Although it is still true to say “The Money is in the List”, the list is not the only method of attaining and sustaining affiliate sales. There are many other ways. One way is to create niche websites and incorporate links to one or more well-chosen affiliate products. Such a site obviously needs to be a good match for the products in question, and the affiliate marketer will need to find one or more ways to drive traffic to the site, but if a large amount of that traffic is likely to be delivered by the search engines the marketer may need to take note of where in the World most of their site traffic is coming from because the geographic location of site visitors can sometimes affect affiliate sales commission levels.
Affiliates who are marketing Clickbank products on their sites usually only have to worry about ways to drive targeted traffic to their sites and maintain a productive conversion rate because Clickbank affiliate sales generate a commission irrespective of the buyer’s location. AdSense publishers have a similar advantage because they are paid for any clicks generated no matter where the clicks originated, but not all affiliate programs make it so easy. Amazon is a good example.
Amazon products are sold all over the world, but Amazon has several independent sites for customers in different areas of the world and each site has its own affiliate program. If an affiliate decides to partner with Amazon UK and the majority of their site visitors come from the US, visitors may be clicking the Amazon links because they are interested in certain products, but be unable to purchase their chosen product because they are not based in the UK. In this case, the possibility of affiliate sales commission would be zero, and the marketer may find a partnership with Amzon.com to be a more profitable option.
It is possible to sign up with all the various Amazon Affiliate programs (currently 12) and clutter pages with several link options (untidy) or utilize systems that serve visitors the correct affiliate links for their location (complicated and/or expensive), but the other option is to work out where the majority site traffic comes from then improve the affiliate sales potential by marketing products that can be easily purchased by the majority of site visitors. How to find out the geographic location of site visitors will be covered in the next article.
