I was recently at a site and clicked on the ‘Affiliates’ link to go to their affiliate page and it said to call an 800 number to join their affiliate program. Huh?
SouthBeachDiet.com’s affiliate page says to join their program, send an email to… What?
And then there are all the programs that make affiliates wait for days before they’ll approve them…
Let’s say I dropped the ball and need to send a message out to my list subscribers, like, NOW, and I have a great idea for an article and now I need to find a product to tie in with it. Seller #1 has it all – a site that sells, good sales copy, the right price, a fat commission – but after signing up for their affiliate program, they send me a message saying I’ll hear back from them in two to three days. GAAAA!!!
Seller #2 has a similar product but their site’s design, sales copy and commission aren’t nearly as good as Seller #1’s but I need a product NOW so I applied for their affiliate program anyway and – YEA! They immediately sent me a message welcoming me to their program and gave me my affiliate link. So, I use it to finish up my message, send it out to my subscribers and head back out to the pool.
As an affiliate, I don’t want to jump through hoops just to join an affiliate program and I don’t want to have to wait for days to get approved. I want my affiliate link NOW. If sites, like Quickbooks and LegalZoom, can approve affiliates immediately, why can’t you?
I was going through my email recently and came across a message from two guys who send out affiliate tips. In their message, they said that one mistake they had made over the years was worrying about how their sites looked and how looks don’t matter.
Yeah, and if you believe that little pearl of wisdom, then I’m sure I can find a bridge somewhere I can sell ya.
Have you ever been in a forum and saw a post from someone who complained that he was getting traffic but no sales and he asked if the other posters would go to his site and give him some feedback so you clicked on his link and as his site was loading, you took one look and said “Yak!” and knew right away why his site wasn’t attracting any customers?
We’ve all seen them – cheesy-looking sites that just make you want to get away from them… FAST.
Looks DO matter, and not just to potential customers, either. They matter to affiliates, too.
When a potential customer (or an affiliate!) lands on your site, you have seconds – less time than it has taken you to read this single sentence – to grab his or her attention and get them to stick around, and even if the text hasn’t starting loading yet, the look and feel of the site alone can make them hit their “Back” button and go somewhere else.
A site that looks professionally designed makes you feel like what they’re selling is a quality product worthy of your hard-earned money, but what does a site that looks homemade tell you? That the product is crap, that they’ll steal your credit card info and go on a shopping spree on the Home Shopping Network, that you will regret it if you don’t get away from the site NOW,…
Since not every seller uses the same affiliate networks (ClickBank, ShareASale, etc.) that I do, as an affiliate, I often turn to search engines to try to find new products to work with.
If I was looking for an ebook on a certain topic, for example, I’d enter
– [topic] + ebook + affiliate
…into Google to see what products come up that have an affiliate program. The sellers who use those specific words on their site are the lucky ones since they’re the ones who will appear in the results, and the ones who use “associate,” “referral,” or “partner” instead of “affiliate” won’t.
Don’t just SEO your site for potential customers; SEO it for affiliates, too. Think of the words affiliates would use to find what you offer online and use those keywords and keyword phrases on your index and ‘Affiliate’ pages and in your META tags.
If you want to see the exact keywords and phrases affiliates are using in search engines, try entering:
Today, I’m launching Affili-Fix-ation.com – the free repair guide for your affiliate program and Affil-E-ation.com – the free, step-by-step guide that shows you how to start an affiliate program and blow your sales through the roof!
As an affiliate, I can show you what you’re doing wrong with your current affiliate program and how to make it make you (and your affiliates!) more money, and if you don’t have an affiliate program yet, how to start one the right way.
There are going to be things that come up – sellers are going to ask me questions, or affiliates are going to say, “Hey! You forgot to mention this” – that I didn’t cover on Affili-Fix-ation, as well as things sellers can do to make their affiliate programs even better [read: more profitable], so I’ll talk about them here in this blog.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me (the link is on the right).
