It appears that using the anchor text words “click here” has been proven to be a successful way to get people to click on a link.

Marketing Sherpa performed an experiment with their newsletter readers and found that wording used in hyperlinks influenced a difference in clickthrough rates (CTR). Changes to 2-3 link words was discovered to lift clickthrough rates by more than 8 percent.

Results:

• Click to continue: 8.53%
• Continue to article: 3.3%
• Read More: (-)1.8%

The results strongly revealed that leading a reader to click the appropriate anchor text would improve clickthrough rates (CTR).

I’ve seen some individuals who have placed links within the image and wondered why CTR is low – it’s because the reader obviously doesn’t know to click the image.

I’ve only played with using “Click Here”, “Url Here”, “Source”, “Product Link” but I haven’t toyed with it enough. The results from Marketing Sherpa has definitely inspired me to use ‘Click Here’ more often….. :)

Does this make you want to click?

Click here to find keywords tool to improve search or ad click conversion within your niche.

So on Saturday, we decided it will be our Santa picture day. Avery’s gotta be ok with him now. After waiting in line for 30 minutes at a somewhat early 10am, we walked up to Santa together with our very cautious child. Avery didn’t want to accept the free candy cane Santa offered her, but remained calm…still weary, but calm…her two little eyes never breaking the sight of him. I politely took the cane and passed it to my daughter who quickly then grabbed on to it (as seen in the photo). Although, she gave more of a blank stare than a smile for the photo, at least she didn’t get upset. Kids are quite funny.

Christmas time is proving to feel more hectic and burdensome over the years. Maybe it’s because as we age, we lose a bit of the fun behind enjoying the holiday as we hit the stores trying to find the perfect gift for everyone…and maybe get lucky and find something on sale.

I can’t count how many times I’ve visited the mall in the past 3 weeks, but it’s much more than I would like. Sure I get some exercise pushing around my daughter in the stroller and lifting her out when she can’t stand sitting any longer while mommy stands looking dumbfounded at picking either a brown and white scarf or a knitted checkered scarf, or whether she should get 2 of the same gift for easy Christmas shopping for the relatives.

I already shop online for quite a few things, but visiting the mall has really pushed me to find ALL my answers online. Cards from CardSmart or Hallmark…no more! I’m sending e-cards this year! A new service, Tribbit.com has a service that allows friends AND family to sign an online Christmas Card. Hallmark ornaments? Maybe it’s me, but most Hallmark stores always run out of that last Christmas ornament I’m searching for…hint, hint…like Baby’s 2nd Christmas for girls….so I end up purchasing it online anyways. And Gift cards…Now, this year I’m passing on buying individual cards from a specific store. VISA and AMEX have gift cards which allow your loved one to buy anything they want from anywhere they choose. Visa® Gift Card Lab offers gift cards with any background design – you choose (you can even customize one). I could make a huge list of things I’m doing this year a little differently….but I’m sure you get the idea.

Because it’s the biggest shopping time of the year, it’s very important more than ever as a webmaster to utilize affiliate campaigns and email lists. If you don’t have an email marketing list, check out companies like Constant Contact and StreamSend that offer free trials. They’re very easy to use and comply with CAN-SPAM laws, making managing a list, especially for a newbie, easier and less-stressful to manage. If you don’t have any lists, think about how you can turn things around for next Christmas or set shorter goals of hitting big holidays between now and next Christmas. Set up a MySpace page and see if you can get those that are interested in your niche (check MySpace Groups) to sign up as a friend, THEN try messaging them to sign up for your newsletter. Actively build lists, because they’ll be the most profitable long-run, with spikes during the holiday depending on the market. Having that extra money coming in, will definitely help with buying all those gifts. :)

Referenced Sites in Post:

1) Constact Contact: Email Newsletters – 60 Day Free Trial

4) Tribbit.com – Create an online Christmas card, complete with photos, text, voice, stories, signed by your friends and family. Free!

Popshops has created a new service that gives you the ability to make a virtual storefront using some of the most popular affiliate networks like CJ and LinkSynergy.

It’s extremely easy to use and eases the process of joining specific online merchant programs. I haven’t come across a program utilizing their lists that requires a manual approval from the advertiser as I’ve experienced with working with CJ directly. So it makes easy last minute changes to a store extremely easy.

The code can be placed within a widget on a blog hosted by WordPress, Blogger or Squidoo. An instant display of affiliate products related to your niche is shown for easy click and purchase.

Over 24 million products are available to be sold from other affiliate networks such as Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, Red Galoshes and Performics. It’s sorta of a one-stop shop site for using all major affiliate networks but you’ll need to sign-up with the major affiliates to retrieve an Account Id prior to finalizing. I double-checked to see if there was a fee to participate and was pleasantly surprised that there wasn’t.  You keep 100% of the commission sales.

There are 3 basic level of plans offered:

• Basic is Free
• Pro is $5/month
• Enterprise is $30/month

The basic free service allows you to establish up to 10 virtual stores and up to 100 products per store. There is only the risk of using your free time to setup the account and the company claims that it is easy enough for a 3-year old kid to do it.

If you find that you need more shops, the Pro plan can create unlimited shops and lets you add search engine-friendly code. The Enterprise plan allows you manage multiple affiliate IDs – useful if you have several websites. There is a 15-day free trial for both of these plans. I personally don’t have a need for over 10 virtual stores so haven’t upgraded from the Basic plan.

Heard of DealDotCom? Doors are planned to open tomorrow for this new discounted shopping network on September 18th geared towards Internet Marketers, using a one product a day, concept.

DealDotCom claims to consider everything under the umbrella related to “Internet Marketing” to be featured on the site at a extremely discounted price, such as products related to:

• Building an online business
• Marketing products or services
• Ways to increase traffic and monetize a site
• Web design and SEO Marketing
• Ebay and ecommerce marketing
• Social and web2.0
• ebooks and videos
• Investing and financial information
• Blogging

Although that I feel that most information on e-marketing can be found on the internet for free from blogs, research or networking, I’m curious about this site.  Joining early could promise a good opportunity to spread the word before the greater internet community gets wind of it.

DealDotCom does a smart thing creating an urgency to buy the product by only holding a limited inventory (first come first serve) of products till midnight.

Membership is free and offers a lifetime two-tier commission structure. When someone is referred, there is a 35% commission rate for the 1st tier. 2nd tiers will earn 15% commission.

If the DealDotCom turns out to be successful, signing up affiliate referrals early will be beneficial.  I’ve already signed up for a free account. Hey might as well join early and spread the word, before everyone else jumps on board.

As I have done on this site, many other sites link to domain/name-of-product/ and redirect either using a PHP jump script (as do I) or manipulate the htaccess file.

What are the advantage of redirecting an Outbound Affiliate Link?

• Keeping others from stealing affiliate sales and making it harder for “newbies” to see how to access the affiliate program or view it is an affiliate link.
• Easily change the merchant offer by changing only one affiliate link within your php redirect file or .htaccess. It’s especially helpful when you’ve sent out an email, newsletter or posted a link on a forum and a merchant has changed the link. You can easily change the redirect on your end and keep the affiliate sale alive.
• Increase confidence of clicking on an affiliate link as many people are hesitant to click on links that look like: http://www.tkyrse.com/affiliateid?12345
• Protect your affiliate links as many will hover over an external link and manually type in the top level domain in the address bar of browser instead of clicking on the link. It seems pretty silly as the site’s owner has gone through the trouble of finding valuable information for free, as the actual click doesn’t cost the reader anything.

There are some instructions on the web to set up a redirect by using .htaccess/301 redirects or php scripts that may appear confusing or overwhelming to a handful of site owners. There are also many software products on the market that charge $20-$60 to assist in protecting your affiliate commissions. But…actually, hiding your affiliate links can be so easy.

Using PHP

Create a file in notepad and call it moneynow.php and enter this:

<?
header(“Location: http://www.susansuarez.com/ref=2424538″);
?>

Of course, change the URL to be your affiliate link and upload the file to your server and use moneynow.php as the new link. So in this case it would be: http://www.susansuarez.com/moneynow.php. Now anytime anyone clicks on this link they will be redirected to the actual affiliate. Very simple, huh?

You could even create a directory called “information” or “recommended” that may add more trust to the link and will appear like this: http://www.susansuarez.com/recommended/moneynow.php

But before hiding an affiliate link, review your affiliate’s TOS and make sure it doesn’t forbid cloaking.

Using .htaccess

.htaccess is located in the same folder as your index.html or .php files. Open it up and at the bottom of that file, type this (Example):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^moneynow.php$ http://susansuarez.com?ref=2424538 [R]

“RewriteEngine on” turns on the rewrite program and the affiliate link will be redirected.

Additional Cloaking

There is a free tool and easy way to further cloak your links from those who hold a mouse over a link to view the destination. Check out ClickFire to automatically add the coding needed to hide the destination, even a .php link, if you want that hidden from experienced marketers aware of php cloaking techniques. Just make sure your links are a different color than your other text so people know that it’s a link to click. Blue is a good standard color to use.

Robots.txt

To keep search engines issues at bay with creating a cloaking page, it’s highly recommended to keep Google from indexing pages that have nothing on it and are used only as a redirect. Google doesn’t like these pages and you wouldn’t want Google to index the page anyways, since it won’t have any content.

Save all of your redirects within one directory and exclude that directory in your robots.txt. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, you can create one in notepad and upload it to the root directory of your web page. The robots.txt file gives spiders a direction as to which directories or files they can examine and retrieve information. To prevent them from accessing any part of the site (including redirects with no content), enter the following within the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-to-be-excluded/

The asterisk (*) indicates “all” spiders or agents. If for some reason, you want to disallow access to any directory, then use a forward slash “/” and not an asterisk for “Disallow: ” To read more on robots.txt, take a look at

Cloaking your affiliate links should increase conversions, for many reasons noted above. There is no need to lose out on money by not ‘hiding’ affiliate links!

Lets start with the not-so-good four you shouldn’t waste your time on.

1) Amazon – Initially the affiliate program seems extraordinary. You get to sign-on with a superstore but the kick-back is between 4% to 8.5% of the purchase, with a maximum of $25 on personal computers, which otherwise be a great affiliate item to get a commission from. There are some people who are making money with Amazon, but most aren’t making a whole lot. Typically people will earn an average of .05-2 cents for every click they can send to Amazon.com. You’ll have to decide for yourself it that’s a good or bad number.

2) Chitika - You may find success with this affiliate program if your site is directly product related. If it isn’t…you may receive a poor performance from Chitika.

3) Auction Ads - Auction Ads gives 2% of referral revenue and many haven’t received much success per cut. Things may change as AuctionAds has just been sold to Media Whiz.

4) Clickxchange – Clickxchange’s interface is poor and their website performance is lousy. The quality of advertisers is low in comparison to the other alternatives, like CJ or ShareASale.

5 Great Programs/Networks

1) Text Link Ads – Text Link Ads lists your blog within their marketplace exposing your site to thousands of advertisers, allowing for easy payment. Upon referral, new advertisers get $100 worth of free text link ads if $125 is invested. That’s not too bad….and the referral program offers $25.

2) Commission Junction (CJ) - Commission Junction is an affiliate network bringing advertisers and publishers together. Best performing ads are listed first and a large variety of big advertisers utilize their system. They supply many advertiser text links and banner options to choose from. There are a few free offers on their site, such as Free Credit Report. A similar site to CJ but smaller is ShareASale, which offers some advertisers that CJ doesn’t list but their interface isn’t as easy to use.

3) Website Magazine - Website Magazine offers free magazines regarding internet news for a commission. The great thing about this magazine is that it has a lot of great information and news valuable to webmasters.

4) Bidvertiser – Besides Bidvertiser having a lower minimum payout of $10 versus Google’s $100 payout, Bidvertiser also allows you to categorize your listings instead of having them figure out which ads are best to place on your site like Google attempts to do. You can change the size and ad color, but make sure that they appear different than Google’s Adsense as Google’s TOS states that you cannot have other ads alongside it that look similar to your Adsense placement/format.

5) PayPerPost – PayPerPost is a great way for bloggers from time to time use to monetize their blog. I don’t suggest using it all the time, as your site will appear as a spam site (nothing other than reviews for money). Referrals are paid $15 per sign-up once the referrals first blog posting is approved.  ReviewMe also has a referral program and offers $25 for new advertisers but you’ll probably get my sign-ups with PayPerPost.

Of course, this isn’t a complete list and possibly you may be one of the few to obtain great success with the not-so-good affiliate programs. It’s important when evaluating an affiliate program to find one that has been established and been around for years. Find affiliate programs that pay good commissions since you are going to work hard at selling the product. You don’t want to end up in situation of being overworked and underpaid.

The best affiliate programs to maximize conversion and also attract people to your site, are usually free offers! So, if you can find a free offer that makes sense take advantage of it.

A free subscription can either be mailed or sent you via a digital issue. I found the internet topics interesting as they covered backlinks, Google, advertising, and affiliate programs.

To sign up for a free subscription involves no other commitments or ‘trials’. They even have an affiliate program if you want to share this with your fellow friends :)