TIPS ON AFFILIATE MARKETING

Online affiliate marketing has been around for over a decade and is even bigger, popular and more lucrative than ever. It now stems from nearly every product imaginable from home furnishings to holidays.

As an affiliate marketer, your success and in most cases, your living is determined by how many sales you make. You can have hundreds or thousands of people looking at your sales landing pages but if they don't convert then this is no good and maybe pointless.

Below are few tips on how to convert visitors to sales by ensuring you have a strong landing page:

• Ensure that visitors landing on the page are given the exact information that they requested. For example if they were looking for a 'Sony Plasma TV model number x' and came via a PPC campaign, then they MUST be taken to the corresponding page.

• Provide clear and concise information on the product. This builds up credibility and the visitor or potential customer is under no illusion as to the specifics of the product.

• Customer Reviews: It is always helpful to read reviews or testimonials of people who have purchased the product. Reviews tend to work wonders and can often result in a decision to purchase or not. Just ensure that there is a balance, are not all one sided and they give a true reflection of the product.

• Provide a clear 'Call to Action'. So lets say a visitor has read the marketing spiel, now what? A clear call to action should provide the visitor to take action e.g. sign-up, purchase etc.

• Avoid using any offline methods such as telephone numbers: If you are really meticulous in your tracking then it may be a good idea to avoid using any kind of method that cannot be logged online. Why? Unless you were targeting a telephone number to a specific campaign or by keyword, it would be a logistical nightmare not to mention expensive. It is also better to direct users to specific pages which can all be tracked and measured. This will help to constantly tweak the campaign moving forward.

• Professional and clean design: Very few if no people will buy a product or service from a website that does not look professional. It is vital that your landing page is visually appealing, clean and uncluttered. Simple design that is informative often works a treat. Ask yourself, if you saw a page that was cluttered and looked unprofessional, would you buy from them?

• Unique selling point: Chances are that the product you are promoting is being marketed by many others. Why should people buy from you? What do you need to clinch a sale? Maybe an eBook, video, discounts or more? If so, mention this on the landing page to entice potential buyers.

The key to making your landing page a success is to tweak it and split-test it over a period of time. You will not have the perfect landing page from the outset but you can minimise the number of errors.