Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi Ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, seo, and I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years, built sites from the ground up, bought sites and sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Today, I'm going to talk about how to increase your affiliate earnings by optimising for earnings per click. There are two ways to increase your affiliate earnings on a website. The first is to get more traffic to the site, which can be easier said than done, and the second is to optimise your site to earn more from your existing traffic. It actually makes the most sense to optimise for your existing traffic in the first instance, overgrowing your traffic, as if you can increase the earnings per visitor, then it means when you later increase your traffic, you boost your revenue even more as you're earning more for each additional visitor later. Now there's a few ways to optimise earnings for existing visitors. In this episode I'm going to talk about on doing by optimizing for earnings per click. So what are earnings per click, or EPC for short? Well, put simply, it's the earnings you make on average for each click that are sent to merchants from your affiliate website over a period of time. So if you send 100 visitors or clicks to merchants in a day and you earn $100 in commissions, then your earnings per click are $100 divided by 100 clicks, so $1 per click. Now all affiliate networks that I've ever seen will make it really easy to find out your earnings per click over any given period of time. You just need to look for reports that give you EPC as one of the results. You just need to look for reports that give you EPC as one of the results. You want to be able to see your EPC for clicks to all merchants over any time period and also be able to break it down so you can see the different EPCs for each merchant you send traffic to. Now, how do we look to increase our overall revenue by optimising for earnings per click?

Speaker 1: 3:15

Well, the first step is simple to increase our overall revenue by optimising for earnings per click. Well, the first step is simple. You just need to go to your affiliate network reports and find what the EPC is for each of the merchants or products that you send traffic to is so, for example, at broadbandcouk, we would rank the broadband providers based on the EPC that each made us. Some providers would have much better EPCs than others. This could be for a variety of factors better offers, better sales processes, all sorts of possible things but all we cared about was what the EPC was for each provider. So now we know which merchants provide the better EPCs, we can then move on to the second step.

Speaker 1: 3:54

We now look to encourage website visitors to click to visit the merchants which have the best, the best earnings per click. So how can you do this? Well, a lot will depend on the products you're promoting and the flow of your website, but a typical example would be where you have a comparison table of products. It's human nature to click the links on the products listed higher up tables like these, so you order the products on tables like these based on the EPC. The higher the EPC for a product from a merchant and the higher in the table you should put them. Merchants that provide a higher EPC are usually those which provide the best products and the best customer experience. Otherwise, you know, people wouldn't buy their products. So as well as being beneficial for you as a site owner, it also works as a great way of helping people find the best products, so it's win-win all around.

Speaker 1: 4:44

Now, if you want to take this to a more advanced level, you can look to optimize epc at a more granular level than your entire site. So you can look to optimize epc at a page level. This is because pages on your site can attract different website visitors with different buying intents. So, for example, on broadbandcouk, people who visited our broadband speed test page were tended you know they would tend to be more interested in providers who specialized in fast broadband deals, whereas those who visited pages about the cheapest available broadband would be interested in the more budget broadband providers. So you get different EPCs. The best EPC will be different for different providers on those pages. So that's why, to optimize completely, it works best to take it to those kind of more granular levels on a page level.

Speaker 1: 5:31

You'll also find that EPC can vary quite a lot day to day for different merchants, so it's best to look at the EPCs over a longer time horizon, usually say between a week and a month. It will vary depending on your niche. Don't do it just on an hourly or daily basis. It tends to need to be over a wider period. Epcs can also change over time between merchants and products, so to get the most value, you need to keep an eye on this regularly, because there can be seasonal changes between products and merchants and you need to change how you list and promote merchants to keep your earnings as high as you can. The most sophisticated method is to build EPC monitoring into your listing algorithms, because most networks affiliate networks will allow you have apis where you can monitor what the different epc levels are for different merchants over time and you can actually then base your automatically base your site to work and change its listings based on as these epcs change over time. But it's how to do it exactly is a little beyond the scope of this podcast, but if you have a large site with significant earnings, then this is something you should definitely investigate. So, in conclusion, if you optimize your site for earnings per click, you can achieve quite significant increases in your earnings with the need to attract a single extra visitor to your site, and it's not that hard to do. So I'd encourage every affiliate marketer out there to optimize for earnings per click.

Speaker 1: 6:58

Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeoplesusecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free, keywordspeoplesusecom. If you want to get in touch or have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopledoosecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.