One of the biggest difference which makes a successful internet marketer is the type of traffic that they are able to acquire. Sure, getting 100,000 social visitors from Facebook will perhaps make you one sale, but that is just out of pure luck. You can see it in almost everywhere where there are “new” online marketers following the advice of the “gurus” – “I have visitors but no sales!“.
Affiliate marketing can be tricky, and I have been focusing on affiliate programs for quite some time after I started my online adventures with Adsense, and I have to say, you need a somewhat different approach.
1. Focus on getting customers – not visitors!
It is very simple, but you can be way off if you haven’t been following the right advice. Many people are focusing on improving the number of visitors to their site, and once they hit some magic number like 1000 visits per day, and they still aren’t making many sales, they get frustrated with their affiliate program, and start switching them around. There are tons of high quality affiliate programs out there with products that will convert like crazy, and sales pages that are optimized to make even the most hesitant customer grab their wallet and take their Visa card out. If you are anywhere the Health-niche, I suggest you have a look at MoreNiche, they have been around for a long time, and I have been with them for over a year now. They are reliable, helpful and have products that have some real PR – so they are already known to many of the customers you send them (this will improve conversions).
The problem is usually the quality of traffic you are funneling to their sales page. This depends on the ways you get your traffic.
Probably the worst way to get traffic is to buy traffic. The visitors are usually people that are in no way interested in the product you are presenting them, and they are there just for some dumb reason – they might even be paid to quickly go through your site and then move on to the next one. If you want conversions, don’t buy traffic – you will only get frustrated as you get visitors, not customers.
Possibly the second worst traffic is most types of social traffic. So you are tweeting about your product, and you are Facebooking about it, to a bunch of random friends you have either bought or “made”. Some of them will visit the page you linked, but what are the chances that some of them are actually looking for the product you are marketing them – very tiny. Most likely they will visit your sales page, and then go away. Once again, they aren’t customers. If they “like” a page that you have created that is closely related to the niche where your product is, the chances of them making a purchase is larger, but then again, when you shared the link with them, they weren’t actually looking for anything at that moment, so they might not go for it.
No matter what anyone says, search engine traffic is still the best converting traffic in my eyes (I might not know what to do elsewhere though). If you choose your keywords wisely, the person who typed that keyword in the search box, already has their wallet with them, and their MasterCard is already out. They opened their computer for one reason today, and that is to buy the product you are selling them. They find your site, and buy the product. They are customers, not visitors. If you had an offline store, you wouldn’t want thousands of people visiting it daily, without buying anything now would you? All you would need is a hundred people each day who buy something – preferably something expensive! Catch my drift?
2. Tell the customer what you want them to do!
So you did the hard seo work, or you bought some Adwords traffic and are now getting targeted customers to your landing page, but it still doesn’t convert. What are you doing wrong?
The amount of conversions you will get, is dependant on the keyword, the product and the overall feeling that the customers have. Some products convert bad, some worse, and some like crazy. Generally if you can get 10% of the people visiting your site, to click to the sales page, and 10% of them to buy the product, you are doing very well – on average that would mean you need 100 visitors to make one sale.
3000 visitors a month for 30 sales a month, and depending on the commissions you get it could mean anywhere from $200 to $1500 in revenue – sounds good? The more traffic you have, the more you will benefit from really working on your landing page to improve the conversion rates, but you don’t just want people to click the link to the landing page, you want them to be in the right mood when they do so. The closer they are to giving their credit card details when they enter the product page, the more likely you are to make a sale.
If you are trying to trick the visitor in to clicking the link to their sales page, it is not going to convert. The visitor is most likely going to be offended and feel like they are being scammed if you trick them in to doing anything. With affiliate marketing, you have to be very honest with the customer from the start, and make it clear that this is the product you are talking about, and this is where you can buy it. No tricks, just plain old “tell the customer what to do” and you are going to see the difference.
First impression is very important! If your site looks like shit, it is very easy not to trust anything you say. “It’s a scam“. If you mispelled one word, you look like you are a foreigner, and what do foreigners do? They scam you. Close the window, or hit the back button of the browser.
People who are buying something, make fast decisions and go with their gut feeling. If they spend 10 seconds on your site, they are not going to buy, they just want to read. So you have to make it very clear for them. Make it clear from the first glance where they can buy the product, why they should buy this product, and how their life will be better with this product. After that tell them to buy it. I am talking about big letters, bold sentences and CTA graphics. Three sentences is all you need, and if they didn’t click to the sales page by then, they not very likely to buy anything unless you are one mean marketer.
If you are involved in affiliate marketing, and you aren’t converting as well as you would like to, try making some alterations to your strategy using the advice above. I am certain that if you don’t have these things in order, your conversion rates aren’t as good as they could be. These are all methods I have used to improve my conversion rates, and I can tell you that it makes one big difference to make 1/10 conversion over 1/50.
Do you have any other tips on improving your landing pages? Leave them in the comments – I hope we can get a nice discussion going about the subject.
