The Affiliate Journey

For those that know me, I’m a big organic SEO guy. I don’t do a lot of PPC, I tend to get frustrated with it. How ever I’m sure that if I did do more PPC I’d be a better writer, more diligent tester, and probably pay more attention to my conversion and click through rates on my sites.

I was doing some brain storming in my business journal this week about how I can grow revenues, and it occurred to me that I haven’t really tested or tracked my conversion rates that well on any of the sites I was reviewing.

Each site was doing OK, and as a whole this group of 8 sites earned between $5K and $7K in commissions each month. How ever I was pretty sure I could get it to $10K.

This led me to do a bit of reading on the subject of conversion and I came to realize that most of the super affiliates I’ve read about don’t have 150 websites. Nor are they promoting 100 different products on one site. They’re laser focusing there efforts on a hand full of offers at any point in time, and usually only one offer per site.

They’re putting there heart and soul into making the most money from that affiliate offer.

This led me to put together the following list of to-do items and things to test for my set of sites.

Focus on one product for the entire site where possible (outside of product reviews)

Each individual article or content page will be focused on promoting one particular product. So for instance if you have a SpyWare site you might have reviews for a multitude of products, but on each article page I will test just one of those products at a time. See which one appears to convert the best then try to improve the Click through rate for that product.

The theory goes is that if you’re conversion rate for the merchant stays the same and you can double the number of visitors you send that merchant you should double your commissions.

Ensure tracking is implemented on every page

Along with tracking, ensure I have unique tracking codes for each page, and possibly even link position.

Knowing which product seems to generate the most revenue for your site is good stuff. Learning which page(s) on your site are generating the most click through s to the merchants site is next.

Setup a unique tracking code for each page of my site, it could be a letter, number of combination of the two. It could also be the keyword the page is focused on.

When I do this I log it all in a spread sheet so I can frequently check my stats to see which pages are producing sales, which are getting a ton of click through s with no sales etc.

You should take tracking into consideration when you’re choosing affiliate merchants to work with. The big networks such as Commission Junction have this type of tracking available, but some in house programs do not.

Test Calls to action on each page

Always be testing is a pretty good modo I think when we’re talking about affiliate marketing.

I’ve often built a site, did the SEO work, and say that site generates a few hundred a month then I walk away to the next project. How ever what I never really thought about was I’m leaving dollars on the table because I don’t know if this site is converting as best it can.

To improve this I need to test different calls to action, content, copy and layouts. (i.e. buttons, anchor text for your links, images, positioning of each). Test them for say 100-200 visitors to that page and then consider tweaking it a bit. Keep notes of changes and dates as well as back-ups of the previous files you modify so you can always go back to a better converting format of a given page.

This can have a HUGE impact on your revenues.

Let me explain with an example.

You’re site gets 100 unique visitors a day, and you make $25 per sale on the particular product you’re promoting.

You see 15-20 clicks through to the merchant and on average you get 1 sale a day from that.

So for argument sake we’ll say you have a 15% CTR (click through rate) and a 6% conversion rate with the merchant. So for any 30 day month you’re making about $750.

There isn’t a lot we can do to improve conversion rates on the merchants end besides as far as layout and call to action goes. We can improve the quality of traffic we send OR improve our education and pre-sell of the product on our site.

The other thing we can aggressively work on is improving our CTR to the merchant.

Let’s say we test, tweak and track some changes to our layout, text, buttons etc. By the end of the month we were able to bring up that 15% CTR to 31% CTR.

That’s a pretty huge change, and assuming that the quality of the traffic is the same or better the 6% conversion rate should hold true so instead of 1 sale a day you’re seeing about 1.86, or let’s call it 2 sales a day.

What does this mean to the bottom line for this particular site?

Well you’ve just taken a $750 a month revenue stream and turned it into a $1500 a month revenue stream.

Could you do that across all of your sites?

Freakin right you could!

You could give yourself a hefty pay raise without creating new sites, just improving the ones you’ve got.

Now I’m not blind to think that this can all be done in a week. It takes time, planning and depending on the number of sites you have probably a few months. How ever doesn’t it seem like it’s worth the effort?

I thought so.

Take some time on Monday to think about how your sites are converting. First step is if you don’t have it setup implement tracking for each page so you can check your CTR’s. This stuff is what Super Affiliates gobble up to increase revenues.

Some people say the money’s in the list. If you play with conversion numbers long enough you might think other wise.