How to make money from your conversion page

Someone asked me recently how to wring every single last little drop of revenue from their website. So it got me thinking about every page on a website and how it could be monetised.

There was the usual ‘hey, we could put an AdSense Ad on this page’ and an ‘Affiliate link on that page’, etc… But then it came to the final conversion page…

What could we do with that?

As it turns out, monetising the conversion page has made him more money than any of the other page on his website he’s tried to monetise.

Let me explain.

The final confirmation page shown to someone after they’ve purchased from you is actually quite a powerful sales page.

The reason being is that someone who has just completed a purchase from you is definitely in a buying mindset; they’re probably on a bit of a high and ready to get their next consumer fix.

But conversion pages are typically a notorious let down. You get through an exciting shopping and checkout process only to be confronted with, “Thanks for ordering from us” at the very end.

What a disappointment!

They’re almost always ignored and very little, if any effort goes into them.

The only half decent one I’ve seen of late is Deals Direct’s which has quite a bit of guff about shipping, guarantees, live help, etc. It’s okay, but I reckon the only reason it’s so full of information is so that users stick around for a few seconds more than normal so all their A/B split testing script loads properly and they can get some reliable data on conversions (sorry, I’m a notorious ‘page source snoop’).

But back to the often ignored conversion page and sales…

We figured that once someone had bought something from the site, they probably weren’t going to come back for awhile to buy from us again. In fact, the chances are slimmer than Lindsay Lohan before rehab.

So we signed up to another ‘complimentary’ retailer affiliate program. Not a direct competitor, but an online retailer who sold goods that complemented the ones being sold on my friend’s site.

It worked!

Lots of clicks off to the other online retailer and quite a few sales generated as a result (about $100 in a month worth of commissions and a conversion rate over 8%).

Okay, so he’s not bringing forward his retirement plans, but an extra $1,200 per year gets him half a holiday.

You could try this if you sold laptop computers, but not laptop bags for example. Or if you sold flowers, but not chocolates; holidays, but not guidebooks; cameras, but not photography courses… the list is almost endless…

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Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.