5 Common Conversion Systems for Affiliate Marketing

What exactly is a conversion system may well be the question you’re asking. A conversion system is simply a tool that you use to convert traffic into cash. As long as it does this job, it can take many different forms. It could be a blog. It could be a mailing list. It could be a messenger bot. It could be a Facebook group or an advert you took out in a paper. It could be a PPC advert on Google that people click through. Whatever form it takes, a conversion system is just a tool to get you to convert that traffic into that cash. 

What we’re going to discuss in this article are the five common conversion systems. This isn’t going to be a comprehensive list because, as you can tell by the few I just listed, it can be an awful lot of things. So we’re not pretending we’re covering everything. We’re just going to try discussing the five main ones you might bump into or might want to use.

Direct Promotions

So, let’s start with direct link promotions. Now, basically, with this system, you make money by taking an affiliate link that the program gives you and buying traffic that gets sent to that link. People click the link they land on the affiliate programs page; they buy or fill in that form, and you make your commissions. Easy, right? Well, there are advantages and disadvantages to anything you do. The main benefit of this is the fact that it is easy. It’s the fact that you can get traffic to it nice and quickly, and there’s not a lot of setups. You’re literally taking that link, putting it into maybe an advert, sending some traffic to it, and hoping that it converts. The main disadvantage is that you may have to spend a lot of money before you start making any money. There are other disadvantages too. If you want to try the free traffic routes, it can take a very long time to get enough traffic to find out if this is a winner or not. Another disadvantage is that some platforms won’t allow you to do this particular type of promotion. They don’t allow direct affiliate links. If the platform allows it – and you want to give it a try – it’s a great way to start, but be prepared to spend a little bit of money on it to get the results as quickly as you’d like. 

Content-based Ad Traffic.

Now, with this particular system, what you do is create lots of content. You put that content out there, and you hope that people find it. You try and get it so that people searching for related terms will land on that content. Now, this content has links inside it. If people click on that link, they go to another page on your website that promotes that affiliate offer. Then, they click a link on that page to go to the affiliate offer, or they could go directly to the affiliate offer from your content. The advantages of content-based ad traffic are that you can use these particular bits of content to warm your traffic up. You can either warm them up a little bit more with some more content. You can get the mindset of your traffic into a buying phase. You get to speak to them about their needs and wants, and you also get to brand yourself.

The disadvantages are that making good content takes a lot of time. There’s also the fact that, unless you’re paying for traffic to get to see this content, it can take a while for the right people to see it. Lastly, the internet’s a big old place. So you need to make sure that your stuff is pretty good to make it stand out in front of everyone else’s. Despite that, content-based ad traffic is an excellent way to go.

Email-based Traffic.

It is the main staple of most online marketers. Building a list is one of the most important things you should do if you’re into affiliate marketing with email-based traffic. You get to create a list and build a long-term relationship with someone. But let me take a step back. You need to get that list first. The reason you want to do this is so you can build a long-term relationship with your customers. It’s a way to get them back to your website.

Whenever you want, you can reach out to them with an affiliate link or an offer. Now to get your mailing list built in the first place, you need to promote it on your content or through paid traffic on Adwords or Facebook, or maybe on your Blog or something like that, offering a gift. Now, once you’ve got the email, you can keep sending them updates until a point in time where they click on a link, and they buy something, or maybe they get sick and tired of your emails, and they unsubscribe. That happens; there’s nothing you can do about that. The huge advantage of email marketing is once you’ve got them there, you get to talk to them a lot. You don’t have to convert them straight away.

You can give them free things. You can provide them with advice, and then when you do promote something, they’re more likely to buy from you. You get multiple chances to make sure they know and trust you. Another brilliant thing about email list marketing is that you can market to them whenever you want and wherever you want. As long as you can get access to your mailing list, you could send out something from a beach or on holiday or when you’re in the office. It doesn’t matter, and you can do it whenever you want to. The disadvantages are that it can take a long to build up a mailing list, especially an active and engaged one. Now, if you’re using somewhere to store this like an autoresponder, it can also get costly because you’ve got a list of people who aren’t buying anything or opening your emails.

You have to pay to have them on your list. A quick tip to make this disadvantage not so painful is to clean up your lists actively. So if someone hasn’t opened something or reacted with you for a very long time, you aren’t paying for them just to be sat there. 

Review traffic 

Now review traffic is excellent because it’s got a personal touch to it. Now, what is review traffic? It happens when you post a review or a write-up of a product you’re promoting or a product that’s related to the product you’re promoting, and putting it out there for people to see, and you’re also warming them up towards the buy button. Not only that, but you’re branding yourself, and you’re showing people that you care about the products that you’re recommending to people. Now, the advantage of this particular traffic is that review traffic is direct traffic. They’re known as direct traffic because they are interested in the product you’re reviewing. Otherwise, why would they be reading it? So you know that they’ve already got an interest in it and now they’re just looking to you for advice.

It’s also direct traffic if you’re promoting a product related to another product because, again, people know about this related product, and now they’re reading up on your review on this other item. The idea is to get them to change their minds or cement their view about the product. Now, if they’re already looking at this review, there’s a good chance they’re interested, so your job is to get them to click on your link and buy it through your particular affiliate program. And you do this by providing content and telling them what’s good and bad about the product. The disadvantage of review traffic is that if it’s a saturated niche, you’re probably not going to get many people seeing your review, at least not until you’ve got a bit of authority.

It’s also good if you know something about SEO. That is search engine optimization, and you tailor your different reviews to take advantage of this. The reason for this is that they get seen on places like Google. People click through them when they search to read a review. They see yours first. Now SEO can be difficult to get your head around, so review traffic is just that little bit too hard for some people.

But if you can persevere, it’s worth adding it to your traffic sources.

Video Traffic 

Now we all know that video is enormous, and Youtube is one of the most significant traffic sources on the internet, and if you can tap into that, then it can deliver a tremendous amount of traffic for you, too. Now people use youtube as a secondary search engine. They search in your niche, and they see videos. If they can see your video and view it and put your affiliate links there, they’re going to buy through your links. The main advantage of video traffic is that it’s potent, and it’s relatively easy to rank on places like Youtube. It’s easier than ranking on Google. There’s also an awful lot of traffic available.

So if you can get on there and get to that top position and people are searching for what you’re promoting, then there’s an excellent chance you’ll get decent amounts of traffic. The disadvantage is that if your niche is way oversaturated, Youtube will be full of videos already. Unless you’re better than them at some video SEO, then you’re not going to get seen.

These are just a few different conversion systems or ways to get traffic, and there are a lot more out there, but these are the main ones that you’re going to come across.