It’s always interesting when an affiliate marketer writes to me and says something like, “I’ve sent 1000/2000/4000 visitors to this merchant and haven’t made an sale. The affiliate manager told me that the sales page was converting at 4% or more, but I haven’t seen anything like that. What’s going on?”

This seems to be quite a common problem for new affiliates. To get around it, it’s important to understand the mindset of the people who arrive at any site you are promoting as an affiliate. There are several factors that make a huge difference to your conversion rate when you are trying to sell products and services. In most cases, your visitors will need to be at least partially PRE-sold before you send them to the merchant. If they arrive at a sales page completely cold and not knowing what to expect, your chances of them buying something are pretty low. If you’ve warmed them up, and especially if they have come to know, like and trust you because you have kept in touch via email for a period of time, then your prospects of making the sale will go through the roof.

Just as an example, I recently worked on a site with a partner in a very competitive niche that was selling a high end coaching product. We did very well in the first few months from organic search traffic, a few well placed Google Adwords ads and a small amount of article marketing. During our initial testing, the sales page was converting at just over 2% ( and that was selling a $4000 product). Once we had the sales process ironed out, we created an affiliate program and during the next few weeks, our handful of affiliates drove just over 14,000 unique visitors to the site.

The result?

We didn’t have a single affiliate sale. Within a couple of weeks I was getting “I drove 4391 visitors to your site and I didn’t make a sale; your program doesn’t work” messages from my affiliates, and I was very concerned that something wasn’t working in our tracking system. On checking our traffic stats however, I found that virtually ALL of the visitors our affiliates had sent us were coming from paid to surf programs and other useless traffic sources like that. It was just totally untargeted, unreliable traffic, and the visitors who arrived certainly had no interest in buying a $4,000 product – most of them probably weren’t even interested in the topic.

Here’s the bottom line. It’s important to understand that if you are going to be a real player in the affiliate marketing business, somebody that makes consistent money, you need to get serious about it. There’s no free ride here, and despite what some people promoting those ‘push the button and get rich’ type products will tell you, you need to do some work if you want to make any money. It’s not hard work, but it’s work all the same.

You need to create some content that generates organic search traffic, or write some articles and submit them to article directories. And if you have the funds, learn to use PPC to drive targeted visitors to your merchants as well. If you find some decent affiliate programs that pay recurring commissions and/or commissions on backend sales, you really can do exceptionally well as an affiliate marketer.

Rocky Tapscott is a Site Build It expert and mentor who works with small and medium sized business owners to quickly boost their sales and profits. He has developed a Free 27 page Report which shows you how to create autopilot income streams using a simple but incredibly effective email marketing and follow up system – Grab your Free Report now.