5 Ways to Boost Your Affiliate Conversions

Your affiliate website might be doing wonderfully, and you might be producing the very best content for your blog or website, but when you look at your metrics each week to check the affiliate conversion rates, you find yourself regularly disappointed. Why is this the case? You feel you are doing everything right, perhaps, but there are additional factors and focuses that make the affiliate setup at times frustrating, but ultimately rewarding once you figure out the key.

If your website’s lifeblood is its conversion rate, then you need to read this article. We’ll be looking into common (and not so common) factors to consider and things you can do to turn that conversion rate into something you can be proud of (or prouder of, if you’re already doing well).

1) Build an Active Audience that Trusts Your Content and Your Brand

Many people looking to get into affiliate marketing are often a bit aggressive in their methods, often not laying the groundwork beforehand. Traffic is great, but it’s only a part of the equation. You need to build a brand, and a trustworthy one at that. What makes your recommendations so special?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I have a wide variety of people coming to view my site once, or do I have people coming back looking for more quality content?
• Do I feel as though my recommendations are effective and solve the problem the reader might have, or am I concerned primarily with the conversion and nothing else?
• Do I have a high level of engagement with my readers, and do they honestly trust my judgment when it comes to providing recommendations and information?

Use your answers to guide your strategy moving forward. Building a solid base might mean that you lose out on short-term gain, but it will make your site more stable and only serve to help in the long run.

2) Focus on Quality, Not Quantity

You might have noticed this already when pouring over your traffic statistics, but it’s quite possible that your affiliate conversions come from one or a couple of major articles (likely the best ones on your site, for one reason or another). Creating a page for every product imaginable is likely not the most efficient method, and unless you can rank in Google for every one of those pages, you’re effectively just wasting website space.

You want to focus on a few things at a time, making your main affiliate pages (and your key pieces of content) as excellent as possible and working on improving the user experience.

A few tips to drastically improve the quality of your review articles:

• Include original pictures or videos of the products in use. This might be expensive in some cases, but readers will know you are serious about your analysis and, in turn, will consider your recommendation much more worthwhile.
• Go over every detail, and do research into what people want to know (even ask them on social media, if you have the audience to do so). You don’t want readers opening too many new tabs and forgetting about your page without clicking the affiliate link.
• Improve the structure of the article and make it easy to read, especially on mobile. You likely don’t have much patience for that sort of issue and neither do your readers. Making it look aesthetically pleasing is an art form all its own.

3) Consider Your Demographics and Work Them into the Equation

What are you trying to sell and what language do you use on your posts? What kind of people are reading your posts, and what do you want the average person that reads the site to be like? In order to find more success, you need to be focused on the people that are going to bring you success and consider everyone else complementary to that success.

If you run an affiliate site focused primarily on fishing, does any audience outside of people who fish matter? Work to target your niche groups with your SEO and advertising efforts, and make sure your articles use the language they would.

4) Create a Bolder Call to Action

Many affiliate site owners aren’t bold enough with their calls to action. A simple link here and there isn’t enough. Dedicate a clearly noticeable (read: unavoidable) space and writing on your article to your affiliate link, stating that “here” is where they can solve their problem or find the best item. Do this a couple of times through the article at natural points. Consider banner images and don’t be afraid to tell people what they should do. If they trust your brand, they’ll often do it.

5) Remove Distractions

The amount of income you might get from ads, unless you have a special deal working, is paltry compared to what you can make from a well-run affiliate site. Remove any distractions such as those or too many flashy effects from your site and your posts, and you should see an increase in engagement and conversions.

By including these things on your posts, you’re only serving to create competition between those items and your post with the call to action. Keeping readers focused is one of the best things you can do, and many readers will run away from aggressive ads and popups (think about how many people use ad blockers).

Conclusion

Much like anything online, you can’t expect there to be any surefire methods to jump to the top of the charts. Even if you do everything right, hard work and a change of process will be required, but trends exist for a reason and you should be confident that you can expect positive change over time by following the above methods.

How do your affiliate conversion rates fare? Are there any strategies above that you would like to implement? Are there any that you have already used or would like to suggest? We would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below and continue the conversation.