So you want to make some money off the Amazon Associate program as an affiliate. You’ve picked a product category to promote and expect countless sales showing on your dashboard reports.
Months pass and like many people, you realize you’re not making any sales at all!
Do you join the bandwagon of people screaming the Amazon Associate program is a scam (there is a thread on a LinkedIn group with that title, by the way) or will you try to find out why you’re not making any sales?
If you’re not the type who makes excuses – of course, you’ll find out why before quitting or blaming the program!
What’s In This Post
Not Getting Sales, Why?
2. Ugly Site
3. Not Providing a Conclusion or Recommendation
4. Not Pre-Selling and Connecting With Visitor
5. Too Much Call to Action
6. Having No Call to Action
Action Points – Do These Now
Not Getting Sales, Why?
Before jumping into new tactics, we must know WHY you’re not getting sales in the first place. Until you’ve discovered what you’ve done wrong, you’ll never move forward.
Clearly, thousands upon thousands of affiliates are making money on Amazon, why not you? 9/10 times, the answer would be you’re doing something wrong.
We get an average of two emails a week from you, readers wondering why their sites are not converting even if they are getting some traffic.
After reading and addressing the emails over the past few months, We’ve noticed a general pattern occurring, so here are six of the most common mistakes we see that new and struggling Amazon Associates go through with their sites and why they’re not making any sales even if traffic wasn’t the main issue.
1. Ugly Site
By ugly, We don’t just mean visually or cosmetically. You don’t need a stunning and flashy website to have a successful and profitable Amazon niche site, but it has to be more than that.
Your site has to have a logical flow for the reader and it also has to create the right ‘feel’ for the visitor as well to trigger a sale or call-to-action (more on this later).
If your site is trying to sell baby goods to mothers, and your site design uses grudgy, computer game color schemes, and graphics, do you think the visitor would bother reading the content, no matter how good it may be?
In addition to picking a look or theme that’s suitable to your product and market demographics, make sure the site is navigation-friendly as well.
Always plan your site based on how you want the visitor to navigate on your site and what you want them to do when they land on a review page.
Minimize distractions and make it obvious that they’ve reached THE LAST WEBSITE THEY NEED to make a buying decision.
2. Not Providing a Conclusion or Recommendation
Related to the last sentence above, if you’re running a review site, make sure your product review landing page has a clear and definite conclusion to stop the visitor from seeking more information away from your site.
Here are some quick tips on how to “close the sale”, so to speak.
- Create a table-of-contents on top of your review post, it gives them a quick summary of what the review has in store for them before they ask “should I bother reading this?”
- Provide a comparison table in the middle of the review. Compare similar competing products but make sure ONE product stands out and that’s the one you’re recommending in the review.
- Close with a compelling statement for the product without leaving any doubts that it is the best product for their specific needs.
- Have the call-to-action near your conclusion
- Include some form of added benefit from ordering from your link such as “Free Super Saver Shipping Now” or “30% Off Now”, or whatever benefit Amazon explicitly mentioned on their product page
They’ve found your page, they’ve read through it, don’t let them leave without doing something that benefits you!
3. Not Pre-Selling and Connecting With Visitor
Unfortunately, fundamental marketing rules are often neglected by many affiliate marketers and website owners which lead to visits with no sales.
A lot of Amazon niche sites cram those “BUY NOW” and “CHECK PRICE HERE” call-to-action too soon, what We call the Cold Call Website.
If you haven’t established some form of connection with your reader, it’ll be no different from those pesky credit card salespeople you see out in the mall shoving a brochure or flyer up your nose or those salespeople trailing your every step as soon as you enter a store badgering you with their recommendations.
Address their customer buying questions (CBQ) from the start, try to converse and reassure their concerns with the said product. Not only will you come up with a more fact-based and trustworthy recommendation, you’ll also end up making more sales as well.
After you’ve addressed their fears, and concerns, and made them want the product, only then should you pitch for the sale.
4. Too Much Call to Action
Having too much call to action is detrimental to review sites.
By plastering tons of “Buy Now” buttons, in-text links, “Click Here” texts, competing advertisement (Adsense, other affiliate networks), cluttered sidebar, related posts, etc. you’re committing Mistake #2 above – Not providing a conclusion. Placing CTA buttons and links are very strategic and must be logical for the readers are they skim or read through your text.A quick tip would be writing the review post as a potential buyer, then find out which areas of the text do you pause and say “OK, where can I buy this and how much is this?”.
Those will be great areas to put a call-to-action link or button.
5. Having No Call to Action
For affiliate marketers, this is not as common as having too much call-to-action, but for many newbies, their sites are often devoid of any CTA, which is surprising to discover.
Many are either using the standard WordPress Twenty Eleven (or similar) theme, then list their review posts like a blog one-by-one with no CTA of any kind.
Action Points – Do These Now
Here’s what you should do right now to improve on your conversion and sales for your Amazon niche site:
- Check your stats and find your site’s TOP LANDING PAGE, the page that gets you the most traffic, preferably a review or inner page.
- Copy the entire content and paste it onto a plain text viewer like Notepad and read the text.
- Ask yourself the following when reading the text and make sure you address all of these or so:
- “If I’m the customer, what are my main REASONS on why I’m looking at this product”
- “I know I need something like this, what’s stopping me from buying this particular model?”
- “What else do I need to know about this?”
- “What other options are there and is this one the best?”
- After addressing their concerns, read the text again. In areas where you feel that you’ve convinced your reader, insert a call-to-action link or button.
- Provide a final conclusion and hard recommendation at the end of your review.
- Update the post and check the actual live site, scan through the entire page from top to bottom. Are there other ads, call-to-action buttons, widgets, sidebar elements and other non-essential CTA elements that can distract the user? If so, remove them or make them less prominent.
These easy steps should be done on all your review and information posts to make sure you’re not leaving money on the table.
Always write with your potential visitor in mind and once they’re on your site, maximize your opportunity to send them to Amazon with a “buy now” mindset rather than a “just looking for more info” mindset.