscription button in a prominent place. On WallerBlog dot Com you can see it proudly displayed on the top right. My RSS subscribers have increased 50% in the last 15 days that this template has been live. Make sure your RSS button is in a visible place.

Make sure the majority of your advertising is above the fold

Whether you’re monetizing your blog with Adsense, affiliate programs or private ads, all will earn you more when they’re above the fold. These ads will have greater click through rates. This obviously earns you more money on CPC advertisers like Adsense and gives you a better chance at making some cash on an affiliate sale. It will also earn you more on private ad sales. Advertisers that get good traffic from an ad are happy advertisers. Happy advertisers are more likely to renew the ad on your blog. Keep your ads above the fold.

Make sure your new theme is sticky

Let’s face it, the majority of us live and die by the traffic sent via search engines (read Google) and this group is a fickle bunch. When searching for something, 75% of people will spend no more than a few seconds glancing at your site to see if it has whatever they were searching for. What they see in those few seconds has to grab their attention. This does not mean to blind them with your amazing color scheme. (Here’s another incredible use of html.) Make sure that your site loads quickly, is easily navigable and, most importantly, is readable. This keeps people on your site longer which increases the odds of you either gaining a new subscriber or making more money! (That’s the whole point, right?) Make sure your theme is sticky.

If you’re just starting a blog or you’re thinking about remodeling, be sure that you pick a theme that will help and not hinder your blogging. The design you choose has a tremendous impact on your ability to gain new subscribers and generate revenue.

Physorg has posted an article highlighting the outrageous cost of sending a text message.

From the article:

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB – or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

For those of you that don’t speak in British Pounds, that’s $732.17 per MB! Want to text message your music collection? It’ll cost you a cool $61,356,851.20.

Maybe technology really hasn’t brought us that far…