Desire Targeting

March 4th, 2006 by Chris

I thought I’d try my hand at creating a new phrase, like “link baiting” and so I thought I’d expand on a topic I have covered previously here. Basically the process of targeting your advertisements not based on your content but based on the desires of your visitors.

Targeting advertising & affiliate programs to your content can make you some money, after all if someone is on a site about gardening they probably are a gardener and they might just need gardening equipment. However for truly great conversions, and eCPMs (effective CPMs) measured in the $100s you need to target your ads to your visitor’s desires or needs. If the product or program you are promoting helps your visitor accomplish the immediate goal that drove them to visit your site in the first place, well then you’re going to get a lot of conversions.

So the trick is to know your audience, and know them well. This isn’t going to be applicable to all sites of course. Sometimes the only reason people visit a site is to read content. However you’d be surprised what you can figure out.

I like to use my literature site as an example. It is a literature archive, people go there to read and search through books. Now initially I put in a lot of “Buy this book from Amazon” kind of links, and many are still up. They perform okay, selling a handful of books a day.

What I didn’t realize is that most of my visitors aren’t there by choice. They’re students and are working on an assignment for school. They don’t want to read Shakespeare in their spare time. So I put up ads for essay and homework help websites, and they do very well. My essay links get clicked on around 1000 times a day. I don’t offer any essays on my site, so it’s not really related to my content, but it certainly helps my visitors reach their immediate goal (which is finishing their homework).

You can also build a site specifically around an affiliate program, so that the affiliate program matches the typical desire of a person visiting. This is the concept behind most review sites. More on this though can be found in my Affiliate Gold article.

No related posts.

Posted in: Affiliate Programs »  by: Chris

3 Responses to “Desire Targeting”

  1. Lord Brar  Says:
    March 4th, 2006 at 7:50 pm

    That’s an interesting tip Chris, I never really thought up like that when placing affiliate links on my various sites (the results indeed sucked as you might have guessed ;) ).

    BTW I guess no one will have any qualms about you adding more authors to the blog as long as they know what they are talking about! ;) With the kind of contacts you have, you sure can attract the experts to share their expertese that others can’t.

  2. Street Lessons » A sudden change in my e-Mindset!  Says:
    March 12th, 2006 at 9:13 pm

    [...] The problem was that little me was focusing too much on “high quality” content with a lifetime value. Now don’t get me wrong — High Quality content is IMPORTANT. That’s the reason why people will come to your site. But my problem was that I was not doing desire targeting (must read advice). [...]

  3. paul  Says:
    July 25th, 2006 at 4:13 am

    The stuffs of this blog are truly sucessful entrepeneurs. It is definitely a must read.

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