Each month when I report my monthly earnings I tend to be pretty forthcoming with how much I’m earning and where it comes from but with one exception. I’ve got a mystery affiliate earner that is starting to rake in a large percentage of my earnings each month and, to be honest, I’d be pretty screwed without it. I won’t be giving away my secret but I thought I might try to shed some light on how I stumbled onto this nice earner.
I met up with Anthony of Working Nomad a couple of years ago and he gave me some good advice that I hadn’t really thought about before then. He said that just sticking related affiliate programs onto a site isn’t enough. You need to try to attract people to your site who are in the mood to buy. You don’t want people who are gathering information, you want the people who are ready to make the purchase.
To do this, you’ve got to think about the sorts of things people who want to buy now will be typing into the search engines. As an example, lets say you’ve got a website about tropical fish. You rank well for the search terms ‘tropical fish’ and get loads of visitors each day. Trying to capitalise on this, you’ve added an affiliate program selling tropical fish tanks. You could sit around and wait for one of your visitors who have arrived on your site through the ‘tropical fish’ search term to buy something but you will probably be waiting a while because these people are more likely to be looking for general information rather than wanting to buy a fish tank. Think about what people who want to buy now will be searching for and target those keywords. So ‘cheap tropical fish tanks’ is good, ‘where to buy cheap tropical fish tanks’ is better and ‘online deals on tropical fish tanks’ is even better.
Think of the affiliate programs you currently have on your sites and how well targeted they are. Even if the programs are a perfect match you will still need to get the right kind of visitor to make them pay off. Brainstorm some search terms that people who want to buy right now would search for. What sorts of things would you search for if you wanted to buy the product now? Write pages targeted at these specific search terms. You might only see a few visitors a week but those people who find you will be a lot more likely to convert than the masses of untargeted traffic.
So there you have it. No major secrets revealed, I’m afraid. But when I was given this advice it wasn’t really something I’d thought of before. It got me thinking about affiliate marketing in a different sort of way and got a few new ideas flowing. Hopefully it will do the same for you.
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