Affiliate Marketing Tips for Success
I have been working online, as an Internet professional of varied degrees for over 13 years. Eleven of those years have been spent promoting affiliate products that make up half or more of my total income. Affiliate Marketing is alive and well. No doubt about it.
In all my years, I’ve yet to see a decline in opportunity to earn. The decline usually comes from declined effort of affiliate marketers (i.e. bloggers), not affiliate programs.
If you’re finding it difficult to making money with affiliate products, try adjusting the way you view the overall concept instead.
Think about how many times you recommend a product or service to your friends or relatives, sometimes on a daily basis. It can be a new flavor of coffee at the local coffee house – perhaps a new song you’ve heard on the radio, a cleaner you’ve tried as a solution to that stubborn stain you’ve been trying to get out of your favorite shirt – I’d bet if you really paid close attention, you make recommendations on a daily basis. Affiliate marketing is essentially the same concept with a digital twist and a much bigger audience.
Below, I have listed some fairly basic steps to help make affiliate marketing simpler:
1. Content – If you’ve done any amount of research at all, you’ve heard the phrase “Content is King.” Content is by far the most important element in affiliate marketing. You should create unique, quality and fresh content for your site. As much as 70% of my traffic comes from search engines and the majority of that comes from Google.
While I’ve always been a believer in providing content that’s of value to my reader and not so much for the benefit of Google, there are few things you will need to do for Google to find you.
- Keyword Research – Do some basic keyword research through Google Keywords Tool. It’s a free and valuable resource that reveals specific keywords and terms people are searching for.
- Identify Buyer Keywords – From those search terms, you’ll see there are two groups of people who are searching. One group is searching for information, while the other group is searching and ready to buy. Your objective is to target the buyers.
In your keyword research, pay close attention to keyword phrases that include the following terms or similar:
buy
purchase
best
review
model numbers
brand names
cheap
- Information Keyword – Those searching for information should not be discounted. The informational type keywords are the driving force for a fairly significant chunk of traffic. If you provide valuable information, you could easily convert those information seekers into customers who buy.
- On Page SEO – You will want to do some basic SEO on your site. While it’s not absolute necessary to get traffic without focusing on SEO, you could be missing the boat on a great deal of traffic without it. You don’t have to be a pro by any means. If you are using WordPress, I highly recommend the All in One SEO plugin to simplify the process.
- Build Back Links and Deep Links – The best method to build back links is to cultivate relationships with other websites or blogs within your niche in a way that allows a link from their site to yours. One of the most popular ways of building back links is guest blogging. Another is by commenting on blogs that offer Do-Follow links in their comment section. CommentLuv is a great system being used by bloggers for bloggers as a collaborative effort in increasing comments for one blogger and back links for the other.
To build deep links you will simply link new content to old content on your own website or blog.
- Presell – Over time, Internet surfers have developed banner blindness for the most part. Banners are among the least converting ads or promotions I offer on my blogs – for the most part, they provide a pretty landscape that’s easily changed up for holidays, events or seasons. Keeping banner blindness in mind, you should consider writing presell commentary on the affiliate product that you wish to promote.
Another option is creating text links in an article that provides a solution to a common problem.
Simply introduce the problem, and then insert your affiliate product link in your solution response to that problem.
Keep in mind that Internet surfers are looking to be educated or entertained.
2. Forum Marketing
Participate in forums within your niche and be as helpful and engaging as possible. You can develop a stellar reputation by helping other forum members with genuine replies instead of posting affiliate links. You should never spam forums – even if the link is of value, it will likely be seen as spam and will likely get you banned.
No one likes spam and people are far more likely to buy from a friend than a stranger. Use the forums to develop friendships with other members. If the forum allows, provide a signature that links to your site. If a signature option is not available, fill out your profile. Most profile options allow you to list a link or two along with contact information and a brief bio. Use that space! You’ll want to plan on spending 3 – 4 hours per week on forums.
3. Twitter Marketing
Twitter should be viewed in a similar fashion as forums. Focus on interaction, educating, entertaining and basically being helpful.
- Answer questions and gain followers. You don’t need a Kim Kardashian size list of followers to make money with Twitter. You need real people to follow you and if provide value, your message will be re-tweeted and hopefully your message will go viral.
- Use Twitter search to find targeted customers - For example, if your niche is diet, you can do a search “diet recommendations -http -www.” – This search will return people who search for diet recommendations and their tweet does not include a link.
The reason for this is a gazillion of marketers on Twitter promoting their products. Of course I don’t want to promote to existing marketers. I want my searches to exclude them. Note: This is an exact keyword search method so try other words and phrases to get the best results.
4. Promote Your Product on Facebook
Facebook is different than Twitter because there is no search function to find message’s targeting your niche – so you’ll want to make a lot of friends.
Ways to gain friends:
a) Post messages on other people’s fan page and build your friend list.
b) Fans Page – Once you have about 300 friends, create a fans page and ask your friends to join.
c) Market your fans page – Post helpful information that people want or need and post links to a presell page from time to time – just don’t overdo it or you’ll lose friends.
5. Article Marketing
This method has decreased a bit in popularity following the Google Panda update but I still believe it’s of some value and worth mentioning.
Write articles and submit to article directories. Article marketing has always shown a fairly decent conversion rate and it’s a great way to gain name recognition and a good reputation within your niche.
6. Products – Product selection is paramount when it comes to affiliate marketing. You could work 23 hours a day, but if you’re promoting the wrong products, your efforts will be wasted.
- Affiliate Networks – I recommend you join up with key affiliate networks like ClickBank, Commission Junction and Shareasale. Review products thoroughly noting the appearance, content, detail, description, etc. Promote only the products with quality landing pages.
ClickBankTip: Promote products that have a gravity of at least 10 and minimum commission of $30.
Commission Junction Tip: Promote the products with Network Earnings of 3/5 or higher.
Shareasale Tip: With many of the offers being from brands that lack big name recognition, it’s sort of potluck to find an offer that converts well. I recommend picking one or two that look good for your niche and seeing what you can do with them. I like using ShareaSale for my seasonal offerings – they have affiliates organized for easy selection that way.
- Track Your Competition – Conduct a Google search to see what your competitors are promoting. If they promote a product heavily and constantly, it’s a pretty good bet that product converts well and you should consider promoting it too.
Affiliate Marketing Courtesy Tip: When you are scoping out your competition and you find a product you’d like to promote, click through the link they provide and sign up there. If there’s a sub-affiliate program in place, they can earn a little for the referral.
I liken this to leaving a nice tip on the table of a waitress that provides me with quality service. It’s an easy way to say “Thanks!”
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