I wanted to start this thread because I'am a very analytical person but I'm having difficulty getting the type of sales with my affiliate programs that I would like. I've asked for advice before and people tell me stuff like "you need to presell" and that is pretty vague. I'm looking for something more logical or analytical. Is it just about CTR? Is their a certain number of clicks I need to get through to my merchants in order to generate sales? How many clicks do you successful affilitates out their average per day? Perhaps it is I'm not sending enough visitors to my store. I would appreciate any comments.
I know it is very generic, but the 'average' online store will convert about 1 to 2% of visitors. I forget where I read that but it is definitely a numbers game. There are, of course, merchants who will convert at a much higher rate than that, but it depends on their trust status with consumers and the quality of their checkout process.
Here are a few factors I think are important: 1. How closely connected is your site's content (and individual page content) with the merchant's products? (The closer the connection and not only will you get a good CTR, but a higher final conversion, too.) 2. Can you convincingly presell? (If you have experience of the product you are the affiliate for, you can write personal, non-salesy copy that recommends the product to your visitors. If you hit the right note and come across as a friend telling a friend about something great he found, you will get a better click through and better conversion rate.) 3. Good copy beats banners every time for both CTR and conversion.
I have a digital art website at www.mangalocity.com. I have an affiliate program through All Posters.com. My statistics show that from 11/1/2005 to 11/10/2005, my total traffic is 203 visits and 114 unique visitors, which amounts to about 26 clicks per day. If its simply a numbers game, then I just need to increase the amounts above. vbmechanic when you say the average online store converts 1 to 2% of visitors, you are saying that no matter how much traffic you have, on average only 1 to 2% will buy? If that is true, then that also means I need to increase. Apparently 520 visits a day isn't enough. I'm not really good at writing sales letters.
The conversion % depends on quite a few things, but yes, a figure that low is not out of the ordinary. Especially for huge affiliate programs like Allposters and Amazon. If someone is buying books online, they probably already know about Amazon. If someone buys posters online, they probably already know about Allposters and don't need to see it on your site to spur the buying impulse. I don't know that many people who make significant amounts from either program; of course there are a few, but generally, they are not the best ways to monetize a site.
What other options are there out there fore affiliate programs? What you are saying makes a lot of sense. If someone is just going to go straight to Amazon to buy books there isn't much reason to put them on my site. Do you know of any other affiliate programs that are not as well known?
Great thread with some great advice. Tesla it is partly about CTR but it is also largely about conversions. The conversion rate is up to the merchant and some merchants convert WAY better than others. So you need to test merchants conversions sometimes to find the best fit. Allposters like Amazon is one of the biggest affiliate programs out there, so very competitive and like vBMechanic I don't know many affiliates that make good money other than ones that were in early and have thousands of pages indexed. One of our affiliate programs is ARTinaClick on CJ. They have over 6,000 products in their datafeed and also have an instant store builder called the IPC. Here is the info about them http://affiliates.partnercentric.com/artinaclick/ One of the ways to increase commissions is to work with datafeeds. So intead of one banner going to the homepage you have a whole store of products and descriptions that surfers may be looking for. Then when they click your link they go right to the product and buy. Datafeeds can triple conversion rates. BUT you need to be creative and change the feeds up and add lots of unique content so you don't get duplicate content penalties. We have tons of great programs with free datafeeds in addition to ARTinaClick. Oh one other program I represent that may have some cool products for your site is National Geographic Store. Not sure how many prints and posters they have but I'm sure they have some. Hope this helps and best of luck!