Who The Hell Is Kathy Pop?

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?”

This problem is quite common, and the way around it is to understand the mindset of the people you are sending any site you are promoting as an affiliate. There are quite a large number of factors that make a difference to your conversion rate as an affiliate. In most cases, the visitors you send to the merchant’s website will need to be at least partially PRE-sold before they get there. If they arrive at a sales letter or order page completely cold, and the don’t know what to expect, your chances of them buying something are pretty slim. However, if you’ve warmed them up, and especially if they already know you, like you, and trust your recommendations, then your prospects of making the sale will go way up.

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?

We didn’t have a single affiliate sale. Within a couple of weeks I was getting “I drove 4391 visitors to your site and I didn’t make a sale; your program doesn’t work” messages from my affiliates, and I was very concerned that something wasn’t working in our tracking system. On checking our traffic stats however, I found that virtually ALL of the visitors our affiliates had sent us were coming from paid to surf programs and other useless traffic sources like that. It was just totally untargeted, unreliable traffic, and the visitors who arrived certainly had no interest in buying a $4,000 product – most of them probably weren’t even interested in the topic.

The bottom line really is this. It’s critically important to understand that if you are going to be a winner in this business, somebody with a real business that makes consistent money week in, week out, you’ll need to get serious about it. There’s no free ride in business, and despite what some people promoting those ‘push button income’ type products will tell you, you need to do some work if you want to make any money. Now it’s not hard work, but work all the same.

You need to create some content that generates organic search traffic, or write some articles and submit them to article directories. And if you have the funds, learn to use PPC to drive targeted visitors to your merchants as well. If you find some decent affiliate programs that pay recurring commissions and/or commissions on backend sales, you really can do exceptionally well as an affiliate marketer.

Rocky Tapscott is a Site Build It mentor and coach who shows 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 deadly effective email marketing and follow up system – Grab your Free Report now.