Improving Affiliate Program
Performance (continued, part 3)
5- Give personal recommendations
Perhaps one of the best ways to improve the performance of affiliate program links is to provide visitors with your own personal recommendations for the product or services. By providing a testimonial for the product you are offering your visitors confidence that they will be satisfied, that their expectations will be met, and, perhaps most importantly, that they will not be ripped off.
Additionally, by recommending products or services that save your visitors time or money, or provide solutions to their problems, you will be able to gain their trust and appreciation. They will see both you and your site as a helpful, valuable resource. Satisfied visitors may even point their friends to your site so they can also find and order the recommended product.
Therefore it is important that you provide honest feedback when recommending a product. Recommending a product that you have never used, or that is of poor value may lead to a few short-term sales, but eventually will only harm your reputation. If you are not offering recommendations that your visitors can trust, you will not be able to gain their loyalty and they will not return.
As an example, here is a personal recommendation I make on my site (slightly modified for the newsletter):
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Conclusions
So, take some time to look over your site, and see where you can fit some of these suggestions in. Look for areas where you can add links, think of ways to describe the products or vendor, and if you have personally used a product, think of how it has helped you, and how it may be able to help your visitors. If there are programs that don't really fit in with the theme of your site, you may want to consider dropping them, or switching to a more targeted program. You may even want to print this article so you can reference it later. Improving the performance of your links will be an ongoing process as you modify and add to your site.
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