A custom thank you page should appear when someone is done shopping at
your website and has ordered something. What a great time to sell them
something else!
I don't generally try to sell them one of my products. Hopefully I did a
good enough job of that while they were at my site. I try to suggest
affiliate programs, of which I am a member, on my thank your pages.
If you have many products of your own, it's probably not a great idea to
lead with affiliate programs. Why should you send someone to buy my
stuff and get a commission when you could sell your own stuff and get
all the money?
If you don't have (m)any products of your own, then certainly use
affiliate programs to start the income rolling.
Let's assume you have your own products. Suggesting affiliate products
while trying to sell your own is very difficult. It will confuse the
visitor who clicks on one of your products and goes to your shopping
cart and then clicks on an affiliate link and gets taken to some other
site. That prospective customer will probably get confused and leave.
Sell them the best you can while they are at your site. Let them finish
the purchase and then use your thank you page to suggest they visit a
complimentary site that makes sense. If you are selling expensive
saddles for horses, send them to some other horse related site that has
an affiliate program. Trying to send them to a site that sells hard rock
CDs might get a sale once in a while, but certainly not very often.
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