When it comes to ensuring success in your affiliate marketing campaign a good set of strategies always comes to your rescue. Here are some fool-proof strategies to adopt.
1. Use Pop-under Adverts on Your Sales Page Instead of Popups
One of the mistakes affiliate marketers who sell products online do is that they use popups for capturing visitor’s personal information or to advertise another program, offer, etc. Popups are annoying since they distract the visitor’s attention. This can mostly annoy customers and they could easily close the browser’s window before it even loads. Moreover, pop-ups are blocked by many browsers today, so they are not seen by your visitors… Hence, the best method is to use pop-under ads that continue to load up across the background. This method is not so intrusive and much more effective than pop-ups. The results show that pop-unders or pop-ins receive much higher response rate than old fashioned pop-ups. By utilizing the pop-unders correctly, you can easily build a mailing list, collect customer’s information and get much more contacts of potential customers and this way earn much more commissions in the overall process.
2. Cloak Your Affiliate Link
Customers have become smart enough these days to know the difference between a regular link and an affiliate link. All they need to do is to hover the mouse over the link and the target link is displayed on the status bar. This way they can easily replace your affiliate id with their own and get the commission for buying the product themselves. If you want to direct customers to your promoted product’s sales page successfully without them knowing it is an affiliate link make sure to cloak the URL. You can use a variety of cloaking methods and direct users to a new window that has your merchant site. This way, customers will not move away from your affiliate site and you get more commissions. There are some free cloaking services online, however, make sure to check them out if your affiliate link works properly when you cloak and that your (affiliate’s) name is shown on the product’s order checkout form since some link cloakers distracts an affiliate link and you might not receive a commission. When you find a good link cloaking method, always cloak your affiliate links to protect affiliate commissions.
3. Consider Using Hover Ads
Instead of the age old pop up adverts which tend to flood a user’s screen it is a good idea to look at using hover ads. These occupy the existing page in a corner and leverage JavaScript and HTML resulting in what is called DHTML. You can use these for your opt-in subscriptions, testimonials, specific company news or information, announcement of new services and products etc. Most of the time, hover ads have a larger success ratio than conventional pop up ads.
4. Use Simple Banners Instead of Flash
Many affiliate marketers think that merely using flashy banners will help attract more customers and commissions. However, that is the exact opposite of what really happens. When you have a flash based banner it takes far longer to load than a regular banner. This means that on the customer’s browser the rest of the page would have loaded and only the banner would be left. This is bad news if you want your banner to market your products for you! Moreover, if you run your own affiliate program and provide banners for affiliates to select and use for your product’s promotion, make sure they are well designed, but at the same time does not take a lot of disk space. Provide many different sized banners, so your affiliates could select whatever they want.
5. Use Informational, Textual Ad Links
Instead of highly promotional advert links use the more sober textual based ones. These are more informational and value-driven and also tell your customer why your product and website is so great for them. Customers will be more likely to click on such links and thus you stand to gain more commissions.
6. Reviews Can Work Wonders
If you have been in the affiliate marketing business for sometime then you obviously know the tremendous value in reviews. By writing reviews which are neutral and yet advertise the benefits of the genre of your products, you are educating and making the customer interested to purchase your products. Customers will be influenced and more likely to buy getting you more commissions. In order to increase your product sales even more, just order some paid reviews about your product on the niche blogs or websites. Reviews not only gives your product more exposure, website visitors and customers, but they also increase your product’s and brand’s awareness throughout the Internet. It’s a definite way to increase your sales.
7. Use Article Marketing and Link to Your Product’s Review to Get Customers
If you are using article marketing techniques you could place a URL to your reviews on the products being promoted through articles. This way, users get to read more about the product and get further interested in buying the product. The link to your product’s review drives you interested visitors and when they read more about your product in the review, there are much higher chances that they will consider buying.
8. Protect Your Affiliate Commissions
There are plenty of stealware software today that pry on commissions and steal them from unsuspecting affiliate marketers. You can use software specifically designed to prevent such activity and combine it with link cloaking methods to prevent such fraud.