Just recently Wanda and I sat down to discuss how we could increase our affiliate income. Some of the ideas that came up were to create more websites, create more PPC campaigns and landing pages, get heavily into article marketing or add large amounts of content to our sites.

These all involved a good amount of extra effort which although we are both hard workers and were prepared for it, we just didn’t have the time to do this sort of work in a big way as we were already adding content to one of our niche blogs which was taking up a bit of time on its own.

We needed something simpler that wouldn’t require much time to implement.

We then thought about the websites we already have. We have a number of niche affiliate sites and some are making more money than others but we have a few that are making hardly anything at all – maybe a few dollars each a month. Some of these websites have not been touched at all in more than a year which probably explains why they haven’t been bringing in much income. So we decided that it was about time we got them making a bit more money.

Our main income from these few sites is from Adsense ads so we sat down and looked at the stats of each of these sites to find the pages getting the most traffic. We decided we would work on any page that was getting more than 500 hits in a month. We took each of these pages and looked at the Adsense ads currently on the page and found that most were small and easily missed.

So this was an obvious change we needed to make. We increased the size of the Google ad and moved it to a more prominent spot and we did this with each page on our list. We also changed the link color to ‘click me blue’.

Lastly we created URL channels in Google Adsense for each of these pages. This was from a suggestion of James Martell at one of our Bootcamp sessions. We should have been doing this from the start as it is a brilliant way to track where your Google Adsense clicks are coming from and it is really easy to do. Once you have added your Google ad to a page you then grab the URL of that page and then add it as a URL channel in your Google Adsense channel area.

The benefit of this, apart from the fact that you can see where the clicks are coming from, is that if you find that a page gets a good amount of money for each click then you can work on generating more traffic to that page.

Our analysis for this has only just started as we only made the changes a couple of days ago but we can already see an increase in clicks which equates to an increase in income.

Over the coming months we will start testing the Google ads on each of these pages and change the link color and ad position to see which works best and we will keep doing this on an ongoing basis.

The next step was to look at the affiliate websites where we are currently making most of our money. These sites are less focused on Google Adsense and more focused on product commissions. Some of these websites are ranking really well in Google and getting lots of highly targeted traffic. We started with our top website and analyzed each page to see what could be improved upon.

The work here involved moving products to above the fold and creating more prominent links or ‘buy now’ buttons. For those that don’t know ‘above the fold’ refers to any part of a website showing in a browser that a person can see before having to scroll down.

We also reworked the review pages for this site which are what really gets our visitors to buy.

We then started to create SIDs for each and evey affiliate link on our site through any product links we have in CJ. This is something we are still working on as there are a lot of links on the site but what this will tell us is exactly what links are generating sales and from what page on our site they are coming from.

When we get a bit of extra time we will also be making use of Google Website Optimizer. This free Google service allows anyone with a website to test and optimize multiple versions of pages on their website.

This whole exercise has taught us the importance of testing which is something we really haven’t delved into in a big way before.

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