I also met Kris last year while at Elite Retreat – his breadth of knowledge is really incredible, and he’s also coming out with a book soon as well!

Kris, at Elite Retreat, I remember you being very clear on the fact that there was no one factor that got traffic to convert into affiliate sales, and that you always tested a variety of variables to find the right conversion “formula”. What are the most important variables that you change in that testing phase?

Earnings-per-click or EPC is one of the more important factors to consider when attempting to evaluate profitability, especially for affiliates using pay-per-click advertising. For instance, if your EPC for a particular affiliate program is 36 cents and your average cost-per-click (CPC) is 40 cents, you are losing roughly 4 cents on every click you purchase. On the other hand, if your EPC is 36 cents and your average CPC is 20 cents, you are making on average 16 cents everytime you generate a click (not bad!). If your EPC is lower than your average CPC on a particular campaign then you should lower your CPC; if your EPC is great than your CPC you may consider increasing your CPC so that you can generate higher volume. There are many large search marketing affiliates that use this simple formula to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing.

Another important factor when evaluating Web site performance is Web analytics. In short, Web analytics programs like Google Analytics – www.google.com/analytics – are free and allow you to better understand the sources of traffic to your Web site. This information is very important to affiliate marketers since Web analytics programs provide data on the specific kinds of traffic being generated across multiple sources ( i.e., organic search-engine traffic, pay-per-click traffic, ad networks, traffic from other Web sites, etc.).

How do you choose which products to spend the most time on in this testing process?

Most of the most successful affiliates on Pepperjam Network test offers based on seasonality. For instance, with Valentine’s Day coming up there are a number of offers that will convert especially well, including flowers, dating Web sites, gourmet food / chocolate / candy sites, day spas, etc. The key is to get your campaign ready to go with enough time to take advantage of early shoppers and then have enough staying power to make profits when many other marketers are vying for seasonal sales.

Another suggestion is to test offers that peak based on something that is happening in the world right now. For instance, American Idol just started up again recently (it was hilarious!). Now is the time to launch a blog or Web site talking about the show, including the contestants, the judges, and what you like and dislike about American Idol. On your Web site you can monetize your Web traffic by promoting American Idol ringtones, apparel, etc. In short, playing seasonality and “what’s hot” is a great way to test the affiliate marketing space. Your imagination is the only limit to your success as an affiliate marketer.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

First, I would make sure the post is search-engine optimized. For instance, make sure your title includes the “target” keyword(s) you would like to rank for. Your exact target keywords should also be used in the post. Second, you may also want to have others link back to your post with the anchor text (aka, target keywords) you want the post to rank for. You can do this by asking other blogger friends to link back or consider pay per post networks such as PayPerPost.com or ReviewMe. Thirdly, another idea is to supplement the natural traffic to the post with pay-per-click traffic from Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Lastly, if you still want to purchase more traffic you can use networks such as Adbrite and Etology.com or send out a press release through PRWEB telling the world why your post rocks.

(From Wendy – Google doesn’t like you buying links, so be careful and do your due diligence on research before you decide to make a link purchase. But I do wholeheartedly recommend testing out pay per click traffic on your posts, which has worked well for me in the past. Kinda sad to see those two sentences together… makes me feel like Google is winning the war on squashing the competition paid links!)

More from this series:

Jim Kukral, The Daily Flip

Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

Rosalind Gardner, Net Profits Today

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.

When I first started building my online business, her Super Affiliate Handbook was my startup bible. To this day it remains one of my most highly recommended affiliate marketing learning resources, because Rosalind is so honest, down to earth, and is vigilant about making sure she helps people run an ethical and profitable affiliate marketing business. Honestly, she is one marketer that I am just dying to meet in person someday.

Rosalind, you have been affiliate marketing for a long time, and the internet has changed pretty drastically in that time. How have your conversions changed over the years, and what is the most important lesson you have learned in that time about getting things to convert and keeping them converting for longer periods of time?

In industry terms, it has been a long time indeed. I celebrated my 10th anniversary on January 1st of this year and because it’s been so much fun and so lucrative, that I have every intention of doing another ten.

As for my conversion rates, they have actually improved over the years as I’ve learned more and more about the business world in general and marketing in particular.

I think the ‘most important lesson’ about achieving higher than average conversion rates is that it is a lesson most of us learned at our mother’s knee — and that’s just to be honest.

It really is that simple.

I like to connect with my site visitors and newsletter readers on a highly personal level and share the ‘honest goods’ with them about products and services that are relevant to their interests. I say exactly what I think about whether a product is incredibly useful or downright junk… and often use highly emotional language to convey my like or intense dismay, i.e. “It’s Crap! Crap! Crap!”

Because many affiliate marketers are unilaterally positive in their product assessments, the result is that many of my long-term loyal readers report that they will not buy a product until they have read my review.

Increasing conversions over the long term is therefore about building long term relationships through honesty and trust. The spin-off benefit of this approach is that I never have trouble sleeping at night.

When you launch a promotion, new product or service now, what are some of the things you do every single time to ensure that your chances of getting the sales are the highest possible?

I don’t really have a formula – although perhaps I should!

However, I would say that the one element that remains consistent from promotion to promotion is having first-hand experience with the product.

When I haven’t had access to the product but still feel that it’s worthy of promotion, I tell my readers that I haven’t personally used the product and will justify the mention with a quote and link to my trusted source of information.

For example, just as I was looking for a new camcorder, I learned about the Flip Ultra through one of Shawn Collins’ posts in which he included a sample video from his camcorder. I knew I needed one and blogged my excitement about having discovered and ordered the little gem on my Roamsters.com travel blog.

Although this approach may result in sales for the original reviewer, it effectively increases the ‘trust factor’ which is again my primary m.o.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

There are so many different ways to promote your entire blog or individual posts, but I usually stick to those that I find least time-consuming, including having a list of recent entries in my sidebar and producing a weekly digest of posts for newsletter subscribers who are not subscribed to my blog’s feed.

If a subject continues to be raised over a period of time, I’ll often refer and link back to the original post from new entries. And on rare occasions, I’ll link back to the post from a comment that I may post to another webmaster’s blog.

More from this series:

Jim Kukral, The Daily Flip

Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.

Jim is someone I consider on the leading edge of video blogging, in fact, he doesn’t do a lot of “writing” anymore. When I sent him my questions, I suggested he might want to answer in the format he knows best, which he has done amazingly well (making me more intimidated to get into video!).

In this 3 and a half minute clip, Jim answers my questions about his most successful online sales campaign ever, setting up split testing, and promoting blog posts with affiliate links. His info is especially relevant to people who sell products or services. He makes a good point near the end about disclosure, and I might try out his idea about offering two links instead of one in a post.

(YouTube link for RSS subscribers)

I think nearly every internet marketing program out there promises riches, but honestly, I don’t think many of them focus enough on this very, very important part of your internet business. Massive amount traffic that doesn’t earn you any revenue isn’t going to keep you in business for very long. So I have reached out to several well-known marketers & bloggers for a 3-Question interview on the subject of getting visitors to covert into revenue.

First up is Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. Although Darren has a business model in which his revenue comes from a wide variety of sources, Darren is particularly talented at making money from CPC (Cost Per Click) ads, in which you earn revenue when a visitor converts into a click. So I the questions I asked Darren were specific to this kind of “conversion”.

Darren, you are well known for earning a six figure income from ads that pay if a visitor clicks on them. What are the different things you have done to test, change and improve your click-through ratio over the years on your sites, and what has worked the best?

The first lesson to learn is that every site/blog converts differently. For starters some ad types work well on one blog but not another but also the positioning and design of ads will work differently on different sites also.

The second lesson (with the first one in mind) is that you need to experiment and track your results. Try different designs/colors but also ad sizes and ad positions. You’ll be surprised what you find when you do. I run split tests on some of my blogs (A/B tests) and will run one ad unit with one color scheme 50% of the time and one with another color scheme the other 50% of the time. Do this for a day or two and you’ll see the difference. Then go with the better converting one and split test it with another style. You can do the same thing with the size of ads and positioning (and even between networks). It’s fiddly but it can be well worthwhile.

Some general principles to keep in mind:

Positioning – in general ads close to your content work best. Ads above the fold usually work best. Other key spots are anywhere that your reader naturally ’stops’ reading (ie at the end of an article).

Relevancy – you can have the prettiest and most well positioned ads in the world but if they are not relevant to your reader (and the content you’re writing about) then you’re unlikely to have them click it. This is why ‘contextual’ advertising works so well – it see’s you’ve just written about iPods and puts an ad up for iPods. If you’re using an ad network that isn’t contextual you’ll need to find ways to manually choose relevant ads.

Traffic - it’s obvious, but once your ads are well optimized you can have the most impact upon how much it earns by getting more traffic to it. However not all traffic is equal in terms of conversion. I’ve found that traffic from search engines can be quite good at getting clicks on ads like ‘AdSense’ ads while traffic from another blog with a good recommendation from the blogger can do better with affiliate programs. Traffic from regular readers is harder to convert with CPC ads so again affiliate programs can be better.

What are the factors that a publisher should take into consideration when choosing a CPC ad network (Chitika, AdSense, AdBrite, Kontera, etc.), and how can they find the one that is the best match for their niche?

Probably the main thing that I’d suggest is signing up for them all and testing. Like I said above – I find that they all will convert differently on different blogs. This is partly about the topic of your blog (ie a product related blog can do better with Chitika) but also about the type of reader you have (ie a blog with lots of loyal and regular readers can become blind to AdSense).

For me the main thing I look at is the topic of the blog and try to match it with an ad network that I know serves relevant ads.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

Depends partly upon the blog and it’s current readership but I’d probably consider:

• Emailing a few key bloggers in the niche with the link
• Posting it to Twitter, Facebook etc
• Talking to a social media expert friend to see if it was worthy of them Digging it
• Adding it prominently to a sidebar/navigation bar on every page of the blog
• Writing a follow up post a few days later linking back to it

Most of the above is fairly basic – but together it can have an impact.

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.