If you are trying to make affiliate sales, but are not having much luck, here are some suggestions for how to increase your sales.
It might just be time for you to start using safelists in order to determine the most effective ads for your sales campaigns.
Are you using safelists? If nothing else, safelists are wonderful because they provide quick feedback about the effectiveness of your headlines and ad copy.
When you use safelists, you need to be using some kind of link tracking in order to see what headlines and copy are producing the clicks.
You should be able to track the effectiveness of a particular safelist, the headline, and the copy. With a link-tracking service like the one I use, TrackThatAd, you can do this by adding a simple character string to the end of the tracking URL.
I use a 9-character code for my safelist posts. The first three chacters designate a specific safelist, the next three characters, the ad, and the last three characters, the headline. The character code for an ad posted to Dustys’ safelist, for an ad about “Eating Nuts,” and with a headline starting “*Live Longer*”, might be “duseatliv.” The statistics provided by a tracking service will quickly show, with such a code, just what is generating the clicks–and you need to know this.
If your headlines are not producing the clicks, you need to work on producing eye-catching, interest-provoking headlines that do. My experience shows that if you do this–you WILL get clicks.
HTML ads win hands down when it comes to effective safelist ads. If you have the choice, use HTML, rather than text-only ads. You may have to upgrade your safelist subscriptions to be able to use HTML ads.
I prepare the HTML ads in advance. I then copy and paste them into the safelist HTML form–and preview them before I hit the “submit” button! You do not need an expensive HTML editor for this and there are many free and easy-to-use editors available for download on the Internet.
Using effective headlines will get the clicks–but you still have to have something at the other end of the clicks that will lead to sales conversions. Here is where your “proven” ad copy can help. If your ad copy is good, people WILL click through to the sales page from your safelist post. After that, it’s up to the sales page to make the sales. Your safelist headline and ad copy are, in effect, presales pages. They “drive” potential prospects to the sales page, see this here.
Once you have safelist-proven ads, you can use them elsewhere.
Just as there are many services with which you can place your headlines and ad copy, there are several ways to display them to potential prospects. For example, many traffic exchanges will allow you to use “solo ads” or “solo emails” to reach large numbers of exchange members. These methods are in addition to the typical banner and web page views seen by exchange members. A single “solo email” might, for example, reach the inbox of 30,000 or more exchange members! Since exchange members often get “credit” for clicking on these emails, your email ads are much more likely to be opened and read. It is possible that using these non-typical ways to reach potential customers with your proven ad copy and headlines can lead to multiple sales.
The problem is, there are no guarantees in advertising, and using various non-typical services to put your offer in front of lots of people is not always free. Therefore, developing effective copy on services that are free or inexpensive is the smart way to go; safelists fill the bill, in this respect — even if you have to boost your subscription level in order to use HTML. Think of safelists as test beds for your ad copy. The good news is, that if your safelist copy is good, you will most likely make some sales from the safelists, too.
If you use your safelists as test beds for your headlines and ad copy, you probably do not need to subscribe to many: perhaps 10 safelists from the TrafficHoopla top 20 will suffice to test your headlines and ad copy.
Testing your advertising services, ad headlines, and ad copy is critical to your affiliate marketing success. You should use link tracking in order to provide the statistics you need to determine what is working and what isn’t. Using safelists as test beds will provide you with quick feedback as to the effectiveness of your ad headlines and ad copy. Using your ads for more expensive forms of advertising, such as for an adword campaign or “email blast,” makes more sense if they have first been safelist proven to be effective.
