Ways To Increase Affiliate Bootcamp Conversions
If you are promoting Wealthy Affiliate and are taking the Bootcamp course, you will ask yourself at some point...Why is no one upgrading to premium!?! It's natural, and everyone goes through that phase. I was stuck there for an entire year when I started my bootcamp site back in 2013.
The truth is, there are some factors that you can't really do anything about, and some things within your control that can help you increase your conversions from Starter to Premium membership. I'd like to discuss both in this blog post.
Factors (Somewhat) Out Of Your Control
Conversion Backlogs
It took me 5 months to make my first referral to WA, and another month after that to get my first premium signup. Then starter members started to trickle in. I was converting Starter > Premium very low, much lower than average.
But now, some members that joined as a starter several months ago are just now going premium. So I might make a sale today, but it's a result of a starter member that joined a while back. I didn't have that advantage when starters were just beginning to sign up.
They key is just to try to increase your number of starter signups rather than worry too much about conversion rate early on.
Stats Don't Lie
Before you get upset about your conversions, look at the data you have and see how you are actually doing. I always look at these four numbers:
- What's my daily traffic?
- How many visitors get to my WA review?
- How many people convert from my WA review to a starter member?
- How many people convert from Starter to Premium?
You might only have 1 Premium signup, but if you only have 10 Starter members from the last week, that's still a 10% conversion rate, which is pretty good!
All of these things are within your control, but I wanted to make the point that if you have trying to force yourself to be awesome and double your conversions over night, within a few weeks of learning about online marketing is a tall order.
I'm not sure if that point is clear, so let me try another way. Absolute numbers might look poor even though your conversion rate is actually good. If that's the case, you need to focus on other things, name traffic to your site and getting more starter signups.
Writing Style
A lot of you are just starting to learn about online business as well as writing blogs, marketing material, and sales pages. No one starts out as a genius. When I started writing, I used to say things like, "Look, you know I'm going to make a commission off of this but I really do recommend this product. Buy it now, before it's too late!"
That's not terrible, but it's not exactly a finessed sales pitch, lol.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to improve your writing style and sales pages. You should!
I do mean to say that if this is your first foray into affiliate marketing, you have a lot of learning to do. Give yourself some time to learn and grow as a marketer. Conversions will naturally improve over time as you understand more about your customer base, the WA platform, and what people interested in WA are truly looking for.
How To Improve Wealthy Affiliate Conversions
Provide Adequate Preparation For What's Inside WA
The #1 mistake I see people making is that they pitch WA just like any other "biz op".
They say, "This is an awesome programs which will teach you how to make money online!"
While that may be true, to the average user, that looks like just another sales pitch. What makes WA different?
Give specific about what you learn inside the community, and what benefits this method of learning has over other types. Talk about specific instances where you needed help and someone assisted you in live chat, or you needed to do something on your website and found a free training module that showed you how to do it.
Needless to say, the more experience you have with the community and how it works, the more you can say on your review!
Just make sure that people know what they are signing up for before they sign up, not only in HOW they are going to make money, but WHAT they will be doing. You can also tell them that they will learn how to build a website and get traffic to that website. You might want to let them know that they can ask questions on training modules. I even provide a screenshot of the signup page so they know what the next step of creating an account will be.
There's a lot going on inside our community. Don't let the newbies get confused!
Be A Real Person
Specifically talking about your website and your sales page, I try to use natural language and be friendly with people. I guess this one is kind of obviously, but it's just a reminder that you don't have to be a "salesman" to make sales.
Encourage People To Contact You Within WA
I try to make myself a main contact point within the community. My referrals (hopefully) know who I am and that they can contact me easily on my profile or their own profile, and then via private message once they upgrade.
Many newbies will be worried that they are bothering people, or shy to jump in with "dumb" questions. When newbies know that included in their membership is a mentor figure, I think it makes them more open to asking you questions. Even if you aren't a pro yet, you can still direct them to appropriate training modules.
Encourage Them To Be Active
It's a fact that the more people engage with other members, the more likely they are going to go premium, and stay here for a long time. Make sure your signups know that n00b questions are allowed, and that this is a friendly forum. I like to try to get people in chat at least once during their Starter Membership just so they can see how easy it can be to get fast help.
Spend More Time In Wealthy Affiliate
The more you are active in the community, the more your referrals will know that you are available for questions. This might be impractical if you just a few signups floating around, but as your number of referrals grows, this can be part of your daily tasks.
Sometimes, it takes just one missed question for someone to quit. How would you feel if you couldn't make any progress on your website for a while due to some kind of difficulty?
One time, I had a referral that asked me a question on her profile that I didn't see. She quit the next month and chewed me out for not delivering on my promise to help. Whoops!
I lost that person, but I learned my lesson. Being available and active really does keep
Set Up Your Welcome Message And Follow Up Messages
This is discussed in Bootcamp, but there are a number of follow up messages that you can send your referrals, mainly a welcome message. Lots of people read these! Check that they are easy to read and have clear instructions on how to get started.
Also, make sure you respond to any questions or responses you get to your welcome message so people know you are alive, and not just an autoresponder robot!
One Last Thing...
Sometimes, it may seem like people are not responding to your messages, or Starters are just not converting to Premium. It's hard to convince someone to upgrade when they haven't filled out their profile and don't respond to your messages!
Don't try to squeeze blood from a stone.
If conversions aren't working for you, focus on other things, namely traffic and on-site conversions from Posts > WA Review and WA Review > Starter. All three of those things are within your control. Even converting at a very low 3%, if you can get a ton of traffic to your site and get them to sign up for a starter account, you can still make a good chunk of change!
Remember, I always look at these four numbers:
- What's my daily traffic?
- How many visitors get to my WA review?
- How many people convert from my WA review to a starter member?
- How many people convert from Starter to Premium?
Also, Kyle has lots of ideas in bootcamp regarding welcome messages, improving conversions, and how to write reviews, CTAs, etc. The entire Level 5 of the OEC course is about improving your writing and content creation. Keep working through your courses and you will see conversions improve over time.
Recent Comments
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Good mentoring content here Nathaniel! Well done! With 20,000 + followers that you have, one would expect you should fill pages of "Thank You", "Great information", " Good Points", "Love it" comments. Should you fall short on page counts, what would be the 2 top reasons for that result?
Rick
Thank you Nathaniel. Always useful info from you.
Can you explain the difference between raw, unique and content clicks on the stats page please?
Kyle answer for raw and unique clicks is.
Raw click = could be the same visitor again and again. Example, a single user could click on your affiliate link 10 times and it would tabulate as 10 raw clicks.
Unique click = only counts unique visitors as a tally. If that same user clicked on your affiliate link 10 times, they would only count as a 1 unique visitor, not 10.
I am not to sure what content click is .
A member will be able to answer the question and help me to.
Great information. I've been doing Bootcamp for nearly 4 months and still not seeing much traffic. More posts with valuable content I suppose.
Good points here! Personally for me when I started at WA a couple of years ago, I didn't see the benefit of joining Boot Camp right from the start. Knowing what I know now, I still feel I was correct in not joining Boot Camp when first starting out. The way I see it is, how can I effectively promote something if I do not know first hand what it can really do?
So I completed the OEC first, built my 2 free websites, and only then did I feel confident in promoting WA. Like you said, "Give yourself some time to learn and grow as a marketer." By taking the OEC first, that is exactly what I did and it has benefited me greatly.
Oh man, I knew it. Should have start with OEC first. No wonder I felt something was missing along the process of the bootcamp. Well I guess better start then never. Thank you so much for sharing your experience :-)
Great points! "How many visitors get to my WA review?" is the hardest one. Do you have a magic formula for that? :-)
Are you making use of the comparison tables? I use those to direct people to my WA review sometimes.
Love it. Great information, and very useful. Just for clarification though:
Suppose I'm not getting any members signing up even for the free membership aka no referrals. Perhaps I should be looking at my stats then?
Then you just need to be working on traffic, and getting people to your wa review, plus the conversion rate of your WA review (visits > starter)
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Well done, Nathaniel! Your content & flow just keep on getting better & better all the time. I appreciate that you took the time to really detail things out with truth for us. Blessings...