When broken down, success in affiliate marketing ultimately rests on three different points: traffic, clicks and conversions. If commissions are faltering (or never actually picked up in the first place) the problem can usually be narrowed down to an issue in one of these three areas.
Traffic refers to the number of readers who actually visit your website. As an affiliate marketer, your readers are your customers for whom you’re providing a product — value. Your blogs and posts, even the ones that do not contain affiliate links, need to provide some sense of value to your readers’ lives. If your traffic has tapered off, compare recent posts against ones that garnered a better rate. Chances are you will be able to spot the differences between them.
Clicks are fairly straightforward. If a reader follows an affiliate link, then he or she has “clicked” and been taken to the product that you wrote about or reviewed. Pretty simple, huh? Just get someone to click a link and viola! You have a click? But, hold your horses, as there is more to it. Readers must be compelled to follow a link, not just presented with the mere option of doing so. Be honest, be optimistic and give your audience what it needs in order to make that click.
Conversions can be a bit trickier and are largely overlooked by many affiliate marketers. After clicking the affiliate link, people have two simple options — make the purchase or don’t. Conversions refer to the clicks that ultimately follow through on a purchase. If you steadily experience slow conversion rates, consider the possibility that the product(s) for which you’re campaigning are not all that great. Take some time to compare other affiliate programs and related products before deciding whether you should stick with your current program or jump ship.
Of course it might seem overly simplistic to narrow down success in this business to three main points, but there is still a lot of room for personal movement and growth within these factors. However, without the secure foundation built by nailing down the right kind of traffic, clicks and conversions, most attempts simply fall through.
Connections in the business world, whether they are with potential clients, long-standing customers or co-workers, need to be genuine. Make no mistake, people can tell when someone is actually concerned about them as opposed to when someone is just trying to make a sale or use the relationship to his or her advantage. So, how do you genuinely connect with someone that you just met or someone with a particularly trying personality? Try some of these tips:
It takes time to learn how to be a good “connector”. Even if you do not consider yourself a “people person,” you can foster these skills over time, learning how to make connections that will positively impact your business for years to come. Fortunately, it’s not all that difficult, and boils down to this: simply treat others how you want to be treated, both personally and professionally.
ragedies, near-death experiences and the loss of a loved one all have one thing in common — reflections. In the period of time following these types of tragedies, people tend to stop and reflect back on their own lives. Has it been worthwhile? Valuable? Driven by purpose? These questions might be simple, but the answers are not.
At the hospital, Schroeder experienced a truly spiritual revelation when a beaming white figure told her that she had not yet finished her work. When she had fully returned to her body and was well enough to leave the hospital, Schroeder set her sights on what she knew to be her purpose — helping individuals find reasonable alternatives to the bloated higher education system.
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Failure gets a bad rap from most people. Of course, no one really likes any type of failure when they are in the process of it, but not everything that is valuable in life is automatically pleasant. Far too often, new entrepreneurs set out for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with virtually no expectations to fail, and, when it inevitably happens, some people never get back up again.
Learning to embrace failure and the lessons that it imparts is by no means an easy task, but is an important one. When the shame and embarrassment that surrounds failure is finally ripped away, entrepreneurs can begin to build the foundation of a successful business by building on the failures of their pasts.
The two owners and founders of BucketFeet, a popular shoe brand that brings together the art world and footwear, started where many newly minted entrepreneurs begin — in their own home. When the first delivery of over 2,500 shoes arrived by 18-wheeler on their residential street, they were stunned when the driver asked for directions to the unloading dock. In the end, the pair shelled out money to the delivery guy and roped in a few friends to help unload thousands of boxes.
However, with each mistake, the two entrepreneurs took measure of the situation and then revamped their plans. Going forward, thousands of pairs of shoes would need a shipping container, a dock to unload and several hands to unload them. Shoe orders should primarily focus on the most common sizes, with fewer numbers of larger and smaller shoes added to the spreadsheet. Firestein and Nemani faced other hurdles during their journey to create a company that now features 30,000 worldwide artists and is worth $16 million, a feat that they would not have been able to accomplish if they had allowed their first missteps to guide them to failure.
But wait! Before making any changes, first identify the reasons behind the slowed or stalled growth. Here are common problems behind affiliate sales plateaus:
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