Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective methods of monetizing content and making money from it. Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting and advertising another company’s brand or business. In return, they receive a percentage of the sales revenue for your service. In this article, we’ll be detailing some of the secrets and strategies to achieving affiliate marketing success.
1. Produce Good & Consistent Content
This one is kind of an obvious one, isn’t it? But still important enough that it needs to be emphasized. To put it simply, content is every type of communication that you use, be it written articles or informative videos. Creating informative and high-quality content is essential if you want to achieve affiliate marketing success. Some good tips on writing quality content are:
- Your content needs to be reader-centric. It has to be written in a digestible and informative way for the reader.
- Understand your target audience and why they come to your website seeking information.
- Your calls to action have to be both informative and transactional
- Produce content at a regular and consistent rate.
2. Don’t Rely On A Single Affiliate Partner
It’s often a good idea to diversify your affiliate partners and not depend on a single affiliate. There’s always the risk of a company closing its affiliate program, they refuse to pay, or they reduce its commission rates. A good example is Amazon Associates, which cut commissions across all its product categories.
A good strategy for diversification is to ensure that none of your affiliate partners is responsible for more than 50% of the revenue you make through affiliate marketing. If something is to happen, only a part of your revenue would be affected instead of the entire thing.
3. The Importance of Conversion Rates
It’s often better to pursue brands that offer higher conversion rates than they do commissions. While it sounds more enticing to pursue an affiliate that offers $600 per sale, when the conversion rate is, say, only 2%, you would need a lot of clicks to generate a sustainable long-term source of revenue. Meanwhile, an affiliate program that offers $2 per conversion but has a 30% conversion rate is more likely to produce a sustainable source of income. It’s a key strategy for a lot of successful affiliate marketing companies.
4. Track Your Affiliate Marketing Success
Ensuring long-term success involves analyzing what does and doesn’t work when it comes to your affiliate marketing. You need to be able to track how visitors engage with your website. By using visitor analytics, you can find out about different things like search ranking, social sharing, which pages get the most traffic, the returning visitors vs. new ones, what elements on each page get clicked the most, etc.
There are also other things to consider, like the origin of converted traffic and which pages have the most visits before conversion. By evaluating and using all the data you’ve gathered through these analytics, you can conclude what changes need to be made and what type of content to focus on in the future.
5. Have Thorough Knowledge of The Product You’re Promoting
A lot of unsuccessful affiliate marketing doesn’t do the necessary research when choosing the business and provider they want to promote. They’re looking to make the most money out of it as quickly as possible. By not familiarizing themselves with the ins and outs of the service/brand, it makes it more difficult to explain or promote just how this type of service would be useful to their viewers. Doing your due diligence and thoroughly breaking down the product, you’re selling to people who visit your website can help make you stand out from the competition.
6. Respect The Rules
When it comes to having successful affiliate marketing, it’s essential when handling and promoting brands/businesses that you don’t step out of line when doing so. Each company has its specific guidelines and rules for the way they want its brand to be handled and promoted by you. A good rule of thumb is not to falsify or make claims that are untrue about their brand. Creating social media pages using their brand name is also a no-go. If you’re working with an influencer monetization platform, you need to adhere to its terms & conditions.
7. Be Transparent With Affiliate Links
You need to be honest and transparent when it comes to promoting brands to your customers. They will lose faith and trust in you if you aren’t upfront with the fact that you’re receiving a commission by promoting a product or service. There are also organizations like the Federal Trade Commission that have rules specifically designed to prevent you from misleading clients. You have to be transparent about your relationship with your retailer.
8. Discount Codes
It’s often a good idea to consult with the companies with you are an affiliate partner to determine whether they have any active discount codes for the products/services you are promoting. It’s an excellent way to incentivise and convince potential customers to try out their products/services. Studies have shown that almost 90% of Gen Y consumers online will try a brand-new product if they have active discount codes.
You can promote the codes by either posting them on your social media pages (making sure that you have direct affiliate links to the company’s shop), sending emails with affiliate links to the discount codes, promoting them on the affiliate-related websites or adding the word “discount” on the meta description to incentivize customers. For example, below is a screenshot of where the meta description has the discount codes advertised in its title:
9. Create A Subscriber List
An essential strategy of affiliate marketing success is building and nurturing a group of loyal subscribers. A blog, for example, is an excellent way to share promotions or deals. Affiliate types that utilize blogs ranked the highest when it comes to ad spending (at around 39%), based on a 2018 report.
Things like daily or weekly newsletters can help facilitate growth in your revenue and ensures you stay connected with your loyal customers. You can incentivise readers to subscribe to the newsletter by offering tips and tricks about how to use the product you’re promoting when sending out the email with the newsletter.
10. Create Tutorials and Reviews About the Product
Creating reviews and tutorials for the product/service you’re trying to promote in a way that is search engine optimized is an excellent way to reach out to individuals who are considering buying said product/service. Around 9 in 10, customers consult with product reviews and tutorials right before they make their purchase.
For example, if you’re publishing a review for Nike’s sportswear, you need to include the main keywords “Nike’s sportswear review” in the meta title to help the link to your website rank high on the search engine results. You will end up with a commission sale from people clicking on the affiliate link. The same goes for the tutorial pages of the product. All around, it’s a great way to get customers and viewers into your affiliate’s services, especially if they were on the fence and not 100% committed to spending money on it. To learn more, you can read this blog on Bluehost Affilliate: How to earn up to Rs 50,000 per month.
Author
Velislava Georgieva is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Inbound Blogging, specializing in Content Marketing and Outreach Strategies. Besides her passion for digital marketing, she likes yoga, fitness, and hiking. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
To learn more, you can read this blog on Bluehost Affilliate: How to earn upto Rs 50,000 per month.
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