This installment in the Converting Visitors to Revenue Interview Series is a true honor, as I am super-pleased to present the queen of affiliate marketing herself, Rosalind Gardner of NetProfitsToday and she also writes a column for Revenue Magazine.

When I first started building my online business, her Super Affiliate Handbook was my startup bible. To this day it remains one of my most highly recommended affiliate marketing learning resources, because Rosalind is so honest, down to earth, and is vigilant about making sure she helps people run an ethical and profitable affiliate marketing business. Honestly, she is one marketer that I am just dying to meet in person someday.

Rosalind, you have been affiliate marketing for a long time, and the internet has changed pretty drastically in that time. How have your conversions changed over the years, and what is the most important lesson you have learned in that time about getting things to convert and keeping them converting for longer periods of time?

In industry terms, it has been a long time indeed. I celebrated my 10th anniversary on January 1st of this year and because it’s been so much fun and so lucrative, that I have every intention of doing another ten.

As for my conversion rates, they have actually improved over the years as I’ve learned more and more about the business world in general and marketing in particular.

I think the ‘most important lesson’ about achieving higher than average conversion rates is that it is a lesson most of us learned at our mother’s knee — and that’s just to be honest.

It really is that simple.

I like to connect with my site visitors and newsletter readers on a highly personal level and share the ‘honest goods’ with them about products and services that are relevant to their interests. I say exactly what I think about whether a product is incredibly useful or downright junk… and often use highly emotional language to convey my like or intense dismay, i.e. “It’s Crap! Crap! Crap!”

Because many affiliate marketers are unilaterally positive in their product assessments, the result is that many of my long-term loyal readers report that they will not buy a product until they have read my review.

Increasing conversions over the long term is therefore about building long term relationships through honesty and trust. The spin-off benefit of this approach is that I never have trouble sleeping at night.

When you launch a promotion, new product or service now, what are some of the things you do every single time to ensure that your chances of getting the sales are the highest possible?

I don’t really have a formula - although perhaps I should!

However, I would say that the one element that remains consistent from promotion to promotion is having first-hand experience with the product.

When I haven’t had access to the product but still feel that it’s worthy of promotion, I tell my readers that I haven’t personally used the product and will justify the mention with a quote and link to my trusted source of information.

For example, just as I was looking for a new camcorder, I learned about the Flip Ultra through one of Shawn Collins’ posts in which he included a sample video from his camcorder. I knew I needed one and blogged my excitement about having discovered and ordered the little gem on my Roamsters.com travel blog.

Although this approach may result in sales for the original reviewer, it effectively increases the ‘trust factor’ which is again my primary m.o.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

There are so many different ways to promote your entire blog or individual posts, but I usually stick to those that I find least time-consuming, including having a list of recent entries in my sidebar and producing a weekly digest of posts for newsletter subscribers who are not subscribed to my blog’s feed.

If a subject continues to be raised over a period of time, I’ll often refer and link back to the original post from new entries. And on rare occasions, I’ll link back to the post from a comment that I may post to another webmaster’s blog.

More from this series:

Jim Kukral, The Daily Flip

Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.

If you liked this article, please...
	Subscribe Via Email		Subscribe Via RSS		Add to Technorati

Or read these related articles...