Website Sales: Promotion is Only Half the Battle

I recently received an email from a visitor of TheWebReviewer.com who was in the dropshipping business. He created a fairly nice website with tons of products on it and followed the next rule of online business: Get Traffic! Logically, if you have no traffic to your website or no one is aware that it is there, you are not going to be selling anything. If you have the greatest website in the history of the internet, what good is it? This person then took the concept of Search Engine Optimization and truly embraced it. Within 3 months, he had a Page Rank of 5, over 5000 backlinks, 1000s of pages of articles and an Alexa ranking of less than 100,000. Very impressive! And this work definitely paid off! The traffic started to consistently flow. But the question was: “I have the traffic, the page rank, the backlinks, etc, but I do not have a profitable website!” What happened? I’ve read a lot of eBooks about this and most of them stress: “If you bring them, they will buy!” This is not entirely true. Half of the journey is getting people to your website and the other half is to convince them to buy. This person had a very nice looking website, but it did not give me any real reason to buy from them. One of the good (and sometimes) bad aspects of affiliate marketing is that the ad-copy (the website sales pitch) is already done for you. Products that are successful are usually that way because of their ad-copy. When choosing affiliate marketing products, be sure to view their sales statistics. Again, they may have a great product, but if they do not sell it well on their website, they won’t make many sales and you won’t get many commissions. Of course, this is one of the major downsides of affiliate marketing: you have no control over how the seller will present and sell their product. Then again, many of these websites have experience above and beyond most of us in the realm of marketing that can ultimately benefit you, the affiliate marketer, in the long run. As an affiliate marketer, I spend a lot of time not only choosing the products that I plan to promote, but I look very closely at their conversion statistics as well as study their ad-copy. You should always ask yourself a few questions:

1) Would I buy from this website?

2) What does this website or product offer me above and beyond everyone else?

3) Does the website look professional and secure to make purchases on?

4) Do they provide contact details or offer refunds on the products?

And these questions not only apply to me, the affiliate marketer, but the seller who is creating their own ad-copy, too. Traffic is a very important and essential aspect of making money online, but just because you have a lot of visitors does not mean that people are going to buy from you at the end of the day. A good ad-copy campaign can easily be the difference between monthly losses and huge earnings!