Every good website design book will tell you, that a link page is a must have. They help you network with partnering websites, draw traffic, and make your website more resourceful. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if that link page could make you some money?
To a novice website owner, it would appear that a link page is nothing more than a link page. For most websites this is true, but you’re going to learn how your link page can start making you money through affiliates.
Affiliate Links on Your Link Page – Why Do It?
Many small business owners think of affiliate links as a waste of time. They don’t see the point in spending time on joining and setting up affiliates. It’s true, setting up affiliates does take some time and work. It is also true that you might not make a lot of money from affiliate links.
On the flip side though, what is wrong with passive income regardless of the amount? Setting up affiliates via your links page won’t make you rich, but it might make you enough money to pay for your website hosting every month or pay for the new advertising banner you need. So, why not take the time to setup some affiliates in your link page?
Affiliate Links on Your Link Page – Finding Affiliates
The first stop is finding affiliates. Because most website and small business owners don’t have a lot of time to search the web, they need a one-stop-shop. Commission Junction is that stop.
Commission Junction is a service that lets publishers (website owners) search, sign up and track affiliate sales.
A small business owner can sign up for a Commission Junction account and search for affiliates via the website. This is a great spot to search for affiliates because they have one of the largest databases of affiliate programs on the web. You can even search for affiliates based on a variety of categories, thus making your search even faster.
Affiliate Links on Your Link Page – How to Make Money
The question still remains, how is this going to make you money on your website’s link page?
It’s simple, once you find a large number of affiliates; you are going to turn them into suggested links. This way, when customers go to your link page and click on a link, they are taken to one of your affiliates. This gives you an opportunity to make money. The amount of money and how you make it will vary from affiliate to affiliate.
Affiliate Links on Your Link Page – Designing Your Link Page
When designing your links page there are some things you can do to increase click through rate to affiliates. As tempting as it may seem to just add the text links or banners that the affiliates offer, don’t. A link page full of un-matching text links or flashy banners is going to turn off customers.
These banner filled link pages will just look like you are begging for money. Instead, create a more useful link page. Create a link page that shows the name of the website and a brief description about it. Take a look at the following example:
iPaddleGear – A website that offers clothing for a variety of paddlers. Here you can find shirts and jackets for kayakers, canoers, and sea kayakers.
Your customer will love you for this. The fact that you spent the time to give a brief description to the website will increase the chance of your customer clicking on it. Customers like knowing what a link is for before they click on it. If this link were to just read, iPaddleGear, customers probably wouldn’t know what it was for and skip right over it, even if it was something that could be very beneficial to them.
Another great tool to help customers “see” links before they click on them is called Snap.
Snap is a preview tool that allows customers to see a small preview of a website simply by rolling their mouse over the link. This is just another great way to increase the chance of a click through on your links page.
As mentioned before, you won’t get rich from affiliate links on your link page, but what can it hurt? Some things to remember; spend time on creating quality links, the more links the more chance for profit, the more useful the link the greater chance of a click through.
