It’s always interesting when an affiliate marketer writes to me and says something like, “I’ve sent 1000/2000/4000 visitors to this merchant and haven’t made an sale. The affiliate manager told me that the sales page was converting at 4% or more, but I haven’t seen anything like that. What’s going on?”
This problem is quite common, and the way around it is to understand the mindset of the people you are sending any site you are promoting as an affiliate. There are quite a large number of factors that make a difference to your conversion rate as an affiliate. In most cases, the visitors you send to the merchant’s website will need to be at least partially PRE-sold before they get there. If they arrive at a sales letter or order page completely cold, and the don’t know what to expect, your chances of them buying something are pretty slim. However, if you’ve warmed them up, and especially if they already know you, like you, and trust your recommendations, then your prospects of making the sale will go way up.
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?
We didn’t have a single affiliate sale. Within a couple of weeks I was getting “I drove 4391 visitors to your site and I didn’t make a sale; your program doesn’t work” messages from my affiliates, and I was very concerned that something wasn’t working in our tracking system. On checking our traffic stats however, I found that virtually ALL of the visitors our affiliates had sent us were coming from paid to surf programs and other useless traffic sources like that. It was just totally untargeted, unreliable traffic, and the visitors who arrived certainly had no interest in buying a $4,000 product – most of them probably weren’t even interested in the topic.
Here’s the bottom line. It’s important to understand that if you are going to be a real player in the affiliate marketing business, somebody that makes consistent money, you need to get serious about it. There’s no free ride here, and despite what some people promoting those ‘push the button and get rich’ type products will tell you, you need to do some work if you want to make any money. It’s not hard work, but it’s work all the same.
The thing you need to do now is create some content that generates search engine traffic, or write a series of articles and submit them to the top article directories. Another great option if you have the funds is to learn to use Pay Per Click Search Engines such as Yahoo and Google Adwords to drive targeted visitors directly to your merchants. If you find some a range of affiliate programs that pay recurring commissions or pay you for backend sales, you really can do exceptionally well as an affiliate marketer.
Rocky Tapscott is a Site Build It mentor and coach who helps small business owners to quickly increase their profits. He has developed a Free 27 page Report which shows you how to create multiple income streams using a simple but deadly effective email marketing and follow up system – Grab your Free Report now.