Ron Davies

Last night I had the pleasure of being on one of Craig Beckta`s membership teleconferences as his guest speaker. I had the oppurtunity to address some of the challenges that Craig’s members face on a daily basis in the course of doing affiliate marketing.

• Selecting suitable affiliate products that would convert wealth but were not already over promoted and the marketplace;
• Building correctly structured landing pages for the selected product that were key word rich;
• Securing traffic to the landing page that was targeted to the products they are promoting;
• Harvesting this traffic to build their last while delivering a traffic to the product for sales conversion; and
• Split-testing headlines and call to action in our ad copy.

Ron Davies

 

Don`t put a little bandaid on the `MONEY CUT`!

Traffic from PPC, traffic from organic seo, traffic from partner sites, traffic from directories, traffic from social bookmarking, the list goes on and on. We are all competing and chasing traffic. Traffic becomes an obsession, almost like searching for boxes when we are getting ready to move to a new home.

But, like a move, it is possible that we are overlooking other parts of the formula. Remember, traffic is only a part of the overall formula for your little online money machine of a website.

Total Revenue = (Visitors x Conversion) + (Retained Customers x Backend Sales)

In other words, if you are throwing traffic at a site that does not convert, you may as well not have traffic. The other side of that coin is that if you are throwing untargetted traffic at a site that converts well, you may as well not have a site.

To further express this, if you are sending quality traffic to a site that converts well, and the quality of the product is such that customer loyalty is lost, you are losing quite a bit of money off the proverbial table as well, as your opportunity for backend sales to the now pissed off customer (I know, language!) faded away when they refunded the first product because it was, in their opinion anyway, a p.o.s.

This is particularly true for affiliate marketers. If you are a vendor and your affiliates knock themselves out to bring traffic which converts to sales only to have the item refunded due to a quality or misrepresentation issue, how long do you think that affiliate is going to stick around flogging your goods.

Ask a few painful questions before you send even one single visitor to your site again;

1. is this the right traffic for this product or service – will the visitors I am sending be interested in it?
2. am I sending the traffic to a landing page (affiliate or vendor) that converts into sales?
3. am I harvesting the list information from this traffic on my page? For example a Clickbank affiliate should NEVER send traffic directly to a hoplink. It is a way to literally hemorrhage money!
4. am I going to see a high level of refunds? Does the product ad copy write cheques that the underlying product can’t cash? In other words, am I going to see a high refund rate? How do I work around this?
5. am I selling into the back end of this purchase? If you don’t have a “one time offer” setup, as either a vendor or an affiliate (affiliates can do it too!)  you ARE hemorrhaging money!

The long and the short of it is this, if you are not addressing these issues, more traffic will NOT solve a revenue problem. It might hide it, but it will NOT solve it.

My job is to teach you how to do this right, and looking after all the above is a big part of it.

Ron Davies

Ron Davies