Affiliate Marketing Web site Preparation, Preparing your Web site for Affiliate Marketing.

It is critical that your website is prepared for affiliate marketing before you launch your affiliate program. This means having your conversion optimised so that an affiliate drives traffic to your site. The optimal change is for an affiliate to convert the user into a sale, lead or your target action. When that happens, an affiliate is rewarded.

Creating a separate micro site or landing page are two proven methods to ensure that affiliate traffic converts to sales as often as possible. If you offer the same payout as a competitor but that competitor’s website converts better than yours, that affiliate will make more money sending their traffic to the other merchants website. To be the preferred destination for affiliate traffic, be sure that your website converts best for the potential traffic.

What makes a good landing page?
Before you start designing,werecommend researching other landing pages. Visit your competitors’ affiliate programs and review their landing pages. Take notes and pay close attention to elements that you see repeated. See what jumps out at you and think about why- this will help jump-start your own design process and give you wide insight as to what are the common practices on affiliate sites. Consider the pages you visit from the eyes of a consumer and see what you like and dislike.

When you start designing your landing page, remove barriers to online sale- experienced affiliates hate telephone numbers unless they are tracked. Make the first impression for affiliates is that it is a great site- as in, you can help them sell lots of products and not all of my commissions will be “stolen by the phone number.” Ask your contacts and network for additional advice on this, it will be well worth it as shared experience is a great teacher.

Deep linking
Affiliates often want to link to individual products you sell. You will need to ensure that your website is setup so that this can be easily achieved.

Affiliate Landing Page Warning
Many companies make the mistake of thinking they will try out working with affiliates to see if it is successful- then they think about how to optimise their website. Affiliates are experts at knowing what sites will and will not convert. Experienced, skilled affiliates who get sales are unlikely to try and work with you if they do not think your website will convert for their traffic. Why should they take the risk if someone else already has a good site in place?

Affiliate Marketing Web site Preparation, Preparing your Web site for Affiliate Marketing.

See
Affiliate Marketing for Merchants
Affiliate Marketing for Merchants
Affiliate Book Affiliate Handbook