As I wrote few days ago, affiliate marketing is not just about driving traffic to your website. There is another important parameter, which can increase your sales significantly! It is conversion of your website. Today I will show you example how we are trying to improve conversion of our own website. Same schema you can apply on your own website and test if such changes will help also to your website.

Before we will start, I will repeat main idea from last post:

If you want to double your sales, it is much cheaper to improve conversion of your website as to pay for higher traffic.

So how can you increase revenue from your website ?

I don't know how to increase your sales, but I know what worked for us. Here is what we did:

1. We identified page where we loose the majority of our visitors.

You can identify such pages e.g. with Google Analytics (it is free tool offered by Google). Google Analytics will show you exactly bounce rate of each of your pages. The page with highest number of visitors and highest bounce rate is problem of your website. This is a page, which you should optimize as first.

In our case it was home page of Post Affiliate Pro product. This page had bounce rate higher as 50%.

2. Test what your visitors need on your website

Only way how to improve your website is to test. You need to find out what your visitors have to see on your website to become your customers. Without testing you can't make decision, if change is step forward or backward.

Again Google has free solution for us. With Google Website Optimizer you can make different kinds of tests on your website and identify what is working and what you should remove from your website.

We don't know what exactly expect our visitors from our website, so we prepared next to original version of our website 2 different variations and we prepared test in Google Website Optimizer.

Variation1: "Combination Nr8"

Goals of this variation:

- With this variation we tried to make home page smaller without long texts, which we had in original home page.

- Visitor should be able to navigate to every important page of our website with only one click.

- We identified the most important features, which are our visitors search on our website and we put them under main banner to convince visitor, that our product has those features. 

Variation2: "Combination Nr11"

Goals of this variation:

- The most important for our visitor could be to see Demo and Buy our product

- Important decision making aspect for our visitor could be opinion of existing customer

As you can see we prepared variations with different layouts and different content. It is better to start with big changes, you will see more significant results. If you will prepare test with really tiny changes (e.g. different versions of text in banner), results of testing will not be so significant.

2. Execute test in Website Optimizer

I will not describe in detail how to implement test in Website Optimizer. This is quite well documented in Website Optimizer knowledge base. I will mention just some important facts about our testing.

Most important during setup of test is to define correct goal of your test. In our test case we defined as target of test visit of checkout page by visitor. It is a page very close to decision to buy our product. If visitor clicked through our website and finished in checkout page, it is good result for this test. Checkout process we will test with separated test.

If you are afraid, that variations prepared in your test will not be so good as original website, you can drive to test just less than 100% of your visitors. All other visitors will see just original web page. Google Website Optimizer is pretty flexible - don't be afraid to test all kinds of changes on your website. This is only way how you can identify what will perform better on your website.

As you can see on image below, we were able to reach better conversion with both prepared variations comparing to original version of our home page. Important is to wait minimum 2 weeks until you will make final decision and select winner of your test. Don't do decisions too fast!

3. implement the best variation into your website

As you can see, our home page experiment is still running, but results are already significant comparing to conversion ration of our original web page.

You can see alone, that to double conversion ratio is much cheaper as to drive double traffic to your website.

It is much cheaper, but it has one more important side effect for your affiliate marketing:

If your affiliates will see, that traffic they will drive to you is efficiently converted into commissions, they will try to drive to you even more traffic as before.