Did you rob bill gates?

« Farmers Are the New Celebrities The Power of Photography »

3 Tips for better conversion rate in Affiliate Marketing

August

14th

Roy

What is the business model in affiliate marketing?

Very simple:

Create a good landing page (a blog post is good enough) > create a positive atmosphere via content so that the visitor can take a positive step > optimize it (normal SEO techniques are good enough) > promote it to get targeted visitors > earn money.

Though the equation is very simple, many things depend on the content, or I would say the “presentation of the content”. Good affiliate marketers actually never try to sell a product. They do not even offer a solution to a problem. To the most they show a way where you can find a solution - and this is what offers better ROI. In addition, sometimes, would marketers would design a problem to provide a solution and to compel the reader to take the decision.

In this situation too, quality content is the king. There is no doubt about that. However, in a lot of cases we see that even though the page or post have enough content (quality content), the conversion rate is too poor.

Now here is the catch. Nobody knows what the best content is or why the conversion rate is too poor. As I always say, every situation is different and thus the approach to solve the problem should be unique too. And in such situations, your best guide can be your analytics report that can say what people are actually doing in that page.

However, here are some tips that may help you to take a better decision:

Good content is not enough unless it is packaged well. Rewrite the content in three or four ways and insert affiliate links in different parts of the content with different anchor texts. As far as my experience goes, using non-commercial anchor text works better for affiliate links. For example I had good results using “click here for more information…” as anchor text. Now, rotate these content designs to find the best match and use the best one in future. This may seem tedious at the beginning but if you are thinking about long-term profit, it is the best solution.
If your target audience is webmasters or fellow bloggers, you must be extra cautious about using the affiliate links. In this situation, you can think about link cloaking. (Whether link cloaking is ethical or not is a different issue but sometimes it works well.) People like us often restrain from clicking on an affiliate link if there are other ways. However, in some cases, I had good conversion by declaring the links as affiliate links (simply cashing on the trust factor). For example “Click here (oops aff link) for more information..”.
Do not offer a complete post - it is always better to keep the reader hungry for more information (posit the link as the food that he or she badly needs).

Anything else?