Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 5 Affiliate marketing is a common channel used to make money online. There are many benefits to getting involved in affiliate marketing opportunities. An affiliate marketer is someone who makes money without having to produce, buy or distribute any products.A merchant partner is a business enterprise or a company that pays affiliate commission on sales, saving money on its own marketing department. Financial success for an affiliate marketer comes from having a good strategy and by knowing the best techniques to use. How Do Affiliate Marketers Generate Traffic to Their Website First it is necessary for an affiliate marketer to create a website and take advantage of the amount of traffic it gets. Free traffic sources can bring a good number of visitors to your website, and you should be using them to build up a following. Another option is to buy traffic for your website, but this can take a lot of money over time, and you do need to calculate the return on investment. If an affiliate’s conversion rate and sales are low, there is not much to be gained by continuing to pay for traffic. A website requires more than just passing traffic, and it would be a mistake to think all your efforts should go into getting traffic. Having a popular website will not help unless it also has a high conversion rate. A low conversion rate means less people are turning into customers and it will not help you generate a healthy affiliate income. Paid traffic is more effective when visitors stay on the website long enough to find a well-designed landing page. How to Leverage Content Marketing Traffic in Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy Anyone searching the Internet and finds your content may also want to buy from your affiliate link. The best way to make visitors interested is grabbing their attention with some compelling content. People will only follow a website if they think it provides them with something useful. Inspiring and informative content is a great free product that people search for, and can access online. A higher volume of sales will result from a website filled with high quality, original and interesting content, which adds value to your promotional material. Your content must be relevant to the products or services offered by your merchant partner. Visitors are not likely to buy products that have no relevance to what they were looking for online. A high volume of sales results from interesting content, which adds value to your promotional material. It is not difficult to attract potential customers to a niche website, promoting products that match the content. What Type of Content Do Affiliate Marketers Produce Success in affiliate marketing relies on having the right type of content that gets the message across. The content should not look too much like native advertising. Creating the right content requires some careful consideration. It has to be informative and must demonstrate clear substance, so visitors can engage with it. Nothing puts people off more than seeing a lot of content which is obviously promotional. Many affiliate marketers place keywords within their text to attract the right sort of visitors to their content. Again, some care is necessary if you want to attempt this. Any article that is full of keywords will put most people off. Use of keywords in the text must appear natural and content must not be over-stuffed with them. The days of keyword stuffing are now over. Affiliate marketing methods now include some more effective & sophisticated techniques. Nothing puts people off more than seeing a lot of content which is obviously promotional. It’s worth spending time & money on content that engages visitors and is likely to gain followers. Your content must deliver real value, and should not look like it is created for the sole purpose of affiliate marketing. Publishing valuable and informative content regularly will help your website gain popularity. Most Internet users will click on a link that looks like it leads to something entertaining or a good source of knowledge. Your content also needs promotion, and using social media will be of great help. Optimizing Social Media Marketing for Web Traffic Generation Social media has changed the way people promote their websites and is now widely used in affiliate marketing. Good quality web content will bring you potential new customers, but social media allows you to interact with your potential customers as well. Social media usage patterns and social footprints of most people reveal a lot about their private life and their interests. Analyzing such information you can assume whether a social media user is a potential candidate as your future customer or not. Social media makes it easy to build and grow a network with other people sharing the same interest. Running Social Media Campaigns In affiliate marketing, social media is useful for finding followers who intend to purchase products from merchant partners. Sharing your own content in some social media updates will take the best quality visitors to your web pages, the sort of people who are likely to make you money. All you need to do is build up a network of followers who are interested in sharing their thoughts on topics related to the products you promote. It costs nothing to set up a social media account and to post regular updates, but it’s not always easy to check the amount of time spent on managing a social media campaign. Website owners who prefer to spend more time on other marketing activities can use the services of a social media marketing company. In affiliate marketing you always need to assess and compare different methods. Analysis is important to determine which ones are more probable to generate sales commission. Earning a high rate of commission for selling a popular product is obviously ideal for every affiliate marketer. The commission rates offered by merchant partners are set as a moderate percentage of the sale price. Merchant partners with the highest selling products may only offer a moderate rate of commission, but a high volume of sales still makes them lucrative. It’s not worth looking for a merchant offering a higher rate of commission. There is less money available from products with limited appeal, even if the commission rate is higher. In the world of affiliate marketing it’s far easier to make money by promoting products that are in high demand. Using Landing Pages to Convert Your Visitors The design of your landing page requires plenty of thoughts and some effort. Even the tiniest detail may have an impact on affiliate marketing success. All internet users need a good reason to stay on a page. Everyone is facing the need to make decisions online about which link to click and whether to stay on a page or move on to another. A click-through landing page must provide an instant reason for a visitor to view what is on the page. Internet users often don’t look past the header, so a landing page header has to grab people’s attention. Too much text on the page may put some people off and flashing graphics might be irritating to others. Many users will not bother scrolling through a lot of images on the page. When designing a landing page for affiliate marketing, utility has to support the appearance. Remember that its purpose is to promote a particular product that you want people to buy. A landing page should not be aggressively promotional, but it does need to be persuasive. Visitors should view the content and feel an urge to make the purchase decision. Then they will click on an affiliate link to convert. Outgoing links should include your own affiliate links. Any extra links on a landing page will only distract potential customers and may point some of them away from the page, before they use your affiliate link to buy the product. What Happens When They Click Submit? When running an online lead-capture landing page marketing campaign it is considered best practice to set up a ‘Thank You’ page, and redirect visitors to it once they submit their details over to you. It shouldn’t be anything special. just saying “thank you!” is enough, and the polite thing to do… while you’re at it, why not use that ‘thank you’ page for another time saving automation purpose? On a marketing campaign it’s considered best practice to set up a ‘Thank You’ page. It’s also polite. As a company’s affiliate/publisher, when you create an online campaign – many times the company you promote will provide you with a tracking / conversion code, which should contain the lead’s details. They expect you to send it over to them, so they can track registered and paying users that were referred by your unique affiliate link. You can and should use that ‘thank you’ page to have the submitted lead data is automatically sent over to the company you’re affiliating. It’s very easy to set up, and, will obviously save you the hassle of transferring it to them manually. Every time a lead is submitted and gets redirected to your ‘Thank You’ page – a pixel (containing the lead data) is auto-magically fired and sends that data over to wherever you need it to go. Here’s how we, at Pagewiz, enable affiliates to embed a conversion pixel containing the lead details. Once you have that implemented – submit a test-lead and log in to the affiliated company’s system to make sure your test-lead got through their automatic lead-validation mechanism. Running A/B Testing to Increase Your Conversion Rate A/B testing allows you to try out several versions of a landing page to identify which one is most successful in terms of attracting sales. You can use a software program for A/B testing or perform your own experiment with two or more versions. You will soon discover which one generates more sales by comparing the data. If you don’t carry out an A/B test, your landing page could lose you sales, without you ever realizing it. It’s important to remember that it’s in direct competition with many other landing pages. Keeping Your Strategy Current with Adaptable Techniques Anyone involved in affiliate marketing needs to be competitive. The level of competition never stays the same and it’s important to adapt if you want to get ahead. You need to keep up with the latest trends and know when your marketing methods need to be revised and changed to match what is happening currently. Successful affiliate marketers strive to always adapt and refresh their techniques. The design of a landing page can make all the difference in your affiliate marketing strategy. You also need to use high quality content to generate traffic and improve the conversion rate of your website. It is crucially important to understand your potential customers and reach out to them through social media and other methods. How do you convert your affiliate marketing traffic into sales? Please share with us in the comments below. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article originally appeared on The PageWiz Blog and has been republished with permission.Find out how to syndicate your content with B2C Author: Kobe Ben ItamarKobe is an account & campaigns manager @ Pagewiz. He has a broad landing page campaigns creation experience and a passion for driving them towards a higher conversion rate. Prior to his entry into online landing page campaigns, he worked as a front-end web developer, and still likes it when people refer to… View full profile ›More by this author:How Neuromarketing Can Make Visitors Favor Your OfferHow to Use the Framing Effect in Marketing CampaignsWhy Minimalist Landing Pages Are the Best And How To Use Them