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Home » The Famous Blog » Maximizing Sales… It’s Time To Remove The Blindfold

Maximizing Sales… It’s Time To Remove The Blindfold

May 23, 2010 - Last Modified: July 1, 2010 by CJ

Maximizing Sales

Lately, Affiliate Marketing has quickly grown into an opportunity for anyone to make money on the internet. Regardless of your age, ethnicity, where you’re from or anything at all really.

The problem is that half the people out there, are going about Affiliate Marketing the wrong way! See, most people get to a certain point where they’ve made a couple of sales and automatically think they’re the next internet gurus. Well that’s far from the case.

The “Phantom Sale Theory”

Anyone who’s made money as an Affiliate Marketer should know what this is. I kind of just gave it a name but it’s pretty self-explanatory. Remember when you started your first campaign and were throwing your affiliate links everywhere you got the chance? And then one day you check your affiliate account and “BOOM!” you made a sale… you just have no idea where the sale came from. You don’t know if it was from the links you placed on forums, let alone which forum. You don’t know if it was from one of the articles you wrote. You have no idea where the sale came from, but yet you’re still happy as ever. Well that’s the “Phantom Sale Theory” and if you’re still making your money that way then you’re definitely not maximizing your sales at all.

Ideally, you want to use tracking ID’s with all of your affiliate links if you know you’re going to post them in more than one location. If you’re affiliate network doesn’t give you the option to ad tracking ID’s then  you’ll need to use an external link tracking tool, which you can find on Google pretty easily. Tracking ID’s rock because once you make a sale, you know where it came from, which tells you which of your attempts worked. Once you know what works, making more sales becomes a breeze.

Do Know Your Audience?

There’s no way you’re going to make as many sales as you could be making, without knowing your audience. Most Affiliate Marketers, don’t even have a clue who their audience is! Take a second and think about things for a sec. Trying to sell something to an audience you don’t understand is like trying to go bowling while blindfolded. Every now and then you’ll get lucky, but in neither case will you get consistent results. Get what I’m saying? Well imagine if instead of just aiming your campaigns at the general public, you only aimed it at those who actually cared what you had to say? If you didn’t draw the conclusion , an audience that cares equals more sales for you. Makes sense right?

Well before I even think about starting a new campaign, I ask myself these questions. What age group am I targeting? What kind of budget does my audience have? Is my audience looking for something they want or something they need? Questions like these help you design your campaign and should be questions that you run through before you even think about designing a landing page or writing an article.

A lot of Affiliates like to build a campaign and then find an audience to match it. Well, if you’re one of them, I’m sorry to break it to you, but that’s a pretty ineffective way to go about doing things. You want to determine who your audience is and once you know that, then you can start building your campaign. Because what happens when you put hours and hours in to a campaign, only to find out that it doesn’t appeal to a wide enough audience? Yeah, it just kind of sucks. Determine your audience first, your campaign second, and you’ll be fine.

Take Off The Blindfold

Affiliate Marketing is not different from any other business in most aspects. Like most businesses, with Affiliate Marketing, you want to know as much about your audience as possible, you want to know what works and you want to be productive. You want to analyze your campaigns, keep record of your results, and pretty much run your online business as if it were any other business. Follow these tips and you’re “OK” campaign can quickly become a “Great” one.

Image credit: margolove

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Filed Under: Marketing

About CJ

Follow @cjszone

CJ is a full time college student and a full time blogger who provide tips for making money online on his Blog. Feel free to Check Out CJ's Blog if you want to read more of his posts. CJ learned everything he knows about making money online from Wealthy Affiliate, check out his Wealthy Affiliate Review

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{ 22 Responses }

  1. Aron says:
    Hi CJ, Wise words indeed, and your post probably fits my story exactly as well as many others I am sure. Everyone comes into affiliate marketing thinking it's easy money and it can be for relatively small amounts but if you intend to make good money then you are right you do have to track and get to know your audience before success truly comes. Cheers, Aron
  2. Jimmy Ahyari says:
    Hi, CJ. I strongly agree with what you say. I manage a blog (in Indonesian language) which has information about wordpress, so, I will only follow the affiliate program related to wordpress. The aim is that the level of compliance with a niche to be high (and probably also will boost sales :D ) *sorry if my english was bad :oops:
  3. Jason Jumat says:
    It's very important to know where you sales are coming from when you make money online. If not - you're obviously not going to maximize any of your sales. Putting your affiliate links everywhere and just do the guest-work "maybe you'll make a sale here ot there" is disastrous. One cannot build a business like this.
    • CJ says:
      Exactly man! Affiliate marketing isn't a guess and check business. It's like any other business. CJ CJ's last blog ..The Death of Summer Jobs and How 17 Year Olds Are Getting Rich
  4. Murlu says:
    Tracking is absolutely crucial for affiliate marketing. Like the post runs through, if you don't know where your sales are coming from, you won't be able to optimize your campaigns.
    • CJ says:
      Well said. :P
  5. Kristi Hines says:
    I think I would like to do a little additional bit of tracking for affiliate programs, as I have one account and affiliate ID spread across several of my own sites as well as forums. It would certainly be nice if there were analytics for each tracking ID to see from what site the click was made.
    • CJ says:
      If I understood you correctly, you just need a link tracking tool, because they definitely make what you're talking about. I use the my-linker tool included with Wealthy Affiliate, so I don't know what the free alternative would be but I'm sure alternatives are out there. CJ
      • Kristi Hines says:
        I think I might stick with creating different custom redirects using the Redirection plugin in WordPress. Then I can see which ones get a certain number of clicks, although that still doesn't tell me which ones actually convert. At least I'll know where people are interested in a certain product, and where they are not.
        • CJ says:
          Haha, we all have different things that work for us! I don't use wordpress so that's not an option for me haha
  6. Tinh says:
    Phantom Sale theory is great. However, all affiliate network now applies tracking ID and tools that help you know where is your traffic from and where is your sale is generated, much easier than ever before :-) But, the important thing all of us must know and remember is that we should explore what our audiences want and provide what they want then your sale is boosted :-) Thanks for nice article!
    • CJ says:
      I completely agree with you! Affiliate networks do now give the option of using tracking ID's. What matters is that you use some sort of tracking system! Haha. As long as you do that and know your audience, you're doing yourself a huge favor!
  7. DiTesco says:
    I always loved stats. These are extremely important "figures" that one can not ignore. Just like you said, there is no point of making a sale if you do not know where, when and how did it happen. If you implement "tracking", then you can identify which campaign worked for you and concentrate more efforts in that particular campaign to see if it gets to convert more sales. Simple post and yet great in its content. Thumbs up
    • CJ says:
      Haha, Thanks DiTesco, I figured, with this being my first guest post, I might bring this one back to the basics. CJ
  8. Andy Bailey says:
    the power of affiliate sales is that anyone can do it. the problem with affiliate sales is that anyone can do it. it's a catch 22, it's so easy to be an affiliate marketer that just about anyone that gets on the internet tries it, the problem comes from doing it ethically. Even then, some find that doing it unethically will get them results and so they multiply what they're doing and then other new users come and see what they're doing and try it themselves. It's a good job there's a site like this to teach them how to do it from the start. It's all about people, not numbers or lists or fancy schmancy tools. Once you get a rep for hocking any old rubbish just to make a half a dollar then you'll only ever have that methodology. Learn properly from the start by following people that are doing it properly and it'll pay you 10x more and last 10x longer than the fly-by-night fewls who don't analyze their results and use the data to modify their methods. great post!
    • CJ says:
      Great comment man! You're absolutely right. Affiliate marketing's biggest positive and negative is that anyone can do it. I personally believe that blogs have helped restore some of the ethics to Affiliate marketing, mainly because if bloggers run a blog where they're scamming people, they'll loose all their followers and get a bad name. So I see popular blogs as resource you can always rely on. And wow, you'r the guy behind commentluv. Really impressive. I'm a computer science major at my college so don't be surprised if you see me creating some wordpress plugins in the near future! CJ
  9. Gail says:
    Most people have no idea how many clicks it takes to generate each sale or how different the conversion rate is for curiosity clicks versus search clicks versus those highly targeted to a particular audience. I encourage anyone interested in making money with affiliate marketing to learn from those who are actually successful at it. The Wealthy Affiliate program CJ mentioned is one and there are others. For bloggers who haven't gotten the whole affiliate marketing scene figured out yet I hope you'll consider the offer to earn gift cards worth up to $105 in the post I've featured in CommentLuv in this comment. For those who do understand affiliate marketing there is a program you should check out mentioned in that post.
    • CJ says:
      I definitely agree with you man, The new affiliate marketers these days don't even notice the difference between the different kinds of clicks and end up doing things like over spending in adwords or posting links somewhere that doesn't do them any good at all. Haha Knowing your audience, and using link tracking makes a huge difference and saves you money. CJ
  10. CJ says:
    Hahaha, Thanks Dennis, It's actually kind of funny that you mentioned the method of tracking down the buyer. When I first started affiliate marketing, I actually tried doing that, and it wasn't the most effective method ever Haha. I asked the buyer where he found my link, and he replied "the internet." It was at that moment I realized there had to be a better way. LOL. CJ
    • Dennis Edell says:
      I have everyone beat CJ. I REFUNDED someone because I forgot the link was out there. One day a sale hit my inbox. YAY! I shouted. Wait a sec, WTF is this? I've never promoted this product, have I? I didn't even recognize the product. I refunded right through paypal explaining that something must be wrong, where did you find this link? I asked him. I don't recall if he even responded, but later realized it was mine; something I promoted once or twice like a year before. It was only $7, but, wow...
      • CJ says:
        Hahaha that's a really funny story Dennis, That's the Phantom Sale theory for you! Our pasts of once being amateur affiliate marketers is always haunts us! A Phantom Sale can be exciting, but when I was new to affiliate marketing, it was really deceiving! I'd get a Phantom Sale and think it was from adwords and then would spend way too much money on a campaign that just wasn't working. Also, I've noticed that contacting buyers directly rarely works because in most cases, they just don't respond. I guess they think it's spam or something haha. CJ
  11. Dennis Edell says:
    "Phantom Sale" I like it! lol I had that problem when first starting. Blogging wasn't much yet and forums were everything, so of course I was active on 20 or so. You couldn't be more right, good luck trying to track down that sale! You could of course try to track down the buyer and ask, but, well.....not the most solid tracking method. LOL I'm just getting more (back) into it now, so for now I know everything comes off a blog of mine. Excellent advice CJ. :)

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