As an affiliate marketer there is one thing you will notice very fast and that is your website visitors will not trust you, and as an effect two things can potentially happen they won’t buy from your affiliate links and you will struggle to maintain traffic to your website.
When either of these to things occur especially in the early days of your affiliate marketing career it can be devastating to the extent of you actually giving up.
So How Can You Build Trust
The days of having a one page website are far behind most affiliate marketers and the age of the authority site has arrived. After so many years of one page websites and marketing anything that looked like it would make a dollar, the web community has become smarter and more informed and they are now doing much more market research when it comes to purchasing products online.
For those that are not sure what this means and the effects it may have you should take a look at our post called evolving as an online affiliate.
There will be those don’t agree with this and for the simple fact that they are using one page web sites with pay-per-click marketing to send the traffic and yes if the audience is hungry enough for that product or service they do get sales.
What is being discussed here is creating trust as an affiliate marketer and building long-term value and relationship for you web visitors so you can generate numerous sales and have a constant growth in traffic and overtime build up relationships with other webmasters in your niche to build an extremely powerful affiliate site.
Gaining The Trust Of Your Website Visitors Is Essential
The very first thing you need to be doing is supplying quality content that your visitors have an interest in, which then leads them to interact with the article by way of comments adding more value and content to your site. If your web visitors are not commenting on your articles then maybe you are writing about the wrong things.
You really need to know what it is your visitors are looking for so setting up a Google Analytic’s account is a very good idea to see what keywords are being used and how long your visitors are staying on your site. Another tool which is free that you can use is called Max Banner Ads if you are using a WordPress blog this is a great way to track your website advertisements and click-through rates.
The next important factor for anyone wanting to work online and to give your visitors another reason to trust you and your site is by to have easy to find contact information in an accessible location such as telephone, email and even your business address, this let’s the web visitor know that you can be contacted. You should have everything for the web visitor to be easily accessible this is one of the reasons visitors leave when there are no contact details, disclaimer and privacy statements on your site.
Think to yourself what you would actually expect to see on a website if you were buying a product or looking for information.
Ensuring that you have an “About Us” page is also a very helpful, as this will reveal some information about yourself as an affiliate marketer and your online business to the visitor. This also helps to establish a common bond with your visitor and eventually increases your chances of success with your affiliate business.
Creating testimonials can be very helpful as well when building credibility but be warned that they need to be real customer testimonials not something that you have written to trick your visitors into buying a product from your affiliate site. If customers are happy with your recommended product or the service, giving you a testimonial is a great way for them to say thank you.
This can help you highlight the product, increase credibility, and of course increase sales.
Promoting Your Affiliate Products Online…
As an affiliate marketer you want to be promoting products to all of your visitors, after all this is your source of income right.
However there is a right way and a wrong way to do this so its essential that you make the offers clear and emphasize the benefits of the product or service to the visitor. Many so-called experts will tell you things like bypassing the sales page of a vendor’s site and go straight to the purchase page meaning write your own sales copy to sell the product.
However doing this could also signal the end of your business for the fact the if the vendor has not taken the time to build a presentable sales page then how much time has he really put into the creation of the product that is for sale. Again this is fine for a one page website that doesn’t want any repeat business and that will be gone after a year.
Having a website that is easily accessible is one thing that will indicate to the web visitor that you’re knowledgeable in your niche and would be safe to do business with. . . Always be courteous to the website visitors whether this is through email, telephone or posts on your blog. Always make an effort to make their lives easier by explaining what the product or service you are recommending will do for them.
You always have to be mindful that when writing the sales copy or blog post you need to understand that your web visitors don’t have the same expertise that you do and anything you can do to put their minds at ease will convert into a bigger commission check for you. Even though you are not going to be dealing with customer complaints, it doesn’t hurt to have some type of customer support this will make your web visitors feel much more at ease.
The internet can be a very impersonal place and if you as an affiliate marketer can establish the trust upfront through quality content and back-end service being email, telephone and replying to comments in a timely fashion on your web site the result will be more sales and an affiliate website that is built to last for many years to come..
Remember, people who trust you will continue to visit your site and follow your recommendations. If you are mindful of this when creating your website, you’re already halfway to realizing success with any business online.
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