8 Essential Tips To Become Successful With Affiliate Marketing
Many affiliates would like to have a mentor showing them how to be successful. But let’s face it, not many affiliate marketers are willing to share what they know. So to help you out, I am sharing 8 tips based on my experience as a successful affiliate marketer that will help you be more effective.
Where’s Your Audience
To find affiliate offers that correspond with your audience, you have first to know your audience. What are their interests? Where do they hang out online? Are they mostly business people or bloggers? Once you can answer these questions, it is easy to find affiliate programs that match your audience.
If you have a site or blog about photography, look for affiliates who promote cameras and related products. Unfortunately, promoting Russian Dating sites on your blog won’t make you any money as it’s not relevant to your visitors.
Plastering ads all over your website won’t work; it will only irritate your site’s visitors! Instead, take advantage of affiliate programs by linking offers to content on your site. And don’t forget to follow the industry guidelines for affiliate advertising so that you both have clear expectations up front and stay safe from scams.
You’ll Need Volume Or High Ticket Prices To Succeed
In the beginning, we tried several different Affiliate niches, including travel, gambling, fashion and even hampers! We quickly realised that you need volume or high-priced items to make it worth your effort.
You can’t make money selling a handful of t-shirts each month; at a price point of $15 and a commission rate of 3%, you won’t earn enough to cover your hosting bills. Unless you can sell 100s or 1000s of shirts, which is difficult when you’re starting out.
However, If you can promote big-ticket items like high-end cameras or televisions, you could earn 10% on a product retailing for $1000 – $2000. So just a few sales could generate $100s in commissions.
Laser Focus
The secret to success is laser focus. If you want to rank highly in Google, pick a topic and stick with it.
You’ll find that Google prefers to rank websites with topical and relevant content, even if the site is new or has a weak link profile. As a result, you get more visitors with less effort, and they will convert.
Quality Over Quantity
Write quality content that is helpful and informative, not just promotional material. People will link to and share your content if they find it useful.
If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for content, try using a website like answersocrates.com or answerthepublic.com to generating questions that you can answer on your site, I entered the word ‘camera’ into ‘Answer Socrates‘ and it came up with the following questions ‘What camera do Youtubers use’ and ‘Which camera brand is best’. Create blog posts around answering these questions.
Google loves this type of content, and you’ll get lots of new visitors and potential new sales.
The 80/20 rule applies to content; we’ve noticed around 80% of our search engine traffic is generated by 20% of our posts. If you have an article on your site which is not driving traffic, remove it or improve it.
The Right Affiliate Program For You
Research and trial and error is the best way to find out which affiliate program produces good conversions for you. However, what works for most people might not work for you and your audience.
Sign up with an affiliate network like Awin. When finding affiliate products, consider the conversion rate of merchants before deciding to promote them. Then, pick programs that are going to make affiliate marketing a pleasure, not a pain.
When it comes to specific niches such as Gambling or Travel, picking the right program can be crucial to success. In the Gambling sector, choose a revenue share model over CPA. It will take longer to generate revenue, but it will be more successful in the long term.
Use Social Media
Sharing affiliate links on Social Media is a great way to generate sales. However, make sure you add value to the conversation, simply dropping affiliate links and expecting people to click on them (believe us, it doesn’t work that way).
You can use a service like Pretty Links or Thirsty Affiliates to manage links on your website and social media channels. It will make it much easier for you to manage your affiliate links across platforms, and you’ll be able to track performance too.
Don’t expect instant success, I’m constantly surprised to see sales from affiliate links in social media posts we wrote months ago, but they didn’t generate sales at the time of posting – you need patience.
Make affiliate marketing part of your social media conversation, not the focus – know when to promote affiliate offers and include non-affiliate based content.
Read Blogs About affiliate Marketing For Inspiration
Keeping up with affiliate trends and learning from others mistakes can save you time and money. Sites like affiliatetip.com are full of affiliate marketing tips and articles that can help you improve your affiliate marketing skills and succeed in affiliate marketing.
If you’re going to make affiliate marketing your primary source of income, it’s a good idea to learn everything you can about the industry.
Specialist affiliates have their own forums and blogs to follow; in the Gambling niche, sites like www.gpwa.org and www.affiliateguarddog.com can be great places to learn.
Another great resource is Niche affiliate forums such as reddit.com/r/affiliate_marketing which contain affiliate strategies, affiliate programs and discussions amongst affiliate marketers to learn a lot about affiliates and the industry.
Don’t Give Up! Affiliate Marketing Takes Time
You cannot become an affiliate marketer overnight; it takes months to succeed and grow your affiliate marketing business. It’s not going to happen if you just put up affiliate links on your site and expect the money to come rolling in!
Have a process for getting new affiliate products onto your site. This includes writing product reviews, promotional offers, guides and tips that provide value for your visitors.
Affiliate marketing is a long-term game, but with patience and perseverance, it can be very successful. In this post, we’ve given you 8 affiliate marketing tips to help you succeed – so that you’ll have the time to grow your affiliate business over time!
The most important thing for success? Stick to one niche topic of interest or product type until your affiliate site starts ranking well on Google, thanks to its high-quality, relevant content.
