I just had my first small success in optimizing affiliate promotion. On my Whisky Rating site I have a prominently placed affiliate ad linked to one of the major whisky online stores, served by Affiliate Window. Although it receives a fair amount of clicks, so far I have not made a single penny yet by sales through this ad.
Earlier this week I had an idea. So far I have rated around 80 different whiskies on my site. Some of them are rather obscure and/or out of stock, but many are readily available. Why not help people who look for information about whisky by adding a direct link to the product in the online store? So I wrote an e-mail to the whisky store, asking for permission to use their product pictures for the whiskies they have in stock after mentioning my plan to add direct affiliate links to their prodcuct pages. Side note: Never, ever copy or link other people’s product pictures without permission or you can get into serious trouble! Luckily they agreed, but after all why shouldn’t they? It opens up a chance for them to get new costumers.
It took me two hours to add the pictures and the links for roughly 50 whiskies. Et voilà: Just two days later I had my first affiliate sale through one of the new links! If it works once, it can also work twice or more. So when there is enough targeted traffic to your site, there is a real chance that strategically placed deeplinks can generate income.
In the affiliate statisics, these links are marked as text links. But to the best of my knowledge, the practice of placing the links in images will not be affected by Google’s “bought text link” penalty because in the code it looks just like an ordinary banner ad.
