Hopefully, these affiliate marketing tips and tricks will help you become a better affiliate marketer. Remember, affiliate marketing requires patience and focus just like any other task. If you are willing to invest your time and do basic research, it can even provide a full-time income.
Affiliate marketing is a hot topic that continues to attract a lot of attention from solopreneurs. It is attractive due to its earning potential and flexibility. In fact, if you are good at it, affiliate marketing is a dream that can earn for you while you are asleep. A lot of information can often complicate matters, which is why the following guide is written as an affiliate marketing tip to help understand strategies that work.
The Product – What to Sell?
Most individuals, who are new to affiliate marketing, mistakenly try to sell products that they love or think that most other people will also like to buy. As a result, there are a lot of affiliate marketers who often complain about the product they are promoting is not selling as per their expectations. In reality, affiliate marketing is not about what you like; instead, successful marketers only sell items that are high in demand at a particular moment in time. In simple words, successful affiliate marketing is all about the hottest products in the market that people are going crazy.
A good example that everyone can understand is the GTA 5 video game, which is one of the top-ranking games of all time. Even after years of its release, the game continues to lure gamers. Despite its allure, it may or may not be a great affiliate product to sell because the demand continues to fluctuate.
In contrast, there is always a demand for new versions and sequels of video games that sell like crazy after hitting the market. Accordingly, a savvy affiliate marketer will likely become an affiliate of a well-known video game store to take full advantage of any new opportunities in the market. At any given time, there may be 10 to 20 "hot-selling" video game titles that are newly released, which makes these affiliate products profitable and marketable.
Many sources on the Internet can tell what content is popular at any given moment. Buzzsumo is one of those products, which can be used to generate ideas of products and services in demand. Once you know what is, you can plan your next move accordingly.
Content Creation
Even if you found a great product, it is unlikely to sell without writing great content. Nowadays, Google and pretty much everyone else put a lot of emphasis on good content. Remember, your readers have an unlimited amount of sources to get information; therefore, your content should be factual and entertaining to make visitors read it. You cannot sell your affiliate products if the reader does not stay on your page.
What kind of content you should write depends on the type of affiliate product. For instance, if you were selling a hot product such as the latest smartphone, you can write two or three pages of content describing the details and offering useful insight just for that particular product. On the other hand, if you were to sell video games, it is better to prepare a top 10 list or a comparison table enticing the visitor to click on the affiliate link.
A common mistake that new affiliate marketers make is to put a lot of third-party or un-related banner ads on their page. This affiliate marketing tip has two negative repercussions. First, visitors are not only distracted from the main topic, but they are often tempted to click on the banner, which effectively takes them away from your primary revenue source. Secondly, such banners portray a spammy website, which has a lot of distraction. To avoid this, try to focus on creating useful content that will provide practical information to the client. If your website is focused on the product, you will start seeing results and conversions without any need to put banners and third-party advertisements.
Affiliate Revenue Model
Before selecting an affiliate platform to work with, it is vital to understand the revenue model that you will use. Most affiliate models are based on a revenue-sharing model, which means that affiliates get a percentage of share from the total product sale, once the product is sold. Based on a 5% share on this revenue model, you will get $5 if the product costs $100. The revenue-sharing model is probably the best idea because it offers a fair calculation of your rewards.
Another very popular model is pay per lead model. According to this model, you will get a certain amount whenever anyone clicks the affiliate link. The pay per click amount will vary significantly from product to product; however, it can be anywhere from 1 cent to $2, or even more in specific circumstances. This particular model is usually very attractive to first-time affiliate marketers because they know that their potential income can be correlated with the amount of visitors clicking on the affiliate link.
Still, you need to read the fine print when it comes to pay per lead model because many of these models will not pay if visitors are coming to their website, but not converting into customers. It means that companies paying for pay-per-lead want quality traffic to their website. If you are creating good content without spam, you can opt for this model because most well-known companies treat their affiliates fairly.
Affiliate Platform
Mostly, you will come across three main types of affiliate services to partner with. The most common are stand-along large companies that sell their products directly. Examples of these large companies include Amazon and 1-800-Flowers. Anyone wishing to sell their products can quickly sign as an affiliate and get relevant details from the website.
You can quickly scroll to the bottom of the website to see if a particular company provides an affiliate program. If you can't find it any link, it also helps to google the company name and adding the text affiliate program after the name of the desired company. If the company runs an affiliate program, google will extract such information.
Another common method of selecting affiliate programs are affiliate platforms and networks such as CJ Affiliate. These networks have thousands of different affiliate programs to choose from. Often, many large companies also outsource their affiliate programs to these networks for better program management.
Recently, there has been a third type of affiliate network that has gain immense popularity. These affiliate networks work with only a few selected sellers that they think to have a very high conversion rate. You may find only a few hundred or even a few websites on these networks, but all of the websites are known to offer a high conversion rate. Max Bounty is one of the most popular such platforms, which publicly displays conversion rates of their affiliates.
Transparency
Affiliate marketing is a well-known fact among Internet-savvy individuals. While most of the web surfers may not understand the inner dynamics of how to benefit from it, they know that some links on the Internet are affiliate links. It means they also understand that clicking on those links will help the website owner.
As you grow your website in an effort to attract repeat visitors, most people will start taking notice of these affiliate links. In today's transparent world, these visitors also want you to be honest with them. Accordingly, it pays off to build trust by disclosing that you are paid from these links. If you look closely at the most popular blogs on the Internet, it is common for website owners and bloggers to let their visitors know that they are using affiliate links.
It also makes sense because many visitors will bypass your link for no particular reason because they don't feel any association with you. On the other hand, experts firmly believe that you are better off by disclosing affiliate relationships because it will build trust, and your website visitors will be more than happy to pay you for your efforts.
It is common for bloggers to take their website visitors in confidence by suggesting that affiliate links help them generate earnings that can be used to provide useful and educational content. You don't have to over-emphasize the affiliate relationship; therefore, you can put such disclaimers at the end of the page or mention it only once on your page.
Share the Content
Affiliate marketing is all about attracting visitors who can also share your content. Luckily, you don't have to be a social media expert to promote your page. Similarly, you don't even need a social account and lots of followers to grow your business. However, if you need rapid development and a lot of publicity, it is a good idea to use social media sharing links and buttons in prominent spaces around the page to encourage visitors to share the content.
According to various research studies, the best place to put your social media buttons is either the beginning or end of the article. For the mobile interface, putting these buttons on the right side of the screen also yields good results. It is also common to use a scrolling tab that moves with the screen because most people will not read the entire content, no matter how good it is. They will either scroll to the end by skimming through the topic or click on your links and skip reading. Using scrolling social media buttons or a fixed tab, which attach itself to the bottom of the screen, is a great idea to allow social sharing.
Studies have also proved that Facebook and Pinterest social links get the maximum number of clicks. Just imagine the power of social media, even if 0.5% of your visitors share your article. In numerical terms, it means that if 5 out of 1000 visitors share your article, it will be seen by more than 100 people due to the chain-link type of response that social sharing gets. In short, you don't want to ignore the power of social media.
Affiliate Marketing
Most affiliate businesses fail because they don't understand that affiliate marketing is different from general marketing practices. For instance, it is usually not a good idea to market your affiliate products on PPC, pay per click, networks. If you are getting $5 to $10 from selling your affiliate product, you can derail your affiliate marketing campaign by spending cash on marketing channels like Google AdSense because there is a lot of competition on these networks.
It is a tricky proposition because you are not selling a product that will give you a $100 profit. As a result, your return on investment will generally be detrimental if you are going to use PPC networks to grow your business. In contrast, these PPC networks are only useful if your affiliate product gives you a hefty share of the sale, anywhere from $50 to $100, to get any real benefit from PPC.
Another costly mistake is to buy traffic from different sources to get clicks on your affiliate products. Often the type of traffic does not convert for the publisher, which makes them unhappy with your affiliate traffic resulting in the closure of your account. Since most affiliates are paid at the end of the month, you are also not likely to get the profit you made from those clicks. Hence, it is practical to divert your efforts in getting real traffic from different SEO sources, organically.
