Maybe you got stuck on which ads to choose or you’ve placed ads that aren’t converting as you’d hoped, despite your best efforts. Before you let frustration get the better of you, keep in mind that there are some key points to know about making affiliate programs work for you, rather than the other way around.
You’d never know it by the hype, but there’s a lot more to it than just placing ads on a quickly built website. You have to develop a keen eye for what will work best on your site and take the time to give it the proper forethought before choosing which ads to run. You have to know what you want from it to get what you want from it. Ask yourself the following:
- Is this ad the right size to match the rest of my website?
- Do the color combinations work well together?
- If not, does the merchant have more to choose from?
- Where would this ad’s positioning most enhance potential conversions?
- How will visitors see and react to this ad? Would it convert?
Knowing these things upfront can save you a headache now and time later on, because you’d have a better understanding of what to change your current ads out with.
Many who are new to affiliate marketing often do not consider running campaigns. While this is fine if you’d prefer to keep the same ads up for a long time, it is worth some thought if you think you may want to switch things up occasionally. For example, some ads have a time limit (to promote, say, a summer sale). You may decide to run that, then move on to another campaign
If you go this route, it can be a good way to stay on top of your Flash website, keep your visual content fresh for your visitors, as well as provide a good excuse to update your written content. This last one is important for improving search engine optimization, particularly if you are using targeted keywords, but it will also help you build some buzz around your affiliate ads. Aimed accordingly and worded correctly, it could really boost your campaigning efforts. Just don’t let the timelines on these ads run out…an ‘out-dated’ ad could hurt your credibility.
Occasionally, you’ll run across the dreaded ‘poorly designed merchant landing page’. You know the type: mismatched formatting, long sales letters, poor color combos or linking/navigation issues. With more people building their own from scratch for their small businesses, as well as running private affiliate programs, it actually happens more often than you’d think. Unfortunately, it directly and negatively affects conversions in most cases.
If a merchant’s landing page is less than desirable, find out if you can build a pre-sell page to help increase conversions (each program should have a contact person at the ready to field questions like these). This is basically a landing page of your own creation that ‘pre-sell’s’ the product before sending visitors to the merchant’s landing page. You can build it as an addition of your Wix site and link to it from your homepage or a Recommendations page, add your content then “set it and forget it”. Just remember these simple guidelines to get the most from it:
- keep it short and balanced – both visually and perspectively
- stick to being informative – avoid hard-sell tactics
- be open to including multiple links to the destination page – but stay away from overloading it with links going elsewhere
If you’re not seeing the conversions within a reasonable amount of time, give some thought to how new your site is. Rome wasn’t built in a day and, as every seasoned website builder knows, each site has to build up its ‘cred’ for SEO/pagerank. If your website is already established or well-known, you may need to consider switching ads. Perhaps you chose the wrong product for your audience or one that’s poor for your campaign, in which case you should re-evaluate things. You may have even positioned your ads incorrectly (are they easy to spot?). It happens. In any case, be open to playing around with your ads. It could make all the difference.
