Today, we are writing a full comparison between affiliate banners and affiliate links on the basis of their different promotions in websites and to equally ascertain which converts best on website visitors for bigger website revenue.
As above said, we mean to ascertain which works best for your website traffic conversions into sales, leads, or subscribers.
Let’s first speak a little about affiliate marketing and what ways to promote them.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a form of online business whereby you’re paid a comission for helping another company market their own product. In other words, you receive a fraction of the payment made when an item is purchased through your own unique link.
Having explained affiliate marketing, let us quickly glance through the best ways to promote affiliate products and make good sales.
Ways to promote affiliate products
From an indepth research by an affiliate marketing guru Niel Patel, he concluded that. The best and the most effective way of promoting affiliate products are as follows:
Using PPC ads
Using PPV ads
Using Facebook ads (Facebook targeted traffic)
Using your website (Most recommended)
Direct marketing
Using forums eg Qoura and Nairaland (For Nigerians)
Considering that the above stated are the most effective ways to promote affiliate products, we shall take affiliate promotion through your own website as the point of focus in this article as the topic suggested.
Let’s check out the forms of affiliate promotion most available for almost every affiliate around the globe.
Forms of affiliate promotions
There are two basic forms of affiliate promotions which are always offered by the affiliate company itself and these are;
Affiliate links
Affiliate banners
These are the two basic forms of promoting an affiliate product and this will as well be the basic concern of our article today.
Let’s jog your memory a bit…
As a business owner and a blogger, I presume you must have signed up for one affiliate program or another one of these times and I guess you preferred the banner approach to reach your audience than the link approach.
Right?
During this course, you will receive a little click to your affiliate ads and this might make you think that this product isn’t going on quite fine or better still that the said product isn’t what people are searching for.
But, you might be wrong by saying this you know.
Several bloggers do not know how exactly to utilize the affiliate link and I will be highly obliged to teach you how or better still tell you exactly what to do so as to increase your CTR and sales between affiliate banners and affiliate links.
We have always been true to our readers and we write tutorials of this nature according to our own experience and trials and we are always confident to tell you what we came up as result with.
Let us now look at what will work best for your website between affiliate banners and affiliate links.
Note: in the end of this explanation, you will deduce what works best and why you should use it.
So let’s get on.
My experience using affiliate banners
I wanted to know the truth between affiliate banners and links which works best so I decided to use HostBlast affiliate program to experiment on this.
I signed up with HostBlast affiliate program and had their affiliate banner and affiliate link up in my website simultaneously and I decided to see how the two works out.
I tried this for upto five days in my website.
I did monitored the clicks to these links closely and I kept the click to my affiliate banner filtered and that to my links also filtered, so I could detect the possible difference between the two.
Note: I had a specific goal for performing this action which is to find out how either of them would perform for my website.
While this lasted, I got an experience that was almost a breathtaking one and I seriously wished to divulge it here.
My experience
Knowing fully well I was trying to know between the links and banners which would work better and bring better conversion, I had different experiences with the two while this experiment was going on.
Mind if we started with the banner ads?
My experience with the HostBlast affiliate banner
As the giant ad company (Chitika) usually affirm, website visitors have grown blind to advertisment banners on websites and they do react to written texts better.
This assertion came to be a reality with me when I checked the progress with my HostBlast affiliate banner in my website and for two days I received only 3 clicks to the banner ad links.
These affiliate banners were placed in strategic positions using Adsense heatmaps and still visitors went over them without clicking considering the fact that the HostBlast affiliate banners illustrated everything you need to know about the web hosting company.
Still no one clicked on the ad banners.
But I was happy I was able to understand why this was so and as a result, I will be giving you a few list why these affiliate banners never got any clicks.
Why my affiliate banners got no clicks over the days;
Banner blindness of visitors (Principal cause)
Non attractiveness of the banners
No compelling text in the banners
Dull coloration
No rich text to wrap it up
No recommendations in the banners
These above stated reasons were why the banners wasn’t able to convert into sales for my website and I wasn’t too unhappy about this as we were only experimenting.
So in a wrap up text, my experience with the HostBlast affiliate banner was a total shame, so let’s look beyond the picture and talk about the affiliate links.
My experience with HostBlast affiliate link
When we are speaking of link advertising, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to advertise the link in its raw form as originated from the affiliate company itself but we are talking about making the said link be embedded in a text in your website smartly.
Something like this;
Why not start your shared hosting wordpress website with as low as #2,600 a year? Click here!
This above sentence should be smartly placed inbetween your post body at a very comfortable place so as not to disturb the readership of your website visitors while reading your posts.
The last side which said “click here” should contain the affiliate link embedded in it so as to allow easy redirection of users to your target affiliate landing page.
The above was only a hint to text affiliate link promotion.
Now, my ordeal as I used the smart affiliate link promotion was a huge success as in less that three days I was able to generate above 188 clicks to the affiliate links I embedded in every of my websites high traffic posts.
Note: this was almost 50 times the attraction I gained using affiliate banners on the same website.
Here is a screenshot to assist my claim;
Notwithstanding the fact that I had no conversion in the HostBlast plan I directed my audience to, the goal was that the clicks came and so did the conversion.
I was quite aware why there was no sales in the hosting plan I wanted to sell and this is as a result of the poor quality of the hosting company I tried promoting as I presume.
Why no hosting purchase occurred
The referred visitors must have taken a review of the web hosting company and didn’t find it quite soothing and as such they decided not to purchase hosting from them.
Equally, the referred visitors may have overlooked the hosting as a result of its low price as they thought it might be inferior as it is a natural phenomena with Nigerians when they visit websites and see low priced stuffs.
So…
I equally used the same approach to my entireweb affiliate and got a very soothing result that was much like the result with the HostBlast affiliate link promotion.
Considering the fact that entireweb affiliate doesn’t pay well for Nigerian signups and clicks, I was able to savour up to $0.2001 with upto 10 clicks I got into the system using them for just a day.
Sure I didn’t get lucky, I only did what I knew how to do best.
Here is entireweb affiliate screenshot;
Why affiliate link smart promotion work best for websites;
Clear explanation of what the visitor stand to gain
It intercepts readership and as such must be read
Doesn’t occupy much space and as such have to be smartly noticed
Its always friendly to readers
Has a clear direction to readers
Since a reader is quite interested in reading your text, he/she will read it through and understand easily
Note: this approach with smart affiliate links could be used best when it comes to PPC (Pay Per Click) affiliate marketing such as entireweb affiliate and also PPL (Pay Per Lead) affiliate such as the cashsuperstar affiliate.
My verdict
The same visitors that turned to be too positive to my affiliate promoted links and got me enough conversions was the same visitors that turned a blind eye towards the affiliate banners in my website not quite too long.
I will be very accurate to say that website visitors really have turned a blind eye towards banner advertisment in the early days even if they are highly targeted.
The reason I said the above was simple.
I draw my website visitors from search engine and search engine only and this is why I was able to get 100% targeted visitors to my website and as such I could give a wholesome verdict that even almost all the time, targeted visitors do not convert on banner ads but on links.
Quite frankly, Chitika ad network was right by their verdict about visitors ad blindness.
Now over to you
As a website owner or a blogger, after reading our views and clarified assertions, I suppose you have to take the plunge, dive into the unknown and explore our guide.
You could find this very very soothing for your website and also you could experience a boost in overall potential revenue of your website and this will be a very big credit to us if you did.
We seriously hope you did and we will be more than happy to share your success story as did ours.
