Of course she was absolutely certain that the affiliate program was ripping her off — She’d actually made sales but they weren’t credited to her affiliate account.

Maybe that was true in her case, I don’t know, but there are also other factors that could explain here lack of affiliate sales.

1.  Does the affiliate sales page convert?

This is probably the biggest thing that all affiliates should consider before joining because it will have the biggest impact on your bottom line.   Does the sales page for the affiliate product that you want to promote have a good conversion rate?  In other words, how many people who click over to the sales page actually buy the product?

Believe it or not, conversion rates average around 2%… but I’ve see affiliate sales pages converting at much, much less.  It’s not unusual to find affiliate conversion rates in the tank at 0.01%.

2.  Does the sales page offer “untracked” sales?

Sometimes an affiliate sales page offers prospects other forms of payment that can’t be tracked to the affiliate who referred them.

For example, if a prospect can order by 800 number, then the affiliate may not get credit for sales they’ve referred who purchased through that toll free number.

I’ve seen a lot of Clickbank merchants do this kind of bait and switch thing to affiliates… let me explain.

The merchant joins Clickbank and sells one of their products through them.  Once they’re in the Clickbank marketplace and affiliates start promoting them, the merchant switches over to take payments through PayPal, phone, or another payment system and cuts the affiliate out of the sales.

3.  Is your advertising targeting the right market?

This is what I think happened to my coaching client… she was getting plenty of clicks, but they weren’t people who were interested in actually buying the product she was advertising.

It’s easy, especially with pay-per-click, to get a lot of people clicking through your ad.  All you have to do is word the ad so that it provokes a lot of clicks.

But clicks aren’t what really matters in a pay-per-click campaign… quality clicks are what matter.

That’s why most PPC experts use negative qualifiers and precise information to weed out all the tire-kickers.  Once you do that and specifically target who will see your ad, you’ll find that the quality of your clicks and your return on investment (ROI) improves tremendously.  (If you want to learn more about PPC, then I highly recommend The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords!)

In the end, there are probably lots of reasons why some affiliate products don’t sell, but these are the most common problems that affiliates face.

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It doesn’t matter how great the features are, how awesome your marketing message, or even if your product has all the bells and whistles.  It doesn’t even matter what your industry is… At the end of the day, your customers all buy some variation of one of these things:

1. Make more money
2. Save more time
3. Make them feel better about themselves
4. Avoid the frustration of doing things they don’t want or like to do
5. Saving or avoid losing money in the future

So now that you know that your customers fit into one of these categories, how can you use that to your advantage?

Easy… Focus all your energy on selling one of these key points in all your copywriting and keep these five categories in mind as you create new products.

Of course, there are a lot of other factors involved in the entire sales process, but keeping an eye on these five categories and integrating this basic knowledge into your business plan will ultimately help you to make more sales and create products and services that address a need in your industry.

And there’s your quick tip for today… there are really only 5 things that people buy.

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There’s really no secret.

I’ve been practicing attraction marketing for years in my own business.  If you’re successful, I bet you have too.

So here’s the big secret… Attraction marketing is any marketing strategy designed to “attract” people who are interested in your products, services, or business to you or your website like a magnet.

Frankly, I think attraction marketing and pre-selling are pretty much the same thing.

The idea is that you don’t want to SELL people your wares.  People hate to be “sold,” but they love to buy stuff when it hits their hot buttons and the buying experience is pleasurable.

In my mind, attraction marketing really comes in two parts… attracting interested people and enticing them to buy.  Let’s talk about each one separately.

1.  Attracting Interested People

The key to making a good living with your business, no matter what business you’re in, is to get your business in front of people who are interested in buying what you have to offer.  The more interested people who see what you’ve got, the more money you’re going to make — simple as that.

In the online world, there are lots and lots of easy ways to do that:

• Write great keyword rich content that attracts interested people through search engines.
• Write articles that will interest your target audience.
• Create videos that will attract interested people.
• Offer a free ebook, ecourse, or report to your target audience (lead capture).
• Advertise your free offer, rather than your products, services, or business.

You want to help interested people find you, but you don’t want to sell them.

You can practice attraction marketing in the offline world as well:

• Advertise a free offer on your website in newpapers, signs, flyers, billboards, etc.
• Create and advertise a recorded message about your business or products.
• Put a sign on your car.
• Use your own products publicly.

The essence of attraction marketing is that you want to give people who are interested in your products, services, or business a reason to be attracted to you and do it in a completely non-threatening way.

2.  Enticing People To Buy

First of all, you’ve got to get the dollar signs out of your eyes.  Too many people operate their business like a used car salesman.

Let me draw you a picture and you’ll see what I mean.

As you’re driving up on a car lot, you notice a group of salesmen sitting together near the entrance.  As your car turns in, all the salesmen turn towards you and you see the cold glint of dollar signs in their eyes.

You flinch just a little, but still find a parking spot and stop the car.

As you get out of the car, you notice that the salesmen are urgently talking amongst themselves until one of them puts on one of those fake smiles and starts walking towards you while the others quickly disperse.

“Hey what kind of car are we looking to buy today?”

YUK!  I hate that so much that I actually refuse to talk to sales people and make my husband deal with them.

No one likes to be treated that way in any situation.

But if you’re hard selling everyone who visits your website, then you’re acting like that money-hungry used car salesman and driving potential customers away.

You’ve heard it before, people buy from other people that they like and trust.

Your job is to give people the things that will attract them to your business, build a relationship with them, and then gently recommend your products, services, or business when they show an interest.

That’s the essence of attraction marketing.

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The Google Slap

Let me lay out my story for you.

I’ve been running Google Adwords campaigns for years from the same account, for several different niche websites.  I’ve never had a problem with them — I’ve always diligently followed the rules:

1. No squeeze pages.
2. Content-based landing pages.
3. Keywords matching the landing pages.

In fact, the majority of my landing pages have always been plain old article pages directly from my website — nothing fancy.

I had a pretty good thing going here… then I made a silly mistake.

For some reason, I got in a hurry and didn’t set up a proper article-type page for a new campaign that I started.  Instead, it was a php redirect to an affiliate sales page.  It ran for about six weeks and I made a killing with it — then Google caught it.

My sales plumetted and it didn’t take very long to figure out that I had been the victim of the dreaded Google Slap!

Every one of my landing pages in every campaign I was running (not just the offending campaign) carried a 1/10 rating.  That means that NONE of my campaigns were showing for any domain or product I was promoting through Google Adwords.

Further investigation revealed that Google also dropped my pagerank for iMarketingWatch.com site from a PR3 or PR4 to a PR1.

I immediately deleted the offending ads and hoped that Google would return my “good” campaigns to their normal 7/10-5/10 ratings.  Days went by and there was no change in my account status.

Then I deleted ALL my campaigns and started over fresh with brand new campaigns that went to articles that I have running on my blogs on other domains.  They were only designed to generate traffic, not sales, but Google ranked them at a 1/10 too, making it impossible to run the campaigns.

I repeatedly emailed Google to see if they would review my account, see that I was following the rules, and maybe stop punishing me for my one error in all these years.  They never answered my questions.

They did manage to send me an automated survey to see if I was satisfied with customer service however.

Google Slap experts claim that once you’ve been slapped you should get rid of the offending domain and start over with a new domain.  They claim that once you’ve been slapped, your site can never recover and make it back into Google’s good graces.  I haven’t decided if I want to dump iMarketingWatch.com and start over or not.  I sure hate to start over!

Apparently, you can never use the Google Adwords account that’s been slapped again either.

I deleted my account over the weekend and moved all my advertising dollars over to Yahoo.

I don’t know if starting a new account at Google would allow me to continue working with Adwords, but I’ve heard horror stories about Google tracking your IP or credit card and giving you the old Google Slap again on your new account.

Frankly, I’m not too inclined to give Google a second chance, despite it’s enormous search engine market share.  At Yahoo I’m paying less money per click and getting keywords that I would never be able to afford at Google — even before the Google Slap.

Although Yahoo generates a lot fewer impressions than Google, Yahoo seems to remember that advertisers are customers and they treat them like customers.

Obviously, Google doesn’t really care about it’s customers.  Rather than being punitive, they could easily just disable the offending campaigns for any advertiser – but they choose to brutally punish advertisers instead.

I guess you can do whatever you want when you’re the 800 lb. Gorilla.

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So let’s see if we can shed a little light on the subject!

CPA in A Nutshell

CPA is an online advertising model where the advertiser only pays for a specified action linked to the advertisement.  For example, if you run a banner on a website and only pay the website owner whenever someone clicks on the banner and subscribes to your newsletter, that would be a CPA campaign.

I’m sure you can immediately see the benefit of running such a campaign – you only pay for actual subscribers, rather than paying for clicks or impressions.  This is by far the most lucrative form of advertising currently available to online businesses.

CPA is really an advertisers dream.

You can run a CPA campaign for nearly any outcome you choose, but most online businesses use it for purchases, free trials, subscribers, zero friction, etc.  If you’ve seen the advertisements where you’re required to put your name and email to get a coupon or be submitted for a chance to win something, then you’re already familiar with the concept behind this form of advertising.

How Can You Benefit From CPA?

Although CPA has been around for a long time, there have been some interesting developments in the industry recently.  The most beneficial development for most of us is that there are now a large variety of advertising networks available to advertise your offer.  Many of the full-service firms will even help you form your campaign, design your creatives, and even help you with your landing pages.

Not only are there a large number of advertising networks that offer CPA, but there is also a variety of methods of showing your advertisements now available through these networks.  You ad now has the opportunity to be shown in a full page pop under, pop over, email, contextual ad, banner, survey, form, etc.

There are tons of choices and lots of opportunity to profit, especially in zero friction campaigns.

CPA And Affiliates

And that brings me to the other evolution of  CPA.  As an affiliate, you have a lot of opportunities to offer CPA advertisements on your website – beyond the normal pay per commission affiliate program.

As an affiliate, you have the opportunity to earn a lot more affiliate commission through CPA because it’s generally easier to pre-sell your website visitors on those kinds of offers.  After all, it’s generally easier to get visitors to fill out a form or request more information about something than it is to get them to pull out their wallets.

Of course, there is also a downside.  It’s often more difficult to get approved to join CPA affiliate programs than it is to be approved for your normal, run of the mill affiliate program.  In fact, I recently came across a statistic that only about 10% of  applicants are approved for CPA programs.

If you can get approved, you can earn some serious affiliate revenue.

If you’d like to learn more about CPA, then I highly suggest you take the time to learn more about different strategies.  I personally like the zero friction method because it just makes sense!

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You may even be offering a gift to help you build a list.

But there’s one problem … NO ONE is visiting your website.

It’s tough to build a list and get clients when no one is visiting, isn’t it?!

Website optimization can be expensive

Paying someone to optimize your website can be very expensive. And doing it on your own can be a hit-or-miss endeavor.

Free online marketing techniques

Marketing techniques such as writing and posting articles, press releases, or posting comments on blogs and forums are all great ways to drive traffic, but they can be time consuming and can take awhile before they really start driving significant traffic to your website.

Pay-per-click advertising

Google Adwords on the other hand are a great way to instantly drive traffic to your website. In fact, you can write an ad and have it on page one of the search results for your primary keywords in less than 15 minutes.

Just in case you’re not familiar with Google Adwords, they are the paid ads or sponsored listings that show up at the top and right-hand-side of every Google search results page. These ads are called “pay-per-click” ads because while your ad may show many times on the page, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website.

Pre-qualified traffic

This is great because you’re only paying for people who have raised their hand and said they’re interested in what you have to offer, so they are already pre-qualified.

However, before you decide to drop all of your other online marketing strategies and throw your entire budget into Google Adwords, you first need to know a few basics, or you can quickly spend a lot and not have much to show for it when all is said and done.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Here are 3 main pitfalls you need to be aware of BEFORE embarking on a Google Adwords campaign to avoid losing your shirt and to ensure greater success.

Pitfall #1: Not testing your conversion rates first

Before you start spending money to drive tons of traffic to your website, make sure you have a web page that actually converts visitors. That means you’ve tested your landing page (the page you will send your traffic to – and more than likely this is NOT your home page) and your visitors are either signing up for your gift or buying whatever you’re selling.

You’ll want to test things like your offer, your headline, your first sentence of copy, your graphics, and font colors. If you’re already getting traffic to the page, test your results first before you start paying for traffic. And remember to only change one element at a time when you are testing.

If you’re not getting any natural traffic to your website, you can start testing your ad with a small Google Adwords budget. Just be willing to commit to that budget whether or not you make any sales.

Once you have tested the page and it’s working (consistently converting traffic into prospects and/or clients), you can start driving more traffic to the page with confidence.

Pitfall #2: Not syncing up your ad copy with your landing page

If your ad is promoting red tennis shoes, then your keyword should be red tennis shoes (or some close variation) and the headline on your landing page should talk about red tennis shoes.

This may seem rather obvious but many people are paying good money to place ads on Google and are not following this simple rule. I have even seen big companies like Nike run a “shoe specific” ad that directs you to their website home page. And when you get there, there’s nothing on that page about the shoe they were advertising.

People will not spend time searching your website for the product or service you promised them. If it’s not right there on the first page you send them to they will leave. Then you’ve just paid to drive people to your site and they left without becoming a prospect or client – that’s a total waste of your budget.

Make sure your keywords sync up with your ad copy and your ad copy syncs up with the content and offer on your landing page. Carefully lead your paid visitors by the hand and make it easy for them to get what they are searching for, and they’ll reward you by joining your list or buying your product or service.

Pitfall #3: Including too many keywords in your campaigns

When someone is searching for information online, they type in keywords that represent the topic they’re interested in. In order to be successful using Google Adwords, you need to know what the best keywords are for your product or service.

Once you have those keywords, you need to create a separate Google Ad Group for each set of related keywords. Unfortunately, most people throw all of their keywords into one ad group, and then wonder why they don’t get any results.

To avoid this pitfall, select a narrow group of related keywords and include these keywords in your ad title and copy. Also include your keywords in your landing page headline and copy. When you do this you stand a much greater chance of converting your traffic.

As a solo-professional, your website can be a wonderful sales and marketing tool for your business. In fact, it can do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to lead generation.

And clearly getting consistent, quality traffic to your website is necessary for this to happen. However, make sure you aren’t throwing money away by paying for traffic without first making sure you’re ready to capitalize on it.

Here’s a perfect example of this in practice. One of the people I’ve helped recently, Carrie Greene of www.CarrieThru.com, had been running her Google Adwords campaigns for several years and was not getting very good results. Once we fine-tuned her list of keywords, her ad copy and her landing page she was able to lower her cost to get visitors by over 55% AND she added more subscribers to her list in just a few months than she had in all of the two years prior.

When you know what you’re doing, little tweaks can go a long way. And once you dial in your ads, they can become an ongoing, valuable source of new prospects and revenue for your business. Helping you drive more traffic to your website cost-effectively is just one area we can focus on if you choose to become a member of my new Diamond Program. In fact, we’ll work together for an entire year to optimize all of your marketing so IT works harder for you, so you can stop working so hard in your business. To request an application for the program, please visit www.DiamondCoachingGroup.com

© Copyright 2008 Debbie LaChusa

Debbie LaChusa created 10stepmarketing to help solo-professionals and small business owners market their own businesses more successfully. Debbie believes creating a marketing plan is the first step in building a successful business. Don’t have a marketing plan? You can get a marketing plan template to help you create one when you subscribe to The 10stepmarketing Ezine at http://www.10stepmarketing.com

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