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It seems obvious to me…
September 18, 2007
Well after having a few people email or comment very excitedly about my last “book review” post announcing that I was still alive, I thought I would write about a few things that have been written about by others before but that I don’t see regularly in my affiliate journeys.
Namely Security certificates and SSL…. For a few hundred dollars a year you can get a security seal. (We prefer Verisign, but just about any seal will do) That seal tells people they are on a site that is run by professionals who are committed to the product they sell. To get the seal you have to get an SSL certificate and by getting an SSL certificate you might as well use https.
Now we white label all of our sites, but even if you just have a landing page you should do 2 things.
1. Put the landing page - not just the order form - in a secure environment. From the search engine you should change the http to https in every possible instance. This by itself has proven to add 10% or more to conversion rate. Be sure to also make sure any other pages on your site that you connect to be in https and those links from headers footers etc are also https.
2. Place the trust symbol for your ssl certificate on the landing page and in the footer of any other appropriate page. Have a FAQ? Add a question that says “Is my data secure?” Put the logo in the answer. The addition of a trust symbol adds another 10-15% to your conversion rate.
Now lets quantify that for those following along with their swiss bank accounts.
Say you have a PPC campaign that is merely breaking even. You spend $1000 a day for $1000 in revenue. Your credit card company and Google both love you, your wife is wondering if you have an internet girlfriend since the bank account ain’t growing. For our imaginary example we spend $1 a click and get a 1% conversion rate but get paid $100 a sale. Plug in your own numbers…
So we have 1000 clicks and 10 sales per day.
By adding SSL to the landing page that adds 10% in conversion you now have 1.1% or 11 sales a day. Now add the trusted symbol and another 10% that means you now get 12.1 sales per day.
This $500-$2000 per year expenditure just took your break even affiliate campaign to a $210 per day profit or $76500 per year. Subtract out the $500 for security certifcate and you now have a $76k cash flow stream. Already profitable? Add 20% to your revenue without an increase in expenses….
Admittedly these results are in an environment where we control the form and sign-up process, but if you are dealing with vendors who are not using secure forms then you could add another 15% or more just by getting them to be secure.
Your mileage may vary.
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