I have just wrapped the affiliate reports for May and just wanted to give you some insights to help you increase your affiliate commissions.
There has been an increase in Federal and military conversion resume sales this last month, while the medical, finance fields as well as job board have been doing well as well. Sites that have however been losing sales across the board are resume service reviews type sites – from looking at them, they keep adding more and more resume service listings, which is known to dilute sales and bring confusion to visitors: tightening it up with just a few services should bring sales back up.
I’m glad to report that affiliate sales increased in May and am particularly happy to see that quite a few new affiliates have been able to quickly make sales and earn commissions. These affiliates are pretty Internet marketing-savvy so for those of you who would like to make more sales, I will take this opportunity to give you a few tips:
WEBSITE CONTENT
With the latest Google Panda update, sites featuring duplicate articles got a big slap – this means that if your site’s content was heavy on articles borrowed from articles directories or other sites, you most likely lost organic rankings for major keywords and, as a result, a lot of targeted traffic; this is not only affecting your overall traffic but also your affiliate sales. Why? Because, by losing rankings for important keywords that were attracting qualified visitors (those who were the mostly likely in need of professional resume writing), you are not sending us those qualified visitors anymore.
Here is an example: Some affiliates were ranking high for terms such as “resume writing” and have now be booted around Google’s page 10 results. They are still ranking well for terms such as “resume sample” though. So what’s going on? Well the visitors coming to their site for “resume writing” were pretty qualified and once redirected to our site, were buying resumes. Now that rankings for this keyword has dropped, we are not getting those visitors anymore and these affiliates’ sales have dropped. While they are still sending us traffic from terms such as “resume sample”, they are not able get sales out of them because these are the people looking for something free.
-> What should you about this? Well, you are going to need some new original content, which you can write yourself or outsource to services such as Need-an-article, fiverr, etc …
ORGANIC SOURCES OF TRAFFIC & BACKLINKS
As you read in the previous section, article marketing isn’t working anymore, whether it’s as a source of traffic or backlinks, since Google slapped article directories a couple months ago.
-> What should you about this? Well, you need to diversify your traffic and linking strategy. You have several options: videos (making them and posting them to video sites such as Youtube), posting articles to third-party blogs and blog networks, forum postings and ad buying.
PAY-PER-CLICK
Pay-per-click still works but the market being so competitive, it’s not as easy to make sales as it used to be. The good thing though is that 70% of people using PPC don’t know what they’re doing so there is room for you if you do your homework. Here are the factors to consider: 1. the market being crowded, bids have increased considerably. 2. people have become more search savvy and the buying process takes more time; for example while 6 years ago, a keyword like “resume” was bringing sales, this isn’t the case anymore.
-> What should you about this? First, do not advertise for broad keywords such as “resume”. Instead look for buying and long tail keywords – I would recommend using intelligence keyword tools such as spyfu, market samurai or keyword discovery or to find out which keywords are profitable. Also before starting a big campaign and spend a lot of money, you can also contact me for advice – I have been doing this for more than 10 years and know what works and what doesn’t ...