Track visitors, analyze, understand and act
I wrote a while ago about the anxiety of the affiliates waiting for the first sale to happen. Most of the people willing to start an affiliate business don't actually make it to the first sale. As a result, waiting for the first site visitors & waiting for the first sale are major sources of anxiety and frustration.
The thing is that actually the first sale doesn't solve the problem, as waiting for the second can be equally painful and frustrating. If there are things to do to have the first sale, then you should know that there are things to do for the second one and for the next to come.
Of course, regular things like building traffic, choosing a niche product, optimize landing pages for high conversion pre-sales still remain valid. But if you really want to replicate the conditions that helped the first sale, there are some easy steps you should take to align the stars again in their lucky position.
1. Track visitors
Not sure about you, but when I did my first affiliate sale I almost fell off the chair. When the excitement went away, the first thing I did was to see the path and actions the buyer did to purchase the product. So the first thing to do is:
- Use Google Analytics, Statcounter(or anything else) to track the visitor behavior on your site. If you set the right goals in Analytics then you can track exactly what the visitor did, what pages he visited and where he spent most of his time. Interested in advanced visitor tracking? Try out our Analytics Mini-Bible. While it is designed for software vendors you might find some nice tips and tricks you can use on your affiliate website.
2. Analyze. Understand
Tracking the visitor helped me understand the conditions that led to the sale for that particular site visitor. Things that you should be looking for, analyzing and understanding are:
- Very often, visitors will not arrive on your homepage. They will get to the page that is most relevant for the search they did, which means you have to work hard and give the same level of importance to any page that is supposed to convert into a sale.
- Who has referred your visitor? If it's Google, then look for the keywords. If it's another site, check why the site has a link to yours.
- Keywords that the visitor used to get to your site. You will be amazed that most of your visitors don't search for the product name (because if they do, it means they already know the product and they can go directly at the producer) but terms in the long tail. Meaning that they search for something that solves their needs, and if your page has the relevant answer, then this is how they will get to you.
- Maybe you had a promotion running that made the sale? Or anything special that increased the chances to close the sale? If you have such marketing actions, be sure to outline them both on the website and in the keywords.
3. Take action
If you really understood what happen that made your sales, then is time to work on things to replicate and even enhance the conditions.
- Check what improvements you could do to your most successful (until now) page. Add more content if needed, or make it even more straightforward - anything that has to do with the conversion rate.
- If Google has referred your visitor, maybe you could do some improvements on the keywords that are already used to score even higher!
- If it's another site that has referred your visitor, then either try to get even more links from it, or search for other similar sites that could refer you buyers.
- Unfortunately, sometimes visitor tracking ends the moment when the potential buyer entered the Merchant site. This means that you can't really do much to improve conversion for the visitors that are already on the vendor site, but you could probably at least check with the merchant if it's possible to track the visitor behavior on their site as well.
- If it's a promotion or anything special that did the trick, how can you replicate it? Ask for help from the merchants, they can offer you special promotions or anything else that you discovered can help you make sales.
Maybe the first sale only gave you a couple of bucks. But that's not really important, you should use it as a learning experience, because knowledge on how to repeat sales is far more important that the revenues from the first couple of sales. Either you decide to repeat the sale for the same product or you diversify with other products applying the same techniques, the second sale it's not easy to do.
Bottom line is that now you know that affiliate sales are possible.
