Building a successful affiliate business is not easy. If it was, everyone who tried to enter the affiliate marketing business would strike it rich on their first try.
Unfortunately, the reality is that it takes research and consistent hard work to achieve success in affiliate marketing. The good news is that most people give up when their early efforts fail, which means that there’s more money left for the rest of us.
The Secret To Success
Over the years, successful affiliate marketers have figured out the formula for creating websites that get good traffic and convert well. That formula can be broken down into the following:
- Eye-catching design
- Killer content
- Powerful calls to action
- A good reputation
If you have those four things, you will have more chance of turning visitors into customers, and making money from your affiliate website.
1. Catching a Visitor’s Attention in Those First Few Seconds
When a visitor lands on your website, you have just a few seconds to get them to stick around. If your site loads slowly, produces error pages, or has broken images, obvious spelling mistakes or other issues, you will lose the visitor immediately.
For this reason, investing in a good design early on in the life of your website is important. Do not use a free WordPress theme – even if it looks nice, there’s a good chance that thousands of other webmasters are using that theme.
Pay for exclusive rights to a premium theme. The investment will pay off more quickly than you think.
2. Killer Content
Good content helps your site in several ways.
Firstly, having a back-catalogue of unique content will help you to rank better in the search engines.
Secondly, good content will attract the attention of other webmasters, earning you links and improving your SEO once again.
Thirdly, good content impresses your visitors. If you give away interesting, informative or entertaining stuff for free, your visitors will be interested in seeing what you think is worth paying for.
You should put as much effort into your free content as you do the stuff that you plan on selling. Make your tutorials as entertaining and as polished as your sales pitches.
If you can’t find the inspiration to do that, you’ve started a site in the wrong niche. Get back to the drawing board and choose something that you genuinely love writing about.
3. Strong Calls To Action
In addition to great content, you need to have a persuasive signup form that uses good calls to action. Your users won’t think “Wow, that tutorial was great, I wonder if I can give this webmaster some money to say thank you!”, so you need to prompt them to do whatever it is you’re trying to achieve with your website.
Your call to action could be as simple as “Sign up to my mailing list”, or it could be to ask someone to purchase the product you’ve recommended in the article. Whatever you choose, be clear, firm and polite in your call to action, and don’t be embarrassed to repeat it once or twice.
4. A Good Reputation
No matter how great your product is, someone won’t like it. No matter how good your servers and delivery systems are, something will go wrong. How you handle those things will have a big impact on the sustainability of your business.
If you treat customers badly, they will complain, loudly. Work with disgruntled customers to settle their complaints. Once you get a reputation as someone who plays fair, you will find it easier to attract new customers.
Track Everything
Install Google Analytics and sign up for a Webmaster Tools account. If you use AdWords, keep an eye on your reports and track clicks and conversions.
If you’re relying on organic traffic, watch your keywords and pay attention to what is bringing visitors in. Keep trying new sales pages, tweak your layout, try different keywords, and try different calls to action.
It may take a few months, but eventually you will figure out what works within your niche. Even then, don’t stop testing!
Comments are closed.