Marbella SEO

Perhaps you are planning to begin an online business. If so, you need to be sure to avoid the mistakes made by others. Recognize that not all advice is necessarily good advice, especially if the tips are carried to the extreme. Always gather multiple opinions.

Anyone who has been in Internet marketing for longer than a few days understands that it is useful to develop multiple streams of income. Some beginning marketers can take this admonition too far, too quickly. I have seen sites that have products for sale, links to affiliate’s products and contextual advertising all on the same site. Sometimes all three appear on the same page.

We know that eventually each visitor to your site is going to exit your site–and that’s fine. The key to successful Internet marketing is to get them to leave in the way that maximizes your profit. 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.

If you have products that you want your visitors to buy, your goal is to have them end up on your “thank you” page after checking out with their full shipping carts. Everything else that you do on that site should be aimed at getting them to that page.

In the case of either affiliate marketing or contextual advertising, you want to move them off your website. However, you want to move them in a way that brings you revenue, either in the form of a click on an ad or by going to your affiliate site in order to complete a purchase there. The way you encourage your visitors to move to the site with which you are affiliated is very different from the way in which you make it appealing to click on a contextual ad. Those two purposes can not be accomplished well on the same page and perhaps not within the same site.

A person involved in affiliate marketing knows the product’s strengths and weaknesses. The task is to highlight the needs of your site visitor so that it becomes obvious that the needs can be met by the affiliate’s product, or, at least, to leave the visitor wanting more information that can be obtained by visiting the vendor’s site (through your link to it).

In the case of contextual advertising, you don’t know what products or services will be promoted in the ads that are served to your site. You need to provide information that your visitor wants (based upon your keywords, page description, and so forth). At the same time, you let them know that there is other information (or even a product category) that they ought to be pursuing. Then, you just hope that one of the ads served on your page will coincide with the additional thirst you have created in your visitor.

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.)

Here are two exceptions to my advice, above. On your product site, you might want to use your thank you page to promote an affiliate offer. I sometimes place contextual advertising on my links pages. My thinking is that any visitors visiting my links have already probably decided to leave my site anyway, so there is no harm having them leave me a little money on their way out.