Affiliate Marketing Success

I have maybe written about this before but I wanted to go into a bit of thinking stuff for this weekend and though that writing a post on conversion rates for affiliate marketing would be a good step for me and for you as well. Just before going to be last night I started writing notes and checking stats on my clickthroughs and sales and I want to look at four stats.

The three parts of the affiliate conversion world from a visitor to sale point of view are; visitor to affiliate landing page, affiliate landing page to purchase page, and purchase page to clicking pay now. Lets take 1000 visitors as a base just so that we can see the flow through and how we can make these numbers better.

Visitor Through Affiliate Link

 We get 1000 visitors to our page, and some of these people are going to click our affiliate link. We will get anywhere from 10 to 200 people clicking through our link to our affiliate program. How can we increase these numbers? And finally we can improve our call to action so that people that visit know what to do and what action we want them to take next.

Affiliate Page to Purchase Page

Once we have sent our visitor to the affiliate program we want them to buy, the visitor must take the next clickthrough to the purchase page. From the outset you may think that the visitor is at the mercy of the affiliate program but that is not entirely true. Our 10 to 200 visitors and potential customers had to come from somewhere and their motivation is important. Once they are on the sales page are they interested in this type of product? Is it relevent? Will it fill the need that the buyer had when they visited your page?

And then of course is the copy on the sales page compelling enough for the person to take that next step to the actual payment page? So what can you expect? Well our affiliate conversion is probably anywhere from 2 to 100 of your visitors depending on all of the above factors

Purchase Page to Give Money

This is the tough part. Before this point we just had people going through the sales funnel and clicking a link. Now they have to be motivated enough to take out their credit card. I don’t think that any of those stupid tricks like hiding the price is going to help at this point although selling value on the pages going to this part, from your review to the sales page are going to play a huge part. If we just stick purchase pages in front of people there will be no motivation to pull out the credit card but if we have been building the need to a starving crowd as Travis Sago would say then we are going to have a greater percentage of people buying and following through at this point.

At this point you are looking at anywhere from 2 to 50 sales I think. Of course you can see that everything before this step matters to the final affiliate conversion

I am sure that this affiliate conversion info is not new to some people but everyone at some point has to look at the process and see where their holes are in the entire sales funnel. Do you know where you can increase these numbers in your own systems? If we can get a 1000 people to our site and have one person buy then fine we will make a bit of money but are leaving a lot of cash on the table but if we can instead have 10 people buy then we have a good system with relevance that we can easily scale up.