Why No One Is Buying Your Affiliate Products And How to Fix It [See Our Earning Report]

Are you struggling to increase affiliate sales? You’re in the right place then.

In this detailed guide, we will discuss two things.

1. Why no one is buying your products and
2. What you can do to make them buy your products

First of all, it’s a common problem. Even the professional bloggers who are now making a living from their blogs once faced the same situation – everyone ignored buying their products. They never give up, they learned and found the ways to make people buy their affiliate products.

We are going to discuss these things to make more sales from your products. Let’s first start with the major reasons why you’re not making any affiliate sales.

But before that, why should you listen to our advice?

Here’s why: the blog that you’re currently reading earns over $11,000 a month (income proof here).

Here’s one of our earning reports.

As you can see above, we earned over $394,000 just from one affiliate program (which is Semrush affiliate program BTW). That’s crazy, right?

Quick tip: If you want to promote Semrush as an affiliate, it’s a smart idea to try their Semrush tool first (grab 14 days free trial from here).

Not just that, we earned over $67,000 from one single affiliate website.

Have a look at the earning proof.

So there you go! If you follow our advice, you’ll definitely find better ways to increase your affiliate sales. Let’s jump into the details without much ado and discover few proven ways to find the right products to sell.

5 Major Reasons No One Buys Affiliate Products from You

If you’re struggling to increase affiliate commission, here are 5 major reasons. Try to avoid them and you’ll be slowly start increasing your affiliate sales no matter what industry you are in.

1. Lack of awareness

Are your audience aware about the products that you promote? Do they know what solutions your affiliate related products provide? If not, no matter how much you hustle to sell your products, it becomes very difficult to make more sales.

Most affiliate beginners promote their products without creating any awareness about the products they promote or recommend. That’s why they often struggle to increase their affiliate sales.

So how do you create awareness about the products you promote?

1. Write product reviews: One of the simplest ways to create awareness about your products is to write product reviews which are actually useful. Most people write product reviews just for the sake of getting more traffic. What’s the point of getting more traffic if you don’t add any value to your audience.

So make sure to write in-depth reviews along with pricing, pros, cons and all the other useful benefits of the products that you recommend to your audience. That’s how you create product reviews that sell.

2. Do videos: Creating video tutorials around the products that you promote through your sites is one of the most powerful ways to drive more sales. If you’re promoting iphones through your site, you can do a video around unboxing it explaining all the features of it along with the problems, pros and cons and pricing.

Just make sure to give an affiliate link where your interested audience can buy those products using your link. That’s how most YouTube vloggers make a ton of affiliate sales.

2. Lack of trust

Did you know that Pat Flynn (top affiliate marketer) makes over $100,000 from affiliate marketing every single month?

Yes, you heard it right. He earns millions of dollars by promoting the best affiliate programs. Do you know what his success secret is?

He builds trust. His audience trusts him like anything. He rarely promotes new products. He promotes affiliate programs that he personally uses and satisfied with. He creates engaging content around the products he promotes.

These are all the ways he creates trust and strong rapport with his audience. The result is massive affiliate sales and more commission to him.

So how can you build trust? We’ve a simple tip for you: use affiliate link disclosures.

Using affiliate link disclosure is one of the best marketing practices. That means, you’ll be telling your audience about the products you promote every time you’re using an affiliate link.

An example of it looks something like this;

“Note: Some of the links mentioned on this page are affiliate links. That means, when you use those links to buy products, I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. That way I can run this website for years to come.”

If your audience come across something like that, they will like you for 2 reasons:

1. They will like your honesty for telling them that you’re using affiliate links
2. They want to support you by buying products from you

So there you go.

You can build trust by using affiliate link disclosures and also make sure to add value with your content instead of solely promoting your products.

Read: 10 highly recommended affiliate link cloaking plugins for 2024

3. Pricing

High priced products often gives you huge commission. That means if you’re selling a $1000 product, you can make $100 per each sale (even if they are offering only 10% as commission). That’s the reason why most affiliate promoters sell high priced products.

But what happens when you’re new and trying to sell high priced products?

No one ever buys. So start slow by promoting highly relevant, useful and affordable products to start your online marketing journey. Once you master the art of selling affordable products, you’ll learn how to promote high priced products more effectively. That’s how most people become successful in digital marketing.

Here are few more tips you can use to find and promote the RIGHT affiliate products.

• Use surveys: To effectively promote your products with the right pricing, conduct simple surveys by involving your website audience. You can use social media sites, quizzes, giveaways, email list etc to start taking the surveys from your audience.Your main intention should be to find what kind of price your audience are willing to pay for those products that you’re going to promote.
• Perform A/B testing: A/B testing or split testing is one of the most advanced and effective ways most affiliate marketers use to increase their sales and website conversion rates.You can use tools like Crazy Egg to find out the best performing headlines, call to action buttons, offers etc to find the most high performing ads to increase your product sales.
• Find out top performing products: You can use affiliate marketplaces like CJ, ClickBank, ShareASale, Amazon etc to find highly relevant products that you can promote through your sites. Just try to find affordable products that solve your audience problems.

4. No special deals or discounts

Why should I buy from you instead of buying products I want from your competitors? What’s your unique point? Are you offering me anything special like a discount I can’t get anywhere else or any deal exclusively for me if I buy anything from you?

If you’ve something exclusively to offer, you’ll increase your odds of earning more commission by selling products no matter what niche you are in.

Did you know that online holiday shopping to reach over $910 billion? It shows the growth of online sales during holidays.

You can try these things to offer special deals or discounts to your website audience.

• Ask the product developers (by email or social media) for any offers. Almost every service and product has a dedicated affiliate manager who has special offers, deals and discounts. So unless you get in touch with them, you won’t get them.
• If you’ve any premium tools, services or products, you can offer them for free to your audience who buy products from you. It’s a great way to increase your product sales especially when you’re struggling or getting started.
• Analyse how your competitors are promoting their products during special events like christmas, new year eve etc to find out any sneaky promotion ways to increase your income.

Suggested Reading: Black Friday And Cyber Monday Case Study: How We Made $13,000 In A Week

5. Your content marketing and SEO strategy is meh

Content is the kind that can make or break your website’s conversions. Your content is what helps you increase your website’s traffic and also sales.

But most people do it wrong. Their content and SEO strategy just sucks. That’s why they get pitiful of sales from their products.

That being said, here’s a better way to layout out your content marketing strategy for more affiliate sales.

• Create case studies: When we talked about how Semrush increase traffic to our website within a month after using it, we included every detail like how much traffic got along with the features of that product.Case studies like that perform really well in terms of more traffic from search engines and also the sales. So if you’re struggling to increase your affiliate sales, focus on creating more case studies, talk about how you’ve benefited from the products that you use.
• Track your results: Each month, make sure to track your stats, traffic, conversions and find out what’s working best for you and what’s not. That’s the only way you can leverage the power of both SEO and content marketing.Also spend time to focus on updating your old blog posts by using commercial intent keywords so you can increase your affiliate income easily.
• Attract more links: Start writing guest posts for others, do blogger outreach and do whatever it takes to build white hat backlinks which is the most effective way to increase your overall website’s traffic from search engines.

Here are few more reasons that might hurt your product sales.

People don’t buy from strangers

Why would anyone buy from unknown people? Would you ever buy from a complete stranger especially when you are purchasing something online? If you want others to buy your affiliate related products stop chasing them down and build a rapport. Without building interaction with others you can never make significant money online.

You don’t have an email list

This is the #1 reason most people don’t buy your products. Email list is the lifeblood for your digital marketing success. Without having a thriving email list, it is very difficult to make money by selling your products.

Offer something to people to get them onto your email lists. You can give away something like eBooks, special reports, plugins, themes or anything that is related to your audience and niche. Analyze what other bloggers are offering to their audience and find a unique point to grab more people attention to build your email list.

Always use best email auto responders like AWeber, GetResponse etc. They can help you make more money by offering excellent features like tracking, A/B testing, email conversion optimization, mobile optimization etc. Did you know that $1 you invest on building an email list returns you $40? It is why you should be start building a targeted email list to build your own online business.

Don’t plaster your blog with too much affiliate stuff

Whenever I visit a new blog, I always observe one thing, new bloggers plaster their blog design with excessive affiliate ads. They promote hell lot of products all at once. Most of them even promote the affiliate products which they never use. This always creates a bad impact on your readership and hence no one shows much interest in buying your products.

Never promote too many products on your blogs, especially when you are just starting out.

You have to build momentum with your blog and start promoting extremely specific products to reap the best rewards from your efforts. Always promote the products you personally use, never promote a product just because it pays you more commission.

How to find people who can’t wait to buy affiliate related products from you?

Over the years, here are few tried and tested ways we used to increase our website product sales and commission, so use them to your advantage.

The rule of 7: Use it to your advantage

Have you ever wondered why marketing ad agencies use so many ads on TV shows, websites or social media?

It’s because of the rule of 7.

According to the rule of seven, a prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message (or your product or service) at least seven times before they take action and buy from you.

So if you’re struggling to increase your product sales, just apply and use the rule of 7 to your advantage. So how can you use the rule of 7 in online marketing?

Here are few things you can do.

• Creating content (articles, videos, podcasts so your prospects can hear or see your content or your website’s name)
• Doing interviews with influencers (this is the fastest way to spread your name online)
• Writing guest posts for others (so you can attract new visitors from other blogs)
• Facebook ads
• Using Google AdWords
• By writing on Quora and Medium
• And the list goes on

Rank for commercial intent keywords

Are you getting a lot of search traffic to your sites but still struggling to turn that traffic into sales? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who’s facing the same problem.

Most websites get a ton of traffic but most of it doesn’t convert. The reason is: they don’t use commercial intent keywords.

What’s the most effective way to increase your organic traffic that also increases your sales?

The answer is: start ranking for commercial intent keywords.

Commercial intent keywords are those keyword terms that people in use Google search before they buy something online. Here are few keywords that most commercial keywords contain;

• Discount
• Top 10
• Buy now
• Free shipping and so on

That means, you can talk about;

• Any affiliate product with discounts
• Top 10 products that you promote along with comparison
• Products with limited sales or early bird accesses
• And so on

The examples include;

• Buy iphone
• Cheap iphone
• Top 10 iphone alternatives
• Discounts on iphone and so on

Here’s a great image that tells you the importance of commercial keywords.

So how do you find commercial intent keywords in any industry?

Without SEO, it’s impossible for anyone to increase their affiliate income. Search engine traffic plays a major role in driving qualified visitors to your sites who are willing to buy affiliate products from you.

Here are few tips to find low competitive commercial intent keywords.

Use Answer The Public: This is a free and fantastic platform to find all the questions that your audience might have for any keyword phrase. Just enter a keyword of your choice to find a ton of relevant questions you can use within your content to drive more affiliate sales and quality traffic from search engines like Google.

Use Amazon: The best way to find commercial intent keywords is to use Amazon best sellers product pages or categories. You can pick any category of product that your website is relevant to. Just plug in those keywords using any keyword research tool like Semrush or keyword planner to get content ideas to increase more sales to your site.

Use Semrush: One of the best ways to find commercial intent keywords is to use the most effective SEO tool called Semrush. Using it, you can easily find a ton of long tail and low competitive commercial intent keywords no matter what industry you are in. Just filter the results by CPC (Cost Per Click) to find highly profitable keywords. Make sure the KD (keyword difficulty) is below 50 so you can rank easily.

Write genuine reviews about the products: People love to buy anything online if someone is providing genuine help.

Observe any successful affiliate marketer who is making a living from their online business (Pat Flynn, Zac Johnson, Harsh Agrawal etc), they all are giving honest feedback on their products to their audience. That’s why their readers and subscribers buy their products using their affiliate links because they offer genuine help.

Always write unbiased reviews about the products you use and tell your readers why they are good. If they are convinced with your product reviews, they will definitely use your affiliate links to increase your affiliate sales, as simple as that.

Learn from your competitors

Here are few ways you can use your competition to increase your product sales when you’re struggling with sales.

• Check your competitors credibility: If your competitors are showing social proof and increasing their affiliate sales, maybe it’s working for them really well and you can also give it a try to boost your website conversions.
• Check your competitors promotion strategies: Keep an eye on your competitors promotion strategies to see how they are promoting their products to increase their affiliate commission. Also make sure to subscribe to their email lists to see how they are using them to get more sales.
• Fill the gaps: Find out what’s missing in your competitor websites to effectively layout a strategy where you can fill the gaps to increase your affiliate sales. Are they not creating regular content? Are they not active on social media sites or YouTube? Find out the gaps and fill them.

Sell, don’t hammer

One of the biggest mistakes most people make is they plaster their product banner ads all over their website to increase their product sales. What happens when you hammer all your ads instead of helping?

No one buys. The #1 rule in is: no one buys products from strangers. So there’s no point of hammering ads or selling hard because it’s not going to help anyhow.

What else can you do then?

Use your banner ads effectively. You can promote only 1 or 2 products 80% of the time that you’re personally satisfied with (instead of promoting way too many products at once). Also start promoting your product review pages every now and then by promoting them on social media sites and by also optimizing those pages for various relevant keywords.

Create interaction and build rapport with readers: Without readership you won’t make any success in selling your products. Readers are everything in building a profitable blog. Here are few ways to build a long lasting relationship with your readers.

Write detailed posts: No one is reading short posts now unless you are a Seth Godin. Short posts don’t provide any value either to your readers or search engine crawlers. Usually long and detailed posts that consist of 800+ (1000+ words are even better) words rank higher in the search engines, they also help you build a great relationship with your readers.

Post consistently: Lack of consistency can kill your blog readership. Most blogs are abandoned because of inconsistency in their posting frequency. If you are consistently posting great articles on your blogs, you will pull more audience attention to read, share and buy your stuff.

Respond to their queries: Let it be comments, emails or general feedback, whenever you get a response from your blog readers – respond to them as soon as possible. This helps you build credibility and trust in the long run. In the end, they are the people who are going to buy your products to help you make more money from online.

Take baby steps: It takes a lot of time to make decent income by selling your products. No one on this earth became a millionaire overnight, they learned, they made mistakes and by following few tactics they are now be able to make a living from their businesses.

There are no shortcuts, you have to define your audience and serve them with suitable products and make money. So it’s always advisable for anyone to take small steps, one step at a time.

Don’t promote too many products and don’t kill your blog readership. Teach them and make them aware of the products you promote. And using rapport that you build with your email list, you can make more affiliate sales.

Credibility and consistency is the key to online marketing success. You have to build trust with your readers and promote the products that you personally use. You can double your affiliate income by tripling your email list.

Read: Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

Be prepared for special days and events to boost your sales

One of the best marketing strategies is to make the most out of holiday seasons and special days during when you can boost your product sales really quickly.

Here’s a screenshot of our sales during recent holiday season.

During special days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New year eve etc, almost all of the products offer HUGE discounts up to 99% off. So that’s when you can promote your affiliate products like anything to increase your commission rates.

Here are few ways you can make more product sales during special days.

• Be prepared: As we always say “be prepared”. If black Friday season is coming in November, you should be start working for it even before 6 months.Start creating content around deal pages, build backlinks and do proper on page SEO to make sure your deal pages are ranking well for various keyword phrases.
• Always build relationships: It’s essential for every affiliate promoter to build strong rapport and relationships with the product vendors to get extra deals and discounts to offer to your target audience.If you’re promoting an affiliate product for a long time, you’ll definitely get bonuses and offers if you get in touch with their affiliate management staff.
• Review your plans each year: Whenever black Friday week comes, we create a thorough strategy and plan to increase our product sales. We always review and tweak our plans in order to get more sales each year during special seasons. You should too do the same if you want to increase your commissions.

Optimize your site well for more traffic and sales

One thing that frustrates anyone online while browsing a website is slow loading times. If your website is taking too much time to load, your audience will simply leave your site and buy from your competitors websites. Here’s an illustration that tells you why faster loading sites are important.

That’s why it’s really important for you to optimize your website speed.

Make sure your site is mobile friendly: Almost everyone is using smartphones to browse information online and they are also using the same for buying products. So if your site is not mobile responsive yet, you’re missing a lot of leads to your competitors. Use a premium responsive design or simply install any free plugin like WP Touch to make your site responsive.

Move to https: One of the easiest ways to increase your website’s trust and sales is to move your site from http to https version. Google also started giving better results to the sites with https version when compared to those sites with non https. You can install SSL certificates from your hosting service to get this job done.

Get a better web hosting service: Hosting services like WPX hosting offers a lot of features like dedicated hosting, SSD storage, free SSL certificates and so on and also helps your site to load really faster. So invest in the right hosting service if you’re running an affiliate based site.

More Affiliate Marketing related resources:

• Affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense: which one is better?
• Essential affiliate related marketing tools for bloggers
• Future of Affiliate Marketing: Is it growing rapidly or slowly dying?
• Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It in 2024?
• Benefits of Affiliate Marketing: Top 8 Advantages of it
• 5 Types of Affiliate Marketing Explained with Examples

FAQs

Final thoughts about increasing affiliate product sales quickly in 2024

When you’re new to affiliate marketing, it’s very common to struggle with getting more affiliate sales because no one knows you and you probably don’t know how to sell to your website audience.

That’s why it’s essential for you to give it some time, implement the tips mentioned in this post and analyse your competitors to start making more sales.

Do you have any recommendations to make more money from affiliate marketing? What reasons do you think are stopping you from buying affiliate products from others? Please leave your thoughts below.