Affiliate marketing can be a great additional source of income, and many affiliates even turn it into their full-time jobs. Yet, most new and even moderately experienced publishers experience frustration caused by low conversion rates.

If you want your profit to grow, you have to invest time and effort, learn the trick of the trade from different sources, apply that knowledge, and keep an eye out for any new advancements in their field. This may be too much for a beginner and can deter you from reaching your true potential. That is why we have compiled a list of steps you can take to gain your audience’s trust and increase your conversions.

Website Performance

Having a website that doesn’t perform well can hinder your business immensely. Internet users nowadays are used to sites that are easy to navigate, search, and use on all devices. Additionally, they want to navigate to pages of interest quickly and without waiting. This means you will have to dedicate some time to figure out how to approach these demands. Fortunately, we are here to give you some guidelines.

You should build, maintain, and upgrade your site with user experience first and foremost. Take the time to research tools most affiliate marketers use and pick ones that suit your needs the most. We recommend using different tracking options, such as A/B testing and heat maps to see exactly how your visitors interact with your site, and if there are some details you could change up to get more conversions.

For example, moving your call-to-action buttons to a spot on a page that shows a great amount of activity may influence your visitors to click it more. You really can’t predict exactly how people will interact with your site and which layout, calls-to-action, headlines and other elements of the page perform best until you test them against one another. A/B testing allows you to do just that and make an informed decision when implementing any change to your pages.

Content

Your content shouldn’t be only a vessel to promote affiliate codes. The fact of the matter is, not many people like the feeling of being sold something. On the other hand, they most certainly enjoy reading and watching well-crafted content. This has several repercussions but gives affiliates some great directions about their content.

Firstly, you should choose a topic that truly interests you if you haven’t already started creating content. You may think this means you will have to be an expert or at least well-versed on the matter, but the truth is, people at all stages of knowledge search the internet for inspiration and answers, and learning along the way can be an inspiration for writing or filming some truly valuable articles and videos.

Secondly, you should adjust the format of your content to the most searched keywords. The truth is, not many niches are ruled by a single product or service. Hence, many people look into different companies providing these goods and want to learn more about them before they decide which one they prefer. That is why you should make at least a few product reviews, tutorials, and product comparisons, depending on what you are promoting.

Lastly, the products should be incorporated into the content organically and presented honestly and objectively. The way you are presenting them should reflect the rest of the content you have created prior, and allow you to showcase your biggest strengths when It comes to creating content.

Products

Accepting an offer that comes your way may be tempting. Namely, you will promote many products and, thus, make more money. Yet, time and time again this strategy proved to be faulty. Again, if you want your audience to trust you, you will have to provide its members with some tangible value. If you follow the first two tips, you will do that through the initial impression and continuous valuable content. The third step is to provide value through the items you are promoting themselves.

Think about these questions:

• Will this product be valuable to my audience?
• Is it related to the content I usually make? If not, will it be useful to everyone, no matter their interests (this applies to more universal verticals, such as finance)?
• Is the product actually high quality?
• Are my visitors, knowing their spending habits and online behavior, going to be able to purchase this product?

If the answer to all four questions is yes, you should take the chance and accept the offer.

Stop Cart Abandonment

There are some additional steps to make sure your visitors actually complete their conversions. One of the biggest problems affiliates face is shopping cart abandonment. In other words – users will go through the motions and put an item in their cart and leave it when they are supposed to enter their credit card data. This can get very frustrating, but we are here to give you some tips on how to avoid cart abandonment.

Make sure the last stretch of the shopping experience goes smoothly. This means you should have a great landing page with no distractions, to make going through the purchase a logical next step. The page should showcase the product’s biggest benefits and contain a compelling, yet condensed, call to action.

Another element to keep an eye out for is the length of your purchase form. As a rule of thumb, if you are asking for more information, you are giving users more time to change their minds. Hence, you should only ask for information you absolutely need to complete the conversion.

There are more methods to keep your audience engaged and stop them from leaving their cart. These include setting up a pop-up that shows up when users are about to leave the site, including user reviews and testimonials as well as security signals and certifications, or a money-back guarantee. Lastly, you can use remarketing products abandoned in a cart to the users who left them there.

As you can see, user experience is key to increasing conversions. Your site’s visitors should come to your site because they are interested in a topic, but stay because they enjoy both your unique take on the topic and the features of the site itself. You should make sure to offer some value yourself first and get the audience to care about and trust you. Only then they will be inclined to support you monetarily as well.