If you’re wondering how to increase affiliate sales, you’re not alone. Making sales as an affiliate is the main goal of affiliate marketing. Without sales, an affiliate business can’t make any money.
There’s many ways to make sales as an affiliate and to increase your sales will depend on the tactics and strategies you’re already using. If you’re yet to make a sale as an affiliate, it shows that the strategies you’re using aren’t working, or at that they aren’t working yet! For more strategies checkout my article covering 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Certain tactics will bear fruit far faster than others so being patient as an affiliate is an important aspect of the business, especially if you’re a content creator. Bloggers can spend months or even years creating content before they see the fruits of their labours. Whereas, those affiliates with a big marketing budget can supercharge their business much more quickly.
A small email list of a few hundred subscribers will reflect a small amount of sales if any. Whereas a list of tens of thousands of subscribers should be bringing in a lot more sales. Likewise with your other marketing efforts. Are you expecting too much from too little effort? Have you created enough content to see the kinds of results you really want? Is your marketing budget realistic considering the niche you’re in?
These are important questions for affiliates to consider to help them grow and focus on the activities which matter the most.
How To Increase Affiliate Sales – Customer Avatar
To make sales as an affiliate you need to put your marketing message (and affiliate link) in front of buying customers. Or, take a “cold” audience and warm them up to make the sales through a marketing campaign. This can be done through several different marketing strategies.
Before you do anything as an affiliate it’s worth getting to know who you can serve the best with the products you’ve chosen to promote. Unless you can match your audience with an appropriate product, no amount of advertising will give you any sales anyway.
You can spend years creating the content and still get it wrong! So learning about your “perfect” customer, or customer “avatar” is an important step for affiliates. When you understand the needs, pains and problems of your target audience, you’re in a much better position to communicate effectively to their needs.
To understand your customer means you know what kinds of content they are actively looking for and are therefore able to provide it; showing them products which can help them the best with whatever problem they have.
When you know your customer better than they know themselves, you’re in a great position to speak effectively to them through your marketing.
How To Increase Affiliate Sales – Get More Traffic
Of course the simplest way to increase affiliate sales is to get more customers interacting through your affiliate links. Depending on your marketing method this might mean to create more content, pay more for advertising, build a bigger email list or become more active at sharing content on social media etc.
Here’s a few of the activities you can apply to get more traffic to your website:
- Create more content
- Use an SEO plugin to improve your SEO (search engine optimisation) score and get a higher ranking on the SERPS (search engine results page)
- Share your content more
- Use automatic share plugins
- Use a social media share plugin
- Create more backlinks to your content
Of course creating content is time consuming and slow. But you can also use paid marketing to generate fast traffic to a website or landing page. See also how to increase website traffic organically and PPC vs organic marketing.
How To Increase Affiliate Sales – Get More Conversions
Many affiliates make the mistake of endlessly creating more and more content without optimising their sales system. A small shift in your marketing efforts can reap larger rewards with less effort. For example, if you collect leads from a website, you can make sales through email marketing.
Email marketing lets you collect email subscribers from a website and turn them into customers by following up with them using an email marketing campaign. This is typically done by offering your website visitors a freebie giveaway of some kind. On my website I offer a free video series and a number of ebooks.
By testing and measuring different opt in offers, you can quickly determine the best ways to turn the same number of website visitors into more subscribers. This is done by comparing different opt in offers:
- Pop Up subscription forms
- Drop down menus
- Sign up forms (static)
- Banners and images – leading visitors to a landing page
Over 1000 website visitors, for example, two different sign up offers will have a different level of interest. Even just changing a small element of your opt in form can have dramatic effect. Focus on the benefits of what you offer, rather than the features.
Focus On Money Producing Activities
Affiliates only get paid when they make sales. Therefore your time needs to be very focused on money producing activities as an affiliate. It can be easy to spend time on less important activities which don’t actually move your affiliate business forwards. This is known as being a “busy fool”. I was a busy fool for some time as an affiliate and can still waste time on less important actions which don’t help make more sales.
Depending on your marketing strategy, your best spent time could be:
- Blogging
- Running PPC ads
- Creating landing pages which convert
- Building niche websites
- Building your email list
- Testing different ads out
- Cross testing opt in forms
- Cross testing ads
- etc
One way to help you focus on the things which matter is to rate your “to do” list in order of importance when you create it. Also operate a “won’t do” list. A “won’t do” list is anything which falls into the category of the unnecessary or unimportant. Ask yourself whether doing the task will move your business forwards. If not, if goes on the “won’t do” list.
Think Bigger & Ask Good Questions
It can be easy to forget that you have a global audience at your disposal as an affiliate. You can easily get caught up in the small actions which don’t matter and which don’t move your business forwards. Ask yourself frequently how you are holding yourself back in your affiliate business. In what ways does your thinking limit your business? What can you do to expand your thinking which will in turn grow your affiliate business faster?
We often only act from our comfort zone and operate from our current situation awareness and current resources.
A good exercise to help you expand your thinking is to “zoom out” of your daily habits and visualise the future/business you want to create. Imagine living the life of your dreams and having the business you always wanted. Then “zoom” back into the moment and ask yourself whether the small daily actions you’re taking are actually taking you there.
If not, consider what actions will be necessary to take your business to the next level. These probably aren’t the ones you’re currently doing. They are probably a little uncomfortable.
Think about how you can double the number currently on your email list over the next couple of months. How can you double the opt in rate on your website and double your website traffic in the next few months?
Ask the right questions and you get better answers.
Create “Must Do” Mini Habits
As an affiliate it’s important to maintain a positive belief about your business and your ability to keep moving it forwards. A small step forwards each day for several years is better than sporadic leaps which can’t be sustained. If you’re a blogger, for example, it can take several months or years before you break through and start seeing the success you desire.
Affiliate marketing is tough and it’s easy to quit. To sustain your growth and keep moving forwards it’s useful to get into habits. Motivation is harder to sustain for the longer term than a habit.
A good mini habit will sustain your affiliate business over the longer term. Blogging, email marketing, PPC (pay per click) and various other marketing strategies can be broken into small daily achievable steps you can add to your daily “to do” list.
Over time, it becomes difficult to break a habit which has generated momentum. If you can apply this to content generation, for example, you can over time build a huge archive of content which makes affiliate sales for you, even when you are slacking off!
Tracking & Optimising
Yes tracking! Without tracking you’re blind in your affiliate business and you won’t know which sales are coming from which of your marketing tactics. Tracking is super important for affiliates because it shows them where sales comes from. This knowledge tells them where to focus their efforts.
Once you start making sales on a more regular basis, you can easily focus on the best performing marketing strategies. That’s when things can really improve because you can stop wasting time on those actions which produce the least and focus instead on the most profitable activities.
There’s many tracking options such as Google Analytics, Statcounter etc. You can also join a platform which gives you more information on your website visitors, keywords, rankings competitors etc. Software tools such as SEM Rush can help affiliates with this kind of information gathering.