How To Convert Your Affiliate Marketing Traffic Into Sales!

Affiliate marketing is a common channel used to make money online. There are many benefits to getting involved in affiliate marketing opportunities. 

An affiliate marketer is someone who makes money without having to produce, buy or distribute any products. A merchant partner is a business enterprise or a company that pays affiliate commission on sales, saving money on its own marketing department.

Financial success for an affiliate marketer comes from having a good strategy and by knowing the best techniques to use.

How Do Affiliate Marketers Generate Traffic to Their Website?

First it is necessary for an affiliate marketer to create a website and take advantage of the amount of traffic it gets. Free traffic sources can bring a good number of visitors to your website, and you should be using them to build up a following.

Another option is to buy traffic for your website, but this can take a lot of money over time, and you do need to calculate the return on investment.

If an affiliate’s conversion rate and sales are low, there is not much to be gained by continuing to pay for traffic. A website requires more than just passing traffic, and it would be a mistake to think all your efforts should go into getting traffic.

The best way to make visitors interested is grabbing their attention with some compelling content.

People will only follow a website if they think it provides them with something useful. Inspiring and informative content is a great free product that people search for, and can access online.

A higher volume of sales will result from a website filled with high quality, original and interesting content, which adds value to your promotional material. Your content must be relevant to the products or services offered by your merchant partner.

Visitors are not likely to buy products that have no relevance to what they were looking for online. A high volume of sales results from interesting content, which adds value to your promotional material.

It is not difficult to attract potential customers to a niche website, promoting products that match the content.

What Type of Content Do Affiliate Marketers Produce?

Success in affiliate marketing relies on having the right type of content that gets the message across.

The content should not look too much like native advertising. Creating the right content requires some careful consideration. It has to be informative and must demonstrate clear substance, so visitors can engage with it.

Nothing puts people off more than seeing a lot of content which is obviously promotional. Many affiliate marketers place keywords within their text to attract the right sort of visitors to their content.

Again, some care is necessary if you want to attempt this. Any article that is full of keywords will put most people off. Use of keywords in the text must appear natural and content must not be over-stuffed with them. 

The days of keyword stuffing are now over. Affiliate marketing methods now include some more effective & sophisticated techniques.

Nothing puts people off more than seeing a lot of content which is obviously promotional.

It’s worth spending time & money on content that engages visitors and is likely to gain followers. Your content must deliver real value, and should not look like it is created for the sole purpose of affiliate marketing. 

Publishing valuable and informative content regularly will help your website gain popularity. Most Internet users will click on a link that looks like it leads to something entertaining or a good source of knowledge.

Your content also needs promotion, and using social media will be of great help.

Optimizing Social Media Marketing for Web Traffic Generation

Good quality web content will bring you potential new customers, but social media allows you to interact with your potential customers as well. Social media usage patterns and social footprints of most people reveal a lot about their private life and their interests. 

Analyzing such information you can assume whether a social media user is a potential candidate as your future customer or not.

Social media makes it easy to build and grow a network with other people sharing the same interest.

Running Social Media Campaigns

In affiliate marketing, social media is useful for finding followers who intend to purchase products from merchant partners.

Sharing your own content in some social media updates will take the best quality visitors to your web pages, the sort of people who are likely to make you money. All you need to do is build up a network of followers who are interested in sharing their thoughts on topics related to the products you promote.

It costs nothing to set up a social media account and to post regular updates, but it’s not always easy to check the amount of time spent on managing a social media campaign.

Website owners who prefer to spend more time on other marketing activities can use the services of a social media marketing company. In affiliate marketing you always need to assess and compare different methods. Analysis is important to determine which ones are more probable to generate sales commission.

Earning a high rate of commission for selling a popular product is obviously ideal for every affiliate marketer. The commission rates offered by merchant partners are set as a moderate percentage of the sale price. 

Merchant partners with the highest selling products may only offer a moderate rate of commission, but a high volume of sales still makes them lucrative.

It’s not worth looking for a merchant offering a higher rate of commission. There is less money available from products with limited appeal, even if the commission rate is higher. In the world of affiliate marketing it’s far easier to make money by promoting products that are in high demand.

Using Landing Pages to Convert Your Visitors

The design of your landing page requires plenty of thoughts and some effort. Even the tiniest detail may have an impact on affiliate marketing success. All internet users need a good reason to stay on a page.

Everyone is facing the need to make decisions online about which link to click and whether to stay on a page or move on to another.

Too much text on the page may put some people off and flashing graphics might be irritating to others.

Many users will not bother scrolling through a lot of images on the page.

When designing a landing page for affiliate marketing, utility has to support the appearance. Remember that its purpose is to promote a particular product that you want people to buy. 

A landing page should not be aggressively promotional, but it does need to be persuasive. Visitors should view the content and feel an urge to make the purchase decision. Then they will click on an affiliate link to convert.

Outgoing links should include your own affiliate links.

Any extra links on a landing page will only distract potential customers and may point some of them away from the page, before they use your affiliate link to buy the product.

What Happens When They Click Submit?

When running an online lead-capture landing page marketing campaign it is considered best practice to set up a ‘Thank You’ page, and redirect visitors to it once they submit their details over to you.

It shouldn’t be anything special. just saying “thank you!” is enough, and the polite thing to do… while you’re at it, why not use that ‘thank you’ page for another time saving automation purpose?

On a marketing campaign it’s considered best practice to set up a ‘Thank You’ page. It’s also polite.

As a company’s affiliate/publisher, when you create an online campaign – many times the company you promote will provide you with a tracking / conversion code, which should contain the lead’s details. 

They expect you to send it over to them, so they can track registered and paying users that were referred by your unique affiliate link.

You can and should use that ‘thank you’ page to have the submitted lead data is automatically sent over to the company you’re affiliating. It’s very easy to set up, and, will obviously save you the hassle of transferring it to them manually.

Every time a lead is submitted and gets redirected to your ‘Thank You’ page – a pixel (containing the lead data) is auto-magically fired and sends that data over to wherever you need it to go.

Once you have that implemented – submit a test-lead and log in to the affiliated company’s system to make sure your test-lead got through their automatic lead-validation mechanism.

Running A/B Testing to Increase Your Conversion Rate

A/B testing allows you to try out several versions of a landing page to identify which one is most successful in terms of attracting sales.

You can use a software program for A/B testing or perform your own experiment with two or more versions. You will soon discover which one generates more sales by comparing the data.

http://www.business2community.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-convert-your-affiliate-marketing-traffic-into-sales-01230147

Don’t Make These 10 Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes!

As the affiliate space continually expands, the number of available networks has grown exponentially. Rookies might get the bright idea to join as many as possible to keep their options open. Instead, a seasoned publisher will know to select a few reputable networks and start small, giving each campaign abundant attention until it starts converting (or cancel it and replace with a higher quality offer). Whether affiliates join a public network like CJ or a private one like Madrivo, the success of a campaign relies more heavily on the affiliate’s deployment strategies than the source.

Not investing in the right resources
One of the tale tell signs of a newbie affiliate is their enthusiasm about making millions of dollars through their free email and hosting accounts. As with many things in life, affiliates must spend money to make money. Investing in servers, IPs, data, and a complex tracking interface allow serious publishers to capitalize on the potential ROI of campaigns they run. Many profitable affiliate companies consist of small teams that have a healthy knowledge of manipulating back end systems for mass exposure. Skimping on the necessary tools will not a wealthy mailer make.

Not tracking
An affiliate who doesn’t track may as well throw their money down a well and wait to see how much comes back up. It doesn’t make sense to put substantial effort into optimizing and deploying a campaign only to depend on the advertiser or network to report the earnings. Tracking platforms top the list of the required resources affiliates need to get started. Many times technical issues (and, sometimes, fraud!) significantly skew the earnings report. Without a tracking mechanism in place, affiliates can’t prove their case for leads they rightfully earned.

Not A/B Testing
Part of optimization includes a/b testing. The merchant and/or network are responsible for providing quality assets that appeal to their target consumer; affiliates, however, are responsible for deploying these assets in a way that maximize conversions. Whether they tweak subject lines, test two different email creatives in the same pool of data, or post banners on sites across different verticals, publishers have a lot of power when it comes to proper ad delivery and placement. A/B testing also benefits the advertiser, strengthening the working partnership with their affiliate and making them more likely to give them better payouts.

Scoping out Competitors
One of the best ways to understand consumer behavior is to understand what’s already out there. If an affiliate considers what people have already seen or experienced against what they’re offering, they can gauge which approaches are most effective for certain demographics as well as what brands are pushing as their selling points. While affiliates don’t want to copy their competitors, they should still know what their up against and take some advice from reputable companies within an industry. The key to a successful campaign is a unique value proposition without the sacrifice of what everyone else is already offering.

Running too many campaigns
Another flub new affiliates often make is running too many campaigns in the hopes that one will just happen to work out. When just starting out, its important to concentrate more on strategy and develop a broad knowledge of effective tactics before taking a shot in dark with several campaigns. If an affiliate focuses on just a few proven offers and spends their time dissecting what did and didn’t work, they’re more likely to be successful down the road. Affiliate marketing is a constantly growing and changing industry because it’s largely driven by consumer trends and evolving technology, both of which can transform overnight. Even more, the time they take to know what campaign performs well in a given vertical and what payout is competitive enough to be worthwhile will save them time and resources on running other offers that aren’t likely to convert. Good publishers will pursue a strong working knowledge of industry tools prior to launching every campaign they’re offered.

Not using SEO
SEO is not dead despite its archaic reputation. In fact, many of the online technological advances made in recent years are based primarily on the use of SEO but in a non-traditional way. While SEO is too complex to sufficiently summarize in a few sentences, new affiliates should take the time to learn about its versatility and different ways it can be incorporated into affiliate marketing. One foolproof way a startup publisher can earn some dough is by placing their links on a page that’s already keyword dense for optimal traffic. SEO works because it simply connects consumers with the information they’re seeking through the words or terms they use to find it. Why not place ads and links exactly where a customer would go to find it?

Not diversifying your affiliate products/verticalsAnother common misstep affiliates make is limiting themselves to running offers within one category. There are plenty of verticals to choose from, whether it be auto, education, dating or finance. All industries have spikes and lulls in sales and growth meaning that one campaign will do well during some seasons and others just won’t. While it’s still important to refrain from running too many offers at once, there’s a need for diversification, regardless of the number. If anything, it will help steady traffic flow and conversion rates when one campaign isn’t performing as well as others in a different industry.

Selling direct to the customer
Affiliates must remember that while they’re selling for a brand or advertiser, they’re not salesmen/women. Instead, they’re a floodgate between the product or service and its ideal consumer. New publishers need to let the merchant dictate the sales strategy and value proposition and then decide the best methods for pushing the advertisements. If too much time is spent building an online storefront for potential customers, it takes away from the energy that could be invested in the best ways to reach the users. Instead, affiliates should consider themselves traffic drivers that bring all of the consumers they reach back to the advertiser, who then becomes responsible for the actual sales transaction. Affiliates don’t sell product or service; they link consumers to it.

With the right balance of time, resources, and tenacity, many new affiliates grow their start up entities into highly lucrative affiliate marketing channels. Diversification, moderation, and experimentation will make a rookie into a pro overtime.

http://blog.madrivo.com/dont-make-these-10-common-affiliate-marketing-mistakes/