6 Vital Steps to Find a Good Affiliate Program

If you want to do well in affiliate marketing, it is not only essential to promote products that are in demand and will convert well; you must find a reputable affiliate program to work with. Working with a reputable affiliate program relieves affiliate marketers of many marketing concerns. By so doing, the main duty of the affiliate becomes simply to promote products/services while the affiliate program takes care of other marketing concerns like marketing tools, training, payment of commissions and customer care. An affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI, aside from being the largest affiliate program in the world, takes care of these concerns and lots more for and behalf of millions of the affiliates signed up on its platform. In SFI, the sign-up is FREE and without any obligations whatsoever. If you are interested in profitable affiliate marketing, the following steps can help you to find very good affiliate programs to work with.

1. Diligently Research the Market: Before choosing any affiliate program to work with, it is essential to conduct thorough research to determine which of the programs can best meet your requirements and is flexible enough to accommodate all affiliates who sign up on the platform. If you sign up with a reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI, it is likely to meet all your requirements and lots more. On the platform, you’ll have the opportunity to promote high quality products that convert well. You’ll also have the option of choosing from the over a hundred thousand quality products listed on the platform. Most of these products are not only popular, they convert well too.

2. Look for High Commissions Payouts: The main benefits affiliates derive from helping products merchants promote their products are the commissions they earn. Therefore, as an affiliate, if you want to maximize your earnings, it is best to look for affiliate offers with high commissions payouts. Affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI, come in highly recommended here. In SFI, the commission volume ranges from 10-50% CV depending on the product and the status of the affiliate.

3. Check the Conversion Rates: Conversions rates directly affect the commissions earned in affiliate marketing. From the in-house analytics of many affiliate programs, you can find out how many high converting products they have in stock. You can find out how well each offer is likely to convert and what are the sales volumes. It is best to settle for offers with a high conversion rate as they are more likely to result in sales. The more of such products on the platform of any affiliate program, the better the program.

4. Thoroughly Analyze the Competition: There are many affiliate programs online. You can check out as many as you can find that present the qualities and advantages you want in an affiliate program. Some of the programs have BB ratings that can also help you to make your choice. Determine the popularity of any program you choose and find out if there is anything unique and special about it which can stand it out in a crowded market.

5. Choose Programs with Good Support Services: On this score, Strong Future International, SFI comes highly recommended. Its training and support services are second to none. These it provides free as well as various marketing tools and unique affiliate links. You can also take advantage of its in-house analytics data, tricks and tips about the business, various marketing materials, tracking tools, email managers and so on.

6. Factor in Regulatory Requirements: Affiliate marketing is a global business and as such subject to local regulations in different countries and geographical locations around the world. At Strong Future International, SFI, they are very conscious of this fact. This is why they make special provisions to make transactions smooth for everyone no matter where they are in the world. These provisions include the use of different currencies of payment, taxation and customs matters, to avoid legal issues. Choosing affiliate programs that can shield you from local/domestic legal issues is always a good marketing decision.

Wrapping Up

You are in affiliate marketing to make money by way of earned commissions. If you diligently follow the foregoing steps, you can choose a good affiliate program that will help you to earn good commissions from your affiliate efforts.

How to Supercharge Your Conversion Rates

You know what? Most marketers are always not too happy about conversion rates. Many always want to have something done to increase conversion rates. This is because it is very important to the growth of any eCommerce store. Even a little increase in conversion rate can make a world of difference in the fortunes of any online business. This is why many eCommerce store owners always worry about what to tinker with to increase conversion rate no matter how little that increase is. It is usually a matter of tweak a little here and there, add here, remove there or try this or that to see what gets the required results. What you can tinker with is quite unlimited really.

Well, expert marketers like to caution that it is not right to attempt to make all necessary changes at once. It is best to make one or two tweaks then wait for the results to come in. You can then move on to the next tweak in an experimental order then see what that yields as well. Following are tested and proven ways that can help supercharge conversion rate for your eCommerce business if you handle them right.

Always Write Very Clear CTAs

Call-to-actions, CTAs are the “business magnets” on a website. Online, no doubt you have come across catchy phrases like “Vote here”, “Opt for coupon”, “Buy now”, “Subscribe to newsletter”, “Download eBook”, and so on. These are clear CTAs urging website visitors to take desired action. If you want to directly improve conversion rate on your website, your CTAs must be short, precise, clear and crisp enough to tell visitors exactly what to expect when they take the invited action. For best CTA results, the links must follow through. If you use a “buy” CTA, be sure it leads users to your checkout page and not to another service/product page. Similarly, a “download” CTA should give users direct access to the promised material without any barriers.
 
Diligently Build Trust

Only a business built on trust stands a good chance to grow and to endure. A vital element of any high-converting page is trust. Irrespective of how great your marketing message is, if the readers don’t trust you, your page won’t convert. As a marketer, you must therefore take deliberate steps to work on and preserve the trust element of your marketing messages. You can gain a lot of trust from social proof and excellent copywriting. Make sure all your mission-critical pages clearly show this. This is exactly why expert marketers always advise business owners not to joke with their business missions, business photos and brand logos. These and audience product reviews and testimonials are hugely important to the trust element of your business. They help conversions a great deal.

Avoid Shoppers’ Analysis Paralysis

Analysis paralysis is a marketing parlance that refers to the inability shoppers to make a decision for reason of either having too many decisions to make or having too much data to analyze and they end up not making any decision at all. A mild state of confusion really and many shoppers do become practically unable to take a decision. This state of affairs can be brought on when shoppers are faced with too many competing products at a time. Knowing quite well that internet users are notoriously snappy (only a matter of seconds per page) in their searches, it serves best to help them take a vital decision even within the short span. Usually, when online shoppers can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they quickly move on and in most cases to a competitor. So what to do? It is always advisable to follow a marketing rule of thumb: “one page, one central message”. If you have several products on sale, it is best to create a page for each of the products. That’s about the best way to avoid shoppers’ analysis paralysis and it helps conversions.

Regularly Tweak Your Copy

Online marketing is always a very dynamic and very fluid business because of the nature of the internet itself. This is why you must regularly tweak your copy for it to remain relevant. At times, this tweaking may just involve some changes while in extreme cases, it may be a complete rewrite of the entire message. If as a business owner, you may not be good at this, you can hire the services of professionals to help you out. This is because copywriting is a fairly technical marketing element closer to science than to art and it needs very clear formulas for it to be effective. What you want is to increase conversion rate for your business, so if you have professionals that can help you out, then that’s really great. All they need do is to make your pages high-converting and your conversion rate improves.

Make Your Data Forms Brief

I once read somewhere that internet users have the attention span of a gnat. Now that’s really fleeting if you’ve had the opportunity of watching that wonderful tiny insect go about its daily business. Many internet users don’t have the luxury of time to fill out forms with too much of their personal info. It is thus advisable to use the data forms on your homepage to collect only very vital info about your visitors. Leave out any info you do not immediately need to establish contact with your visitors. Skip info you can get later when the relationship begins to build up. It is advisable to add only essential data that you absolutely need in order to effectively communicate with them or deliver your marketing messages. Demanding for too much personal details can put users on their guard making them reluctant to share their data. That reluctance at times derives from lack of time and in some cases many of them trying hard to protect their sensitive personal data. If the data you collect is brief, you get more cooperation from users and that helps conversions.

Summing Up

For any eCommerce business, conversion rate usually increases when there is a clear alignment between message clarity and user intent. If this alignment is not there, there is a tendency for users to ignore the messages altogether and that affects conversion rate. What matters most therefore for the business owner/marketer is to be sure their marketing messages convey their products benefits clearly and succinctly enough and without distractions. If these messages benefit exactly what the buyer persona wants or needs, conversion is enhanced.

7 Tips to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, the main job of an affiliate is to persuade and influence the decision-making process of consumers in an appealing way. The persuasion hinges on adding value to the consumer through the said product/service being promoted. That is with the end goal of convincing consumers in favor of the product/service. The affiliate gets paid for these efforts through earned commissions. All the affiliate really needs to get things going is a fair bit of online clout or skills to persuade or influence people online. These here 7 tips can greatly help that process. 

 

1. Regularly Review Products/Services

If you are able to regularly review products/services falling under your niche, you stand to benefit from the relationship that you have fostered with that particular audience. Next is to leverage the trust between you and your audience and inform them about the benefits of investing in the product/service being reviewed.

2. Focus More on Conversion Rates

It serves affiliates interests best if they are able to focus more on conversion rates rather than commissions which many tend to focus on. It is much better to promote products from product merchants which have better conversions rather than chasing products with higher commissions. Reason is because you do better business through higher conversions in cumulative terms. A higher conversion rate ensures profit in bulk which more than compensates for staying away from products that appear to offer more commissions but with lower conversions. Experienced marketers tend to see products with higher conversions as “hot” products and a must to sell.

3. Always Keep Track of What Works

Keeping track of what works helps marketers to decide what they must do more of. You can get some insights of what works by tracking the analytics about user engagement on your platforms. That helps you to understand which of your content really works. Affiliate marketers can easily take advantage of various analytics tools like Google Analytics provided by their affiliate networks to keep accurate track of their promotions. Armed with these insights, marketers can take very vital decisions about re-tweaking, re-directing or re-jigging their marketing activities.

4. Foster a Relationship with your Audience

Affiliate marketers can deliberately foster some relationship with an audience that has specific interests. By doing so, they can easily tailor their regular contents accordingly. That is one great way to develop a relationship with your audience, making them trust what you have to say. The idea is to focus more on quality rather than quantity by putting your audience first and appealing directly to the niche where they belong.

5. Promote only Products Worthy of Adding Value

It is smart marketing to promote only products consumers want to buy. These are products that have the qualities worthy of adding value to the life of consumers. That is the only way your affiliate platform becomes reliable for consumers to meet their needs. Inevitably, that translates into higher conversion rates for your promotional activities.

6. Stick with the Rules

Sticking with the rules helps marketers to build trust and reliability which are very vital for successful affiliate marketing. For this reason, it is always advisable for marketers to play by the rules in the realm of affiliate marketing. That simply implies that companies/brands that you work with who have created a name for themselves with hard work and years of experience would always like to protect their good names. That is why many companies/brands are very sensitive towards how marketers approach the promotions of their products. It simply depends on business ethics in the main. So, you must avoid making false and improbable claims about any products/services you are promoting unless you want to quickly lose credibility.

7. Keep an Eye on the Latest Trends

Out there on the internet, competition is always very stiff. You must stay on top of new trends if you want to have any worthwhile chance at all with your ever-increasing competition. Being vigilant about new marketing techniques and implementing them positively always helps marketers to stay up-to-date in their trade. Being in tune with new trends and marketing techniques at all times helps marketers to move with the times. Doing so can positively impact conversion rates for their businesses.

How to Boost Your E-Commerce Site's Conversion Rates

If your e-commerce site is getting good traffic but is not converting well enough, you have a marketing problem on your hands. What that means is that out of the two ways of generating sales with an e-commerce site, one is doing poorly. Since the traffic your website receives is satisfactory, your focus should be on how to increase the conversion rate of the existing traffic. That requires some marketing skills if you want to get more sales from your existing traffic. 

These tips will help you with the skills to increase your site’s conversion rate.

Make Your Product Pages User Friendly

Online surfers are always notoriously in haste. Your best chance of making a conversion when they hit your website lies in the fleeting seconds they spend on the site. That comes about if you are able to hold their attention a little bit longer on your product page for them to take positive actions. To enhance that, you must think and put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors. That is, if you are a shopper yourself what holds your attention in a product page? Take into account the things you look for when you shop online and be sure to have those things in your product page. Because a product page is usually the last stop of online shoppers before a purchase is made, make sure yours has very high quality description text and high quality original photos that present your product in a very appealing way. You can throw in any other aesthetics that clearly differentiates your site from your competitors’ sites. If you splash in fair and competitive prices as well as good shipping policies, the conversion abilities of your website will be greatly enhanced.

Make your Website’s User Experience Great

Your e-commerce website converts well if it is usable and user-friendly. You must make it a priority to spruce up your website well enough to ensure it provides a great and memorable user experience. Make sure that your site is doing everything right from a technical standpoint. Just tick off the technical expectations of your website and be sure that they do not only do what they are meant to do, they do these things very well and fast enough. Here are some technical things you must check off right.
1. Good website design and hosting.
2. Website security.
3. Website aesthetics and general appeal.
4. Loading speed.
5. Mobile-friendliness.
6. Navigation.
7. Check out process.
8. Available payment options.
9. Communication/feedback and CTA buttons.
10. Customer support.
It is not advisable to depend solely on conversion rates to determine whether your site is providing a good user experience or not. Collect and study the data of your visitor metrics. You can get great insights from there about user experience. If your site has a high bounce rate or the average visit duration is too short, it is a pointer that something is wrong with the user experience your site is providing. In that case, you can go through and spruce up the above technical details once more.

Build a Mailing List in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you blog for business as is expected, you may get good traffic but if this traffic is not converting well, you cannot make good sales. Your blog merely provides good informational content to attract all sorts of visitors but it is the commercial content which your product page provides that helps conversion more. What that means is that technically, your blog and your product pages are ranked by search engines for different search terms. That poses some technical challenges no doubt because you must have to isolate and market to people who are interested in buying products. Using your mailing list to send marketing messages by email helps that process a great deal. If you manage to stay in the minds of people who may buy your products through effective use of emails, you make better sales from that effort. However, for best results, your email marketing messages must be direct and professional to avoid being spammy. A good mailing list takes time and efforts to build but it is a very valuable marketing asset to marketers when in place. If you build one in your marketing strategy, your website will convert more. To build a credible mailing list, you can get your website users to voluntarily leave their contact email addresses with you in exchange for some value you are offering. Such values include eBooks, Discount coupons, Gift cards, Quiz draws, Token gifts, Newsletters, Research findings, Poll results and so on.

Tips to Optimize Conversion Rate on E-Commerce Business

If you are selling out of some e-commerce platform, you will always want to make sure that your website visitors complete some certain desired actions. The rate at which these visitors complete these actions to become customers is referred to as conversion rate. The higher this rate, the better business your e-commerce site is doing. Conversion rate is a direct indicator of how many new customers you can acquire and how many potential leads become available for nurturing to full scale customers.  High conversions rates show that your brand is attractive and viable, a direct consequence of great, enjoyable and memorable consumer experience on your website. A typical worthwhile experience which they’re unlikely to get if they do business with some other e-commerce site! With the right strategies, it is possible to positively increase your conversion rate. If you let it be known from your website activities/actions that you have real value to offer and you offer it seamlessly, customers rarely forget who you are and where to find you. You get very good return business as a result.

Here are some handy tips to help you optimize your conversions if you’re doing business out of some e-commerce platforms.

Set Conversion Benchmark Targets

Setting benchmark targets in anything you do in e-commerce business is always a good strategy. In that quest, conversions always cover a fair amount of ground when referring to various benchmark targets to achieve. Some of such benchmarks may be very simple and some a bit complicated but they all have to do with numbers and timing. You can accurately get the rate of conversion by dividing the number of conversions by the number of website visitors. When you factor timing into it, say in hours/days/weeks/months, it becomes a set benchmark which you can work towards to determine how good you are doing. What this means is that you can accurately evaluate how well your campaign is going and be able to identify if and when your conversions are growing or not.

Deploy Onsite Call-To-Action Tools

Characteristically, many internet users are always doing multiple things online.  That gets them really busy selling, shopping, socializing on social media, reading and reviewing emails. When surfers land on your e-commerce web page, you need something like a call-to-action to remind them to do business with you before they exit the page. That’s where pop-up reminders become very handy. For effectiveness and better results, a call-to-action on every page of your website and as a pop-up reminder helps visitors remember what to do. If they take the hint, that action can easily translate to a conversion and sale. For good results, make sure your call-to-action pop-up unfailingly helps to remind your website visitors when exiting to reach out if they have any questions/inquiries about any products you are offering.

Use On-Platform Analytics Tools

Analytics are online marketing data gathering tools to help gauge your performance. When deployed on e-commerce sites, they are immensely useful for gauging what your customers want and what they are searching for within your store. They can help categorize your site visitors and even their geographical locations using the terms these visitors type into the search bars of your site. This is exactly why for SEO reasons, your product description must include a word/phrase customers are seeking to search for the product.

Optimize Product Images and Videos

Since major search engines have found a way to index images/videos, it has become imperative to optimize them. Optimizing product images helps to show the relative scale of the product, the brand name, relevant details and evidence of authenticity. This is the information which helps search engines to index these images for easy search. In addition, there is more relevance to the message when the branding is consistent in the images/videos of your products. That is where quality really matters. If you cannot guarantee professional quality of images/videos from your in-house efforts, you can outsource to professionals who can guarantee quality and ease of optimization.

Simplify Your Checkout Procedure

In e-commerce marketing, this is a given. The easier it is for customers to complete checkout procedures on your site, the friendlier your site is to customers. No shopper ever wants to get involved with complex checkout procedures. The easier it is for them to select a product, add to a cart, confirm a shipping address, add a credit card, and make payment with easy finish notice, the better for most customers. The simpler and easier this process is, the better for your e-commerce business. An easy checkout procedure also helps to reduce abandoned shopping carts which can negatively impact your numbers. To really simply your checkout procedure, you can customize your checkout process to a single page. That in essence creates an ideal checkout page for your e-commerce website.

How Affiliate Marketing Helps to Boost Conversation Rates

By exploring some delicate ways to fuse some tried-and-tested sales strategies alongside some proven modern marketing methods, affiliate marketing can indeed help companies grow conversion rates exponentially. It is all about online promotional efforts effectively using affiliates to push your brand online. These affiliates are made up largely of bloggers, social media influencers and publishers whose main marketing function is to promote products/services for a merchant in exchange for a commission paid them by the merchant. Traditionally in affiliate marketing, affiliates get paid based on specific actions completed by consumers such as link clicks or subscriptions. That is why affiliates promote vigorously to get more of such direct actions from their promotional efforts. The more direct actions they generate, the more the commissions they earn. Conversion rates get boosted by way of boosted direct actions from the promotional efforts of affiliates. That is how affiliate referral programs using well-known promotional tactics with increased vigor gets to have a direct boost on conversion rates. 

In affiliate marketing, one of the biggest reasons why revenue grows for merchants is because of a spike in conversion rates. If affiliates increase their promotional efforts to get enhanced commissions, their efforts help to boost conversion rates as well for the business of the brand they are promoting. This works well when affiliate’s posts help to turn blog readers to customers thereby helping to boost the affiliate’s business as well as the business of the merchant. Direct actions from affiliates resulting in attracting readers to theirs websites do result in making such readers to make a purchase, sign up for a mailing list or perform some other desired action. These sequential actions inevitably count towards a boost in conversion rates for the business of merchants. That is if the affiliate marketing works well and desirably. Do you know how affiliate marketing works well to get expected results? What it does is to simply help to connect your product/service with its intended consumers through a channel they trust. Such trusted channels are usually bloggers, publishers and influencers with large following built largely on trust. The more of these followers/readers they manage to lure to a brand, the more commissions they earn and in turn the more they help boost conversion rates for the business whose brand they are promoting.


 

5 Website Glitches Which Can Hurt Your Sales

Every online marketer always wants a website which is functional, simple and coverts customers easily. It is smart to maintain those qualities as much as practicable. It is a known fact to many marketers that the things which drive conversions are unique to every website and every product. For that reason, when conversions are down, many marketers turn to solutions/strategies that promise high conversion rates and guarantee a certain outcome. This web strategy and approach to conversions should be comprehensive enough to facilitate the uniqueness of both your brand and audience. These here are 5 things you can properly manage to create a page/website that is hospitable to high conversion rates.



01. Cumbersome Check-out Process. Having a cumbersome check-out process is one avoidable way to end up with abandoned shopping carts and failed conversions. This can be fixed by ensuring a seamless check-out process that involves as minimal information as possible in as timely a manner as possible. Many online shoppers habitually have no time to waste. The faster and easier the check-out process is, the better the sales.

02. Poor Web Design. Because it directly impacts the way users interact with your site, a poor/weak web design negatively impacts your conversion rate. Usually, a poor web design is attributable to a lack of aesthetics in color and style, outdated organization or look, over-complicated display features, and any other combination of first-impression factors. When a web surfer lands on your web page, an impression is made within a matter of milliseconds. That is the time it takes for them to make a decision whether to stay or to move on. “Something” compelling must hold them on your site long enough for them to deal.

03. Lack of Transactions Security. Building trust online is not an easy thing to do because of overwhelming presence of scammers. That is why consumer trust has become the single most important element factored into high conversion rates. For shoppers to willingly submit their personal information necessary for conversions, they have to be able to recognize your website as being secure. For many shoppers, the slightest sign of fraudulence or error, whether it is sloppy content or a glitch in the checkout process, it calls your legitimacy to question. To counteract consumer fear of scams and theft, you must add security/business seals to your site. That helps to show your site is verified.



04. Under-developed Product or Service. Sometimes when your product is not selling as expected, the problem may really be within the product/service.  Most often, an under-developed product or lack of understanding regarding the audience of that product can hamper high conversion rates. Your product/service must at all times be clear and easily communicated fit for the audience it is designed for. Any piece of the product/service which is a deterrent for consumers must be quickly straightened out.

05. Web Conversion Problems. All told, many of the glitch problems do directly impact conversions and can all be classified into web conversion problems. Some of these problems are, slow load time during check out, confusing information, absent or unclear display of shipping or pricing information, glitchy form submit buttons etc.etc. These can dramatically impact conversions. You must therefore routinely go through your check out process the way a user would then fix any conversion deterrents.