One of our favorite sayings around here is: Diversify your revenue streams! Now, that might sound odd from a company that provides full service ad management, but our company mission is building sustainable businesses for content creators. And a business relying on only one income stream is just not sustainable. 

This interview happened in the Summer of Live 2020 and our guest was the wonderful Katelyn Fagan. She’s a blogger at the site What’s Up Fagans and an instructor on her Best Blog Courses, where she loves to teach bloggers how to make more money.

Katelyn shared some absolute gems for optimizing existing posts to maximize affiliate revenue, the best link type and placement for conversion, Amazon Affiliates and more. 

Now, to the earnings!

Helpful Resources

View Katelyn Fagan’s Affiliate Marketing Slides.
WordPress Gutenberg — Should you switch to WordPress Gutenberg?
Mediavine Ads and Affiliate Marketing — How to find the right balance.
Shorter paragraphs — Increase your RPM by shortening your sentences and paragraphs.
Mediavine’s Create Plugin — Learn more about our WordPress plugin for content creators.

The post Improving In-Post Affiliate Earnings with Katelyn Fagan: Mediavine On Air Episode 7 appeared first on Mediavine.

A few weeks ago we began to get more support tickets about our recommended products feature. We were using a now unsupported method not returning useful information from Amazon URLs.

We know that affiliate link support has become an important part of both Recommended Products and Lists for many of our users. Providing reliable data on Amazon products was our focus and we went to the source, the Amazon Products API.

Starting with the 1.5.4 release Create fetches product data from Amazon’s API and takes care of refreshing images on a daily basis in full compliance with Amazon Products API Terms of Service.

What does this mean for you?

Well, in order for you to take advantage of these features, you will need to get Amazon Products API tokens. We have a detailed help document to help you find your Amazon Products API tokens, but here is the gist below:

In order to qualify for Amazon Products API Tokens, there are some specific requirements, and you can learn about those and obtain your tokens here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/assoc_credentials/home

Once you have your tokens you will have to add them to your Create Settings.

First, if you haven’t already, take a moment to register Create so you can get access to Affiliate Support.

Then visit the Affiliates Tab in Create Settings. Here is where you will be able to enable Amazon Affiliates.

Once you’ve enabled Amazon Affiliates, you’ll have access to the API Token Fields.

Add your Access Key, your Secret Access Key and your Associate Tag.

Be aware that Amazon takes its time to provision API access, typically between 24 and 48 hours. Create will lock you out of using the Amazon Affiliates keys for 48 hours by default.

If you’ve used your tokens before, and are sure they are ready to go, you can opt to clear our Provision lock using the button in the bottom of the settings.

Now that your tokens are added and you’ve waited the required 2 days, it’s time to start populating your recommended products.

The next time you add an Amazon Affiliate link to a Create card in the “Recommended Products” section or a List, paste your affiliate URL and the product image and title will populate.

As always, our support team is here to help if you have any questions. Please reach out to create@mediavine.com. 

The post Amazon Affiliate Updates to Create appeared first on Mediavine.

While programmatic display and video advertising are always our primary focus, many other opportunities exist. Sponsored work with brands, selling products, e-books and affiliate advertising could all contribute to your overall earnings.

In fact, if you look at some of the income reports submitted by our fantastic publishers, affiliate advertising often represents a significant piece of the pie.

The million-dollar question: Can your programmatic and affiliate ads coexist in harmony, maximizing earnings without compromising website speed or quality?

The answer: Yes, if you strike the right balance. Below, we break down Mediavine’s best practices to help you achieve this equilibrium.

Block ads from posts, not the entire site

If you have certain posts or pages that are rock stars at generating affiliate revenue, it may be best to remove Mediavine ads from that content. Why?

We’ve written extensively about what programmatic advertising is and how the ads placed on a website are chosen. The SSP and advertisers they work with are parsing every page and every visitor in order to find the perfect ad for that page and user, and at the best price.

That’s what programmatic advertising is and why it’s effective, but not if you’re competing with yourself. The ad exchanges may well pick up on the affiliate product you’re promoting within your content, and subsequently serve an ad for the same or similar product.

In this scenario, you’re taking attention off of your affiliate ad or links with display ads which, while relevant to your users and content, won’t produce as much revenue.

Obviously, you shouldn’t turn off Mediavine ads from the entirety of your site, but in specific cases like this, giving affiliate links free rein may boost conversion rates.

The delicate balance of doubling up

Lucky for you, turning off ads for a specific page or post is as easy as pasting (or removing) a small snippet of code onto that page.

The reason this is effective is that it leaves highly-viewable, optimized Mediavine ads running on the majority of your site’s pages, which may help earn even more revenue from your affiliate traffic.

Wait, what?

Let’s break it down further. Say you’ve created an affiliate post around a great new cleaning product. Within that post is an affiliate ad or link.

The user clicks through and places that product in the cart, but then prices a few more items that caught their eye before eventually purchasing the product.

Now that user has visited a product’s website, where very likely a cookie has been placed to identify the user as someone interested in their products.

Suddenly that user becomes very valuable to that specific advertiser. Anytime they go to any other page on your site, they will see highly relevant ads from that product’s website.

Because that programmatic advertiser is likely paying top dollar to place those ads in front of that user, you’ve now earned off of that user twice: Once for the affiliate product, and once for the programmatic ad(s). The definition of double dipping!

The importance of affiliate ad placement

Mediavine’s approach to advertising is to display fewer ads than we theoretically could, but in highly viewable positions, enhancing user experience and revenue alike.

Affiliate ads should follow the same guidelines.

Poor placement of affiliate ads, links or widgets could not only hurt affiliate ad performance, but also lead to decreased Mediavine ad performance.

For example, placing a large affiliate widget in the middle of your content can mistakenly signal the end of your post to some users, causing them to bounce early.

Ideally, larger widgets are placed at or near the end of your post, below your most valuable content. This keeps users engaged with your content — and the ad units contained within that content — all the way through to the end of your post.

How do you know what users are really engaging with? Consider using a heat map. Besides being super awesome, these maps actually help identify audience behavior in ways that are eye-opening. Use that data to place affiliate ads accordingly!

Conventional wisdom isn’t always on point. The sidebar, for instance, is always viewed as an easy, open piece of real estate. Seems like a no-brainer for affiliate ad placement, right? Not necessarily, as overloading the sidebar can hurt your earnings.

You might convert a few more affiliate sales, but adding extra sidebar length (remember your sidebar site health) may dent your Mediavine ad revenue in the process.

Again, it’s all about balance and using all the tools — and information — at your disposal to make the best choices on a site-wide and page-specific level.

Don’t forget about site speed

Site speed isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. — Eric Hochberger

This wouldn’t be a proper Mediavine blog post if we didn’t mention site speed at least once. Affiliate ads can be heavy, especially if using multiple images and links.

Coupled with the fact that most affiliate ads typically don’t utilize lazy loading, this can have significant impacts on your overall site speed scores.

Any time site speed is affected negatively, ad revenue is also affected negatively. Keep this in mind when adding new affiliate income streams.

Is $46 a month from a new affiliate really that much? What did it cost you in earnings from Mediavine ads as a result of poorer page load times?

There are situations when going all-in on your affiliate links makes sense, other cases when it clearly doesn’t, and others still when it’s a little less clear.

If you’re smart about it and consider all the factors, you’ll know the difference and reap the benefits from an intelligent affiliate advertising strategy.

The post Mediavine Ads and Affiliate Marketing: Striking the Right Balance appeared first on Mediavine.

Affiliate marketing.

If I were to leave that phrase there, would you feel enticed or bored?

Curious or scared?

Well the thing is, affiliate marketing can be a nightmare and a dream.

A nightmare because it’s relatively easy to do it wrong and fail miserably (like I’ve done in the past) after investing serious effort and money building great content.

A dream because, when done right, it can bring BIG bucks home in a passive way.

And we both know passive income is sexy, very sexy.

So if you’re interested in learning how to complement your display ad revenue with affiliate marketing, it’s your lucky day because the folks at Mediavine have graciously accepted me (Alejandro Meyerhans from HumanProofDesigns) as a guest on their blog to hit you with a value-packed, actionable guide to implementing affiliate offers on your site.

Oh, and no sales pitch. Refreshing, isn’t it? 😀

This is my best effort to condense the almost 5 years of experience HPD has with building affiliate sites for ourselves and our customers into one post, so let’s jump right into the meat!

1. A very quick overview of Affiliate Marketing.

So for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, affiliate marketing basically refers to promoting or otherwise “featuring” products in our content that visitors to our website are then able to purchase online, and we are paid a commission when they do.

The most typical type of affiliate post is a roundup of the top products in a particular niche, i.e. “kitchen blenders”, talking about the good and the bad aspects of 3 to 10 blenders, and where to buy them (usually Amazon, which runs the biggest affiliate program on the web.)

So you’re helping your visitor buy the right kitchen equipment, they’re happy because they’ve found what they needed and made a purchase, and you’re happy because you make money. Win-win!

But how do you create and structure affiliate content that is truly helpful for your beloved readers?

2. The best type of affiliate content

Like I mentioned above, the most typical (for a reason) type of affiliate content is product roundups.

They simply work like magic because they offer a quick comparison between the top options, what each one is good for, their flaws, etc., and help your visitor make an informed purchase.

If you’ve ever searched for “best kitchen blender” you know exactly what kind of page I mean. Fancy tables, pretty product reviews, pros/cons…And a big button that reads “check price on Amazon” or something along those lines.

And those posts can make A LOT of money.

However, unless you funnel your existing traffic from other posts on your site to those pieces via internal links or banners, or maybe by being very good at Pinterest, you won’t get much traffic because most of those keywords are quite competitive.

And here comes the first major pitfall we see over and over and over. People pick very hard to rank for keywords and just invest money and time getting a great page up…only for it to sleep on page 8 of Google results.

So if you aren’t super motivated to learn all the ins and outs of SEO for affiliate content, you need to get a bit creative.

A bit smarter.

You need to go for the low hanging fruit.

And don’t think it’s not profitable because it hangs low!

What am I talking about here? Long tail keywords.

3. The #1 golden rule of making money with affiliate marketing: Pick good keywords you can rank for.

The affiliate game is brutal. There’s a lot of money to be made.

Some seriously big companies (such as The Wirecutter, Forbes, CNET…) spend thousands trying to rank for a single, super-competitive keyword like “best blender”.

And here’s the good thing: The majority ignore keywords like “best food processor for making bread dough” because the search volume isn’t as high.

Even though you’ll find big publications when you search for the product keyword ‘food processor’, you’ll see that they aren’t exactly talking about that. They’re just talking about food processors in general.

But they fail to satisfy the specific user intent for that product:

“I want to make bread dough with it.”

So what happens when you go and fill that gap in the supply of accurate, specific information?

You win.

Your article ranks, visitors land on your page, they discover that it’s tailored 100% for their specific query and – most of the time – they buy.

4. Structure

A good converting product roundup will have the following structure:

• • A catchy introduction & table of contents for the lazy readers who need to jump straight to it.

Mediavine caveat! While a TOC may be amazing for affiliate marketing, it can impact your display advertising. If you have questions about adding this and how it might affect your earnings, please contact us!

• A nice table comparing 3 to 5 top products. There’s a bajillion plugins to do this if you’re using WordPress so simply browse around to find one that you like. My recommendation is Amazon Affiliate for WordPress.
• A ‘Reviews’ section containing the following for each product you list:

1. Name of the product and good images
2. What it does and does not
3. Its main features
4. Pros/Cons
5. A Call To Action (namely, a big fat button that screams “click here”)

• A conclusion where you recommend one product above all the others, again, with a nice link to check it out.

When done like this, you’re sure to send a high % of your visitors to Amazon and to deliver your content in an efficient, easy to digest manner that will help readers make a decision.

That said, I’d avoid reviewing more than 5 products at a time. Too many choices will be intimidating.

“Ok ok, understood. Long tail keywords about products. Feature a bunch and compare them, retire in Bahamas. Let’s get to work!”

Well, hold for just a sec before you book that flight, let me warn you about a couple potential mistakes and give you one last tip.

5. Typical mistakes you can avoid easily

Mistake #1: Forgetting the exact type of keyword structure that’s a sure winner:

Best [product] for [specific use]

The product can be anything from “bread machine” to “portable refrigerator”.

Then give it a use. Any possible use for that product. “For whole wheat bread”. “For camping”.

That’s really it.

Sure, I could spend another 8,000 words explaining advanced keyword research methods and tools (we’ve published dozens of posts about this topic on our blog, like this one) but for the sake of brevity and effective action items, stick to this format.

Forget all other keywords. It will work.

Mistake #2: Recommending bad products

People are smart.

They are able to recognize if you’re bluffing or actually recommending good stuff.

Do some research and make sure the products you review are great, have some pricing differences between them, and sell well (just look at the rating and amount of reviews on Amazon!)

If the product is good, your readers will trust you, and they will convert, which means you don’t need a ton of traffic to make decent money.

Oh, money:

Mistake #3: Recommending cheap products

Nothing wrong with a “best silicone spatula for eggs” post. In fact, at the time I’m writing this post only two other sites on the entire internet care to cover this specific question. You’ll rank top 3 on Google automatically.

But how much does a silicone spatula sell for? $2 to $20 for a set? Your commission on that item will be sad. Barely a few cents.

So, since you’re going to be creating the content anyway and uploading all those pictures and making it look fab, you may as well make sure the things you review are on the high end of the pricing spectrum.

For me, anything below 50 to 100 bucks isn’t worth the effort of writing the post.

You want to be able to bring home some decent money every day with just a handful of sales. A $250 appliance in the kitchen niche brings $11.25 in commission. How many such appliances would you need to “sell” per day to double your current revenue?

Mistake #4: Not optimizing your page properly for the keyword

Here are the best places to add your “best this for that use” keyword in your post for it to rank like a champ:

• Title: I suggest you also add the current year and the word “reviews”. For example, “Best Juicer for Wheatgrass and Leafy Greens of 2018? Our Reviews” to rank for even MORE keywords and bring in extra traffic.
• Meta description
• Slug (what goes after your url: janetfoodblog.com/best-juicer-for-wheatgrass-and-leafy-greens)
• Your featured image meta description
• Somewhere in the body of the article

And that’s it!

Just write the rest of the article naturally without repeating the keyword every 3 sentences and your ranking will go straight up.

Mistake #5: Not reading the TOS (terms of service) of the affiliate program thoroughly

Amazon can be a bit picky in terms of what you can and can’t do as one of their affiliates.

You need to be super clear in the wording of your links when you’re sending a visitor to Amazon.

You can’t mention pricing (because prices constantly change and the price at the time you’re writing the post and when your visitor is reading it will very likely differ.) You also can’t upload Amazon’s images directly on your site.

Don’t worry though, Amazon will provide you with the right tools to create your affiliate links and show you how to use their images the right way. Plus, the affiliate community is very helpful (and there are TONS of tools out there created for the sole purpose of affiliate marketing, just browse around and ask fellow affiliates for their favorites.)

So, do your research and ensure that your content complies with Amazon’s TOS, so you stay on their good side and continue to profit from this affiliate relationship for a long time.

Mistake #6: Not doing it

Seriously.

I say the same thing to people in affiliate marketing who ditch display ads without really trying.

Exactly one month after I started working with Mediavine on one of my sites, its market value went up 30% just because of the display ad revenue it was pulling and it was already a VERY successful affiliate site. Best decision ever.

So even if you’re currently making a killing in ad income, reinvest some of that cash and put together some good affiliate content for your site. Trust me, you’ll be very happy with your past self pretty soon.

6. One Last Tip

If I were to recommend one more thing, it’d be that you start following the blogs of successful affiliate marketers and SEOs to learn their techniques and how they do everything from keyword research to optimizing their page layouts to get more clicks to Amazon and better rankings.

(The Mediavine blog has an SEO checklist that we find helpful.)

(An SEO podcast might be good too, if only we knew of a good one…OH, how about Theory of Content, hosted by a Mediavine co-founder?!)

And, of course, the place I’d suggest you begin your reading research is at HumanProofDesigns.

We live and breathe affiliate marketing, so if the affiliate bug bites you, you’ll feel at home here! 😀

Wishing you the best year ever with your online endeavours,

Alejandro Meyerhans

HumanProofDesigns is a company that provides training and services for affiliates, from website creation to SEO services; HPD aims to be the ultimate resource for knowledge and solutions for all things Affiliate Marketing.

The post How To Write Affiliate Marketing Content That SELLS appeared first on Mediavine.

Affiliate programs work well for many consumer product brands, and we work with publishers every day who have successfully diversified their revenue through affiliate marketing.

They’re sharing authentic experiences with their audiences and reaping the benefits through a commission of the sales.

But do affiliate programs work for every brand? We don’t think so.

We considered an affiliate marketing program from the moment we began the public-facing part of our business. The bigger a programmatic publisher network gets, the more leverage we have to broker better deals on its behalf.

It makes sense that we keep growing and at a rapid pace. Exposure provided by the motivation of a referral program would do that in spades.

You know what else it would do? Put our authenticity into question.

We rely on our publishers to keep us in check. We get better every day by the suggestions they give us.

How to get better at serving them, what features they need from us — all of this requires an honest back and forth to get better at what we do and what we offer.

When Mediavine is recommended, the network is rewarded in a roundabout way. The more we grow, the more everyone makes because that’s the nature of programmatic advertising.

It’s a slower, more authentic burn, and we think that’s worth it.

“Honest opinions from your users are infinitely more valuable than blanket praise.”

We want honest reviews out in the world for so many reasons, but one of the biggest is what people find when they search for information about us. Honest opinions from our users are infinitely more valuable than blanket praise.

If you’ve got an incentive in the form of a referral bounty, you may not share your honest experience with Mediavine to other people — or even to us.

That doesn’t help us get better at what we do, and it could lead to overall network dissatisfaction if no one is willing to tell us what we’re doing wrong.

No one is perfect all the time, or even some of the time. We’ve certainly made mistakes as we grow this business, and we’ve owned those mistakes as they were made because they’re a learning opportunity.

Every failure has been an opportunity to learn how to be better, do better.

As much as we’d love to grow even more rapidly, losing that hunger and that ability to be certain we’re making our publishers happy is not worth it.

Losing our authenticity and our drive to be better just to have more reviews out there in the world is too big a loss to our long term goals.

We’re the ad network for publishers, and that’s important.

The post Does Mediavine Offer an Affiliate Program? appeared first on Mediavine.