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How To Avoid The The Single Biggest Trap Affiliate Marketers Make

It’s always interesting when an affiliate marketer writes to me and says something like, “I’ve sent 1000/2000/4000 visitors to this merchant and haven’t made an sale. The affiliate manager told me that the sales page was converting at 4% or more, but I haven’t seen anything like that. What’s going on?”

If you have ever had this problem, then it’s important to understand the mindset of the people who arrive at any site you are promoting as an affiliate. There are a number of factors that make a huge difference to your conversion rate when you are trying to sell anything. In most cases, your visitors will need to be at least partially PRE-sold before you send them to the merchant. If they arrive there completely cold not knowing what to expect, your chances of them buying something go way down. If you’ve warmed them up, and especially if they have come to know, like and trust you, then your prospects of making the sale will go through the roof.

To give you an example, I recently built a site with a partner in a very competitive niche, selling a high end coaching product. We did very well in the first few months from organic search traffic, article submissions and a few well placed Google Adwords ads. During our initial months of testing, the sales page was converting at over 2% selling a $4000 product. Once we had the sales process sorted, we launched an affiliate program and during the next few weeks, our handful of affiliates drove 14,000 unique visitors to the site.

What were the results from all that traffic?

Not one affiliate sale. As you can imagine, I was getting “I drove 4561 visitors to your site and I didn’t make a sale; your program sucks” messages from my affiliates, and I was very concerned that something wasn’t working right in our tracking system. However on checking our traffic stats, I found that virtually ALL of the visitors our affiliates sent were coming from paid to surf programs and other useless traffic sources like that. It was just totally untargeted traffic, and these visitors certainly had no interest in buying a $4,000 product – they most likely weren’t even interested in the topic.

Here’s the bottom line. It’s important to understand that if you are going to be a real player in the affiliate marketing business, somebody that makes consistent money, you need to get serious about it. There’s no free ride here, and despite what some people promoting those ‘push the button and get rich’ type products will tell you, you need to do some work if you want to make any money. It’s not hard work, but it’s work all the same.

The thing you need to do now is create some content that generates search engine traffic, or write a series of articles and submit them to the top article directories. Another great option if you have the funds is to learn to use Pay Per Click Search Engines such as Yahoo and Google Adwords to drive targeted visitors directly to your merchants. If you find some a range of affiliate programs that pay recurring commissions or pay you for backend sales, you really can do exceptionally well as an affiliate marketer.

Rocky Tapscott is a Site Build It expert and mentor who works with small and medium sized business owners to boost their sales and profits. He has developed a Free 27 page Report that teaches how to create multiple income streams using a simple but incredibly effective email marketing and follow up system – Grab your Free Report now.