For a long time I had links to Sensible Cocoa, BinPress, Dropbox and Mobfox in the footer of every page on Cocoanetics.com. I also had two entries for other people’s components in my parts store section that linked to another company’s store via affiliate links.
I had established the links because I was hoping to earn a bit of passive income from these links, with the exception of Dropbox where I wanted just wanted to increase my free storage. This was the only successful part, I raised my storage to just under 25 GB over the past year.
A long hard look at where our income was actually coming from revealed that advertising made up only 1% of revenues, with affiliate commissions only be a fraction of that. All in all I was giving mixed messaging and noise to my readers, while at the same time not deriving any relevant monetary value from it.Also, we recently passed the 6000 follower milestone on Twitter. When I granted a wish to the lucky person his first one was for one of the affiliate links in my parts store. Talk about mixed messaging…
There was a time when I was excited about the prospect of sending a bit of traffic to other people’s websites in exchange for sharing in their success. But it turns out that you need orders of magnitude more of the first to actually notice the second. So I was not seeing the upside, but the affiliation noise was only giving me the downside.
So I learned my lesson. I’ll quit the bait-and-switch game and leave that to the big guys. There are no more affiliate links, anywhere on Cocoanetics.com. Yes, I could have come to this realization sooner, but better late than never!
Having removed that you might be wondering why there are still ads in some very prominent places. For example there is a wide banner inserted at the place of the <MORE> tag in each article which gives it about 13000 views per month which is nothing to sneeze at. So yes, you can still advertise here.
BuySellAds.com is doing a great job in helping us small guys sell ad space. And not just the small guys, even heavy-weights as Ray Wenderlich are using BSA. And if it is good enough for Ray then it is good enough for most of us.
Categories: Advertising
Oliver,
As much as I wanted our link to remain here (who wouldn’t want that right?), you make a good point. In order for the affiliate game to make any significant revenue for you – you will need to send out significant traffic. However I can say that we’re using BSA to advertise here and at almost the same cost we’re getting double or triple the visibility we were getting with the affiliate links, so it’s not a lost game.
I think it sends a clear messaging and also consolidate all of your “advertising” revenues through one provider such as BSA and thus giving a better user experience to your readers. I’ve noticed that part of your affiliate (Binpress & Sensible) were advertising there anyway, so it also sends a clear messaging to potential advertisers as well – want visibility? Advertise with us.
Good luck!
Adam
http://www.binpress.com
Thanks Adam, “clear messaging” is exactly what I want to achieve. Thank you for your comment!
Also – one thing you will notice with Ray Wenderlich and even Steffen Itterheim, they both consolidate these affiliate links into a 3rd party store page where they advertise fellow publishers.
I suspect this is not 100% done to achieve some kind of revenue but to support fellow developers and allow their readers to “discover” more premium content. Additionally since this is done on a 3rd party page where it clearly states these are games developed by others, it somehow doesn’t affect much the messaging.
I’m not suggesting this is something you should be doing – but it’s worth to note how others have attacked this angle.
Adam
http://www.binpress.com
The “can still advertise here” link gives me a 404, page not found.
Ah, thanks for telling me. Fixed it!