Affiliate Marketing Made Simple

Today, affiliate marketing is a well-established method of selling online. If you offer a proportion of the margin of your product or service to a considerable number of affiliates, you can boost your sales. But first, you need to craft an attractive affiliate scheme involving your product or service. It doesn't end here. You must promote and implement the scheme in a professional manner.  If the affiliates who signed up for your program, are bringing in a good amount of traffic for your website, then the search engine plays a less relevant role. Amazon is the pioneer of affiliate business model. They have sold millions of books via tens of thousands of Amazon affiliates.

What exactly is an affiliate marketing program?

Any affiliate program is a contractual arrangement between 'the owner ' of a product or service and an Affiliate organization, to pay commission, in exchange for promotion of its goods and services. This typically involves adding advertisements of the owner on affiliates' websites, mainly in the form of banners, buttons, links to promote the Merchant's offering.
If you sign up to be an affiliate, then your responsibility is to redirect visitors of your website to the merchant’s website. In the process, if you face any issues from the customer service regarding ordering a product, or delivering issues, all this will be dealt with by the owner of the affiliate program.

How does it work?

Usually, affiliate programs are structured and automated. If you decide to sign up to be an affiliate to any program, you must agree to abide by the owner’s terms and conditions before you are entitled to promote any of his products or services. Once you sign up for the program as an affiliate,  you will receive a unique tracking ID associated with the registration or website. You need to add the HTML code to your site so that the owner can track where each of the sales came from. You along with other affiliates of that program get paid once a month. You will also be given access to a monthly report that gives all information about outlining leads, sales, and conversions.

Usually, most affiliate programs are commission scheme based on monthly payments via PayPal. Electronic affiliate businesses are scalable and can recruit an unlimited number of affiliates to promote the products and the cost of doing so can be negligible.
Here are some models that you must know out of the various types of affiliate models in use today:

'Pay-per-click' model

In this model, affiliate commission is based on the number of unique visitors clicks to the merchant's website from your website, if you are an affiliate. The merchant will track all the unique clicks through the IP tracking to prevent click fraud. If you are an affiliate, you can benefit from of an instant source of commission.

'Pay per lead' model

This model is applicable where the product or service has a long sales cycle and requires human call-back. Example: If the merchant is a mortgage broker and wants users to fill in a call back form with their contact details on, each completed contact form would count as a ‘lead’ and you will be paid to the affiliates on a qualified ‘per lead’ basis.

'Pay per sale' model

If you are an affiliate, the merchant or the owner pays an agreed sum of money to you each time a user visits your website, clicks through to the merchant website, and buys a product or a service. It might be a commission value for a sale or a commission based on a percentage of the sale. But to get the commission, you will have to meet a minimum order a sale value. You will receive bonuses based on the number of sales that you make over a given period.

The advantage is high sales volume with low-cost sales effort.
The disadvantage is lower margins and affiliates need to be paid commissions to remain motivated.

How to create an effective affiliate marketing landing page?

While creating your affiliate landing page, aim to make as many conversions as possible. You will have to set up and optimize your marketing landing page so as to actually get conversions. You can do this by setting up your landing page in such a way that your call to action button gets clicked as many times as possible.

What is the importance of an affiliate landing page?

The main problem observed with most affiliate landing pages is that they are generic and almost always have a mundane design.
These pages have all the necessary features such as headlines, CTA button, and contact form, but they lack the extra oomph to convince the visitor to click on the CTA button and actually make a conversion.

The second biggest problem plaguing affiliate marketing landing pages is the lack of trust from visitors. If your page seems untrustworthy, then no one will read through the page. This can be caused when you advertise one thing and then deliver something totally different.

As an affiliate, you want to build trust between you and your visitor, not destroy it. You should ensure that your landing page is trustworthy and also very creative.

Is it difficult to set up an affiliate landing page?

Despite the fact that you want to go the extra mile to create a different and more creative landing page, it doesn’t mean that it is a difficult process. This process will be easy if you do it right and also create your affiliate landing page using a landing page platform that can assist you in making your page.

Here are a few tips on how to create an effective affiliate marketing landing page

Avoid message mismatch on your affiliate landing page

If there is a message mismatch on your affiliate landing page, your visitors may start to mistrust your page. Ensure that you maintain the consistency of your affiliate landing page. Ensure that your CTA button gives the visitor the same offer that is mentioned in your headline or on the link that he or she followed to get to your website. This will help to ensure that you get conversions and also secure future conversions.

Make the page aesthetically appealing
There are no rules or set guidelines to achieve this, all you can do is trust in your creativity and design aesthetic and choose a landing page layout that will be both relevant and attractive to your visitors.

You can go for color contrast when highlighting an element on your affiliate landing page, for example, your CTA button. You should go for a bright color and an image that is relevant to your offer and also looks good.

Use enough whitespace on your affiliate landing page so as to ensure your page is not cluttered and it looks clean.

This will make it more appealing to your users and also ensure that they do not get distracted when they are on your affiliate landing page.

Shorten your landing page’s permalink

The permalink or URL for your affiliate landing page should be short and relevant. It is quite easy for people to remember your URL if it’s short thus making it easier for them to share it with other people or access your site at a later time.
This will help to increase conversions on your affiliate landing page due to an increase in traffic to your landing page.

Put the opt-in form  on the top of the landing page
Many visitors on your page do not want to read through all the content on your landing page thus if you place the opt-in form at the bottom of the page very few visitors will convert. You should place the opt-in form at the top of the page so to increase the chances of conversion on your affiliate landing page.

Test your affiliate landing page

Test different aspects of your landing page such as the title, format, font, opt-in form appearance and the position of the opt-in form on your landing page.
This will help you get a clear picture of what your visitors react more positively to. This will also help to ultimately increase conversions on your landing page thus increasing your earnings.

To conclude, don't have too many words on your landing page, you will risk losing the attention of your visitors thus reducing the number of conversions on your marketing landing page. The tips above is everything you need for creating an effective affiliate marketing landing page which will build trust with visitors and lead to conversions.

Become a Lander Affiliate Partner: Lander Affiliate Program