I was reading another blog the yesterday and the author was asking for question about how he could help his readers with affiliate marketing. It just happened that I also had a conversation with a blog owner who is getting well over 5000 uniques a week and is making less then $1000 a year in affiliate commissions from the site.
How the heck is this possible is what a lot of beginner affiliate marketers might ask.
I want to let you in one something, once you get this you may very well change your mind set about how to make money with affiliate marketing for ever.
Making money with affiliate programs isn’t about traffic, it’s about conversions.
Let me say part of that again.
Making Money With Affiliate Marketing Isn’t All About Traffic.
Ok some might be saying, hold up, that’s not true without traffic you’ve got nothing. In a sense you are right someone has to come by your site, blog etc. in order for you to convert them into a buyer and of course into your commissions, how ever it’s not a game about how much traffic you can get, the game is …..
How Many Conversions Can You Get
If you learn anything new today try to get this in your head, making more money with affiliate marketing isn’t about more traffic it’s about more conversions. Of course to get more conversions you need traffic and that’s what we’re going to focus on for the rest of this post, but get out of the traffic mind set and put your conversion hat on because that’s where the money is!!!!
What Kinda Traffic Do I Need Then?
Glad you asked
To go after more conversions you need more traffic from buyers, or people that are on the verge of buying a solution to their problem, or a cure for their pain, or a scratch for their itch… Getting the picture.
You want qualified traffic not just massive amount of generic traffic for your market.
Let’s do a quick example:
Let’s say you’re selling a golf lesson dvd. It’ a great dvd program that helps improve your swing and can lower your handicap by 7 strokes in 2 months if the user does the exercises and practices.
Now you run a golf blog that talks about everything golf. It posts about golf shoes, new golf gadgets and golf vacations. Of course on the odd note you sometimes post something about a free tip.
In each of those posts about golf tips you make a plug for your golf dvd. You’re getting a few sales but based on the overall number of unique visitors your site gets each day you believe you should be making a ton more money.
STOP HERE FOR A SECOND
Let’s look at this…
Who do we have coming to the site?
We have people that like golf
We have people that are interested in learning new tips, and possibly about new equipment and vacations
However, we don’t necessarily have people willing to whip out their Credit Card to buy a golf swing DVD. We might assume we do, but if you’re not familiar with what ASS U ME did ;).
Ok let’s re-think this golf blog.
Let’s instead of going after the same ol, same ol traffic we’ve been hitting let’s try and target this down so we might get more conversions.
Let’s fire up the Google Keyword tool and look for a few ideas on better converting phrases.
Here are things I’d think about…
Golf DVD (consider other words here also like golf swing dvd, golf instruction dvd, golf tips dvd)
It makes sense that if someone is searching for a dvd that will improve their golf game they might buy what you have to offer which happens to be a golf dvd.
Golf instruction (be careful here to not use the term free in there since lots of people are looking for free golf tips)
People searching for golf instruction may be looking for a company to offer them lessons but you may be able to convert them to buy your dvd offer as well.
Golf Lesson Again, like instruction could be people looking for lessons from an instructor, but they are none the less looking for a way to improve their game. You should be able to convert some of those.
That’s enough to get us started. What I would do is take those root keywords I listed above (golf dvd, golf instruction, golf lesson) and plug them into the google keyword tool. Look for keywords that have 300+ visits a month on EXACT Match (if you’re not sure what exact match is I’ll have a post on this tomorrow) and start writing articles about your offer with that keyword in mind.
Sure you might not get as much traffic as you would from other keywords BUT you’re going to be getting more qualified traffic for the keywords you’re targeting.
There’s a way to ensure all your efforts go towards increasing conversions and I’m going to cover that in a post in the net couple of days. So if you haven’t already, subscribe to my blog with either your favorite RSS reader or via email in the top right hand corner.
Happy converting everyone!!!