subject: Affiliate Marketing Success: Tools and Tricks to Make the Most of Your Business [print this page] Affiliate Marketing Success: Tools and Tricks to Make the Most of Your Business
Successful affiliate marketing involves firstly selecting the right products and then ensuring you use the most effective promotional techniques to maximise your returns.
You must not regard your business as a set-and-forget' affair but rather one where you keep trying different promotional techniques and constantly analyze the results they bring in.
The good news is that you will often find no shortage of promotional materials and choosing the right ones is where the real skill is involved.If you are content at selecting a couple of banner adverts at random and place them haphazardly on your site then you can expect rather haphazard results from your limited efforts.On the other hand if you give care and consideration to your website and make it easy for visitors to navigate around and get the information they are looking for then you will have far greater success.
Striking the right balance between relevant content and an eye-catching mix of advertising and promotional materials will be key to your business. Also don't think you simply make one choice and then stick with it because you are always free to make changes as and when required.
If you choose a banner advert and it does not pull in the returns then replace it with another and see how that performs. Maybe the ad is too large and slows down the opening of your webpage or is too small and difficult to read. Maybe one just works better than another; you don't know why one banner is better than another, simply use the one which works best.
Feel free to experiment with the size and position of your adverts and your hard work in testing and tweaking your website will pay off. What works will depend on the overall look and feel of your website and you will have to experiment to find out what is best for you.
You will also want to find a balance between adverts which stand out and capture the visitor's attention and those that are just so overpowering that they detract from the other content of your page. The overall page has to look good, not just the adverts it contains.
Also don't be tempted to cram too many promotional materials to your site as this will make it look cluttered and over-complicated. Instead choose wisely and select a more limited range of materials which fit together to make your website look attractive to the eye.
Remember you want to encourage visitors to stay and look around and not present them with a chaotic frenzy of ads and images which makes them want to lie down in a darkened room.
Keep in mind too that just because you are promoting someone else's product does not mean that you have to automatically send visitors away to the product owner's site.
Instead have an opt-in form linked to an autoresponder on your website so you can capture the email addresses of any visitors who complete your form. Naturally you will have to offer them some sort of incentive to join your list but then you can market to them via email as well.
Because not everyone who wants to buy will do so on the first visit to your site, a short series of well-written emails from you may provide just enough extra incentive to turn them into buyers.
Email has another great advantage in that you can ask the members of your list what types of products and services they want to buy. Then make sure you source these products and add them to your affiliate product range without delay.
Do all this and your site will always stay fresh and up to date and your product range will evolve and change to reflect the demands of your customers.
