The other option is to use a
third party service such as Listbot.
By using their service, you are able to easily automate many of the tasks such as adding
and removing subscribers, and mailing out the actual newsletter. This disadvantage of many
third-party services is that you don't always have complete control of your subscriber
list, potentially making it difficult to transfer your existing subscribers to or from the
third-party service. Additionally, many of the free third-party services insist on adding
their own advertisement or those of their sponsors to your newsletter.
Using Affiliate Program
Effectively in Newsletters
This brings us to the topic of
using affiliate programs effectively in your newsletter. One thing that is important to
note up front is that most pay-per-click programs do not allow you to promote in
newsletters. These include ClickTrade, Safe-Audit, TeknoSurf, and a host of others. The
reason behind this is that these services all track the number of click-throughs, based on
the number of banner impressions. If newsletter ads were allowed, you can see how
potentially there could be more click-throughs than banner impressions, making it
difficult to track the true effectiveness of the campaign.
That said, most affiliate
programs will allow you to promote them through newsletter ads. If you are planning to use
the direct URL that the program asks you to link to them with, you may want to check
specifically with that program to ensure they don't have terms limiting the use of
newsletter promotion. However, there is one simple, and effective way to not only ensure
you will receive proper credit, but also check the effectiveness of the ads you place.
This is to create a special page
on your web site that is a direct link to the affiliate program. Then you simply use a
link to this special page on your web site in your newsletter. This does five things:
1. It insures that the visitors
are actually coming from your web site
2. It allows you to track the
ad's effectiveness by either checking your server logs to see how many times that
particular page was visited, or by adding a simple counter to that page
3. It allows you to provide a
brief intro to the product, or a personal testimonial to further enhance the possibility
of the reader making a purchase
4. It gives you the chance to
link to other offers or areas of your web site if your reader decides they are not
interested in that particular product.
5. It allows you to create an
automatic re-direct that will give you the first two benefits listed above, and decrease
the chance that your reader won't click-through to the affiliate program offer.
Whether you use an automatic
re-direct will depend highly on the program or offer you are promoting. You can test both,
but may need to consider whether adding a personal testimonial on the link page is a
significant advantage or not.
If you do choose to use the
automatic re-direct (for example, if the personal testimonial was included in your
newsletter, and does not need to be repeated on your web site), the HTML code is quite
simple to set up. In the <head> of any web page, simply include the following HTML
code:
<meta
http-equiv="refresh" content="2;
url=http://yoursite.com/yourspeciallinkpage.htm"
Note that there is no >
bracket to end the statement, instead it simply ends with ". The variables you can
control are the 'url=' which is the page you want the visitor's browser to automatically
re-direct to, and 'content=' where the number immediately following is the number of
seconds until the browser re-directs. If you want, you can set this value to 0, and the
browser will re-direct as quickly as it is able to make the connection to the other web
site.
