What tools does an affiliate need? For starters, you need to track your stats - how many clicks you send to the sales page of the product you are promoting. If you are not tracking that stat, you could make two sales and think you are doing a great job. However, the reality could be that you have sent 3,000 visitors to that sales page, and that work only resulted in two sales.
That is not a very good conversion percentage, and you are basically wasting your time and efforts. Either the sales page is not converting well, or your source of traffic is very poor. Either way, something needs to be done – and if you are tracking your stats you will have realized this already.
Likewise, if you make those same two sales, but only sent 50 visitors to the site, you need to know that so you can keep up with that source of traffic – that is converting at 4%, which isn’t too bad at all.
By tracking your stats, you know what works, and what needs to be changed.Another thing you need to do is “cloak” your affiliate links. If you don’t know what this means, it is best to show you an example to explain it. Say your affiliate link looks like this:
http://www.salessite.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/refer.cgi?r=3572&p=17
This has a few problems associated with it. First, it is obvious that this is an affiliate link, and many people do not like clicking on affiliate links (this is more of a problem in the Internet Marketing niche than it is in other niches). Many people will simply cut off most of the URL and just go straight to the sales page.
The easy solution to this is to “cloak” your link so that cannot be done. Your new link will look something like this:
http://www.mysite.com/info/ebook.htm
That’s two tools you need, but there are many more that can help you. My new Affiliate Software Pro takes care of those two, and much more. Here’s what else it can do for you:
• Link Tracking – Like we discussed earlier, this is absolutely imperative so you know which campaigns are working, and which campaigns need to be dumped.• Link Cloaking – This was also discussed already, and is needed to protect your affiliate commissions.
• Link Branding – This allows you to put an additional message at the bottom of any page you are promoting. This can be any bonus you are offering for those who purchase the product from your link, or it can highlight any features of the product that are beneficial to the reader.
• Covert Linking – Is the product owner using a squeeze page, but you don’t want to send your traffic to a squeeze page? With the Covert Linking tool, you can send your traffic to any page on that website, and still get credit for the sale.
• Covert Cookies – This allows you to earn affiliate commissions without your visitors seeing any visible traces that you are promoting an affiliate program. In fact this solution actually plants your affiliate cookies completely independently of the visitor clicking on your links.
• And More – Check it out at www.AffiliateSoftwarePro.comThese tools can drastically increase your chances of making a sale (multiple sales, actually), and it is all very easy to implement. For more on my new Affiliate Software Pro, check it out here: