BetterVisitors

Affiliate Marketing: Your Site or Theirs?

October 1st, 2007

A lot of affiliate marketers buy traffic from BetterVisitors. And then they send the traffic straight to a web page that they got from an affiliate company.

That got me thinking: is it better to use the slick page provided by the affiliate company, or build your own?

It looks like using the affiliate page is a no-brainer — it’s done very professionally, and it’s been tested again and again and proven to bring in sales. BUT BEWARE: there are some big downsides to using their page that these companies don’t tell you about.

The biggest reason to do your own web site is that it’s yours, and the customer is yours. Once you have a customer, the possibilities are endless. Think of what having a customer means:

• You can get repeat orders from that customers
• You can email your customers about other offers you have
• You form a relationship with your customer, and they tell YOU about new opportunities

The second most important reason is that you can stand out with your own page. If your page looks just like the thousands of others that the affiliate company is handing out, why should anyone buy from you? I mean, there’s absolutely nothing unique about an affiliate page. If you don’t stand out, then you can sell to your mother and your children and other people who love and trust you, no questions asked, but it’s going to be a little harder out there in the real world.

At our TrafficPartners™ Partner Program here at BetterVisitors, we don’t provide a page. I’ve found that we get better results from people who just say why they like it better and include one of our banners, or even just a text link! That’s because people believe a real recommendation more than a slick page.

I can hear someone asking, “Hey Mike, that sounds great, but I can’t design a scribble on the back of a napkin, let alone a web site! How am I supposed to put together my own web page?”

Here’s a dirty secret from people who make money on the web: a fancy design HURTS sales. In fact there are studies on the Web that show that customers prefer web pages that look “home made.” That’s because it looks like a real person did it, not some mega-corporation — and people trust people more than they trust big business.

So even if you have to use automatic web-page building software, I’d still recommend making your own page. Website Wizard is a great package that I can recommend. Even if you build a page that looks like crap, it’ll probably work almost as well as a “pro” site, and it can be improved over time. Plus it’s YOURS.

The smart customers build their own pages to promote their affiliate product — and themselves. Others just spend a lot of time promoting the affiliate company and get nothing out of it themselves.

Entry Filed under: Maximize Your Page, Traffic