Guess what? People don’t look at ads. (We suspected as much…)
Monetizing your blog is more than sticking a few affiliate ads or a snippet of AdSense into your header or sidebar. Those of us who have wasted our time putting Amazon’s dynamic ads into our sidebars or a Commission Junction banner ad into our header and never received a single click already know this. We think to ourselves, maybe it’s just my site…maybe I don’t have enough traffic. Maybe the type of people who visit my site are the “wrong” type of people.
Most people won’t be able to retire on the earnings they receive with AdSense, but, unlike affiliate banner ads, at least they get something for the 30 seconds of effort if the content is right. But AdSense is not about augmenting sites, it’s about arbitraging traffic. You get a tiny bit of compensation for this, but for some types of sites, it’s not worth $.07 to send a user off your site.
ProductWiki just did an analysis of their PPC vs Shopping.com, and their affiliate earnings, and Shopping.com outperformed AdSense by a factor of 4.6! Does that mean we should all go parse the Shopping.com XML feed and stick it into our blogs and websites? No, but we should take a look at some of the key points that ProductWiki is making.
- The stuff you want to sell should be RELEVANT to your users
- The STYLE of your offerings should integrate seamlessly into your site
- Always remember the “IGNORE FACTOR“
What ProductWiki describes as the “ignore factor” is similar to what world-renowned usability expert Jakob Nielsen found in the results of a landmark eyetracking study he participated in recently. The Nielsen research showed that people avoid looking at ads…or more importantly, items they perceive as ads.
People ignore ads that:
- look different than the rest of the site
- are overpolished
- are animated
- appear unnecessary
- look like…well…ads
However, people do look at ads that:
- display items a user many want to buy
- are related to the page content
- match the style of the site they’re on
We as affiliates, need to integrate usability and product design best practices into our merchandising strategies. We need to engage our users by picking products of interest, adding useful descriptions to our products and making sure everything is seamlessly integrated into our sites. We need to remember that it’s about adding content to our websites and blogs, not about sending our valuable users away. Then we’ll have the edge.
Technorati Tags: AdSense, Commission Junction, ProductWiki, Jakob Nielsen, PrestoGifto, usability
August 18th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Great post. I hadn’t realized that there was a Nielsen study confirming some of the stuff I was saying. (I’m Erik from ProductWiki)
I like the idea of PrestoGifto. An orthogonal way of earning some deserved income for bloggers. A good AdSense alternative for sure as it allows for some creativity in the choice of ads.
November 23rd, 2006 at 4:54 am
Hello!
I’ve just recently begun setting up my shop through prestogifto. I absolutely LOVE it, but was wondering if, in the future, it will be possible for a small modification? As of now, when someone clicks on a product in the store…it goes to the cafepress DESIGN page for that design. Will it be possible for it to go to that specific item’s page?
Thanks!
November 23rd, 2006 at 10:56 am
Hi Megan,
There is an option to change the link destination to the item’s landing page in the style editor. Let me know if you have any problems.
Jessie
December 21st, 2006 at 7:48 pm
Just installed the WP plugin and it works like a charm. I tried to change some of the products today but it seems the site is down as no pruducts will display. I will try again later.
BlogSire