When to Send Visitors Away from Your Site

icon1 Posted by Rochelle in Site Building Strategies on 04 28th, 2008 | 8 responses

In a recent post, How to Add External Links Alphabetically to Your Site’s Sidebar, I give instructions for adding links to a site’s sidebar. This particular set of instructions will send visitors away from your site when one of these links is clicked, instead of having a new window or tab open up.

In the comments for this post someone asked why we would ever want to send visitors away from our sites. This is a good question. Most of the time you don’t want to do this, but there are times when you do want to do this.

As you know, the point of having niche stores is to send them away from your stores to eBay (or Amazon, or whatever affiliate place you want them to shop at), have your affiliate cookie set to visitors computers, and hope they purchase one or more items. This remains true for the external links you add via the post listed above.

Have I confused you yet? I hope not. Consider this: eBay is a rich resource for articles as well as stuff to buy. They have articles to help people buy, to help people sell, marketing tips, and more. Even better, eBay encourages members (buyers and sellers like you and me, not eBay employees) to write articles. You can add links to your sites that take visitors to the articles of your choice.

Here are some of the many places on eBay where you can find information to link to:

 eBay University Learning Center
 eBay Security and Resolution Center
 eBay Buying and Selling Guides (TONS of resources here for niche stores to link to)
 eBay Reviews of Items (again, TONS of places here to link to)

You can use eBay’s own resources (most of which contain excellent information) to drop your affiliate cookie onto visitors computers. Don’t link directly to an article. Instead generate an affiliate link and use THAT link to add to your site. Clever, isn’t it?

You can create affiliate links to eBay by following my instructions for ‘How to Create eBay Affiliate Links.’

Rochelle

8 Responses to “When to Send Visitors Away from Your Site”

  1. Tao says:
    April 28, 2008 at 11:07 am

    Hmmm!
    Nice idea!

  2. Paul says:
    April 28, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    I Made My First BANS Sale!!!

    Just wanted everyone to know I made my first BANS sale today!

    I did the following to make it happen.

    1. Used Rochelle’s “The Niche Store Checklist has been Revised” to create the BANS site. http://www.nichestorestrategies.com
    2. Used Marks’s “More Free Build a Niche Store templates – Come and Get Em!” to build the site. http://www.thenichestorebuilder.com
    3. Used JTPratt’s “Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch!” to fine tune the site. http://www.jtpratt.com
    4 Used JTPratt’s “Best Practices for Setting Up a New Wordpress blog in 60 Minutes or less” to set up a blog correctly. http://www.jtpratt.com

    Thanks to all the forum posts at BANS and all the people who commented on the sites listed above.

    Come take a look http://www.toolboxhero.com and make relevant comments at http://www.toolboxhero.com/blog. The blog is dofollow so go ahead and build some backlinks.

    Next, more backlinks, more BANS stores, and implement more ideas from Rochelle. Mark, and JTPratt!!

    Thanks again, Paul

  3. John Harrington says:
    April 28, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    I was wondering if you had an example of creating a link to an ebay review or guide. Do you have a link in the sidebar go directly to the ebay content or do you suggest writing content and add the link in the page/

    thanks \J

  4. Ronni says:
    April 29, 2008 at 12:12 am

    CONGRATS, Paul, on your first sale! Just finished checking out your site – it’s terrific! Great information, and very friendly. I tried to leave a comment on your blog, but it required a username and password. (?) Anyway, best of luck with it!
    Ronni

  5. Paul says:
    April 29, 2008 at 6:09 am

    Thanks Ronni,

    I am used to Joomla where users have to register BEFORE they can make any comments so I had the “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” checked in Wordpress admin area.

    That’s fixed, try it again if you want.

    Just a quick note: After posting this comment on the three blogs it only took the Google bot 45 minutes to come and completely index both http://www.toolboxhero.com and http://www.toolboxhero.com/blog. Yahoo and MSN showed up shortly after!

  6. Paul says:
    April 29, 2008 at 6:30 am

    I personally don’t like to send someone away from my site using Adsense. It doesn’t make sense to me to get just a few cents from Google when I can get more through many other companies that use affiliates.

    I would much rather set an affiliate link with ebay, amazon, clickbank or a dozen or so other good name brand companies I have a relationship with.

    Don’t forget about building individual links into your content. Many of the larger companies like Target, Kmart, and Northern Tool let you build specific links right to a product. If you are writing content you might as well take the extra few minutes and build those links. You can see an example of automatic links for amazon on the main page of my http://www.toolboxhero.com site.

  7. Rochelle says:
    April 29, 2008 at 9:00 am

    Paul,

    Congratulations on your sale!! The first one is the hardest and it just gets better.

    Thank you for sharing how you did this. I’ve never heard of jtpratt.com. There is some excellent information there, some of which I may impliment on this blog when I get a chance.

    Your site looks very nice! Interesting how you included your toolbar into your header. Have you had many downloads?

    I noticed that you include your email address. Be aware that it is likely to be picked up by spam harvesters and overwhelm your email with spam.

    Rochelle

  8. Rochelle says:
    April 29, 2008 at 9:31 am

    John,

    I’ve done both (added content page with link that goes to eBay and added external link in sidebar that goes to eBay content), but what I’m mainly doing now is adding the external link. I’d rather drop my affiliate cookie, which is guaranteed if the external link is clicked. If I have a content page then visitors may or may not click the link.

    Adding external links to my sidebars is new for me (I started doing it a few days before I wrote about it here) so I don’t have any feedback yet to offer on how well it works. But since my goal is to get people to eBay I like that this does it in one click to my sidebar instead of sending people to a content page with a link that might not get clicked.

    Rochelle

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