If you’re going to be successful in the online marketing world, you’re going to need to become proficient at a range of website optimization techniques.
In this pot, I’ll provide an overview of how to optimize affiliate sales pages. I’ll look at optimization using two approaches: with specialized software and manually trying different layouts.
Manual Optimization Techniques for Affiliate Sales Pages
If you have a relatively new business, I understand that you may be on a budget and the idea of buying another piece of subscription software for your blog is difficult to justify.
If that’s the case, you may consider a few manual optimization techniques. Manually optimizing your pages gets you a ballpark estimate on a couple of key data points, which is usualy enough to get you to the point where you’re ready to up the ante and buy more sophisticated software.
To manually test pages, you’re going to need to create different versions of the page and place them at two or three different URLs on your site. How many tests you do at a time will be determined by how much traffic those pages are getting.
With each of your different test-pages, you’re going to want to engineer the pages so that they have the same objective: selling a specific affiliate product.
Testing Page Elements
Basically, you’re going to create 2-3 versions of the same page, and play with one or more of the following elements:
- Page layout
- Affiliate link placement
- Number of affiliate links
- Headers and subheaders
- Page text
It’s important to note that ideally you will only be testing one element per page, since testing multiple items on a small number of pages won’t always tell you which change was the one that got you the best results.
Read more about A/B testing your affiliate site.
Use Campaign Tracking Links
Many affiliate programs let you create different unique links to track campaigns, which is a great feature to incorporate into this process.
When you test each different affiliate sales page, you’re going to want to give each page it’s own unique link. That way, when you are calculating results, you’ll know not simply how many people visited the page or clicked through from the page, but can have actual data on conversions to affiliate sales.
Beyond Manual Testing
Once you’ve done a couple of manual optimization tests, you begin to realize how annoying the process can be. Fortunately, there’s a lot of software options that allow you to A/B test different pages, layouts, and text on your site automatically.
That means that you don’t have to deal with redirecting links, setting up entirely new page structures, etc, because these systems will take care of it for you.
Click here to continue reading about automatic sales page optimization techniques.