Welcome to part four of the Affiliate Marketing 101 series. The first part explained the different types of affiliate websites you can choose to support your online affiliate business, and how to setup those websites.
The second part of the series starts after you’ve decided what type of affiliate you want to be, and setup your domain name, site host and website theme. You must now set the foundation for displaying your site on search engine result pages (SERPs). This depends mostly on creating good content and structuring it correctly. SEO helps focus your content on useful keywords. These keywords will ensure that your site is there for qualified visitors.
Next, the third part of the series discussed how to handle traffic once it arrives at your site. The key is to monitor and analyze sessions on your website so that you have useful data on which pages are converting best and which are under-performing.
This fourth part to our Affiliate Marketing 101 series clarifies the main goals of your affiliate site, what it means to persevere in your marketing efforts, and how to make improvements.
Introduction
Hitting the gym and working up a sweat might seem an unlikely metaphor for affiliate marketing, but physical exercise and business share three keys to success: setting goals, perseverance and changing it up.
Setting Goals
Now that you have a website focused on a specific industry, your job is to funnel traffic to merchants and earn commissions on sales. You will begin by joining affiliate programs like Commission Junction that connect your site to successful merchants, or you can approach individual merchants directly. The goals of your affiliate site at this point typically revolve around:
- Generating content and traffic
- Trial registrations and email subscriptions
- Conversions, sales and revenue
Generating Content and Traffic
The first step in physical fitness success is the repetitive motion of different exercises like pushups, situps, squats, etc. Similarly, the first step in converting visitors through affiliate marketing is consistently producing relevant content that brings visitors to your site. If you have a blog or a review site, make sure to publish new blog posts on timely topics consistently. If you run a coupon site, you always need new and up-to-date coupons. The fresh, focused content also contributes to higher positions in SERPs.
As you begin generating traffic to your site, you’ll need to start facilitating and measuring the conversions occurring through your landing pages. Find out whether your visitors are new or returning and what pages they are looking at. Use these data points to funnel traffic to different landing pages. These can be either an email signup page that grows your email list, to some sort of free trial of your merchant’s product, or even directly to the merchant’s cart.
Trial Registrations and Email Subscriptions
Free trials and email subscriptions are an important intermediary between a visitor session and a paying customer. Think of these as micro-conversions. They allow you to keep the lines of communication open with your audience, and are another step closer toward you earning your commission. To continue our exercise analogy, getting visitors to sign up with your offers is a great subgoal like losing weight or building muscles. They are important motivators that keep you focused on your ultimate goal of overall health.
Conversions, Sales and Revenue
Converting visitors and returning fans into paying customers of the merchants with whom you are affiliated is your ultimate goal, and one of the main reasons for beginning an affiliate site in the first place. If you’re not driving sales through your site, you’ve got a hobby, not a business. The relationship of an affiliate to a merchant is the same as a publisher to an advertiser. Your affiliate site is the publication. Make sure you’re doing everything you can to funnel visitors, one way or another, into your advertisers’ shopping carts. If the merchant offers subscription products, you may want to discuss commissions for renewals as well.
Perseverance
Another commonality shared between exercise and affiliate marketing is that perseverance is required for success. Just as serious fitness buffs know that simply walking into a gym does not produce a fit body, as an affiliate marketer you can not expect instant results just by launching a site. A lot of heavy lifting lies ahead if you want to achieve your goals.
Set realistic time-frames for improving how your site displays in SERPs, gaining traffic, growing your email list and converting visits into revenue. An affiliate site is not something you set up and walk away from. It may not be your full-time job (yet), but keeping it viable demands careful and consistent attention. Among the many challenges faced by all affiliate marketers, you will likely face challenges around generating new content and low conversion rates.
To combat these challenges makes sure to communicate with vendors so that you aren’t competing on keyword bids and are up to date with new product releases. You may also want to track your visitors and commissions by country and region. Doing so can help you discover new market opportunities, and focus content on a different segment of your audience.
Overcoming Plateaus
Finally, there’s a well established principle in fitness training that dictates changing your workout routines every three to four weeks. This is necessary because your body adapts to your workouts and performance plateaus. If you don’t change things up, your efforts produce less and less results. In the same manner, your affiliate marketing strategy and tactics must be refreshed regularly to maintain your regular visitors’ interest and gain new traffic. The plateaus in affiliate marketing happen with stale content, lower displays on the SERPs and unengaged traffic that doesn’t convert. Always be on the lookout for new content ideas, new promotions and campaigns, and general opportunities to further communication between your advertisers and your audience.
Holiday Season
Speaking of changing it up, now is the time to approach your vendors for additional support and material. Inquire about campaigns they are running and ask if they can provide holiday season banner ads or highly converting text copy.
Keystone
Just like your pursuit of physical health, a successful affiliate marketing website requires you to set goals, persevere, and overcome plateaus.
John Hernandez is an Affiliate Marketing Manager at cleverbridge
