Millions of business owners rely on affiliate programs to help increase their sales and in turn their profits. If you are the owner of an online business, especially one that sells a particular product or service, you may be able to benefit from the use of an affiliate program. If properly implemented, they are a great way to increase your business’s revenue without having to do a large amount of extra work  The first step in getting started is to find an affiliate tracking software.

An affiliate tracking software?  If you have never heard of this product before, you may be wondering exactly what it is.  Affiliate tracking software is the actual program behind your own affiliate program. If you start your own affiliate program, you will be relying on your banners and links to help increase your websites traffic and its sales.  These banners will be placed on the websites of your affiliates. With affiliate programs, each time that one of those links is used to generate a sale, the website owner, webmaster, or website publisher, whoever you are partnering with, will receive compensation for their part in the sale. 

To be able to compensate your affiliates, you will need to have a way to determine if, when, and who helped you generate a sale. This can only be done with affiliate tracking software. Therefore, if you are interested in starting your own affiliate program, you must have affiliate tracking software. When it comes to affiliate tracking software, you will have a number of different options.  Two of those options include purchasing your own affiliate tracking software program or using someone else’s.

If you use someone else’s affiliate tracking software program, you will most likely end up doing business with an affiliate networking company. These companies not only provide you with tracking software, but they also help to track the sales of your affiliates, and even pay them. The payment feature is unique because it is not offered on most software programs that you have to buy on your own. With software programs that you buy on your own, the software should calculate how much you owe each of your affiliates, but you are required to take care of the rest.  Depending on what your business is and how busy you are, you may not have time for this.

Having to pay your own affiliates may seem like a disadvantage to buying your own affiliate tracking software; however, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Even though you are still required to send out your own payments, you will generally find that this process is easy to do. That is because most affiliate tracking software programs are designed to automatically calculate the amount of money each of your affiliates make. Whether you choose to pay your affiliates on a weekly or monthly basis, you should be able to find out, right away, how much money you have to pay them.  If you are paying them with a check, you can simply write the check and move on to something else.

A potential disadvantage to purchasing your own software can actually turn into an advantage. That disadvantage is customer service support.  A large number of affiliate tracking software programs do not come with customer support.  Almost all will come with a detailed user guide, but customer service support is not guaranteed.  Despite the fact not all software programs offer customer support, there are even more that do. This means that if you want to have access to customer service support, you just need to find affiliate tracking software that has the support included.  If free customer service support is included, it should be outlined in the software description or software features section.

The above mentioned advantages and disadvantages are important when determining whether or not you should purchase your own affiliate tracking software or do business with an affiliate networking company. Whichever decision you make, you should be well on your way to seeing an increase in profits. The affiliate tracking software program you choose will not have a direct impact on how much money you make, but it will have an impact on how easily your affiliate program flows.

Join Us At The Wealthy Affiliates 

Not too long ago highly effective online marketers and affiliates started using so called second offer boxes on their landing pages. The script used for these boxes ‘senses’ when a visitor intends to leave your landing page and then it shows a layer over your current page with which you grab the attention of your visitor back.

These tools have proven to be highly, if not mega effective. Both product owners as well as affiliates benefit tremendously from this relatively new technology and the reasons for it are simple:

Reason 1: The combined attack
The combined attack might sound aggressive since sales is not about attacking a prospect – however due to ever increasing media exposure there is a fight for attention of your prospective customer. Using second offer box tool allows you to create two opportunities to earn visitor attention instead of one.

Reason 2: Pick the ‘ripest fruit’ first and down sell or cross sell
In direct marketing a golden rule is that one promo piece should obtain one objective. This means that one landing page should aim to achieve one objective. In most cases this would be making a sale, correct? What if your offer converts a reasonable 2% – this causes 98% of your (often paid) visitors to leave without taking any kind of action…

These converting 2% is your ‘ripest fruit’. But that does not mean that the other 98% is not interested in your services, right? Using a second offer box software tool you can now instantly grab attention and offer: a report in trade for contact information, a free sample, a light version, a trial period or one of the almost unlimited other marketing options you have.

Using this type of technology will give you the edge over your competition that either doesn’t know about this technology or doesn’t take action. Test it and you’ll see the stunning effect!

Reason 3: Non expensive and easy to use
A wide variety of scripts are on the market, most crappy, some OK, some good. There is one script I can recommend it’s one of the best of its kind and it’s totally free of charge! On top of that is has the fastest response time, the most design options and some exclusive psychological triggers that you won’t find anywhere else. Go to Return On Traffic, see some live examples of the software in action and grab it for free. You can easily set it up in under 15 minutes flat!

The use of the internet to generate leads and sales is the most direct form of direct response marketing around. Every element of your offer, your presentation and your traffic source can be tested and optimized with lightning speed compared to traditional DM (direct marketing).

As long as DM exists, and as long as the internet exists there is a lot of fuzz about how to increase conversions. Why is that? Part of it is because the so called “gurus” want to create some smoke curtains to make things actually sound more complex than they are. Selling their courses is the reason for their existence so it’s in their best interest.

On the other hand, if it were easy to achieve record breaking conversion with every campaigns you create, there would be absolutely no need to read advice, tips, tricks, case studies and instructions provided by well know direct marketers. Therefore, there is a science and an art to achieving high website conversion ratios.

This is not rocket science. And the art will develop with learning, experimenting, and evaluating your results.  The science part is by far the most important part. It will be the basis for your results. If you don’t have the science in place, you will never master the art.

But as has been said, the science of getting high website conversion ratios is not rocket science, so let’s grab the bull by the horns and see what three of the most important elements are to achieving high ratio website conversions.

Tip 1:  One page, one goal
When your website is e-commerce related it has been proven over and over that pages that have only one goal outperform all others. In other words, it’s hard to combine the goal of making a sale with the goal of getting people interested to leave their name and email address on one page.

Having two goals on one page requires communicating two messages at the same time. What do you think will happen? The messages will be distorted and both will have their effectiveness diluted.

Does this mean that it’s not wise to have an opt-in box on a sales page? Generally, NO! Of course there are some advanced techniques that can make an exception to this rule, but this would be subject to heavy testing and fall far outside of the scope of this article.

Tip 2: Use of technology
OK, but you still want to sell and to generate a list of prospective clients. Well you’re a marketer, right?  In the category of ‘basics’ this is an important one. Across the years multiple solutions have been found to solve this problem. The use of technology is very important to win the conversion game! Here are some popular solutions.

Have you ever heard of a “squeeze page”? This is a web page that is positioned before your sales presentation where your visitors are “teased” in to filling out their name and email address to qualify for the sales presentation page. This technique has been extremely effective, currently it seems like results are declining.

Another technique that’s currently winning popularity is presenting a second offer box upon people leaving the sales presentation page. This is basically a software tool that ‘senses’ your page visitor is leaving. At that point it opens and shows the visitor a relevant second offer.

This could be a light version, a discounted version, re-emphasizing as strong benefit or product feature etc. This type of software comes in various forms and price categories. Do you want to know a secret? One of the highest performing scripts out there is free. You can grab it right now for free at Return On Traffic.

Tip 3: Test
You must have heard it over and over. Test, test, and re-rest. Actually it is surprising how few people still do not do this.  If there is one thing that you want to do after reading this article, it’s testing, testing and testing. Contrary to popular belief it’s not the test of your headline that’s most important, the test of your offer is. What do you offer, how do you present it, at what price, how do you prove the quality, how do you deliver, and what system and business model do you use? Test, test, and test and you WILL succeed!

Yes it takes time, but it’s not rocket science. Ramp up the pace of testing and you will succeed on-line, big time!

Don’t Forget To Pick Up Your Free Software!