Affiiate Success – How to Get Conversions
Posted on February 6, 2010 by Amit
A regular topic of discussion on affiliate forums is “I am sending a ton of clicks and not getting any conversion”. And that rightfully is a big concern, since without conversion there is no affiliate success.
Are you really Sending a Ton of Clicks
Not all clicks are real. Some of your clicks can be from the search engine bots, search marketing bots (if you are doing search engine marketing) and other web crawlers and bots. Obviously the bots aren’t going to buy anything, so you will need to count those clicks out. Also to prevent the bots (at least the legitimate ones) from clicking through your affiliate links, you should make all your affiliate links nofollow. This will cut your clicks substantially.
I use the user-agent data from my web logs to see which ones are bot clicks. Also a reverse IP check for will tell which ips are bots.
Now Do the Math
Once all/most bot clicks are counted out, you now have a realistic idea about how many clicks are by real visitors to your site. Now see what your percentages are. Do you still see a lot of clicks and still not sale.
Remember not all niches have the same clicks-to-conversion ratio. Free sign ups, free trials generally have a higher conversion rate than where the visitor needs to make a purchase.
All purchase decisions are preceded by some amount of research, the higher the cost of the product, the longer the research.
Now the Secret to Affiliate Marketing Success
Now that we know that there is a research phase before the buying phase, for an affiliate to be successful, the affiliate site, its content, its data, its presentation, its layout, its call-to-action, pretty much everything about it must be aligned to either catch a buyer in his/her buying phase(which is very difficult), or to coax him/her from the research phase to a buying phase.
As an affiliate marketer you will need to think from your visitor’s perspective. If you were buying the products that you are trying to promote, what would be your main concerns, what would you need to know before you will buy. Some possible question can be – what is cost of the product, is there contract to sign, is there a cancellation fee, is there a coupon and many more.
Depending on the product, you will need to come up with the possible questions an then address them properly. The better you do this, the more your chances of affiliate success are. Its called pre-selling. Since you are an affiliate and you can’t sell the product, you will need to pre-sell the product, so when you deliver the visitor to the merchant’s site, all his/her questions are answered, the research phase is over, the visitor is ready to buy. And as an affiliate marketer you have done your job.
Things to Remember
Every niche has a different way to it. What works for your coupon site may not work for your jewelry site or your web hosting site. May be in-depth product reviews works for a web hosting site and just a plain list of latest coupons works for a coupon site. You will need to experiment and find the right format for your niche. The idea is to try and rule out everything that doesn’t work, and get to that sweet spot where you provide the right mix of info to your visitors and convert them to confident buyers.
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