7 Tips to Boost Your Blogs Affiliate Conversions

Are you driving traffic to your website but not seeing any sales for your affiliate promotions? Before you try other traffic sources or change the offer, you may want to take a look at how your landing page and the sales process is set up. Many affiliates tend to overlook conversion rate optimization in their campaigns You should definitely plan before you start affiliate programs. But before you start your affiliate program, make sure that you have gone through an affiliate marketing training. If you are trying to make your campaign work, here are seven things you can do to boost your affiliate conversions:

1. Use Social Proof and/or Your Personal Recommendation to Sell

Sometimes people need extra reassurance before they make a purchase. Using social proof is a great way to add credibility and trust to the offer. By posting images of customers, reviews from third-party sites, news mentions, and star ratings from reputable sites, you remove a lot of skepticism on the part of the buyer.

If you have established authority and credibility for yourself on your site and blog, then giving your stamp of approval is a great way to sell a product or service. Many affiliates will try too hard to promote their offer through a salesy approach when it would be far better to simply recommend the product to an engaged audience.

This can be done through a review approach. Simply walk through how you’re using the product, your overall experience of the product, and the pros/cons of the product to provide helpful insight to your audience. Using elements like product images, bio photos, and demonstrations will also help immensely.

2. Incentivize Your Offer

When you’re promoting an offer that is competitive, it can be easy to lose the sale to another affiliate, merchant, or competing offer. To ensure that the customer makes the purchase from you, you can provide an incentive for buying through your link. The incentive can be anything from cash back, additional bonuses, to a one-on-one consultation.

You have to really think about what kind of incentive would be valuable to the customer. For example, a customer buying an expensive printer would find value in a set of printer ink cartridges. It makes perfect sense to offer this customer this bonus for buying through your link.

You also need to sell the incentive and add some context. Give the customer reasons why your incentive is valuable. Explain why the bonuses complement the product. The bonus may cover for a product weakness, make the product more effective, or add more utility to the product.

3. Demonstrate the Product or Service Being Used

Some products and services can be difficult to explain in text. In these cases, it’s always a good idea to show the product or service being used. This gives customers a better idea of what they’ll get inside the package, what the exact features are, what the main functions are, and what kind of value they can expect.

For example, if you’re selling a software subscription service, you’ll want to use things like screenshots and short videos of how the software works. You can demonstrate a core function, explain the various features, and show the user interface layout to provide an inside peek into the platform.

This works incredibly well for physical products as well. You often find products with image and video demonstrations selling better than competing products that only show the photos of the product in the eCommerce world. When you provide demonstrations, things start clicking in the heads of customers. They begin to get an idea of how they would personally use the product or service.

4. Focus on Generating the Lead and Send a Follow Up Series

Many affiliates often go straight for the sale. This is often understandable when you’re dealing with paid campaigns and you need to see an ROI on your ad spend or if you’ve enlisted the aid of an SEO agency. But even in these cases, it can be better to focus on generating the lead. There are several advantages of generating the lead over going for the straight sale.

When you generate the lead, you can send a follow-up series that educates and sells the person on your offer. This gives you more time to promote your offer and also gives you the ability to contact the person multiple times. The approach that works well with email is a good balance of educational content and sales promotions.

Even if you do not end up generating a sale from your leads, you have the opportunity to promote other related offers that they may be interested in. Some affiliates focus on building relationships with their email lists and try to establish themselves as a credible authority so that they can promote offers later to a more responsive audience.

5. Use Videos to Support Your Sales Presentation

Videos have become a powerful tool in the sales process. If you have the opportunity to use video in your affiliate promotion, then you should do so. It can make a big difference in your affiliate conversions. This is especially the case for competitive offers as many affiliates won’t bother to spend time producing good videos.

There are many different types of videos you can use to support your affiliate promotion. This includes testimonial videos, product demonstration videos, general review videos, and sales presentation videos. Think about what kind of video would do the best job to support your affiliate blog promotion.

There are additional benefits of producing these videos. You can upload them to social media, add them to YouTube, and share them on other content platforms. Google also ranks video listings over regular listings if they think that video does a better job in serving the user’s search query.

6. Write Content for Your Target Audience, Not the Search Engines

Many affiliates create content for the sole purpose of ranking their page in the search engines. However, they can get carried away by over-optimizing their content. There can be many problems with this including too many keywords being used, language sounding robotic, and the flow of the content being ruined.

“Content should include relevant keywords, without stuffing them,” says Jason Berkowitz from Break The Web in NYC. “We follow TF*IDF protocol when implementing keywords/search terms into content to ensure the content remains natural, engaging and relevant.”

A great way to write content that is engaging and valuable to the audience is to simply write for the audience first. Once you’ve written some quality content, you can go back and start optimizing it for the search engines. The process of writing for human users is far more difficult if you’ve written it for the search engine robots first.

7. Optimize Your Copy and Design

Sometimes the problem with poor conversions can be simply attributed to poor copy and design. Look through your blog affiliate promotion and see if the copy really pulls you in. Does the headline make a big impact on the audience? Does the first paragraph lead you in to make you want to learn more about the rest of the post? If the answer is no, you need to do a copy overhaul.

Other times it’s the actual blog design that’s getting in the way. For instance, using too small of a font can negatively impact your conversions. You want to use a font that has high readability and is clear on both desktop and mobile device screens. You also need to make sure your formatting helps support your content and sales copy. The key is to try different colors, fonts, layouts, and formatting to see what works best.

Another common problem that gets ignored is loading times. Each additional second in loading time hurts your conversion rates significantly. You want to use Google’s speed test tool to evaluate your blog’s loading speed. Then you want to follow up with Google’s suggestions to make improvements.

In conclusion, these seven tips should help lift your blog’s affiliate conversions significantly. Don’t always assume that it’s the traffic or offer that’s the problem. Sometimes the issues are simpler than you think and can be solved quite easily.