In the world of affiliate marketing there are still many areas that require improvements. Affiliate networks offer a wide variety of tools for publishers and also give advice on how to optimise sale commissions. However, that is not enough if you really want to be competitive. In this article you will find some technical advantages that I think every publisher should have in order to generate more leads and sales. Of course, not every company has a team of developers available, but many tools exist online to improve your performance.
Conversion tracking
First up is conversion tracking for landing pages, deals, products and/or advertisers. Observe your traffic sources and ads and see how they perform. You can do this by using existing tools or services like Voluum. Personally, I both use this tools in addition to a self-developed tool.
Also, make sure that you know from which page of your website a conversion or (e-mail) subscription originates, so that you can optimise it when necessary.
Dead links detection
Broken links won’t make you any money. Manually looking and finding dead links takes a lot of work and effort. Also, a system to let users report broken links is not optimal, as broken links on your most remote pages won’t easily be discovered. Best is to can create your own tool that automatically finds broken affiliate links and replace them. There are also some WordPress plugins and other dead link checkers to help you cope with this problem.
Self optimising website based on performance
Self optimising websites or landing pages can explain themselves in many ways. Some websites automatically push their most popular deals or products forward to their homepage, where other websites categorise on search metrics. This saves a lot of time on sorting things out and it also improves financial performance. Work that you would normally do manually, after having to analyse the traffic and clicks on your site, can not only be done automatically but also continuously.
A/B testing based on conversions
A/B testing allows you to split traffic on your website, so that visitors experience different web page content or designs on version A and version B of a page, while you monitor visitor actions to identify the version that yields the highest conversion rate.
Most (performance) marketers are optimising by the amount of clicks. But it’s better to make the technical connection to be able to optimise on the amount of conversions. That’s because a high number of visitors clicks could just come from confused visitors. So try to close this blackbox.
Technical SEO done right
Although many of you have the skills and knowledge to do SEO, doing SEO right is actually quite hard. Of course, it’s important to have a fast website and have sitemaps available in html and xml, so a search spider can crawl and index your website.
When you are not a developer, there are many tips on how to improve technical SEO. Think about keeping your site free from cloaking, using redirects, and URL structure properly and preventing duplicate content.
Automatic quality checks on content
Another thing that can save you lots of time when done automatically, is checking and updating your content. Personally, I like to use a tool that checks sites for duplicate content. Make sure you are connected and make use of as much automatically generated data as possible. Doing things manually on a regular base is your big enemy for productivity, it should only be allowed when you want to do something special.
Automatic SEO checks on pages
A great tool to automatically check your SEO is Yoast. Actually Yoast is a game changer to boost your SEO. It’s a plugin for WordPress that can easily improve your SEO, even when you have moderate knowledge of it. The tool checks if your website is SEO-proof and will give you tips on how to improve your site SEO.