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How To Increase Your Click Through Rates And Maximize Profits From Affiliate Programs On Your Wordpress Blog.

Posted on 11. Feb, 2009 by Derrick.

Before I get to the meat of the article, I thought I would first define a few terms just in case you’re a newbie: If you already have some knowledge in this area, feel free to skip the definitions and go straight to rest of the article.

DEFINITIONS

What is an affiliate program?
An Affiliate program is simply a program you can join that allows you to sell specific products for a commission. Usually when you join such a program, you will be provided with a specific affiliate web link to the product sales page. This allows the Affiliate Program to track referrals to their site from your link, and thus compensate you for any referrals that actually lead to a sale. This is probably one of the easiest and fastest ways to create an income online, as you don’t need to create, deliver or provide support for a product - you just recommend it.

What is a Click Through Rate?
A click through rate or click through ratio is simply the number of times a link is clicked on and goes to the linked web page over the number of times that link is shown within a specified timeframe. (Also known as “impressions”).  For example if this article was visited 100 times, and one of the specific links were clicked thru 20 times to another webpage - then the click thru ratio would be 20%.

THE PROBLEM

So if you’re an affiliate marketer, ie an independent sale’s agent for specific products, you would normally make your sales through having a website with links to these products. There are many other ways to do this such as creating advertisements that link straight to the their sales page (and therefore not requiring you to have a website) as well as email marketing (which requires you to build a list). For the purposes of this article I’m focusing on people who have set up a website or blog and primarily write articles that include links to the products they are recommending.

Most people who do this, simply insert their affiliate links into their blog or website: They simply copy and paste the affiliate link into the post. Now here’s the problem. Most affiliate links look horrible and meaningless as they are computer generated and created primarily to produce a unique link so your referrals can easily be tracked. Here is an example of how these affiliate links can appear:

http://www.AffiliateProgram.com//a.php?a=CD13798&b=25367&d=0&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4110&s1=&s2=&s3=&s4=&s5=

Of course this is not the link that will be in the text - however this horrible link will show up in the status bar. (usually at the bottom of the web browser). They appear when you hover over the link - revealing the address of where the link will take you. Because the link is meaningless and looks ugly, many people will choose not to click through and therefore you are losing opportunities for sales. These are visitors who have somehow found your website as a result of the the time you have spent with traffic generating strategies. You can stop losing these potential sales.

THE SOLUTION:

There is a way to minimize the loss of these click throughs and that is by creating professional looking and meaningful links. This is done by creating a redirect ie - creating a nicer looking link that redirects to the actual affiliate link. Here are some examples of such links:

http://www.YourDomainName.com/AffiliateProgram
http://www.YourDomainName.com/recommends/AffiliateProgram
http://www.YourDomainName.com/Goto/AffiliateProgram

Compare these links to the one previously. Which would you prefer to click thru on? As you can see, these links look much more professional, meaningful and therefore more likely to be clicked through. By creating these links you should be able to increase your average click through rate. Also since redirects conceal your affiliate ID’s within the actual affiliate link - you are also stopping people from stealing your commissions by removing your affiliate ID and replacing with their own!

So how can you set these “redirects” up? I’ve been using a software that not only creates these redirects but also helps you manage and track your affiliate links within Wordpress. Normally when you use the affiliate links you have no idea how many times they are actually clicked on unless you login to each individual affiliate program and check your statistic there - This can be very time consuming if you have subscribed to many affiliate programs.  This software makes it much easier to see an overall picture of how effective each of your affiliate links are - all in one place.

Besides this great benefit and helping you make more money and preventing loss of income from stolen afffiliate ID’s, the software has many other features which also help you save time and maximize your affiliate programs. For more information about Ninja Affiliate click here and watch their video on how you can do this and more.

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