Unlock Your Site’s Potential

No site is perfect – not even one earning high commissions or generating large revenues. There are always improvements that can be made: your website will always need further development, and effective optimisation.

So it makes sense to periodically check for increased revenue potential, then improve the website to that effect.

YOU’LL LEARN:

• How to spot potential revenue areas on your site
• How to analyse data and optimise your site
• Tips to improve traffic and earning potential

Eyes On The Prize

First, define what is especially important for your website by thinking about the specific goals that you originally set out to achieve. Ask yourself: have these changed? With these fresh in mind, you can focus on what exactly it is that influences these goals – that is, which ‘screws’ you have to turn.

For affiliate websites, commission revenue is the bottom line and almost always the most important factor. To achieve it, you’ll need to pay close attention to conversion optimisation. Of course, the traffic to your website has a significant impact on the amount of revenue that can be earned.

High volumes of traffic and high conversion rates are the ultimate metrics for an affiliate website – always make changes with these goals in mind.

Find Traffic Potential

It’s always possible to get more traffic to your website. Look at your site statistics, find the most popular articles with the most page views, then simply write more of this kind of item. Use the same structure, content, and topic area – if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Quite often, you can further optimise existing articles as well.

If an article has a lot of visitors but ranks lower down in a Google search than you feel it should, then you should look into techniques for SERP optimisation – ways to try and improve both on-page and off-page optimisation.

Also, while we’re on the subject of search results, look at the top search terms that are displayed in Google Search Console. You can then write more articles around what appears to be attracting the most visitors.

Shout About Good Content

In contrast to your popular articles, you may also have very good content that’s had very few visitors. Optimise it by building new backlinks and internal links to the article. You should also re-share such posts or pages on social media every now and again, so that they garner more attention.

Related Topics

One useful way to improve your ranking in Google (and therefore traffic) is to write about related topics. Look at you blog’s previous subjects and then create new articles which explore their themes in more depth, or explore themes that are only broadly related.

You’ll be able to take advantage of synergies between existing and new articles through reciprocal linking.

New Topics

No topic remains truly static and most blog sites will see changes in the subject area they focus on. Keep on top of the launch of new products, new technologies, changes in markets and so on – content about these new developments works well on the social web, as the new often divides opinion.

New developments are also a good reminder for you to examine your old content and see if it is still fit for purpose, needs updating or needs something new.

Traffic Sources

Use the Google Search Console to see where your visitors are coming from. Use the info to help tailor content to meet their needs. You can also make great use of Google Image Search – if you have a lot of pictures on your site, then you should optimise them using the appropriate filename, format and alt text so they can easily be found by people searching for information via image searches.

Social Media

Try to pick the best social-media websites where your content will be well received. Social-media appears in many different contexts; you want to attract the right crowd and not timewasters.

Tools such as Buffer analyse which of your article types are most often shared on the social web. This will indicate topics that should be created more often.

Analyse The Competition

Analyse your competitors using a tool like similarweb.com. What traffic potential do they have? When you find competitors with a lot of traffic, look at their content and how they market their websites.

Keep Your House In Order

The sources of income on your own blog or website must be optimised, too, so they reach their maximum potential. Try the following:

Conversion-rate Optimisation

Conversion rate is defined as the percentage of an article’s visitors who perform a specific action. As an Amazon Associate, you’ll mostly be interested in a sale or a clickthrough.

To optimise the conversion rate, there are many possibilities: try other advertising media, change the position of adverts, change other content within the article and much more.

Heat-map analysis is a very revealing tool to use – an example is http://www.crazyegg.com. It displays where visitors click within an article, to help you place the affiliate advertising material where most users will see it.

Try variants: optimisation is based on the principles of testing and comparing. For example, use optimizely.com.

Repeat Success

Look at your existing well-functioning revenue sources. Because you know what works well with these, you should use these good sources of income more often and write similar content more frequently.

Improve The Underperformers

Also, find the problem areas and evaluate whether any optimisation is possible. Almost every source of income can be optimised; you just have to try and learn from best practice and have patience.

New Revenue Sources

Whether you are phasing out an obsolete income source, or have simply found a new source of income, you should regularly try something new. Remember, though – always perform tests and compare the results with the ‘old’ sources of income.

Optimise Top Products

If a particular article or page on your site attracts many visitors, take advantage. Make sure you perform a full conversion optimisation; try installing new affiliate links and other sources of advertising revenue together within the article, to help increase the click-through rate.

Conclusion

Success in affiliate marketing is intertwined with the continued optimisation of your website. It is about many factors – content, monetisation, traffic and more.

Each site has a lot of potential – you just need to find and implement many tests to find what works best for your own particular website. This is, of course, an ongoing process.