So, you’ve got your very own website, you’ve been working hard and spending your spare time promoting some of the products in the affiliate Marketplace. You’ve made a few sales but you’d really like to shift things up a gear, so you need ideas to help improve your affiliate commissions.
Don’t worry, I’ve compiled a list of useful tips and tricks to help boost your affiliate earnings. These tips will help to turn more of your visitors into customers.
1 – Learn Everything You Can About The Product And How To Promote It Effectively To Your Target Audience
As an affiliate, you need to build a website to ‘pre-sell’ the product or products you are promoting. ‘Pre-Sell’ is simply getting the visitor more interested in the product, through a review, list of benefits, case studies etc.
The visitor reads your content, has their interest peaked and clicks through to the official product site, where they hopefully buy.
However, it’s no good just having a few paragraphs of text and a banner, then expecting your visitors to eagerly buy. You need to make your site attractive, informative and appealing for the visitor.
- Basically, it’s your job to get them excited about the product and make sure they understand how it will change their life for the better. Some of your visitors will already be familiar with the product, but most will not. What you tell and show them, will have a huge effect on whether they click through or not.
- The visitor may not fully understand what the product is or how it will benefit them and they could be in browsing mode. As you can imagine, the more positive your site is about the product, the more you can show them that it’s the best choice, the more testimonials you use, the more likely the visitor will click through and buy.
- Make sure you cover any questions the visitor may have regarding the product. Tell them about what it is, what it does and why it’s the best. You can get all the info you need from the product website. Many product vendors will have pre-written reviews, articles, etc you can use and you can normally use any testimonials and case studies too.
- Get to know the products you’re selling inside out and it will make a massive difference to your results. If you can successfully get the visitor excited about the product, you’ll make more sales.
2 – Promote One Product At A Time
Remember to promote one MAIN product on your site. If you have a review site with multiple products, make sure you choose one as a winner/favourite/best. And explain why it’s the winner/favourite/best.
Everything should lead to that one product. Obviously, someone may buy one of the other products you’re reviewing, but in general visitors will go for your main suggestion.
Be careful about including other offers, banners etc on your site.
Many affiliates have multiple ads, banners etc for other products, but I would say avoid that approach. You don’t want to confuse your visitors and offering one product at a time is the best way to go.
3 – Set Yourself Up To Get Free Traffic From Google
The more visitors you get, the more sales you should make and you can get visitors in 2 ways. Paid traffic and free traffic.
You can buy as much traffic as you want, but it’s obviously best to try and set your site up so it attracts plenty of Google lurv and start enjoying the wave of free traffic. Also, because traffic that comes from Google has actually searched for what you’re promoting, it tends to convert into sales well.
To get ranked in Google you need plenty of good content based around your subject matter and keywords. As you’ve probably noticed recently, Google is getting rid of weak, content light sites. Make sure yours is high quality and informative and include plenty of links to your chosen product.
Another important part of getting your site ranked is updating your site regularly.
Google will visit your site when it’s new and ‘index’ it, so it can show it in the search results. It will keep coming back as long as you have new content on your site each time. If you stop posting new content, Google will visit less and you will find it hard to get ranked for your keywords.
No rankings = no free traffic.
To avoid this happening, have a blog on your site and post a couple of articles each week. They don’t have to be regarding the exact product, but make sure they are relevant to the product. Remember, you’re educating your visitors so they see you as an expert. They’ll be far more likely to trust you then and buy your recommendations.
It’s simple to get info for your articles. Google your subject and you’ll find a world of info you can re-write. Look at other sites in your niche for useful info, buy PLR articles you can use as your own and re-write them or even hire an outsourcer to write content for you. It’s not expensive and will be an investment in your business.
Obviously you redirect people back to the product you are promoting throughout the article or post.
4 – Use A Headline On Your Homepage
Your website needs to grab your visitor’s attention. As humans our attention span is pretty low, for most things. However, our online attention span is even lower.
If you don’t grab your visitor’s attention immediately, you’ll lose them with one click of the mouse. If they click away, they are not going to buy anything you are promoting, so you won’t earn any commission.
The best way to draw them into your site is with a headline. If you tell them immediately ‘What’s in it for them’, you’ll keep their attention longer. If it’s a review site, even having something general such as:
“I’ve Spent The Time, Money & Effort Reviewing All The Best Products In The Making Money Online Niche . . . So You Don’t Have To”
Is better than no headline at all. It gives something for the visitor’s eyes to go to when they land on your site. If they like the headline, they’ll read the next bit and so on. Make sure your headline offers them a benefit, peaks their curiosity or makes an irresistible offer. You’re much more likely to draw them in than just having “Welcome To My Site”.
The longer you can keep them on your site, the better. How long they stay, or your ‘Bounce Rate’, is another thing Google takes into account when ranking you for your keywords.
Video on your homepage is a good idea. If someone watches a video, they stay on your site at least a few minutes, which improves your bounce rate.
5 – Start Building A ‘List’.
A ‘List’ simply refers to a list of email subscribers. You’ve seen the websites where it asks for your email in return for a sample, free report, video etc? They are building a list of subscribers.
Once you put your email in the box, the email is stored in what’s known as an Autoresponder. You also upload email messages into the autoresponder and it sends them out to your subscribers at pre-set intervals. You can set it for daily, weekly, monthly etc, it’s up to you.
Your visitor gets a confirmation email, minutes after putting in their email address. They click on it to confirm it’s actually them subscribing.
They begin getting the rest of the email series which should be a mixture of help, advice, tips, news etc, with some product promotion thrown in every few messages. Because they have given you their email, they are obviously interested in what you are offering, so you can pick up a lot of sales when they begin getting your emails.
The beauty of this is that it can be set up in a day, with 20 or 30 emails lined up and ready to roll. Then it becomes autopilot, as a percentage of your visitors will sign up, read the emails and end up buying the product, without any more effort from you.
You can build up to having 1000’s of people on your ‘list’ and make a good income from that alone.
You’ll need to set up an autoresponder and the most popular ones are:
http://www.aweber.com
http://www.getresponse.co.uk/
http://mailchimp.com
Check each one as you can normally get a deal for the first month, or a free account with a set amount of subscribers allowed, to get you off to a start. Remember, to be successful online, you must be prepared to invest a little money.
If you can’t afford this yet, wait until you get your first commission check and re-invest some of it. Having a good subscriber list is worth its weight in gold and can bring in a serious income.
Last Thing, Keep Working At It . . .
Don’t give up on the dream of financial independence. Keep working towards it by chipping away each day and you’ll be there in no time.
But please understand that you can’t build a site in 10 minutes, then expect to do nothing else with it and for Google to automatically send you customers and sales. You have to learn how to attract visitors and improve your results, then keep applying yourself a little each day.
And before you know it, you’ll have a raging success on your hands!