Youve got your affiliate website designed and it looks great. Its up and running; youve taken care of onpage and offpage optimization in order to please the search engines. Youre even pulling some targeted traffic as youve noticed by viewing your web stats from your web host.

The problem is your still not making the sales you dreamed of. You are not converting your visitors and youre not quite sure why.

Let's back up for a minute and review the process from the visitors perspective and the reason youll see is simple.

We are assuming most of your traffic originates from SEs via targeted keywords which you have optimized your landing page around.

All your search engine optimization strategies are working fine but they can only deliver visitors to your site, not convert them into buyers. Once you get valuable targeted traffic like this you dont want to lose your vistor because of poor page layout, confusing navigation, or misleading content in relation to the keyword that enticed the visitor to choose your link. Why lose a potential goldmine? Assuming your page is structurally well laid out and navigation is logical and intuitive, we suspect the mass exodus is due to presenting the wrong message to the visitor.

Pre-sell not hard sell!

Your job as an online affiliate marketer is to warm up the buyer, gain trust, over deliver with great information, and get the most wanted responseclicking to the merchant site with an open to buy mindset.

Youll never get to that point if you simply hard sell with banners or similar generic sales copy that the visitor would find on the final merchant site.

Your website information must be the critical conduit that convinces the buyer he is making the best choice based on your unbiased recommendation.

If your info page reads like a slick sales copy then the visitor will suspect a purely commercial relationship and the process goes nowhere; the visitor leaves, chances are for good.

Your visitor is looking for information, not a sales pitch. Remember and live by this and you will gradually see visitor CT ( click thru) rate increase as well as sales.