I am always telling affiliates to get an email sign up form on their website. I try to drive the point home to them that once an affiliate has an email list they can use that email list over and over again and get multiple sales. It is so hard to persuade a reader to take out their credit card once, never mind over and over again.

Smart affiliates have figured out that it is very hard to get your website found and once you have that site visitor you have a small opportunity to get that customers attention.

Getting that reader on to a newsletter list can lead to getting that reader back on your website without them having to use a search engine again. You hear all the “Affiliate Guru’s” telling you the money is in the list. Guess what, they are right.

Some things have changed though in the last year or so that is actually costing you sales and visitors to your website. In the past I have had a No-Popup policy when it comes to my websites. I strayed along that and put a few pop ups for email sign ups on few of my sites. While I was loving the additional sign ups the site was getting I was baffled by the mobile traffic. To be honest I wasn’t paying attention to mobile traffic that much and at first it didn’t concern me that my bounce rate was almost 100%. Yes I said 100%!

Don’t Take Mobile Traffic for Granted!

It wasn’t until I looked at my sites on a mobile device that I noticed the problem. Sure I had looked at my sites on my smart phone but that was ages ago and it looked just fine. I didn’t notice that the sites I had put the pop up on was the only sites with the 100% bounce rate. Usually I get a site visitor to sit on my sites for 5 minutes and visit 4 to 5 pages. It was only after I sat down on the couch with my iPad one night when it hit me. Since my pop up was configured to pop only once to new visitors I got the pop up on the iPad.

Well it stopped me in my tracks. The pop up was nothing like I had it looking on a normal site. It was huge and there was no way to close out the pop up and visit the site. As a user I was mad, as the site owner I was even more mad that I didn’t pick up on this before.

So lets see, I was telling Google through my analytics on mobile that my site sucked and that I wasn’t up to date on mobile. Exactly what I didn’t want to happen.

I encourage you to take a look at your websites on a mobile device, make that a few different mobile devices and see what your site looks like. You may be surprised by what you see. I would bet that you won’t be happy with what you will see.

First in a series of merchant spotlight webinars from Team Loxly is Small Biz Theme by Don Campbell. The theme affiliate program is run on Shareasale and is 30% commission, 60 day cookie and managed by Team Loxly 🙂

This theme is unique in that it can be used by consultants to easily build sites for clients, or for clients to have the site set up once and then not be able to “mess it up” when they need to make updates. The blog is secondary (you can change this) with info pages for the company instead.

Built in are sections to create the mobile version of the theme… no extra charge or extra plugins… and a really cool ability to add content to facebook pages right from within your blog! There are some free apps that allow you to create pages that you have to change on facebook, but this function within small biz theme hosts the pages for your facebook tabs right on your own site. Plugins for that type of functionality start at around $40-50.

If you can make the time to watch the video you will see all kinds of goodies and get info on what’s under the hood so you can better sell this theme as an affiliate. There were many good questions asked and answered throughout the video and we welcome more questions and comments from those of you watching the replay!