In this concluding episode of How To Convert Traffic Into Sales, we are going to discuss strategies to increase the conversion of traffic into sales of your own products.

If you are a product owner, the key to converting traffic into sales is really in the overall game plan, which is made up of the following objectives:

1) Proof
2) Hook
3) Offer
4) Over-deliver
5) Offer again

1) Proof

When traffic comes to your product site, your main objective is to prove to the visitors that your site is a trustworthy site and your product can meet their needs.

This is when you demonstrate your copywriting skills.

Some of the tricks that can help you to achieve this objective include testimonials, case studies, your photo, a video intro from you and as suggested by one of our readers, a link to your Facebook account.

2) Hook

If you can achieve the first objective of Proof, you can basically filter your visitors into 2 groups.

The first group is made up of people who don’t need your product or service at all. This group of people will not do anything regardless of how good your product is. Ignore them.

The second group consists of people who have a need for your product or service, but they may or may not buy it. This is the group of people you want to Hook!

I believe you should have guessed it by now that what I mean by Hook is to get them into your list. Whether they are going to buy or not, you will want to convert them into your list because they are your target prospects now or in the future.

How to convert them into your list is another huge topic. In short, the trick that has been working for me is to provide a free version of the service I’m offering. If you can somehow offer a free version of the product or service that you are selling, I highly suggest that you offer that option. This way, you can capture all the people belonging to the second group.

3) Offer

Once you have a system to Hook your hot prospects, the next thing you must do is to give them a good reason to take action now - i.e. buy your product NOW!

In real life, you don’t propose to your new girlfriend the first day you’re engaged. But in sales, you MUST do so. In Mandarin, we say “Hit The Iron While It’s Hot”.

You can use strategies like “one time offer”, “increasing price strategy”, “limited supply strategy”, “time-sensitive offer”, “fast action bonus” and many other tricks. The idea is to give them enough reasons to take action NOW or they will either miss a great discount or great offer.

Typical conversion rate is about 10%. My best record is 60%, meaning every 5 people who opt-in, 3 are paying customers.

4) Over-deliver

For those who reject your initial proposal, you now enter a long-term courtship. Your job is to over-deliver.

Depending on your strength, you can over-deliver by providing good tools, resources, services, videos tutorials, blog and many other things. Make them remember you and trust you.

5) Offer again

Finally, never be afraid to find good opportunities to offer them again. You can either offer them the same product or you can offer them other products.

There are many ways to skin a cat. As long as the relationship is built and you can identify their needs, there are plenty of ways to make money from your list.

Last week, we talked about how to convert traffic into “ad-click” sales. Today, we will discuss how to convert traffic into “product” sales.

Similar to ad-clicks, the “prerequisite” of any product sales is targeted traffic. Whether you’re getting traffic from search engines, PPC or other advertising channels, the traffic must be interested in your product.

If you are getting traffic from the search engines, you’ll have to note that in addition to getting targeted traffic, you have to get traffic from keywords that can convert into sales. For example, you may be getting lots of traffic from the keywords “ideas for Christmas presents”, yet not making any sale. Instead, a low volume keywords of “unique Christmas present for mum” may get you some sales. Like it or not, certain keywords simply convert better than others and you need to find out what these keywords are!

With that prerequisite in mind, let’s look at the strategies to convert traffic into product sales, including affiliate sales and sales of your own product.

1) How To Convert Traffic Into Affiliate Sales

Whether you are selling your own product or affiliated product, the most important factor is trust or confidence.

For those of you who have read my Insider Advertising Report, you will know that Sales Is A Transfer Of Confidence.

If you are selling an affiliated product, you can build trust in 2 ways:

i) Give a personal encounter of your experience with the product that you recommend.

- This is usually a one-page review on how the product has benefited you. The storyline will always be something like “I was having so and so problem…. then I found this product…. then my problem is solved.”

- In this model, the visitors are likely to read your experience in detail and eventually click to the product site.

ii) Build a ’seemingly’ trustworthy niche site, one that seems to have great info and great reviews, with prominent links or banners linking to your affiliated product.

- Such a niche site usually have 5-10 pages of relevant contents, with the objective of making the site look as if it understands the niche well. Every article should link to your affiliated product. In addition, every page should have a prominent banner that links to the affiliated product. This is important because the number of traffic to your affiliated site has a direct impact on the number of sales you make.

- In this model, you don’t really expect your visitors to read the articles. The articles and entire website are just to make them trust your site before they go to the affiliated site.

As an affiliate marketer, your main job is to build “instant” trust and then focus on how you can redirect as many of that traffic to the affiliated site as possible. In other words, simply repeat this process… Build Trust, Redirect… Build Trust, Redirect… The more you repeat this process, the more commissions you will make. It’s a numbers game.

You can’t really measure how well you’ve built trust, but you can measure how many visitors who leave your website visit your affiliated site. Your job is to increase that click-through rate. Focus on the click-through and commission will follow!

If you are an affiliate marketer who simply advertise the actual sales page, the above strategy will not be applicable. For you, your success depends a lot on how well the sales page is written and how targeted is your traffic.

2) How To Convert Traffic Into Sales Of Your Own Product

Selling your own product is slightly harder because you can’t recommend your own product and expect people to trust you.

This is so true that one of my clients always advertise his product in the capacity of a product user, with a presale letter describing how he has benefited from the product. If you are a product owner, this can be a strategy worth considering.

There are quite a bit of strategies I would like to share with you on how to convert traffic into sales of your own product, but today’s article is already a little stretched. I’ll leave this part to next week’s blog. Stay tuned.

By now you probably realize that getting traffic is easy, but knowing how to convert traffic into sales is harder!

In today’s blog, I’m going to share with you some practical tips on how to convert traffic into sales.

First, what sales are we referring to?

Are we talking about ad clicks, as in the case of Adsense click-through? Or we’re referring to product sales, as in the case of affiliate sales or sales of your own products or services?

Since they require different techniques, I will discuss them differently.

How To Convert Traffic Into Ad Clicks

The “prerequisite” of any ad-clicks is targeted traffic. Whether you’re getting traffic from search engines, PPC or other advertising channels, the traffic must be interested in the content on your webpage and hence the content of the ads. Without this prerequisite, nothing else can work.

With that prerequisite in mind, let’s look at the strategies to convert traffic into sales (ad clicks in this case).

1) Place an ad above the fold

Don’t worry about making your webpage ugly. Be focused. You want ad-clicks! Just get it.

One of your ads, such as an Adsense ad, should be above the fold (i.e. can be seen without scrolling) and located right in the middle of the webpage. Usually, a good place to put it is immediately below the title.

2) Place an ad near the action button or action link

If you are running a forum or any website where people tend to click on buttons or links to take some actions, place an ad near the most used button.

3) Place an ad at the end of the article

If the visitors happen to read the content on your webpage, you’ll want to offer them something to do after reading. And that something is of course… an ad!

4) Don’t frame the ad!

Don’t frame the ad with borders. Remove any border.

In the offline world, retail shop owners are adopting an open concept, removing glass panels and walls because they realize that this will increase the traffic flow to their shops.

Same goes for the virtual world. Borders prevent people from clicking the contents in it. No borders please.

5) Build instant trust

Nowadays, people are more and more web savvy. You can forget about the old tricks of camouflaging your ad and misleading visitors into clicking your ad. (That is against Google’s terms by the way). If your visitors ever click on your ad, that’s because they want to get the info and they know you’ll make money out of it.

Instead, what you should do is to build instant rapport with your visitors. Make them feel that your website is trustworthy, not a made-for-Adsense site.

No, I don’t mean you have to start writing every article yourself and putting a personal touch in every article. That would be crazy, especially if you have hundreds of niches.

The trick I use is to place a ‘personal’ photo on my niche site, so that visitors can feel that what they are visiting is a little personal site of mine and I am the little expert in that niche.

Of course, I’m not going to put my real photo! You can find tons of free photos here.

That ends part 1 of How To Convert Traffic Into Sales series. Next week, we will continue to discuss how to convert traffic into product sales. Stay tuned…

Take a look at the screenshot below. This is what I mean by dominating Google’s first page.

Out of 10 results in the first page, 9 are articles from the same author, syndicated on different websites.

The last result is a YouTube video, which is something Google tries to include in every result page.

In fact, for this particular search term, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th page of Google are mostly dominated by the same article.

Interested to know how it’s done?

In today’s blog, I’m going to show you exactly how it is done. Yes, I know exactly how it’s done because I’m the person behind it.

What happened is this article is an article submitted by one of the members at ezArticleLink, our new link building system.

The article gets published in hundreds of other domains in the system, over a period of time, so as to get backlinks to that member’s site.

Now, the question is, if you write an article and publish in hundreds of article directories, will you get the same result?

Not likely, because most of the articles are buried deep in the directory and more importantly, there is no backlink to those articles.

Then what makes this article different?

I’m not going to hide anything. Here are the reasons:

1) Unique article

The article has been spun according to our spinning requirement. This ensures that every published article is unique (at least in the eyes of Google).

To ensure good user experience, Google does not display duplicated contents. It will only choose the most relevant one (usually the one with the most backlinks) and show it.

For Google to show all your articles in one page, that article must be unique. So to Google, it is showing 9 different articles.

2) Highly relevant content

Google’s objective is to return the most relevant webpage for a given search term.

By means of relevance, I mean…

i) The title of the webpage must be relevant

As you can see from the screenshot, all the titles contain the search keyword, except for the 9th listing, which is something else (actually an error with that site that cause it not showing the correct title and the problem has just been fixed).

ii) The content in the webpage must be relevant

In this case, every webpage you see in the screenshot above has content related to the keyword. NO OTHER miscellaneous content or randomly generate content in it.

iii) The internal links and outgoing links in the webpage must MOSTLY be relevant

Except for some standard navigation links such as home, contact, privacy etc, ALL the links in the above webpages, be it internal links or external links, are about ETF, stock or forex trading.

3) Highly relevant backlinks

This is the most important factor.

Each of these webpages you see in the screenshot above have highly relevant backlinks from other unique webpages from different domains. This is possible because of ezArticleLink’s auto link building system.

When I say highly relevant backlinks, I mean 2 things:

i) The anchor texts of the backlinks contain the search term.

ii) The backlinks are from webpages with relevant content

That’s all. When you have all the 3 ingredients in one place, plus if that search term isn’t too competitive (in this case, there are 62k competing sites), you get amazing results like this.

This is a good example to show you how to create webpages that Google likes. Take note of these factors when you create your next webpage or website.