Selling is a numbers game. Is affiliate marketing selling? You can dress it up, call it recommending products, conduct reviews even give away free products.

No matter what you call it or how you disguise it, please make no mistake, it is SELLING!

There are literally millions and millions of results for selling on Google. About 4,340,000,000 results (0.58 seconds).

A search of Amazon for books on “selling” delivers over 40,000 results.

Clearly, there is several lifetime's worth of information and knowledge on the subject of selling if you wish to educate yourself.

Putting how aside for the moment, I am interested in a fundamental question.

Selling Is A Numbers Game?

When I first left school, I worked for an insurance company as a clerk in the New Business Department. We processed new proposals submitted by the life insurance agents.

To learn more, I studied the sales techniques they were taught. New agents learnt a kind of sales formula, 100/10/2. Contacting 100 people will get you 10 appointments, resulting in 2 sales.

Does this work? Of course not. There are too many variables. The most obvious is filtering or targeting the initial list.

While this formula clearly would not work, keeping statistics and refining your list would increase the probability of sales occurring.

Top sales professionals within their chosen fields would be able to answer questions such as:

• Demographics of their target market.
• The average number of calls required to make an appointment.
• Percentage of appointments that resulted in a sale.
• The average value of each sale.

Selling is a numbers game without any doubt.

Selling Online

It makes no difference whether you are the producer of a product or an affiliate marketer selling the product. Selling is a numbers game.

Although we are going to focus on digital products as they are the most commonly distributed online, the same principles apply to physical products.

To make sales, we need to:

1. Have a satisfactory item for purchase with demand.
2. A description and an offer or Call To Action
3. Customers who need and want the item for sale.

Since we are focussing on the numbers, we will assume we have a fantastic in-demand product and produced a suitable offer.

Finding Customers

Assuming you have developed your customer avatar (a detailed profile of your ideal customer), all we need is to find them online.

You may have been very specific in targeting your audience to niche forums, for example, or taking a broader approach with paid advertising.

Whichever methodology or combination of methods you use will produce statistics or numbers that will help you determine which is viable and or scalable.

There are 3 significant numbers you need to consider.

1. Impressions – how many people saw your ad or “Call to Action”.
2. Clicks – how many people clicked on your ad or “Call to Action”.
3. Conversions – how many people purchased your product.

Understanding The Numbers

When purchasing paid advertising, the number of impressions will either be agreed to upfront as a set number or delivered via a daily spend.

Impressions from organic traffic can be determined from your blog analytics or banner ad impressions. Social media platforms record either the reach likes or shares a post had. 

Most affiliate tracking software nowadays will let you know how many people clicked through to your offer or ad.

The same software will notify you of a sale and your pending commission.

You now know on average, what percentage of people that see your offer will click on it, and you can also determine the percentage that converts to a sale.

For example, if 1,000 targeted people see your offer and 20% click-through then 2% purchase you have 4 sales.

Your assumption is then if 10,000 people see my offer, on average I should expect approximately 40 sales. On average I need 250 people to see the proposal to produce 1 sale.

Knowing your costs to obtain visitors, calculate your ROI and see if it can be scaled up.

NB: If your visitors are not targeted, it will have a detrimental effect on your averages. Testing and optimization are vitally important.

Income Goals

Now I have determined (for this example 250) the amount of traffic or visitors I need on average to produce a sale. Let's see what that looks like if we want to achieve an income of $10K per month.

For this example, we will assume we are selling a $67 product and receiving a 50% commission.

From the Affiliate Sales Calculator, we will earn $33.50 per sale and need to sell approx 299 per month to make $10K.

299 sales x 250 visitors mean we will need an average of 74,750 targeted visitors every month or 2,500 per day to achieve an income of $10K.

NB: The Affiliate Sales Calculator can only tell you how many sales you need. The traffic required to produce sales is determined by your own testing. 

Conclusion

Selling is a numbers game, always has been and always will be.

Knowing this game and mastering your numbers is essential to your success.

Firstly determine the traffic you require to acquire each sale. Use the Affiliate Sales Calculator to determine the number of transactions needed to achieve your income goal.

Use your own traffic data or a cautious estimate of traffic required to obtain a picture of the ongoing traffic requirements and whether or not is either achievable or affordable.

Please let me know if the Affiliate Sales Calculator has been useful and Invite you to comment below. Please like and share this post.

To your success,
SteveT