How I convert traffic into sales at 4.15%

You'll often hear people who use top affiliate networks like PeerFly talking about the "marketing funnel". It's a way of depicting the number of visitors coming into a site (the top of the funnel) and where they are lost before finally making a sale (the bottom of the funnel).

Your job as a blogger or online business owner is to convert as many people as possible into paying customers using whatever means you have at your disposal. The more people you can convert, the more money you make.

Please note that this is organic, not paid, traffic and is meant to highlight a way to supplement your online income!

Ask around, you'll find that a 4.15% conversion on clicks through to your site is pretty darn good. In fact, it's up there with the best in the business. So how do I do it?

Affiliate with high converting sites

The secret to maintaining super high conversion rates is to pass off the sales to high performing sites. For example, I am an Amazon associate (that's basically an affiliate) and, as such, I can link to any product or service sold on Amazon and earn a commission on any sales arising from the traffic I drive to Amazon.

So far, that's just your basic affiliate arrangement, which can work very well if you are good at driving traffic to your site and funneling it to your affiliates. Check out this course entitled "Instant social media traffic" that can show you how build large traffic volumes using innovative social marketing techniques.

Turn high converting sites into a point of sale

In particular, I can make my own products available on Amazon and drive traffic through to those products too. If you are passionate about a subject enough to create your own products, why not make them available on Amazon? Take a look at "Good money: Generate long term passive online income", which not only teaches people how to generate revenue through passion based content marketing, it is also a good example of making your own products available through Amazon.

Amazon converts at 4.15% for me

So, instead of trying to compete against Amazon, I work with them to share in the profits. Sure, if I sell my own courses and books through them, they take a cut, but they also convert at 4.15%. Their whole site is set up to cross-sell, up-sell, reduce cart abandonment and so on.

What I lose in profit margin I more than make up for in sales volume.

Now, I can't tell you if Amazon will convert at 4.15% for you. It may be higher, it may be lower depending on how you drive traffic. All I can say is that at 4.15% over the long term, Amazon is converting traffic for me better than most any other business I know.

A site like Amazon is generally going to convert at a higher rate than small businesses because Amazon has a lot of experience, trust and reputation built up over the years. You might be just as reliable, but chances are far less people know it.

Amazon also make it super easy to add affiliate links to content and other parts of your site. All you need to is memorize your associate id and tack it onto the end of any product URL, like this:

?tag=associate_id

Hey presto", you have an affiliate link that can drive revenue at any time or place.

What's more, if you do a good job of creating high quality content that goes viral, those links can become huge revenue generators, all converting at an excellent rate.

Affiliate traffic funneling

Of course, the figure of 4.15% conversion is the rate at which traffic I send through to Amazon converts. That is not the rate at which visitors to my site ultimately convert, because not all visitors click through to Amazon.

However, articles and posts I write that offer reviews on products, or predictions about the future of a niche on innovative social sites like topulo.us often become fairly popular and social media can help to spread those articles around.

For example, check out this prediction about Rebecca black's new single entitled "Rebecca Black's next single to be smash hit song". This prediction caused a lot of interest at the time it came out and continues to drive organic search traffic through to the reference links (which happen to be affiliate links).

Off site, engaging and interesting content like this helps to drive sales through Amazon for traffic that doesn't even come through my own site.

Affiliate marketing ground rule #1

Be warned that people don't like reading sales pitches. There's no point in filling your content with affiliate links because people will switch off immediately. Links embedded in content need to valuable and interesting to the reader - if they happen to be affiliate links, but are exactly what the reader wants to see, then everyone is happy.

If you try use this technique, make sure you don't overdo the affiliate links or you will pay the price.

Good luck!