One of the fatal flaws of new affiliates is that while their ambitions for their new website are massive, and they “plan” to receive tons of traffic and make lots of money, 99% of the time their site suffers from a lack of planning in terms of targeting and converting visitors.
I swear to god that 99% of new affiliates posting in the PAL forums asking for advice are all basically saying the same thing, “I have nice site that gets some traffic but I’m not making any money”.
Factors that you should take into account when converting visitors
1. Keyword Research
Success in affiliate marketing means making websites that will convert visitors and give you the highest ROI for your investment. So, how do we go about making sites that will make money?
The first thing that I do when planning a new website is do keyword research so that you can find niches or “keywords” that have relatively high volume, limited competition and most importantly that will have a high conversion rate. Generally speaking, any profitable keyword with traffic of over 500 exacts in google keywords tool is something that I will show an interest in. Of course, anything above 2,000 is even better, but than again the competition for those keywords will be very high.
Although ranking for keywords such as “3Betting Light” and “MTT Strategy” might get you traffic, these types of visitors are NOT looking to sign up to a poker room. They won’t make you any money.
Instead, you should concentrate on targeting keywords where the traffic obviously has intent to buy.. For example, “poker bonus”, “iPhone Gambling App”, “paypal deposit methods”, “real money instant win games”, all have players that are looking or at least considering to sign up to a room.
From my experiences, while a keyword such as “3betting” will have a 1,000+:1 conversion rate, “sportsbook deposit bonus” will have around a 3:1 conversion rate for CTR to signups. In other words, this is a money term. The same goes for anything with the keywords “play online”, “real money xxx” or “best xxx online”.
2. Buying a Domain and SEO
Once you have a keyword in mind, you need to figure out the best way to SEO and rank your site for that keyword as quickly as possible.
Buying a keyword rich domain (i.e. a domain that has your keywords in it) helps a lot when doing this. For example, if I wanted to rank for “poker bonus” than having a top level, exact match comain such as pokerbonus.org would help a ton. If the exact match domain is already taken than try finding another domain which still includes your keywords, such as “bestpokerbonus.org” or “onlinepokerbonus.org”.
One of the major benefits of having a keyword rich domain is that you can link to your site with your keyword without triggering a Google penalty as easily.
For example, linking to the site pokerbonus.org with the anchor text poker bonus will seem more natural to google than linking to the site hotpoker.com with the anchor text “poker bonus”. If you build too many links with anchor text like this than it would eventually trigger an algorithm in google that would give your site a penalty and decrease your rankings.
Another advantage using exact match domains give you is that when you get natural links to your site, using your domain, you will get a bigger boost in the search engines for that keyword.
Converting Visitors on your Website
Getting traffic to your site is one thing, but actually converting it intelligently with the use of text links, banners and CTAs (call-to-actions) in articles is the final hurdle.
It’s important not to over think or complicate this step. If you have traffic coming to a single page on your site for the keyword “xxx bonus”, than just give them the information that they need and give them a big banner or CTA to click so they can go to the gaming site easily.
On the other hand, if your traffic is just looking for information than banners tend to be least effective. Instead, you should intelligently place text links inside articles and engage with the reader why they should sign up or play at a specific room.
This requires more than just “hey you can get a big bonus here.” You need to try a different approach such as, “if you’re looking to qualify for the WSOP than you should really try Carbon Poker’s daily satellites. Carbon Poker run x number of satellites each day from just $1, and they have the easiest competition compared to major US sites like PokerStars.”
Don’t over-do your site and confuse your traffic with too many offers or banners. If your traffic is looking for the best protein powder or US-friendly poker site than just give them one or maybe two products to promote. Don’t promote millions of products on one page and expect that it will increase your revenue ten fold. It will just confuse visitors and increase your bounce rate.
Also, I think it’s a good idea to provide negative reviews of products to back up your positive reviews or other products. Otherwise if you just say that everything is great than your reviews will lose respect and authority from visitors.
I would like to thank Adam Grunwerg for the Guest Post
Hi, I'm Gerry. I build Poker Websites. I live in N.Ireland, and I might just be the worst Poker Affiliate to ever have a affiliate blog.