Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
If you are just starting out or have been doing affiliate marketing for some time, following these ten steps will help improve your chances of success. Each tip gives insight into the methods used by the most successful marketers in the industry.
Affiliate Marketing Tips
• Create solid content
• Track your success
• Know your products
• Engage your visitors
• Concentrate on one niche
• Provide information and help, rather than sell
• Choose the right products
• Always be testing and improving
• Dedicate the time
• Set proper expectations
Create solid content
If you expect to make extra income from affiliate marketing, you will need to create quality content. Content is in every piece of communication you use. You will need knowledge of calls to action both informational, as well as transactional, and the ability to write in a broadly readable way.
You also need to make your content reader-centric. Answer their questions, provide them with detailed information, but written in a way that is accessible and engaging.
Know your audience, look at what brings them to your website. A search box is an excellent way to learn what they want to find on your site.
Write, write, write. Commit to creating regular content.
Track your affiliate marketing success
Ongoing success needs insights as to what has worked in the past. While you do not want to set it and forget it – knowing how visitors engage with your site is important. Obviously, search ranking will have an impact, as will social sharing, etc.
You need to use your visitor analytics to learn more about your visitors. What percentage are new versus returning visitors? What pages get the majority of your traffic? What links in your navigation bar and other places on each page get clicked? All these questions will provide answers that you can use to improve and add actions.
Where is your converting traffic coming from? What pages are visited most before a conversion? Use your analytics to get answers you can use to determine what new content is needed or even where to place certain links on existing pages. Use your data!
Know your products
Knowledge can distinguish you from your competitors. As an affiliate you are making recommendations to your visitors of various products, so to stand out you need to be seen as an expert, or at least a place to get detailed information about the products you promote.
Too often affiliates grab a few vendors they think will be of interest to their visitors without getting to know them. Even if you are not providing reviews of these products, you still want to know how they work and what benefits they can provide users. Don’t sign up with a new vendor just because they appear to offer something in your niche – do your research. Look at the reviews others have done to start, but try and use it yourself, even if it is just the demo.
Engage your visitors
Most successful affiliate marketers talk to their visitors. If you have a blog, allow comments. This will provide you with the opportunity to have a conversation with your visitors. Yes, you will need to filter out the spam, but if you reply to most of your commenters and start dialogues, they will return to continue the conversation.
Ask questions at the end of a blog post. “What other factors should be included?” “Would you like more information on this topic?” “Tell us your opinion!” These calls to action will help foster community interaction. When replying, use the commenters name wherever possible.
The more your visitors come to see your site as a community of like-minded people, the more they will return and increase your conversions.
Concentrate on one niche affiliate business
Too often affiliate marketers use a shotgun approach, getting as many products as possible to push when they should be focusing on their main interest and niche-related products. If you want to develop a successful affiliate marketing site, always stick to one niche. You can create other sites to promote other niches, but don’t spread yourself too thin, because that will lead to thin content sites.
Provide information and help, rather than sell
Blatant sales and self-promotion sites never gain traction. You need to help your visitors and provide quality information they find useful so that they keep coming back. If you look at the sites that rank well for the various terms used in your niche, you will find that useful information wins out. Do your research and provide more details or updated information.
Always be testing and improving
You should always be trying to improve your process. Test length, use of schema, different art, and other factors. Affiliate marketing, like any learning process, is an ongoing effort. While many of the steps above can be implemented at the start, you want to learn and improve as you go.
Dedicate the time
To become successful you need to put the time in. Affiliate marketing requires an ongoing effort, so be prepared and allocate regular time for your efforts.
Set proper expectations
You are not going to make a million dollars in a month. You need to set realistic expectations. Many affiliates spend a set amount of time to build out their original sites then commit to a smaller amount to keep adding content while starting a new site. Whether you have a single site with concentrated ongoing development or a number of initially smaller sites, set goals and work towards accomplishing them.
SOURC@NAMECHEAP.COM
