Quite often an affiliate marketer will write to me and say something like, “I’ve sent 1500 visitors to this merchant and I haven’t been able to make an sale. The affiliate manager for the program told me that the sales page was converting at 5% or more, but I haven’t seen anything like that. What do you think I am doing wrong?”
If you have ever had this problem, then it’s important to understand the mindset of the people who arrive at any site you are promoting as an affiliate. There are a number of factors that make a huge difference to your conversion rate when you are trying to sell anything. In most cases, your visitors will need to be at least partially PRE-sold before you send them to the merchant. If they arrive there completely cold not knowing what to expect, your chances of them buying something go way down. If you’ve warmed them up, and especially if they have come to know, like and trust you, then your prospects of making the sale will go through the roof.
To give you one recent example. I recently built a site in a very competitive niche that sells a high end coaching service. We did very well in the first couple of months as we generated visitors from organic search traffic, article submissions and a few site targeted Google Adwords ads. During our initial series of tests, the sales page was converting at over 2%, and that was selling a $4000 product. Once we had the sales process refined, we launched an affiliate program and during the next couple of weeks, our small group of affiliates drove 14,000 unique visitors to the site.
What were the results from all that traffic?
Not one affiliate sale. As you can imagine, I was getting “I drove 4561 visitors to your site and I didn’t make a sale; your program sucks” messages from my affiliates, and I was very concerned that something wasn’t working right in our tracking system. However on checking our traffic stats, I found that virtually ALL of the visitors our affiliates sent were coming from paid to surf programs and other useless traffic sources like that. It was just totally untargeted traffic, and these visitors certainly had no interest in buying a $4,000 product – they most likely weren’t even interested in the topic.
The bottom line really is this. It’s critically important to understand that if you are going to be a winner in this business, somebody with a real business that makes consistent money week in, week out, you’ll need to get serious about it. There’s no free ride in business, and despite what some people promoting those ‘push button income’ type products will tell you, you need to do some work if you want to make any money. Now it’s not hard work, but work all the same.
You need to write some articles and submit them to article directories, or create some content that generates organic search traffic. And if you have the money, learn to use PPC to drive targeted visitors to your merchants as well. If you find some good affiliate programs that pay ongoing commissions for memberships and/or commissions on backend sales, you really can do very well as an affiliate marketer.
Rocky Tapscott is a Site Build It expert and coach who helps small business owners to quickly boost their sales and profits. He has developed a Free 27 page Report which shows you how to create autopilot income streams using a simple but incredibly effective email marketing and follow up system – Grab your Free Report now.