Selling is a process. You have to guide your customer to take baby steps. Else they’ll be gone if they get scared by huge amounts of new content or inconsistent information. Or they’ll simply get bored.

Affiliate marketing success is about providing the right service, at the right time for the right people (the people willing to spend).

To start off, make sure you are tracking your visitors. Google Analytics is a free tool used to generate detailed statistics about your visitors. Keep your eyes on “Time on Site” and “Bounce Rate”.

Bounce rate shows single-page visits (visits in which the person left your site from the page they just entered from). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.

You can also use Google Analytics to see what are the most popular page paths followed by your visitors. Provide a link on your index (or landing page) directly to the most popular final destination of the paths. Easy site navigation will always keep your visitors on your side.

Treat your online visitors as you treat your friends who are coming over to visit. Invite them in (with a good headline or a puzzling question). Offer them a cup of coffee free video or e-book, get them intrigued in what comes next. Build anticipation. Encourage action by providing proof. That means testimonials, and thankfully, MoreNiche is rich in testimonials.

Make your visitors curios for more and suggest a “next step”. Suggest another article, a product review, testimonials or, if you feel you’ve walked through the decision making process, send them to the order page. I’ve seen lots of inquiries in the MoreNiche forum regarding where to send visitors; product main page or directly to the order page, so I hope this answers your questions.

If your visitors’ final decision is not to buy, give them an alternative. A good idea would be to encourage them to bookmark your site. SocialMarker.com has a tool which you can plug into your site and will generate bookmark buttons for the most popular social sites.

If your visitors come from weird, unexpected keywords and find almost no relevant information on your site, write an article trying to find the link between the topic of your site and what they’re searching for. People like original ideas and they’ll stick to your site just because you think outside the box.

Don’t distract your visitors with too many ads. Or if you do, make sure they’re relevant and displaying them will bring only benefits. Don’t be pessimistic about your site. Why would you want to believe that ads are more productive than your content?

You’ve seen bad sale pages before. Red headlines, yellow highlighting, irritating pop-ups and pop-overs, fake handwriting and the other tricks of the trade are all ways to grab a stranger and focus his attention on what the site has to offer. But any small error in the salescopy, offers, call-to-actions, design and the visitor will be lost.

Take them as bad examples; focus on honest, credible and quality content. Be human and your visitors will take it soft if you make mistakes or if your content or call to actions aren’t perfect. Because you’ve proved to them that you’re human. And humans are not perfect.

Your visitors will find it easy to come back to your site and pick up where they left because you have splitted your site into easily “digestible” chunks.

Now, getting more technical. Optimize your site to load quicker. Use Flash, animations, large images and scripts moderately. Yes, they have their charm, but your main focus should remain on content.

There are loads of technical advices to be given on how to optimize your site. I won’t list them here, because you can find specific website performance faults with this free Web Page Analyzer tool.

Time is of the essence! So, go go go!