Success Secrets

Hi. I consider myself an affiliate failure ... so far. It's not that I don't build good sites and get traffic and clicks. My best sites average 150 or more unique visitors per day, have good content and rank on Google. And yet, they hardly ever convert. For example, I sent 2453 clicks to one merchant this year so far, with 1 sale and a commission of 12 bucks. And so forth. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling a little frustrated.

But since I'm not taking the "bad karma" excuse route, I'm assuming that I'm missing something in how to go about making those clicks count. Many of you, I hope, are making a nice living here on the www, and have got it right.

So ... what do you do right? What's the best thing you have done to make your clicks happen and CONVERT? Please share, so in a few weeks the frustrated among us can come back and post our new success principles too! Thanks!

Actually a $12 commission isn't bad if those clicks were spread out over a period of time.

When you do make a sale, try to figure out what sold [not every merchant/network makes that easy] and on what page -- try to see if you can spot a pattern and create more pages like that.

The complaint of many clicks but no sales isn't new:
http://forum.abestweb.com/showthrea...ghlight=convert

You'll find some tips within that thread plus you'll see that other affiliates share the same problem and are looking for solutions

__________________
~Rhia7 -- Remember the 7
Twitter me, Afffiliate Tips for Newbies

Rhia, that is bad, 1 sale for 2453 clicks. It's like half a penny a click and the conversion rate is bad. If there are other merchants, I would try them out. Or maybe Adsense or something.

The turning point for me was when I learned about Pre-sell. When I first started out my sites converted around 1%, so I learned everything I could about pre-selling. After I tweaked my pages with pre-sell information, my sites now convert around 5% or higher.

Just do a Google search on Pre-selling and I'm sure you'll find plenty of information about it.

thanks for the input.

I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to go through the pages of one of my less popular sites, that averages 20 or 30 visits a day. Every so often, I get a commission from a good merchant posted there. I'm going to ask myself what the visitor to this page is most probably looking for, and how can I help them.

Next, I'm going to drastically cut back on the amount of affiliate links on each page, so that the visitor doesn't have more than, say, three options. (It's so tempting to put up links all over the place for things that are only slightly related to the topic.) I will attempt to rephrase things in a "pre-Sell" manner. And I will come back to this thread as time progresses and share what's been happening.

Sound like one of these support groups! Well, I guess it is.

Conversions, and the tracking of them, are largely a function of the merchant. And the network. For a few years, I promoted Musicians Friend when it was on Bfast. It did pretty well for me, usually a few hundred dollars a month. This was before my site was getting anywhere near the great levels of traffic it gets today.
When that merchant switched over to CJ, conversions plummeted to the point of disappearing. Since then, no other musical instrument merchant has come close to what I used to have with Musicians Friend and Bfast.

So I will make this experiment with these factors on a site that gets modest traffic, and see where it goes.

Ten days later...

I redid a smaller site I have, and focused more on the merchants that convert better. I took out lots of tangentially relevant links, and focused on two merchants. I'm going on the assumption that less options will better focus the visitors on the relevant stuff. A sort of "squeeze" strategy. Since traffic is low there, I'll only have an idea in a few weeks if there's a difference. Nothing yet.

On the musical instruments site, I decide to jump into the Amazon, as another poster on the thread Rhia linked to claimed a much better experience. I created a detailed aStore for all possible instruments and put it in frames, so I keep my pages and still have the aStore with its own checkout. I also put some "deals" widgets in the content sections.

The result? 242 clicks recorded, 2 items ordered, 1 shipped. Don't know yet what the unshipped item was. Ah, but the item that was shipped, from my detailed musical instruments site, full with instructions for home recording and computers and microphones, keyboards, etc.., was .......... A CAT LITTER BOX!!

Go figure

I'll keep you posted. Funny thing this affiliate marketing...