Affiliate marketing, just like any marketing activity, is chock full of fancy acronyms. We have EPCs, SEO and SEM, PPC, OPMs, CTRs, SERPs, and whatnot. But every once in a while, it pays to remind ourselves of some of the slightly older acronyms in the realm of marketing.

Far from outdated or irrelevant, marketing textbook material can be useful in fine-tuning a website to increase conversions.

Affiliates, meet AIDA.

In part one of this two-part blog, we will look at one of the fundamental marketing and sales concepts: AIDA (which is an acronym that stands for Attention – Interest – Desire – Action).

It describes the stages of the sales process: (1) attracting the potential customer’s Attention, (2) creating Interest in what you are selling, (3) creating a Desire to own it, and (4) leading the customer to take the Action to close the sale.

Applying the AIDA formula to your website effectively means you will be optimizing the different aspects and areas of your site for the different steps in the sales process.

Let’s look at the steps one by one.

Attention

Short and sweet, the idea is simple. You can use any number of ways to catch the prospect’s attention — a search engine result with a great headline that the searcher clicks on, a PPC ad, or a link from another site.

Look through some magazine or Internet ads and notice which catch your attention. Try to analyze why you stopped on this or that one. Was it a catchy title? An unusual photograph?

A clever or informative phrase? They don’t always have to be highly unusual or exotic; PPC ads on Google are just a few words.

Interest

This is where deciding what to do gets harder. You have the visitor, but now you need to keep them, too. As the saying goes, your competitor is just one click away. You need to present the right information in the right form, at the right place and time to raise and keep the visitor’s interest in your offers.

In Internet terms, attention is measured in split seconds. Studies have shown that customers wait only a few seconds for a website to load before abandoning the site. Even if the site loads, if a quick scan of the page doesn’t confirm to the visitor that they are in the right place, they hit the back button without even reading the first line of your sales copy.

If your site doesn’t excel at raising interest in your visitors, your traffic driving expenses are not working to their full potential! Think about adding some “scent” to your site.

The next step to implement is desire, then finally action. These remaining two components of the AIDA formula will be revealed in part two of this blog.