One of the most important lessons I learned when making money with websites is to increase website conversions.

One key aspect of doing this, is to make sure you remain relevant to your visitor at all times and also have a clear non confusing message. In this post I will be discussing this concept and how it can help you make more money.

Whether you are running a PPC campaign or driving free traffic from the search engines, relevancy is vital in order to keep the visitor on your webpage and also interested in what you’re offering.

Far too often I see web pages that do not do this, and the result can be very low conversion rates for the webmaster. It really isn’t rocket science, and is more down to common sense.

Take for example a landing page used for a PPC campaign. From the moment the visitor reads your ads headline to the point where they complete a sale, you must be consistent with your message and relevant through the whole process.

I’ll explain this in more detail below, but I also want to add that this is just as important for any form of traffic that you are driving to your pages. Whether free traffic from the search engines, a video or JV traffic, it’s all about being consistent and relevant to the visitor.

Let’s stick with the example of a PPC campaign. Once the visitor has read your headline, and then your ad and decided to click it to be taken to your landing page, they’ve already formulated in their mind what they’re expecting to see when they arrive there.

They formulate their expectations based on the original keyword they typed into the search engine and also from reading your ad itself. This is pretty obvious, I’m sure you’ll agree. However the issue that arises is when the visitor lands on a page and the consistency is no longer continued. The result is usually a swift hit on the back button and the sales process grinds to a halt.

If you’re selling dog insurance, then if would not be a good idea to send traffic that is specifically looking for this kind of insurance, to a page that offers this amongst many other forms of insurance.

Yes you’re offering the visitor what they want, but what you’ve done is made them work for it. You don’t want the visitor to have to think for even 1 second, “what do I have to do now?”. If the user asks that question, you’re very close to losing them altogether.

Often in affiliate networks like Commission Junction, which I like to use and are a great network, they don’t make it that obvious how to create a very targeted affiliate link.

The risk is that affiliates end up sending their traffic to the home page of the merchants site in hope that the visitor will just find where he/she needs to go. This is a terrible mistake to make, not from Commission Junction but from the affiliate.

If you’re a Clickbank affiliate this is not a problem, because you usually just have one page to send the traffic to. However when you are dealing with merchants who have giant catalogs of products, you need to make sure you create specific deep links that take the visitor straight to the product that is most relevant.

So what are some other reasons that consistency is lost?

Some of the common mistakes I see, are having a weak headline on the page that doesn’t have benefits, and simply doesn’t immediately reinforce to the visitor that they are indeed on the right page.

Also when you’re running PPC campaigns, it’s a good idea to create many different landing pages, each one tailored to the keywords that you are driving traffic with. By having multiple landing pages you can ensure that you tailor make each one to be as consistent to the original keywords and to the ad you used. This will also help with your quality score with Google.

Another common issue I see that causes conversions to drop off is having too many messages on a page. What I mean by this, is the page might have multiple options for the visitor to take, and this only confuses the visitor and again causes them to hit the back button.

An interesting article I read recently discussed how generation ‘Y’ internet users are much less patience than older generations, and they’re very quick to hit the back button or close a site if it confuses them, loads slowly or simply doesn’t get to the point fast enough.

I for one found this very interesting, because it means that for these internet users it is vitally important to keep their focus, which is done by remaining relevant and clear with all your pages.

What I’ve found works well is ensuring that my pages have strong benefits, great headlines, and only have two options for the visitor to take. They either click my affiliate link (or leave their email if I am email marketing) or hit the back button.

Another simple trick to do is make sure your affiliate links open the merchants page in a new window. By opening the landing page in a new window it leaves your website open in their browser, so they may well come back to it later if they didn’t quite find what they wanted the first time, which can slightly increase the opportunity of another sale from your site.

One last thought I want to leave you with, is if you are choosing to collect email addresses via an squeeze page, I have found that I get a lot more opt ins when I clearly explain what the visitor will receive and how they will receive it, before they opt in. Don’t expect the visitor to be as excited about your free opt in incentive as you might be, you need to spell out the benefits, and it’s always a good idea to let them know that they can very easily unsubscribe at anytime they want.

Matt Carter

There are many things that I do to make sure that I select great keywords for search engine optimization, such as the competition level and the search volume, however one other important thing to do is check the viability of akeyword.

By this I mean, is the keywords likely to make money, and is it in an active niche where money is being spent. Recently I did a post on Google trends, so if you haven’t read that then here is the link: Best Selling Affiliate Products.

One easy way to check this is to use the free Google Search Based Keyword Tool. All you need to do is type in your intended keyword phrase and check out how much money per click Google suggests you would need to spend on PPC Advertising for it. If you see that at least 50 cents a click is the going rate, then this is a good indication.

Below is a screen shot for you:

In the image above I have entered the keyword phrase “affiliate marketing” for example purposes. You can see where I have circled in blue that the price for this keyword is $3.77. This tells me that people are willing to spend money on this keyword, which is a strong indication to me that it is a viable option for me to go after for SEO.

Considering that SEO takes much longer than PPC marketing, it is important to select the right keywords from the start, otherwise you may regret it later. The last thing you want to do is spend weeks and months building links to a page so you can rank it for a particular keyword, only to find out later, when you are getting traffic from that phrase, that there is not much money in it.

This is one, of many simple but effective affiliate marketing strategies that you can implement for free, to help ensure you are building your sites on profitable keywords. I can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure you take the time to select the right keywords for any site you are planning out.

All the best

Matt Carter

]]> http://mattsmarketingblog.com/affiliate-marketing/affiliate-marketing-strategies/feed/ 31 http://mattsmarketingblog.com/affiliate-marketing/best-selling-affiliate-products/ http://mattsmarketingblog.com/affiliate-marketing/best-selling-affiliate-products/#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:32:08 +0000 Matt Carter http://mattsmarketingblog.com/?p=1055 One of the most common questions I get asked by people is “what are the best selling affiliate products?” It’s a great question and one that we all ask at some point, so in this post I’m going to discuss this topic and also tell you about a great free Google tool that I use.

Although I do sell and will continue to promote information products as an affiliate, I am preferring to target physical products more these days, because I am simply getting better results from them. My conversions are higher and the opportunities are huge, because there are more products to choose from.

I find health supplements sell very well, as people who have some sort of health problem are very willing to pay good money to remove the problem, and get their quality of life back. Any kind of health related product tends to fall into the category of best selling affiliate products from my experience, just make sure you choose good keywords to market them on.

Google Trends

Google provide some fantastic free tools to help online marketers, and one of my favorites, that I use when analyzing potential products to promote is Google Trends.  This tool allows you to see the search volume of keywords over time, which is a great indication of how well the products in the niche sell.

Recently I was looking for more physical product ideas to set up a site for, and the niche I was looking at was Snowboards and Ski gear. I thought it could be a great niche to be in, as the keywords I was looking at had decent search volume.

However it didn’t take long for me to see my flaw, because when I typed in “snowboard gear” into Google Trends, there was a huge spike in the North American winter.

This is a more obvious example of trending, as it is caused by seasonal variations, however if I had just gone on the average yearly search volume, I might not have made many sales during the Snowboarding off season for North America.

However you can also look at the trend over years and see if the niche is growing over time, or slowly dying out. If you search in Google Trends for “Buy Halloween Costumes” you can see that the trend seems to be going up since 2007, therefore you might be able to find some easy to rank on keywords with search volume, and whip up a Halloween blog promoting costumes as an affiliate and make some decent sales, even if it is only once a year.

Google Trends also provides some other interesting info about the location of people who are typing in keywords. This info can be very useful if you want to do geo targeting. For example you might be selling product XYZ, and decide to target a keyword with the city name in it, EG. Product XYZ New York. Building large geo targeted sites can often work well, even if each keyword has lower search volume, you can make up for it with many pages on your site.

The best selling affiliate products are ones that are evergreen, and potentially bring in sales all year round. However you can still make some great sales at certain times of year, such as Halloween if you are selling costumes, but just be aware that the sales will not last long. Also as mentioned anything health related is also sells well.

***IMPORTANT NOTE***

For those of you who are not aware, I’m running two in depth workshops on selling physical products over a 2 week period for anyone that grabs CWealthsystem through me, where I will be going into a lot more detail on marketing physical products as an affiliate and revealing some great niches to target, how to pick the best keywords, SEO, link building and much more…

Plus you get a whole lot of extra stuff too, such as templates and the Keywords Academy product for free also. To join the others who have already signed, up all you need to do is grab cwealthsystem through my affiliate link and email me your receipt.

For full details you can either watch the webinar I did recently with Daniel from Cwealthsystem here: Cashing in with Physical Products Webinar, which has got some awesome free content in their for you. Or you can skip straight to the bonus video here: Mega Bonus Pack. which contains the link you need.

All the best with your marketing

Matt Carter

In this post I’ll be discussing some of the best affiliate networks, and provide people alternatives to sticking with Clickbank.

There’s nothing wrong with Clickbank as such, but the problem is, that it can be pretty competitive. If you just branch out a little, you’ll find there are other networks, with great physical products that convert extremely well and have less competition.

I have harped on about this next point a lot, but I don’t care, I’m going to continue to harp on because it will help you. When you are considering a product to promote make sure you choose BUYER keywords to target, do NOT fall into the trap of targeting info seeker keywords (end of rant).

The reason I slotted that in there, was because in the Clickbank Marketplace when you are looking at products to promote, some of the easiest keywords to make money with are product names, and product name review. However although there is still plenty of easy money to be made targeting these keywords in Clickbank, and variations of these, there is a sea of opportunity out there, with less competition when you venture to other networks.

I for one prefer to promote physical products, although I do still promote a lot of digital stuff from Clickbank too. So with that said, I have listed below some other networks that you might like to consider.

Keep in mind that Clickbank auto-approves all affiliates, but most other networks are not that easy. This doesn’t mean you can’t get in, because you most certainly can, but there are some things that you might like to consider to help your chances, which I have also listed below.

Getting Accepted Into a Network

You need to have a some form of a website in most cases. If you don’t have a website, then you can just buy a domain and set up a wordpress blog template of one, add 6-10 articles on the niche topic, make it look pretty, and off you go.

Also quite a few, but not all networks, require telephone contact with you before they will accept you, this is mainly the CPA networks. So make sure that you do not miss the call from them, or you’ll instantly get rejected.

When you are filling out the ‘your experience’ field on the application form, ensure you make yourself sound as good as you can. I am not suggesting you falsify information, I am just saying that the more detail, and the more you can show them that you have a clue and know what you are talking about, the much higher the chance of getting accepted.

It’s all pretty easy really, in fact I applied for new affiliate network the other day, and they called me, and the questions they asked where the following:

• How do you drive traffic? (SEO, PPC etc…)
• What sort of traffic to you drive (highly targeted keyword specific traffic)
• Where does your traffic come from? (country, say USA and UK)
• What offers are you considering promoting in our network?
• If you were accepted today how long until you started driving traffic?
• What sort of websites do you build? (this depend on your approach, but saying article sites is fine)

These are all pretty straight forward questions, but it helps to have a good answer ready to give them. Oh yeah and try not to say that you have no experience, because if you’ve read my blog posts and are on my list then, you’ll have learned a fair amount, so you are experienced, even if you haven’t made the money yet, it will come soon….

Best Affiliate Networks

Commission Junction – are probably the largest affiliate network there is, and they have a huge range of niches and products. They are a great network, but what I don’t like about them is that it’s a little tricky to navigate to the offers, as the layout is not that user friendly. But there are a HUGE amount of buyer keyword opportunities for products that you can target in here.

Linkshare – These guys are not that hard to get accepted into, which is good, and they also have a large range of products to promote, including some great electronics and gadgets.

ShareAsale – Another decent sized network, and again acceptance is not too hard here either. Commission payments are good too.

Market Health – This is a great natural health market place, with great commissions and a large range of products.

MoreNiche – Yet another great health network, with products for all sorts of conditions. The payments are decent too, and the landing pages pretty good.

Max Bounty – These guys are a CPA network, and they have a lot of different offers, ranging from debt relief and insurance to health and beauty.

There are of course many other networks out there that are also good, however these are some of the best affiliate networks. So remember the tips I mentioned about getting accepted, and all the best!

Matt Carter

I’m going to share with  you some affiliate marketing tricks in this post, that I  use when in a tough niche, or just want to accelerate my progress in any new niche.

One of the most common obstacles that a new website faces, when they are trying to rank at the top of Google (and by Google I am referring to Yahoo and Bing also) is the lack of trust Google has in new domains.

In the past I have bought brand new domains and then gone out a unleashed a back linking tsunami on the new site on that new domain, and noticed that still some pages just take forever to rank.

Sometimes it can be even more frustrating when Google does rank the pages on a new domain straight away, right up on page one, only to then remove them for 6 months, until they feel they can trust the domain.

By the way if this does happen to you, it is nothing to worry about, as in my experience if you just keep building links to the domain, after about 6-8 months it shows up at the top of Google again, and all is well.

However this is obviously not the ideal situation, and one that I prefer not to go through if I can help it. So with that pretext in place, now let me tell you one trick that I use to help avoid this and rank new websites fast and consistently.

Buying Aged Domains

The sub-heading pretty much gives it all away right there, because buying an aged domain, of say 5 years, and preferably with some page rank already, is the instant ‘Trust’ that you can give Google!!

All you need to do is find a domain for sale that will work with your niche and new website and then build your new site on that, and off you go. Google will trust your site, as it believes it to be a domain that has been around for a while, and it has already got some page rank.

What to Look For in an Aged Domain

When I’m looking for a domain to buy, and I will explain how I do that in a moment, I’ll look to see how old it is and if there is any page rank. To find out the age you can go here: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/ and simply search on the domain in the search bar and they will give you the details of that domain.

By doing this you’ll also find the contact details of the owner, so that you can contact them directly and make them an offer.

Depending on how competitive your niche is, will influence what you look for in a domain. I just bought one this week that was 5 years old and page rank 1, and the whole process from finding it to owning it took about 24 hrs.

How to Find an Domain for Sale

The easiest way to find a domain related to your niche that is for sale is to go to Google and start searching, by using the following search queries:

inurl:keyword “domain name is for sale”
inurl:keyword “website is for sale”
inurl:keyword “buy this domain”
inurl:keyword “domain is for sale”

(replace the word ‘keyword’ above with your keywords)

Then by using a free plugin called ‘SEO Quake’ you can sort the results by page rank. I have explained in a previous post how to use SEO Quake so please refer here: SEO Quake Tutorial to learn how to use it)

Once you have entered your search query, turn SEO Quake on  and then sort for highest to lowest page rank and start checking out the domains for sale.

If you have no luck with those searches, you can always just search with out the “domain name is for sale” part on the end, and just look for sites that have age and at least a page rank of 1.

The type of site you are looking for are ones that look like they are not that serious about their marketing, and have average looking sites, sort of a hobby if you like. These kind of sites are usually the best ones to want to sell when they are approached.

Then all you need to do is negotiate a price with the owner, make them set the price and then offer under half what they offer, and go from there.

I have found that using this trick enables me to get started in new niches much faster, because my web pages respond really well to back linking and get top Google ranking faster than on new domains.

You do not need to do this though, as most of my sites are on new domains, but I just wanted to share with you guys  these affiliate marketing tricks that I sometimes use to get fast results.

Hope that helped

Matt

I often get asked how I pick a profitable niche market, and what keywords I choose. These are of course very good questions indeed.

So in this post I thought it might be helpful to share an example of a market and product that I came across, which I don’t have time to build a site in, but maybe one of you will.

I should also add that this style of affiliate site is for Amazon affiliate marketing, which is very easy to get accepted into, all you need is a website!

Ok so let’s get straight into it, the product that I came across is ‘Morphy Richards Breadmaker’. I don’t know much about this brand of breadmaker, but I don’t need to know much either. What I first did was go to the Google keyword tool and check what sort of search volume this product has.

Typing in the phrase “Morphy Richards Breadmaker” into the keyword tool, shows me that an exact match gives 8,100 searches a month, which is great!

Next I do a quick competition analysis of the keyword for SEO, and what I found was that on the front page of Google that there is not one website directly targeting this phrase. By that I mean no one has the term “Morphy Richards Breadmaker” in their title, keyword, description or H1 tags of the page!!

Now I look for the number of backlink to these sites on the front page of Google have, and to my surprize the most is only 15 links!

So this keyword phrase is really really easy for SEO, and it is highly targeted, because it a brand name.

Affiliate Sites

I did some more research and found this site:

http://www.morphyrichardsbreadmaker.com

This is a great example of a site that is an Amazon affiliate and is targeting this brand of bread maker. Notice that they are targeting many model numbers too.

Although the model number may not get much search volume, it you have enough of them, it will soon add up. So you could make a simple site, like the example above and target the phrase “morphy richards breadmaker” and also all the model numbers, and before you know it have a 20 page site!

The only problem with Amazon affiliate marketing, is that the commission is low, and is usually about 4%. However often customers will buy more than one item, and so the basket size increases and so do your commissions (especially around Christmas).

Morphy Breadmakers may only get you $5 commission a sale, but if you can get top Google rankings for many keywords, that are highly targeted, then you can have yourself a nice little money earner. Just remember many streams form a large river! Also the best thing is that the SEO is pretty easy for these keywords too.

That’s all from me, I hope this post opened up some new ideas of different types of sites you can build and also the potential with Amazon affiliate marketing too

Matt Carter

I am about to share with you today some really important tactics that you need to be using on your affiliate marketing sites.

I have noticed recently, from emails people have been sending me, that a lot of people are leaving money on the table with their affiliate marketing sites, by not monetizing their pages properly.

This is a real shame, because you can work so hard to get traffic, however that can all be wasted if your pages are not laid out correctly. So that’s what I am going to talk about in this post.

Affiliate Links

We all know that an affiliate marketing site needs to have affiliate links on the page, that’s a no brainer (I hope). However what I like to do with my links is make them VERY obvious, and lay them out in such a way that they draw the attention of the visitor.

There are a few simple but effective ways to do this. The first thing is to use BOLD font for you links, and also include arrows surrounding them in some cases. Below is an example:

==>Click HERE To Get Your FREE Acne Cream Trial<==

That would work well for a CPA offer where the customer gets a free trial of the product. Notice how I always tell the visitor what to do in the link and reinforce the benefit of clicking here.

I will usually have 2 or 3 of these links inside my article, spread out, and have them placed directly after a very strong benefit that I have mentioned in the body of the article.

Ideally if you set up your affiliate marketing sites so that the web pages are all targeting BUYER keywords, then really you want to get them to click those links as fast as you can, and shuffle them over to the merchant and let them take care of closing the sale.

Affiliate Banner Ads

Make sure that you check the affiliate resources section of the merchant that you are marketing for, and see what kind of advertising they have for you. A good merchant will have a range of image ads, all different shapes and sizes that you can use on your affiliate marketing sites.

There are a couple of places that I like to place ads on my affiliate sites, and I think this will be best described using a diagram, as you can see below.

Now this is just one way to lay out an article page to increase conversions, however it does work really well on a number of my affiliate marketing sites.

You will notice that in the top left I have a product shot, and this usually only done when I am writing a review of a product. Make sure though that the product shot image is still an affiliate link that can be clicked!!

Above The Fold

The above image may not have really illustrated this next point that clearly, however what I also make sure I do is have as many obvious image ads and text links above the fold of the page, without making the page look silly of course. I don’t want visitors to my sites to have to scroll down before they see the ads and links. Doing this can increase you click through rate to the merchant and henceforth sales!

Headlines

If you are going to to use headlines on your affiliate pages, then try and make them have some form of a benefit to catch the readers attention.

This next point is more aimed at sales letters, however it is a good trick to know nonetheless, and that is to make sure that your headlines tell a story in themselves.

What I mean by this is, if the visitor scans you page quickly and only reads the headlines, then make sure they tell a story that flows, on there own. So they either skim the headlines and are convinced to take action, or at least keep reading the rest of the copy.

Apart from these tips, what I always say is remember not to try and sell too hard in your copy, and instead opt for a more balanced but still convincing approach, as I have found that helps my conversions also on my affiliate marketing sites.

Matt Carter