For the majority of bloggers, affiliate marketing is an essential tool that can turn a failing project into a vastly profitable blog that is regularly visited by a loyal audience. If you’ve ever found yourself trying to improve how your blog is monetized through affiliate marketing and came up short, don’t despair. We have prepared ten effective ways of using affiliate marketing to ensure a steady flow of passive and active income.
1. Using an Affiliate Marketing Aggregator
Any blogger who’s ever engaged with affiliate marketing knows that managing several affiliate marketing programs simultaneously can be a major hassle.
That’s why outsourcing your entire affiliate marketing strategy to an aggregator (e.g., VigLink) may be a great solution for any blogger. VigLink can manage several affiliate marketing programs without human input; not only that, but the service can even introduce affiliate links automatically without the need for any supervision. Sure, aggregators take a cut of the commission payments but, considering their effectiveness, it should be money well spent.
2. Leveraging Exit Pop-Ups
The term ‘exit pop-ups’ refers to advertising windows that appear when a visitor is preparing to leave a web page. Sure, exit pop-ups may be considered a bit intrusive but the fact of the matter is that they are highly effective in increasing affiliate sales and driving your revenues.
To make exit pop-ups more valuable, try to include a clear call-to-action and don’t be afraid to mix in a little bit of FOMO (‘fear of missing out’). For example, if you’re promoting a marketing course, you could structure your exit pop-up to list the undesirable outcomes (e.g., lost sales) that could happen to a visitor’s business if they don’t participate in this specific course.
3. Bringing Back Email Newsletters
A lot of bloggers have moved on from email newsletters and, instead, prefer to focus on less intrusive ways of informing their followers about new posts (e.g., through social media).
It’s important to remember, however, that the people who have subscribed to your newsletter are already primed for purchasing something. Instead of considering email newsletters intrusive, such consumers would actually appreciate you sending one-two messages with links to affiliate posts and valuable offers. The only thing you have to do is address their needs directly and enjoy your increased affiliate revenues.
4. Writing Comparison Posts
Integrating affiliate links into informative blog posts can be challenging. You have to ensure that your discussion flows smoothly from offering unique insight on a particular topic to recommending a certain service or a product.
One of the best ways of overcoming this barrier is to write comparison posts containing reviews of the promoted offerings. Comparison posts naturally lead to endorsements which, in turn, are just a step away from providing your readers with an affiliate link.
5. Using Star Ratings
This idea is closely related to writing comparison posts. Any good review should end in a clear verdict about a particular product or a service. Communicating the results of your review to users even before they’ve clicked on a page can incentivize visits to your affiliate marketing posts.
Adding star ratings to your posts can be as easy as installing a WordPress plugin or adding one-two lines of code to your page mark-ups. If everything goes right, the search engine outputs should display a shiny star rating next to the link to your blog.
6. Creating Opt-In ‘Bribes’
We have already discussed the value of a good email newsletter for improving the performance of your affiliate marketing links. But what if your newsletter is empty and you’re at a loss on how to recruit new loyal subscribers?
Creating an opt-in ‘bribe’ should easily address such a problem. The ‘bribe’ could take the form of anything free and valuable that you could offer to your new subscribers such as promo coupons, short e-books, free trials, etc.
7. Using Heatmaps
The term ‘heatmap’ sounds like something straight out of a Hollywood movie about the military. However, it’s also one of the most effective means of facilitating affiliate marketing.
A good heatmap should display which elements of your landing page are clicked the most often by your visitors. In turn, placing affiliate links or similar conversion mechanisms close to these elements should drive your revenues and improve the overall visitor experience.
8. Running Sharing Contests
If you want to squeeze a little bit more ‘juice’ out of your existing affiliate marketing posts, running a sharing contest may be just the thing.
In a sharing contest, a specific pool of users (e.g., the visitors who have made reposts of your content on social media) is given the option to win valuable rewards. Such a mechanism may not only expand your audience but also improve your legitimacy among a wider array of blog readers.
9. Referring to User-Generated Content
If you want to quickly gain approval and legitimacy among your targeted audiences, there is no better way to do it than by featuring user-generated content.
For example, if you run a blog about art, you may regularly feature two-three digital or physical drawings sent by your viewers. Such posts could be accompanied by affiliate links featuring the products and services (e.g., certain brands of pigments) directly related to how users typically produce content in your chosen niche.
10. Generating Affiliate Traffic Outside Your Blog
Driving more people to view your affiliate marketing posts is probably one of the most challenging tasks for any blogger.
Luckily, there is a wealth of platforms that could help in attaining such an objective. For instance, you may regularly answer questions about your field on Quora or similar websites. If your content is informative enough, users should naturally follow your Quora profile to your personal blog.
While affiliate marketing constitutes an incredibly broad field with several different approaches to growing revenues, the ten strategies outlined above should produce immediate positive results. Be sure to share your own experiences with affiliate marketing in the comments section!
About the Author
Anna Clarke is the owner of PhD Centre, who provide expert PhD thesis writing services. She specializes in research, content and article writing on various topics, including Education, Marketing, and Technology.
