Ever wondered why bloggers who start an affiliate marketing website soon give up without even making 100 sales? There is a mix of mistakes and bad tactics that lead to an inevitable project shutdown.
Almost all people who start an affiliate blog have the same itinerary. They start by having an idea, acquiring a domain and hosting, installing WordPress, adding web content and sharing it on social networks. Seems like the way to go, right? Well, that road is full of challenges people don’t take into account when starting an affiliate blog.
Let’s say you have a content schedule, an e-mail list, and a strong social follower base, but your affiliate blog isn’t converting…
If you’re in this line of work and feel that affiliate marketing isn’t bringing you the income you’ve hoped for, there’s something wrong. There’s just one thing you can do if you find yourself in that situation – make an affiliate blog audit and check if you find the following reasons why your website isn’t converting.
1. You promoted an affiliate product but that offer expired
A common affiliate blogging mistake is to start promoting a product and not checking the offer status on a regular basis. The reason why your affiliate blog isn’t converting, in this case, is that you’re not paying attention to the offers you push out to readers.
If you want to fix this, start by creating a database for the affiliate products and offers you write about on your blog. Go ahead and set up reminders to check those offers to see if they expire anytime soon. When you find an expired offer, don’t just delete that content but find something to replace it with.
2. You have a lot of broken links
Most times, using affiliate links require you to add some sort of URL parameter or to use a link cloaking service. These options are great because they allow you to see how many people click on your affiliate links but they have a strong disadvantage since they don’t tell you if the link is broken.
You see people clicking on affiliate links but they’re not converting? This may be a good time to check the status of those links. Maybe the product isn’t available anymore and the advertiser link is removed or maybe you added some bad characters to the affiliate URL.
When you create the affiliate links database for your blog, don’t forget to also check for broken links from time to time.
Is your affiliate landing page converting?3. Your landing page isn’t converting
While most affiliate bloggers use links from blog posts to promote products, others use landing pages. We’re not saying one strategy is better than the other and we’d recommend you to try them both. If you use landing pages, always remember to perform A/B tests and check them often for converting statistics. If a landing page isn’t converting, you’ll need to update or remove it, depending on the case.
Read more: 7 Steps To Unlock The Full Potential Of Landing Pages.
4. You have traffic problems
If the offer you’re promoting is a top seller but you still aren’t converting on your affiliate blog, there’s probably something wrong with your traffic numbers. In most cases you’re probably not sending enough traffic to the advertiser website to have a high conversion rate. That’s a bigger issue and you should look into ways of improving your website traffic.
Another traffic-related reason why your website isn’t converting could be that you’re not sending the RIGHT kind of traffic. This happens more often than you’d believe. People start a blog in a certain niche but they promote offers that aren’t related to their affiliate blog. Even if you have high traffic on your website, if your readers aren’t interested in the product you’re promoting, your conversion rate will be extremely low.
5. You don’t have a strong email marketing strategy
One of the best strategies to increase your affiliate blog conversion is to match it up with email marketing. You can do this by creating an email list (or more!) for your blog readers and use it to promote affiliate products. If you’re doing this and you’re still not converting as much as you’d like, there’s a big problem with your email marketing strategy.
The good news is that there’s a simple fix to this. Scriptly has a lot of email sequences you can use to sell affiliate products using email lists. You just need to sign up for an account and customize the email sequence that is proven to sell more.