Do You Waste Your Affiliate Traffic?

How can I be wasting my traffic, you may ask. The more traffic I get to my site, the merrier. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Your goal as an affiliate marketing should not be traffic. You can’t eat traffic. You can’t take traffic to the bank and cash it. You can’t take traffic to Walmart and  buy groceries. So unless you convert that traffic to sales, then more traffic is not that important.

Now there are exceptions to that rule. If you are building a brand and just pushing content to your site to gain authority status in your market, then you can probably get excited with your traffic level. But affiliate marketing at the end of the day is all about conversion and profits.

So you spend money to get more traffic to your site, then you should at least try to convert them to customers. You can’t simply let them go through your pages hoping for a click on your ads or links. You should be proactive in getting them to convert. You are wasting your time if:

• You do not have an easy-to-navigate website: unlike some experts say, usability actually matteres. The easier your site is to get around, the better conversion rate you are going to get. If going through your site is similar to solving out a very tough maze, then you shouldn’t expect any favors from your visitors.
• You do not call for action: I know some of us like to be nice and don’t be pushy about things. But if you want to sell, you should provide enough call to action for folks to take action. No call to action can lower your sales by as much as 100%!
• You do not grab your users information: you drive traffic to your site and let them just take the offer you have for them? That is wrong! Wrong! Wrong! You should grab your visitors’ information by asking them to sign up for your newsletter. Throw a nice bonus for them. Just get them to join your list and you can sell more and more.
• You do not retain your visitors: your visits should not be one time deals. If your analytics software is telling you that people don’t come back to your site after their first visit, then you should try to change the tide by asking them to join your RSS feed or provide them with an incentive to come back again. Affiliate marketing is more lucrative if you can do  business with people for more than one time.
• You do not test: I can’t emphasize this poitn enough. If you don’t test, you are not going to be able to improve your conversion rate on your affiliate site. It’s hard and boring but as soon as you see the larger checks you realize you have done the right thing.

There are many other ways you can waste your traffic. Here is my advice for you: don’t! Do yourself a favor and at least do just the bare minimum to retain your visitors. That way your advertising cost becomes an investment cost and not a sunk one.