Make sure your shop can be seen
One of the most basic mistakes people use when selling affiliate merchandise on their site is not taking visibility into account when placing their shop. The most basic rule is that if your affiliate shop can’t be seen, you won’t get the clicks you need. And if you don’t get the clicks you need, you won’t get any sales.
Think about it this way. If an average click-thru rate for your type of site with the affiliate merchandise you’ve chosen is 2%, that means that for every 100 visitors, you have two clicking a product. Then, there’s conversion. It might be, again, 2%. So you would be getting 2 sales for every 100 clicks (your mileage will certainly vary).
What that means is that, no matter what affiliate program that you’re participating in, you need to make sure there is traffic coming to your affiliate shop, viewing your banners, or whatever.
So, the first thing to ask yourself is, how are my visitors getting to my shop? If the answer is, “A text link somewhere on the homepage” then, unless you’re a really busy site, that might not be enough.
Some ways to enhance your visibility are:
- Put a cool graphic on your homepage promoting (and linking to) your shop
- Put a featured product on your homepage and talk about why you like it (I’ll describe how to do that easily)
- Put a small shop right on your homepage (make sure you’ve got fun things to say about the product so it doesn’t look out of place
- Talk about how the shop supports your site
- Talk about your shop in every e-mail you send to your users
- Promote it. Promote it. Promote it!
