It is something you have control over.

But what exactly is a conversion ratio?

For affiliate programs, conversion ratio (or CR) is number of visitors that click through your affiliate link compared to number of sales you make.

For instance if you had 100 visitors to one of your affiliate programs you were promoting and got 1 sale then your CR would be 1%.

One sale for every 50 visitors would be a CR of 2% and one sale for every 200 visitors would be a CR of 0.5%.

So what would be a good conversion ratio for an affiliate program?

Well after much research I have seen that a 1% CR is quite acceptable. A CR of 0.5% would be a little low and if you have a CR of 3% then you are on to a winning affiliate program.

Depending on what you are promoting your goal should be to achieve a CR of 1% to 2%. But how?

To get a higher CR you need to concentrate on following factors:

There are many thousands of affiliate programs on net that you can join. Every man and his dog is running one. But how do you decide which ones to join?

There are two trains of thought in this area. First you can take scatter gun approach, which is quite popular on net, and join as many programs as possible. This ensures that at least SOME of them will pay off. Well, that’s theory.

The other alternative is to take shot gun approach. Join some leading affiliate programs in just a few areas and put more effort into each one. Do some affiliate marketing research by reading as many articles on subject as possible. This way you can narrow down your candidates.

Well, as always there are pros and cons to both but why not do what everyone else is not doing. It seems to me most sites are taking scatter gun approach. For example: We have 3,000 affiliate programs listed on our site. We have largest selection of affiliate programs!

Why not focus? Find your own niche. Find a particular area that you are interested in.