Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

There are very few things that get the backs up of some of my clients than when I suggest placing an outbound link on their website. In most cases, if they do give in, the link should be on a links page, preferably one their visitors can’t find.

“Can the link to the page please be made in the same color as the background?”

“Sorry,” I have to tell them. “An invisible link is a big search engine no-no.”

You see, most website owners are afraid that if they place a link on their website, that link will bleed them traffic. This is particularly a concern with the corporate crowd, but small business, online marketers and affiliate marketers tend to share in this external-link-phobia.

But what if outbound linking could actually increase conversions?

OK, I admit it sounds silly on the surface. How could placing a link to another website increase your conversions? Either people will follow the link (and they’re gone) or they ignore it. How does that increase conversions?

Before I go any further, my strategy will not apply equally to all affiliate websites. In fact, it might not apply to all. But it will apply to most. That is because most affiliate websites, just like most other websites, will cast a net wider than they can serve.

No problem, if you’re fishing for tuna and a few haddock get stuck in your net, just throw the haddock back into the water.

Wait! Stop. Rewind.

If you are fishing for tuna and a few haddock get stuck in your net, why not toss the haddock to the neighboring boat that is fishing for haddock?

A couple years back, I was advising a fitness equipment manufacturer on the redesign of its website. They sell only commercial fitness equipment, a lucrative market of bulk sales, but a very small percentage of the market for fitness equipment.

At the time, I was looking at the future of SEO and recognizing that the search engines of the near future will measure such things as bounce-backs to determine rankings. You can read more recent details on this here: http://www.seo-writer.com/blog/category/browserank/ , but the bottom line is that once a searcher clicks on your link at Google or yahoo or whichever, you do not want them to bounce back to the search engine.

As it happens, most people in the market for commercial fitness equipment don’t search for “commercial fitness equipment”; they search for “fitness equipment”. So this company had to target its rankings for a very wide net: fitness equipment. This means that when for every tuna we would catch, there would be dozens of haddock. And throwing them back could be more than just a nuisance, it could cost rankings down the road.

Strategies for outbound linking

There is a three-step process for deciding how to dispose of all this haddock profitably.

1.Determine who your extra visitors are. If you are selling gourmet coffee, you might be attracting visitors who want cheap coffee. If you are selling insurance leads to Americans, you might be drawing a lot of Canadian and UK traffic. If you are selling services to seniors, you might be attracting a lot of young people to pages about senior fitness videos, seniors fashions, etc.
2.Determine what products and services these people might be ready to buy. In the examples above cheap coffee, Canadian or UK insurance, or younger fitness videos and fashions.
3.Find the right websites to send them to…but not just any site. I suggest following one of two strategies.

Who You Gonna Call?

Most people trade links for SEO purposes. But what if a link partnership could really be just that? A partnership? What if you could place a link that sends qualified leads to a cheap coffee website, and in return that website could send you qualified leads that want your gourmet coffee? What is this was all automated by a simple, prominent link reading “For cheap coffee, click here”?

Even easier, what if you just placed an affiliate link to another product, such as cheap coffee. Don’t even try to make the sales pitch. You already have some 1500 words plus selling the fresh aroma of premium gourmet coffee on your web page. All you need is a prominent link near the top:

Then let the other site do the selling, and you collect the affiliate income from the link. This is exactly what I advised the fitness equipment manufacturer to do. In fact, this is what I do right near the top of my pricing page at http://www.seo-writer.com/pricing.html . It saves me from having to wade through queries that just waste my time, plus I make a few extra coins from the page. These are perhaps the best conversions of all – conversions from time eaters to money makers.

So don’t be shy to place very prominent links on your website. You might find they are not so scary, after all.

This guest post was written by David Leonhardt of The Happy Guy Marketing SEO consultants.

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