Do Not Consider Several Streams of Income from One Site
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 week knows that it is important to develop multiple streams of income. Some marketers who are just starting 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 leave. The key to successful Internet marketing is to get them to leave in the manner 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.
In a retail or wholesal site, you want your visitors to leave only after they have stuffed your shopping cart full of your products and completed the check out process. The last page on your site that they see should be your “thank you” page. All of the other time they spend in your store should be directed toward getting them to that page.
If you want them to purchase an affiliate product, you want them to get off your own site only by clicking the link to your affiliate. With contextual advertising, you have a similar purpose in that you want them to click one of the ads as they exit. However, the ways in which you assist your visitors in deciding how to exit your site is very different in affiliate marketing from the method you implicitly use in making an ad click the attractive option.
Your job as an affiliate marketer is to convince your visitor that this affiliate’s product can meet the visitor’s specific needs. You highlight those needs with your copy and point out the ways in which the product is particularly good at what it does. You know the product well and can write specifically with that in mind.
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, so there is no harm having them leave me a little money on their way out.
Whether you have an existing business that you want to move online or are looking to start a new one, you should eventually try to develop more than one income stream. Just make sure that you don’t attempt to do in on the same page!
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