Affiliate Marketing Monday – Choosing the Right Merchant

This week’s Affiliate Marketing Monday is going to be a quick discussion on choosing the right merchants for your site.  This is a very important step in making money because the right content with the wrong merchants is not going to do you any good.  It seems that it would be pretty self-explanatory, but I’ve seen some weird mixes of content and merchants.  My advice is pretty simply, find merchants that relate to what you are talking about.  If your blog is about photography, then a banner with a Canon camera sounds like a pretty good match.

When searching for merchants through your affiliate dashboard, don’t get sucked in to searching by which merchant pays you the most.  Why would you put a banner up of a tool set that pays out a $100 commission, compared to a banner of a camera that pays out only $20?  You will have a higher chance of getting 5 sales to create that $100 than you will with getting one tool set sold.  Like I said, pretty self-explanatory.

The next thing that you want to find when searching for that right merchant is making sure that they have the banner sizes that you need.  If you have a site that requires custom sized banners, send a quick e-mail or phone call to their affiliate manager and see if they will create a custom made banner for you.  One thing that I will advise is, don’t save one of their banners and try to re-size it to your dimensions.  As an affiliate manager on the merchant side myself, these banners were created with a branding purpose, so please don’t do anything to alter them.  If they aren’t willing to create a custom size, then you might want to figure out what kind of relationship you really want to have with them.

If the affiliate network has an automatic e-mail that gets sent out from the affiliate whenever they update banners, usually called a subscription, I would recommend signing up for it.  This could be good for you because they may have some special offers going on that you don’t know about.  This will also help prevent banner burnout, which is the effectiveness of a banner declining more and more every time somebody visits your site.  For instance, if you have the same reader everyday, they will get used to the banners you have and begin to not even look at them or think about clicking on them.  So make sure you are updating them, or even rotating them on your site.

Good luck on your search for the right merchant.  Remember, find a merchant that relates to your content, it is really that easy!
photo credit: Saad Faruque via photopin cc