Affiliate Optimisation 101
Affiliate marketing is a field where the micro-testers are rewarded, and those who go buy intuition alone often find themselves left standing in the dust. With so many variables effecting the outcome of your affiliate pages, it's absolutely fundamental to micro-test your pages, optimise their performance, and make sure that you're squeezing every last drop of earning potential from them. Whether you're a full-time internet marketer, or just someone that is using affiliate marketing to create a side income, you can't afford to let your pages bleed potential. These basic strategies will help you get every last drip of commission money from your sales pages.
First, you need to make sure you're spending your time wisely when optimising your affiliate pages. While many newbie marketers go about optimising their pages through intuition alone, it's really not enough to create sustainable, long term results from your sales pages. You need to let your optimisations be based in real metrics, not intuitions, and as a result it's important to have some kind of monitoring and analytics software installed.
Here isn't the place to name names or suggest brands, but there are several things that you should make sure your analytics software is capable of. Firstly, you need to be able to monitor how long your viewers stay on your page. Secondly, you need to be able to monitor how your viewers click on your page, and where they click. This combination of data is important, as it allows you to gauge where you're losing most of your potential customers, and where you need to make changes to retain them.
Want to increase your sales? Put repeat 'Order Now' buttons throughout your sales text. It's amazing how much this small addition can increase your sales. Try it for yourself -- run a modified version of your website for one week and watch how it changes your viewer behaviour. Even if it doesn't have a measurable increase on your sales, you'll have realised how it can change your viewer behaviour dramatically. Understanding your audience is key to achieving massive sales success, so any monitoring is important.
Finally, when you've got the information that you need, experiment with different page setups, design options, and sales copy configurations. Unsure of whether a paragraph or sentence is really necessary in your sales page? Create a different version of the page and run it on its own for a week. Measure and modify as you need. Micro-testing is truly one of the most important and absolutely vital parts of sales page optimisation, and without a highly optimised page it's easy to be left in the dust of your competitors.
There's a saying in business, that when you're not coming out on top, your opponents are always doing something that you don't know about. Don't be the affiliate marketer that thinks they can win by intuition alone. While you may win some small battles, the true victory lies with those that can consistently win on all fronts. Optimise, study, and analyse, and you'll make the sales that you deserve.
To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the free Clickbank v Paydotcom report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include the resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.
