8 Tips to Increase Affiliate Marketing Conversions

Affiliate marketing offers anyone with a laptop a chance to generate a viable income as long as they can create quality content. However, the strategy of churning out content with the hopes that readers will convert into buyers automatically is one doomed for failure from the start. But, how to increase affiliate marketing conversions in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Well, let me share some tips and trick that we’ve used to increase affiliate sales conversions for our clients. Keep in mind that every one of them or even a combination doesn’t guarantee results for a particular niche.

You will need to test out what works best for you. Some A/B testing with affiliate links placement, call to actions, and taglines will go a long way.

Affiliate Sales Conversions vs. Traffic: Which Is Better?

Most affiliate marketers start marketing with a two-pronged strategy.

On the one hand, they try to earn money through commissions. On the other hand, they boost their web traffic via SEO and make money through Google AdSense.

Since it is always easier for a webmaster to get traffic, rather than converting visitors into affiliate sales, they’ll eventually often end up sticking to just SEO and money from ads.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Garnering more web traffic is undoubtedly a good way to make additional money. But the operative word here is “additional”. Your earnings through improved affiliate conversions and commissions could be many times more than that.

Depending on your niche and product prices, a bump of even 1-2% in conversion rates will earn you more than what your months of SEO efforts may not deliver.

In short, as an affiliate marketer, your utmost focus should be on increasing affiliate sales.

How to Increase Affiliate Marketing Conversions

Make Sure You Have the Right Niche

On the surface this tip might sound simple. You’d think: any popular / trending niche can be your meal ticket. The fact is that’s the wrong approach.

If you’re starting a website with a nominal visitor baseline, you need to steer clear of competitive niches with high appeals for two reasons. First, it will be one heck of a task for you to rank for your target keywords, which means little to no traffic. Second, affiliate commissions might not be that lucrative due to market saturation.

Instead, go for niches that experience low competition where you have better chances of ranking above the fold and on the first search page. Most users won’t go past the second search result page while looking for a product or its reviews.

It is better to get one of the top rankings for a low-competition niche rather than having your website buried in a bulk of web pages on the internet.

As a beginner, you should aim for niches with low-competition keywords that have 1,000-5,000 monthly search volume – even lower can do. Besides volume, you also need to make sure your niche has some depth. By depth we mean you should have options and sub-categories that can be covered in multiple ways.

In the example above, I’ve done some legwork for the product category “dog harness”. The list shows only low-competition keywords and allows you a lot of depth in terms of the content you can cover.

You can write about the product category “dog harness” in multiple ways without facing cutthroat competition (as indicated by the search volumes lingering around 2,000-3,000).

People searching for these non-competitive keywords are serious buyers. So, there are more chances of them buying through your affiliate link.

Create Tables, Add Visuals to Give a Quick Glimpse

An affiliate marketing website gets two types of visitors: those who want to read in-depth reviews before making a purchase decision, and those who just want to quickly skim through an article to see all their options.
The former is patient and gradually goes through your affiliate article. However, the latter might be in a hurry and may get turned off by mountains of text that they have to parse through to find a product link they want to click on.

Not only are you risking losing a reader but of course the potential of them converting too.

For those in-a-hurry visitors, make the information you present more digestible and visually appealing. A table of all the reviewed products, with ratings or Pros and Cons, with affiliate links at the beginning of the article will increase conversions.

You essentially facilitate visitors who want to make a quick decision, and they can click on your link and land directly on the product page to learn more or make the purchase.

Above is an example of what I’m talking about. If you notice, it has defined a category to give a quick brief of the reviewed iPhone cases (e.g., best value, most popular).

This categorization is an excellent way to earn more click-throughs and eventually increase affiliate conversions.

Keep Your Reviews Short If It Is a Listicle

If you’re covering a single or couple of products in your reviews, you should write in-depth reviews. Your reader expects it.

Otherwise, refrain from writing long reviews. Product listicles have been an established norm in affiliate marketing where you cover any number of products from 7 to up to 20 or even more.

If you’re writing a listicle, keep your reviews short and snappy, punctuated with easily identifiable affiliate links to reinforce the buying decision.

This is a good length of a review that is not more than three short paragraphs and also has pros and cons listed neatly.

Don’t Make it All Glossy and Salesy

While writing the review, don’t try to push for a sale. This can prove to be counterproductive and turn away visitors from clicking on the product or continue to read your review.

Instead of using superlatives in every sentence, highlight the product features, their benefits as well as any negative repercussions. Like the example used above, it will be great to add the pros and cons section at the end of every product review.

This is another good example of writing an unbiased affiliate review. It’s for a portable generator, and the reviewer doesn’t shy away from outlining its shortcomings.

Make Your Product Links Stand Out with Strong Call to Actions

The affiliate commission you make solely depends on the sale processed through the product links used in your articles.

Therefore, you need to make sure that visitors don’t have to search for even a fraction of a second to find a product link.

To begin with, use a colored CTA button that pops and catches the eye instead of using in-text links within the content. The wording of your CTAs also matter so make sure they are attractive.

Let’s take a look at some examples of good affiliate CTA buttons.

A bright red CTA button in all caps and a bigger font will surely not go unnoticed.

A CTA button, along with the product shot, will also easily grab the attention.

Highlighting prices and offering multiple options will make the CTA buttons stand out even more.

Besides the CTA, you should also embed affiliate links in product titles/headings because readers are very likely to click on those on first attempt. Also, link the product name appearing within the body of the review.

The idea is to make it as easy as possible for readers to go to the product buying page whenever they want.

Make Your Affiliate Article Visually Appealing

Adding a good quality photo with your review is another way to increase affiliate sales conversions. People are more likely to read and click on image-heavy reviews that show them what they’re reading about.

Please note – generic stock images will not do for reviews. If you are reviewing a particular model of a product, use the picture of the same model. And since you’re an affiliate, you should have access to pictures to use.

Here, you can see how a high-definition product shot accentuates the review and gives the reader a vivid look into what they’re about to buy.

The chances of them clicking on your affiliate link are bound to improve.

Carry Out A/B Split Testing

Well, I mentioned this early on and I want to reiterate that you can only monitor your performance and optimize affiliate conversions if you do A/B split testing. This is perhaps the most important tip to increase affiliate marketing conversions.

You have to try different things and contrast and compare results.

Sometimes even a small change can improve conversions substantially. Just the change in color of your CTA button or the look of a product review table could trigger the change.

If you want to get the most out of your affiliate marketing efforts, you must experiment and track results. Whether you change the color of the buttons, their placement, images, formatting, article length, or whatever, hone in on those features that get the best results.

Start with a master or original page and then tweak a single element and see how it affects conversions. Continue to do that till you are able to create a high-converting affiliate marketing page.

Leverage Affiliate WordPress Plugins to Boost Conversions

WordPress is the most popular and arguably the best platform to build your affiliate marketing kingdom. As a new player in the field, you have access to a number of WordPress affiliate plugins to boost conversions. All you have to do is to learn how to use them and then use them.

A lot of the tips to increase affiliate marketing conversions mentioned in this article are easily executable using these WordPress Plugins. Let me give you a quick review of the essential WordPress plugin categories that I use and you should use too to increase affiliate conversions.

• Article Structure: Preset formats, image placements, tables and content structure for your articles. Thrive Architect is a no-brainer here. Simple drag and drop functionality and incredibly easy to master.
• Table Plugins: Use them to make product tables, feature tables, price tables, etc. My plugin of choice is TablePress.
• Popup Plugins: Use popup plugins to create exit-intent, slide-ins, and scroll popup notifications with affiliate product links. I’ve tried a few to find an easy-to-use solution. For me Sumo is the best.
• Coupon and Deal Plugins: Make deal coupons with links, images, share buttons, and expiration countdowns of your affiliate products. WP’s own Coupon Plugin works perfectly here.

There are gazillions of other affiliate WordPress plugins that you can pick in line with your website’s layout and affiliate marketing approach.

Increasing Affiliate Sales with Quality Content

All of the above tips I’ve shared will make a difference in your affiliate conversions. But, they’ll be of no use if the content you’re publishing is ‘meh’.

Your site might have the best conversion elements installed, yet if readers don’t find what they’re looking for or are misinformed, you cannot succeed.

It’s vital that any content you publish is created after ample time is spent on research, planning, writing, editing and formatting. This is where my team of professional article writers, especially affiliate article writers can be of service.

And not just writing, if you want, we can do complete keyword research, editing and publishing for you. All you have to do is pick out your niche, and share your requirements, and we’ll do the rest.