Once you’ve chosen an affiliate product or program to promote on your blog you cannot just slap a link to it into your sidebar and forget about it. The task then is in thinking about how you’ll drive readers to it.

Similarly to contextual advertising – positioning of your links to these programs is essential – as is the way you actually link to it.

Keep in mind that with affiliate programs you have two tasks that need to be completed in order for you to earn something from them.

1. Get readers to click on the link/ad to visit the affiliate program’s page
2. Have readers actually purchase the product

Here are a few techniques that you might want to keep in mind as you fine tune your affiliate programs for the end of the year:

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Another task that is worth doing in order to prepare your blogs for the end of the year is fine tuning your affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs are quite a different way of monetizing your blog than advertising and while there are some similar principles that come into play when optimizing them they also take a different mindset to fully realize their potential.

The beauty of affiliate programs is that they have the potential to pay a lot more than most advertising programs (if you choose the right product) – the challenge is that you only earn money from them IF your reader actually takes an action (usually when they buy the product).

Choosing Affiliate Programs

There are literally hundreds of thousands of products and services that you can promote with affiliate programs on your blog. When you consider the array of products that Amazon has available (just one of many affiliate programs you can use) it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the choice. How do you make the decision what to promote? Here’s a few things to look out for:

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Bloggers using Amazon’s aStore will have received an email today announcing some updates which include (the below is a direct quote from the email):

• For those of you linking from your website to your aStore rather than embedding it, we have added the capability to put a link back to your website in the store navigation.
• Advanced users can now remove both the header and category navigation when embedding the aStore within existing websites.
• The custom product description length has been extended, allowing you to say more about the products you recommend to your customers.
• Product detail pages now display a “crossed-out” list price followed by the Amazon.com price.
• The page title in the browser now displays the name of the aStore combined with the category name or product name, making aStore more search-engine friendly

The Amazon Associate Program emailed their publishers today to let them know that they are officially launching their ‘Product Previews’ service to all Amazon publishers.

This has previously only been a beta test with a select group of publishers.

The ‘Product Previews’ allow you to promote Amazon products and give your readers more information about the product that you’re linking to without them leaving your site through a small popup window that opens up when readers hover the cursor over Amazon text or image links. Here’s a screen cap of an example (click for full size).

To add Product Previews you need to a script to your page’s templates and it will automatically convert image and text links that you’ve already got on those pages.

I’m not really a fan of any type of ad that pops up over a page although these ones are not nearly as bad as some other pop up ads which the user has little or no control over. At least with these ads the reader can make them disappear after they open up.

I’ve included the information page on Product Previews that Amazon provides publishers below instead of regurgitating all of the information.

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Amazon have emailed participants in the aStore beta test (my review here) with a sneak peak of what will be included in the next version of aStores. Here’s the list:

• Build and maintain multiple aStores using a single Associate ID
• Specify products to feature on Category and Sub-Category pages
• Create multiple instances of individual categories and sub-categories (e.g. Beatles Music and Rolling Stones Music)
• Feature up to 54 products on the front page of your store rather than the current limit of nine
• Write longer custom product descriptions
• Better control the layout and design for use in frames by providing the capability to remove the store header and category navigation

Looks like some nice improvements but what would those of you testing aStore like to see included?

Amazon have just emailed those testing their aStore to let them know of three ways to integrate it into their website.

1. Link to your aStore as a stand-alone store (this is what they were offering previously and is as simple as having a link (like this) to your aStore.

2. Embed your aStore using an inline frame - where it will appear as though the aStore is a part of your site and they can shop without leaving your shop (as in the picture above/left).

3. Integrate your aStore using a frameset - placing the aStore in one frame and your site’s navigation into another – also making it seem like it’s part of your site (below).

Instructions for each method are in the ‘get link’ section of the aStore menu.

It’s nice to see Amazon taking their stores in this direction – it answers a lot of the concerns expressed by publishers when they were announced.

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Two of the main critiques of Amazon’s new aStore (the new beta test from Amazon that allows you to make your own Amazon store) that I’m hearing from publishers are:

• It’s hosted on Amazon’s domain which doesn’t look that integrated with your site
• There’s no link back to your site from the store

One of the more creative ways I’ve seen the aStore used in the last two days (and I’ve seen a few of them) is by John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing who has added a store to his site using iframes. This enables him to put the store on his own domain (see his aStore here) and also to put his own header and footer around the store with whatever links he wants back to his own site.

I haven’t seen anything on Amazon’s site saying that this is against their terms of service but it could be worth checking if you’re going to give it a go.

found via a comment in a previous post by 5 Star Affiliate Programs