What is good income for affiliate links?

[MarkMitford]

I have been working on getting more revenue out of Dotster's under construction page. I am sure many of you have seen it in the past and immediately closed the window as it was such a mess but it is getting better now with a new design on Weds and new graphics yesterday (20kb less on the page saved about 100GB a month in bandwidth):

http://futurehome.dotster.com/

Given that it is semi-targetted to the user (the search area in the center lists subjects based upon keywords in the domain name) what do you think would be a good target revenue per visitor??

In other words what revenue level can be considered successful for a page using affiliate links?

Thanks in advance,

Mark......

P.S. Feedback on the futurehome page is appreciated, just don't say "remove the 'make us your home page' thing" as that gets us a good percentage of the revenue at the moment

[INFORG]

I use $30 per thousand visitors as my benchmark. I have found that with targeted links I can do this number in pretty much every category/subject. Your page looks fine, but I have found through experience that using less links works better for me, so I hone down the offerings based upon revenue until I get to my top 20-25 producers.

In general, I view the "future home" site as theft of my traffic. I still use Namewinner/Dotster, but parking pages bother me. Dotster seems to take longer than my other registrars in resolving to my name servers - is that an intentional thing to increase revenue too?

If you have a second, I have a private question regarding Namewinner if you could PM me.

[William9]

MarkMitford asked:

...a good target revenue per visitor [under construction page]??...

The proposed changes to the Dotster parking page as indicated on http://futurehome.dotster.com/ are ineffective, annoying and degrade the integrity of Dotster in my opinion. My visit yielded:

1). A “Top Results for: Denver real estate” pop-over – mildly annoying.

2.) Pop-over closing yielded “the Future Home of a
Dotster Registered Domain” search/parking page which looked OK and professional! Presumable the domain name will appear on the parking page (if even in 8 pt font), if not, it flunks Parking 101.

3.) Closing the ok Parking Page, got me 2 (TWO) really annoying additional pop-ups. First a “Would you like to set you Home Page to “ http:/partner3.firehunt.com/?” Closing the firehunt pop-up got me the “Credit Rescue” pop-up.

Dotster has one the BEST reputations as far as registrar integrity. The trial page I tested is too too similar to the pop-up sequence on porn/warez sites.

There is a certain point where the incremental revenue from an addition “POP” is less than the amount lost from 1) dropped registrants 2) registrants that refuse to use your parking, and 3) surfers who simply do not revisit. There is no statistic on it – it is just a gut feeling.

My gut feeling is that you should not put the test parking page into production. What you should do is beyond the scope of this thread.

Good luck.

[bidawinner]

The more "pop ups" and "pop unders" and would you like to make us your home page...the farther I move away...

My traffic and You (dotster) want to figure how the best way "you" (dotster) can make money off of it ?


Personally I think it is unethical ..it's not dotsters domains or traffic..

nothing personal Mark..I feel the same with all registers that do this..

[MarkMitford]

Thanks for the feedback.

2gajgops: We don't deliberately hold off on changing nameservers or forwarding. As soon as you make the request on our account management pages to change Nameservers that request is submitted to the VRSN registry, they update their zone file on the same schedule for all registrars (no registrar has preference on getting their names in the zone file). If you use forwarding instead of nameservers then it is updated every two hours (I think). A good way to avoid the parking page from ever appearing is to list your DNS servers when you register the name.

I agree with you about honing down the offering to the best performing links, I am in the process of doing that.

William9:

If you think this is bad you should see how the page used to look

1) I agree, that annoying pop-under (at least on my NS its a pop-under not a pop-over, please let me know what browser/OS you use so I can try to get that fixed) is a new "feature" of Applied Semantics who generate the center search box, its is keyword based depending on the domain name).

2) The parking page has a page title including the domain name, it used to be included in the main search area but that has disappeared so I am going to add it to the center of the parking page as well.

3) I would love to get rid of the firehunt thing and am hoping that the additional revenue from improving the parking page will be sufficient to allow me to do that. The other pop-up used to be larger so I am gradually trying to get rid of that one as well.

Bidawinner: I agree, part of my goal with this is to generate enough revenue from the page to allow me to remove the pop-ups. If you don't want us using your traffic then please change the NS so we don't incur the bandwidth costs

Seriously though, I would love to have a parking page where there was nothing generating revenue, however in the current environment where margins on domains are tight registrars need the extra revenue to spend on improving customer support and developing new tools for customers (such as our free WHOSI Spam-Shield and Domain Monitoring).

Thanks again for the feedback.

Mark......

[mole]

Originally posted by bidawinner
The more "pop ups" and "pop unders" and would you like to make us your home page...the farther I move away...

Don't you use a popup killer, bid Don't leave home without it.

But yes, this make this your homepage Java script really gets to me grrr

[MarkMitford]

Mole: You're preaching to the choir I am trying to increase the rev for the rest of the page so we can dump that java script.

An alternative I am considering is a cookie so that you only get the popups/homepage thing on your first visit to the page, after that it remembers you and disables them.

Here's the kind of pop-up I want to avoid, grrr!:

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978616.html?tag=fd_top

[mole]

Yeah mark, that thing just gives a bad name for the whole of the interactive industry.

[INFORG]

Mark,

I know everyone (including myself) hates pop-ups, but they can be a legitimate source of revenue. The rule of thumb that I use is absolutely no more than 1 pop-up - no spawning pages, scripts, phony close window graphics, etc.

Find your best ratio advertiser and create your own small pop-up ad using their creatives. This will yield you much more than those rotating ad companies anyway.

[system0]

regarding pop ups :

i personally loathe them and would only use it as a last resort as i think long term it drives more visitors away from your site

pop ups are a god send for some sites though - warez and joke sites etc make a lot from pop ups

regarding the earlier post about the amount of commissions per thousand visitors. I think it depends on many aspects.
* type of site
* how you market the link - ie. there is a huge difference between sticking up a banner and taking the time to market the company by for example, creating a full page for them
* website genre. There are huge differences in commission per visitor between different genres. For example, joke sites get high traffic but no one goes there specifically to but anything (which is why cpm is better for them). A shopping directory on the other hand can make large amounts of money with a relatively low number of visitors since most people have gone there specifically to buy something.

What a lot of webmasters make the mistake of is thinking that sticking a few affiliate links up will make them money.

If you want to make money on the web then you either have to sell something or have a site with high content. Content is the keyword.

People will want to link to your site if it has great content since they are helping their visitors by pointing them in your direction. My affiliate review site only has one ad (which i only added the other day). Im not after the fast buck with this site but long term having high content and little ads will keep pr high and encourage people to link to you.

if you need any help with it or a point in the right direction give me an email and ill do my best to help out

[DomainPairs]

Re: popups

I now surf with active-x disabled and Java on prompt to avoid popups, auto-installing trojans and home page modifiers. This is mainly to reduce the unwelcome and unread advertising. I also often don't bother going into a site if it requires Java or Flash.

You may be interested to know that many adult membership sites are introducing popup free tours to improve conversion ratios.

Text links also can often generate more traffic than banners, if used wisely.