Affiliate Marketers: How to Increase Conversions (and Sales)

Your conversion rate is the most important factor to improve if you want to create a successful affiliate marketing or sales campaign… besides having a good solid offer (of course!). If you have a 2% conversion and your competitor only has a 1% conversion it becomes very hard for them to compete… and lets face it, you’re getting twice the sales.

So how do you raise your conversion rates as an affiliate marketer?

==> Start by Getting More Targeted Traffic

The obvious way to increase conversions is to get more traffic, right? Wrong!

Not all traffic is the same. The best traffic that yields the best results in all cases, and costs the less, is always highly targeted traffic. So start by improving the quality of your traffic.

One easy way to do this is to narrow down your keywords to be more specific. For example, if you’re selling sports shoes, instead of optimizing or bidding for keywords like “Nike shoes” try going for specific brands like “Nike Sprint Runner 2014.” Also try cutting down on broad match or phrase match terms, and go for exact match terms instead.

The principles of getting more targeted traffic apply no matter what kind of traffic source you’re using and is the difference between success and failure of any marketing campaign.

==> Use Geotargeting (Keyword Pass-through)

Let’s say someone who lives in Boulder, Colorado typed in “Nike Shoes” and landed on your site. Which of these headlines would be more appealing?

“Buy Sports Shoes Online Today” or “Buy Nike Shoes Online, Delivered to Boulder in 48 Hours”? Naturally, the latter is going to be more appealing.

Two quick ways to increase your conversions on anything you’re promoting is to add keyword pass-through and geotargeting. Keyword pass-through simply means passing the keyword someone typed in to get to your website to your landing page, and using it in the headline or body copy.

Geotargeting involves using the IP address of the browser to detect where they’re located and then using that to increase conversions. There’s a free script you can use from MaxMind.

==> Split Testing

Ultimately, the only “real” way to increase your conversions consistently is to split test your sales funnels and offer pages on a regular basis. Split testing is basically where you to create more than one version of a page and then display it alternately or send traffic to both versions and see which one performs better. Many time even the simplest changes can make all the difference.

If you have a small amount of traffic, start with basic A/B split tests (2 versions) that tackle large differences in your website. Then continue testing the better performing version, until you hit the maximum conversions you can. If you have a profitable campaign that’s getting significant amounts of traffic, try using multiple variables testing to figure out the best possible combination of factors. There are many software that can help you do this automatically.

==> Starting an Email List

If you have a campaign that’s profitable or breaks even on the front end you might want to consider setting up a squeeze page or opt-in page to gather leads and to build an email list. You must of course always have your buyers in a email list and market to them.

Setting up an email list will allow you to promote multiple affiliate offers to the same traffic source. Leads if they come from the squeeze page, buyers if they purchased from you. This will literally multiply your potential income per lead/buyer.

These few proven tactics for increasing your conversions are small but critical steps to becoming a successful affiliate marketer or marketer in general. The most important factor or take away from this article is to regularly try different ideas and TEST, TEST, TEST. Affiliate marketing is often just about trying out as many different things as possible until one works.

If you are looking for different software solutions to help increase your conversions check out our recommendations.

Originally posted 2017-11-11 03:12:00.