5 Tips To Improve Affiliate Sales

5 Tips To Improve Affiliate Sales:by Matt Jackson
Affiliate marketing can be a highly effective and efficient online business model. Rather than having to manage your own stock or risk buying large quantities of goods in a hope of making profit you can market other peoples’ products and take a percentage of the sale. Depending on the affiliate programme and the affiliate network that you choose, you will be offered a percentage per sale or a flat amount per sale. Ensure that your content and the products you affiliate with have some cross over and consider introducing data capture forms to develop your own list of high quality leads.
1 – Choose Products Relevant To Your Content
It should be fairly common sense that the products to perform best on your website will be those that are somehow related to the content that you serve. If your website or blog is well established then look at the most popular content, the pages where people enter your website and spend the most time.

• What content do these pages serve?
• What products would best match that content?

2 – Write Content Relevant To The Products
Once you’ve selected your products you can also write some additional blog posts, articles, and how to guides on the pages of your website that are geared specifically towards these products. What’s more, you can help pre-sell the products before directing visitors to the affiliate product page and this will increase the likelihood of making a sale. You can also introduce highly targeted lead capture forms; you may not make a sale immediately but by keeping in regular contact with interested readers you will greatly increase the chance of a sale at some point.

• Have you written content targeting your affiliate products?
• Would you be able to write your own product descriptions, reviews, and how to guides?

3 – Capture Lead Details On Your Site
Capturing lead details on your own website is a great way to improve your affiliate efforts. Without lead capture forms and strategies you will need to continue to rely on the driving of new website visitors and unique traffic to your website to make any sale. With a list of qualified and targeted leads you can increase the chance of making a first sale and you can attempt to cross promote and make additional affiliate commissions.

• Do you offer ebooks or anything that you can leverage to gain email addresses?
• Could you write a multi-part course or a weekly newsletter to attract leads?

4 – Utilise Tools And Plugins
Whether you use WordPress, Joomla, or any other content management platform or blog system you will be able to find a plethora of plugins and a multitude of applications to help your affiliate efforts. Consider plugins like Pretty Link, Sociable, and Easy Affiliate for WordPress because these could really help inject some serious profit into your online business efforts. Do some research and find similar tools for your own content management platform.

• What platform does your website use?
• Are there tools available to help improve, speed up, or optimise the affiliate sales process?

5 – Make Sure You Choose The Right Affiliate Network
Different affiliate networks have different terms. Some will offer weekly payments, others monthly. Some may have high minimum payouts while others have more modest and achievable minimum payment levels. Also consider the quality of the merchants who are registered to the network, their locale, and any other factor that might be important to you, your business, and your website visitors.

• Are you a member of numerous affiliate networks?
• Are you disgruntled with the terms or the quality of your existing network?

The Monetise affiliate network is packed with quality merchants, offers low and regular payments, and provides a means for businesses to improve their existing affiliate profits.