Posts Tagged ‘External Links’

Improve Your Affiliate Commissions By Tracking External Links On Your Website

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

A popular way for website owners to make money is to earn affiliate commissions promoting different products on their site by using their affiliate links. One thing that is very important for website owners is to have accurate and detailed web analytics data that can track how your website is being used, and most web analytics software such as Google Analytics will tell you what your visitors click on once they arrive at your website. If you are a webmaster that has access to this kind of web analytics data, there are a number of ways you can use this information to make sure you are getting the highest amount of affiliate commissions possible.

One way that you can improve your affiliate commissions while tracking your visitors’ behavior is to see how many people click on a given affiliate link on one of your pages versus the total number of people that view that page. This will give you the click-through rate of a particular affiliate link, and it will show you exactly what percentage of your viewers are clicking where you want them to click. With this data you can make small changes to the layout of your webpage to try and increase your click-through rate, which will increase the number of people that are redirected over to the product you are promoting.

An external link on your website is a link that points to another location on the internet, so regular links to other websites and affiliate links are both external links. Your web analytics software should be able to track both of these kinds of links, including how many clicks each link gets, and a good way to use this information is to track how many clicks one of your affiliate links gets and compare that to the data that your affiliate company is providing.

There are different ways to track affiliate commissions, and there is always the possibility that an improperly formatted link might not give you credit for the referral. By checking your data against the data that is provided by the affiliate company, you can make sure that you are getting credit for all the visitors that you refer and not leaving any money on the table. If the data between your own web analytics and your affiliate company does not match up, you should be able to identify the problem and fix it, or you should speak to a representative at the affiliate company to get things straightened out.

As in any business, the more information that you have about your customers, the better prepared you are to make decisions that will help to increase your profits. Affiliate marketing on the internet is a unique industry because you can encounter difficult problems that can subtract from your profits, such as not actually getting credit for the people that you are referring to an affiliate website. By tracking the external links on your own website you can make sure that everything is working the way that it should be so that you are earning the highest amount of affiliate commissions possible for you.

Article-Exchange Update

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

I posted an article to my article-exchange directory last evening. This was an article that I wrote to promote my site Gemstone Jewelry Now.

There is minimal instruction on the site as to posting procedures, just the various input boxes for title, description, article body, and resource box. I screwed up on the format for the resource box and ended up with no working links. It appears that the software does recognize an URL in the standard format and that you can use html to put in anchor text, but I will need to try again to be sure. There was also no space between the end of the article and the beginning of the resource box info. I will try adding a couple of spaces at the end of the article next time.

My major complaint with the directory software is that it dumped the article at the end of the category. I should go back and check to see if that is still the case, possibly the owner of the database can check an article off and it will move to the top of the list. Another thought that I had was that the broken links may have flagged the article and sent it to the end of the line. If this is really the way that the software works there is not much hope of a direct click to a site from the article even though it appears many times. Users are not likely to make it to the end of the category unless they know that the freshest content is at the end. This is the reverse of the way that every other article directory that I have seen works. The pages may still get indexed and the links count, but I would expect no direct traffic.

This may be a good thing for the directory owner as his articles may appear on page one for any category, but for those others adding content promotion would be the only way that I would expect the article to be viewed. The owner of the directory does give instructions on how to list the articles on RSS feeds (something other article sites do automatically).

I do need to go to my installation and make some further observations. At this point the jury is still out on the utility of these article directories. They have not been in place long enough to see if they produce any traffic either directly to the site or due to articles posted to the directory. I will have another update when I have some more thoughts on this topic.

Show Me the Money

Another Basic Topic

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

As I was out strolling the web this evening my attention was drawn to another web basic that I had not specifically discussed in the Website Basics section. I had a page on navigation, but basic to navigation is the link system. I wrote up an article on the topic and posted it to the Website Basics section this evening. I expect to find a few more topics and I am soliciting suggestions for basic topics that I have not covered.

Leave a comment in this blog and you will get a do follow link. Follow the instructions in the comment section to get a good keyword link to your site.


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