Wondering how to make more sales online? If you’re an affiliate who has already made sales online, or you’re just starting out, listen up! In this article I’m going to discuss how to make more sales online through the various strategies which affiliates use.
Not all affiliates use the same tactics to make sales. Some write blog posts, like this one. Others upload videos to YouTube or TikTok, and some use social media strategies. Many use paid marketing to send traffic directly to their affiliate products, or build an email list and send out automated marketing messages via email.
Before you make your first sale online, you’ll need to employ some kind of marketing strategy. Depending on the direction you choose, your marketing budget (or lack of it) and the effort you put in, you can make your first sale within a few weeks, or a few months.
How To Make More Sales Online – Organic Vs. Paid Marketing
I’m a fan of organic marketing and I’ve created a lot of content. On this website alone there’s over 800 blog posts. However, organic marketing comes with a massive downside. You’ll often need to work really hard, and for a long time before you see the fruits of your labour. When you do eventually make a sale, it’s more difficult to scale up, because you’re relying on passive traffic which comes in organically (without paying for it). However, you can track your sales, see where they come from and focus on promoting those pieces of content which generate the most sales.
Paid marketing is different in that you pay for traffic. Initially you’ll need to try some paid advertisements out to see what works and what doesn’t. Unlike content marketing, you can see very quickly what works. Despite the face that you’re spending money for untested traffic, paid marketing has a massive upside. That is that once you find a winning advert which consistently generates sales, you can simply add more budget and scale up. The downside is that many affiliates will give up before they find that wining advert which produces a consistent profit.
How To Make More Sales Online – Make Your First Sale First!
Your first sale as an affiliate is an important milestone. See also how to make your first affiliate sale. Once you’ve made your first online sale, you’ve proved to yourself that it can be done. Before this milestone you can easily harbour some scepticism towards affiliate marketing and this doubt can hold you back. Once you have sold something once, you know you can do it again. This time with more clarity because you (should) know exactly how you’ve done it.
Make sure you track your traffic, leads and sales so that you know where a sale has come from. There’s nothing more infuriating that making a sale but not knowing which action caused it. Not only have you now got more clarity about how to make a sale, but you have a greater belief in yourself and your ability to actually do it. This can create a snowball effect, leading you to focus on the actions which created the sale and fuelling you with confidence.
It’s obvious to suggest at this point that to make more sales, do more of what brought you a sale in the first place. Without having made a sale initially, this is much more difficult. You’ve less experience to draw from and you don’t know which actions are going to lead to the sales.
How To Make More Sales Online – Before You’ve Made A Sale
Before you’ve made a sale, it can be easy to keep focusing on the fact that you haven’t made a sale. You become demoralised and disillusioned. Instead of focusing on the steps to make a sale, you focus instead on your lack of results. This leads you into a negative spiral of not-doing. You don’t want this! Instead of focusing on your lack of results, focus instead on the actions you are taking each day. Tick them off one by one and reward yourself for doing so.
For example, as a blogger, I focus on creating a blog post most days. In the beginning, I was getting hardly any traffic to my website. For each single organic visitor to my blog, I would rewards myself and have a mini celebration. Celebrate your small wins because they lead to the big wins eventually.
A single click on your website can eventually become 100 daily “hits”. Lead your website visitors to your email list and your subscribers to your affiliate products. Broken into small, achievable chunks, anyone can succeed with affiliate marketing given the right mindset. Breaking goals into smaller steps is the key to making more sales online. Make small achievements each day which are achievable. Don’t focus on the things you can’t control and don’t overwhelm yourself trying to take giant leaps. Small, incremental improvements over time is the key to success online.
Do What Works
It’s easy to say, just do more of what works. But that assumes you’ve already made a sale and know what works to generate sales online. Often we don’t. We need to try things out so we can discover what works. This is known as “failing forwards” in affiliate marketing.
If you’re selling with a paid ad, run more ads. If you’re selling doing organic marketing, create more content. But to get to the point of making those sales you’ll need to do a lot of “failing” first. Failing isn’t failing if you use it to get better with affiliate marketing. Each so called failure is actually a stepping stone towards success – given the right attitude.
There’s so many ways to make affiliate sales. Pick one and run with it until you make a sale. See my post on 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Pick one and get really good at it.
Turn Traffic Into Leads
Once you start generating traffic to a website or landing page, it’s just the beginning. You need to turn that traffic into leads. This is done by testing out a good lead magnet – a free giveaway which appeals to your target audience. You can increase your conversion rate from a website without creating a tonne more content too. Simply test out and measure different lead magnets and alter your call to action to give the best opt in rate.
With a higher opt in rate to your email list, you can turn the same amount of traffic into a larger number of sales. The email list is an important part of the sales process from a website. This is because on a website, most visitors only stick around for a few minutes – for many visitors it’s just a few seconds.
But get them on your email list and you can continue messaging them for several months or even years. See also the power of the email list.
Making More Sales Online – Tracking
Tracking is the key to making more sales online. Once you have collected data on what works, you can spend more time on those actions which bring about the most sales. Have you heard of the Pareto Principle? It states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of activities.
In affiliate marketing this is also the case. Much of the work in affiliate marketing is in learning which actions produce the best results. So with around 80% of your work, you’ll see no actual monetary benefit. Hence why so many affiliate marketers quit. But if you see this work as the important foundation to your learning which actions actually do work, you’ll see the bigger picture. Longer term affiliates can work far less hard and make more money because they put in the work beforehand. They have learned which actions produce the results.
Once they have done this (once), they can benefit from their hard work before hand. I like to think about affiliate marketing as a lot like kung fu (Since I’m a kung fu teacher). Kung Fu literally translates as “hard work”. But it really means the hard work you’ve done previously to attain a level of skill.
Affiliate marketing is like this too. The hard work you do adds up to knowing which actions produce the most sales. You can then focus on those actions only, once you start connecting the dots!