Affiliate marketing can drive sales and increase revenue. In addition, it’s a cost-effective kind of activity whereby you pay only for performance—that is why more firms are using this type of marketing strategy more often. Over the years, Google trends say that searches for affiliate marketing have grown massively.
Brands and affiliates themselves have contributed to the increased searches because affiliate marketing helps both of them generate revenue. Affiliate marketing is used in:
- Capturing consumer’s attention
- Engaging with them
- Increasing sales
So, if this isn’t enough to encourage you to use affiliate marketing, let’s look at this strategy in-depth.
What’s Affiliate Marketing
This is when an affiliate or a promoter is paid a commission for marketing other people’s products. The commission you get varies from one brand to another. And the sales are traced through affiliate links from one site to the next.
Generally, affiliate marketing leverages the power of influence, meaning the more you partner with many affiliates, the more you get exposure hence fueling sales. But, it requires time, effort, and proper planning for better results. With that in mind, here are the affiliate marketing ideas.
Reviews
The easiest and most effective affiliate marketing idea is the use of reviews. Simply, you get affiliates to write opinions about your product based on their experiences. Most people trust past customer’s views of a particular product. So let them describe how your product helped them and if it performed as expected.
The aim is for the affiliate to offer helpful information without coming off as promotional (but they should include what they like about the product). In addition, the affiliate should maintain their reader’s trust by providing them honest information to make buying of the product easy.
Products Comparison
An affiliate marketing strategy should give customers the satisfaction they need to choose that product. Try to let them know the difference between two competing products to select the one that suits them easily. The affiliate should explain this part with a product comparison post. Here put yourself in the buyer’s place and then try to offer all the information you want to know about the product.
Choose an affiliate company with all the necessary software to help with comparison posts with a comprehensive view.
Informational Videos
While most affiliates use text when it comes to affiliate marketing, a good number of people prefer consuming information in the form of a video. This way, they don’t have to read; instead, they just listen. In fact, trying both text and video formats could help give you an idea of the most preferred kind among the two. Meanwhile, shoot a video showing details of a particular product, including its benefits.
If you make an informational video about a product, then you find most of your consumers appreciate it more; it’s advisable to stick to that kind of marketing. Your main aim is to fuel sales using the strategy that works best.
Educational Webinars
Webinars, too, can be used in affiliate marketing. Here, the affiliate needs to research informational topics and then use them to craft educational webinars, and topics should be relevant to their promotion. It could be 40 minutes long webinars educating everything you need to know about a particular product.
For example, if you have a blog that deals with personal fitness and your products include gym equipment, supplements, and gym clothes. Then the affiliate market you hire should host a webinar on something like “10 workouts for the lower stomach” such a topic covers the product. The important thing is for the affiliate marketer to be creative and catchy in the content they produce.
But remember, webinars take up more time than most of the other types of affiliate marketing strategies. Therefore, the commission you pay could be high as well. Look for ways to keep the audience engaged; you could take some questions or include surveys.
To make it easier for people to purchase the products mentioned in the webinar, you could do so with a follow-up email containing the product’s link so as not to lose a linking opportunity.
Gift Guide double your sales. A gift guide produces the best results in terms of revenue when used during the holiday season. During this time of the year, people scramble to find the best gifts for their friends and loved ones.
A gift guide used in affiliate marketing is always a catch. But, it draws people in and can even help loved ones. This tactic could be a game-changer for your business.
When describing the product you’re recommending, it should sound authentic, honest, and persuasive, but never promotional.
Seasonal Content
If you’re using affiliate marketing, you should consider what people are looking for throughout different seasons in a year. For instance, in July, many people look to go for vacations, which dominate most of their minds. So that time, it’s good for your affiliate to brainstorm the audience with all trendy topics related to holidays. By doing that, more people are going to consume the content you put up on your website.
Taking this route helps you provide your consumer with fresh content when they need it, and it attracts more people to your site because they’re sure they will get what they’re looking for.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a direct form of communication with your current and potential clients. You can use an affiliate company to collect email addresses from people you can transform into actual buyers. Once you make initial communication with the audience and get positive feedback, you should constantly communicate to them. You can achieve this by sending them engaging, valuable, and educational content about your products.
Since the affiliate company has helped build a robust mailing list, the rest of the work goes to the product company. They are supposed to create a list of educational newsletters giving details about the features and benefits of your product. But avoid promotional content since this can put off some potential buyers.
Use Pay Per Click (PPC)
Affiliate marketing uses PPC mostly to drive sales for a specific product. Fortunately, paid per click can be used to achieve many things using only the same ad. In fact, PPC is usable for a general-purpose instead of a specific goal. For example, you could use PPC to promote a product webinar, create a mail list and drive communications all under one ad.
When the audience clicks on the ad, they’re sent to a specific page; it could be about the benefits of a product or anything else about what you’re selling. For example, once a consumer clicks on the ad, if it’s a VPN website, you could offer seven days of free trial for every user in exchange they provide an email address. This way, you’re able to create a mail list and promote the product as well.
Exclusive Discounts and Deals
Use affiliate marketing to launch promotional offers on some of your, if not all. Consumers love discounts; it will be easy for them to click on the links that lead to the discounted products. Plus, customers will always be on the lookout for such deals once in a while. Therefore, having several affiliates include links to your exclusive deals drives sales significantly.
Once you’ve decided which items are on offer, affiliate marketers should help with the promotion on all their social platforms, provided they have a way of tracking how many people use their link to purchase the product.
Dedicated Resource Page
As an affiliate company, you shouldn’t restrict yourself to promoting products from just one brand. Since you’re working on commission, pushing products from multiple vendors helps encourage more sales, meaning you get higher commissions. You should create a page on your website whose sole purpose is to showcase all your affiliate products.
What more, ensure the page is accessible from different sections of the site. Such a way of marketing benefits the product company because maybe someone was searching, for example, a makeup brush only, but then finds even foundation on that page. So they might end up buying it even if it’s from a different vendor, which becomes a win for two different companies.
So, an affiliate company promoting different brands makes consumers aware of products from more than one company. Provided each product has a link to the merchant’s site where more detailed information is available.
Influencer Marketing
This involves paying an influencer, be it on Instagram or YouTube, to give a shout-out to your product. You can then provide a code with a link to track how many people purchased a product using that influencer’s code. This creates a flood of traffic to that product, even if it’s just temporary.
While higher-level influencers refuse commission as a form of payment, macro-influencers commonly take commissions since they promote many products. Others even agree to market your products in exchange for free products and services.
Longform Guides
Businesses are now using this tactic to market their products. Primarily long-form is used to collect leads, although a company can decide to attach them to the sign-up forms. Apart from that, you can publish a long-form guide on your website, which earns you SEO points and makes it easy for the affiliate links included in it to be easily accessible.
Note that the long-form guide gives you more information compared to shorter forms. Plus, the consumer is more appreciative of getting a lot of free information, leading to increased clicks on it, more shares, and eventually a revisit. Especially if you have a massive following on your website where you educate people on different things, using a long-form to review a product and add links to that product could make you money. Since people trust your opinion, they’re more than willing to click on it.
Quality Partnership
An affiliate company needs to make quality partnerships to ensure its credibility isn’t damaged. It would help if you refrained from product companies that don’t care about their consumers. As an affiliate marketer, you can’t afford to lose your loyal followers by promoting products and services that don’t meet their expectations.
Go for partnerships with brands that help you grow as well as help maintain your reputation. By focusing on quality collaboration rather than trying to maximize sales, leads to long-term success. The reason being you accumulate a large group of loyal people over time who support you whenever you post an affiliate product. Better to grow slowly and become massive than grow fast, and you end up losing it all.
Product Tables
To make it easy for the consumer to maneuver through your page, have charts summarizing every product feature you’re promoting on your website. Readers looking for quick results love a more visual summary of a product instead of reading through a paragraph for important information. So, having a list of all products, their prices, reviews, features, and then inserting a link to the merchant’s product in the form of columns makes things easier. Organize all those things in easy-to-read columns.
Find how to create a product table accessible for those using phones or computers, displaying all the content properly.
Profitable Affiliate Company
It’s not easy to select the best affiliate company out of a thousand of them. You have to probe a couple of them and check the marketing strategies they use to see if it suits your business. The easiest way to do this is to go for companies that are within your niche. Such an affiliate has the right audience that is looking for products that you manufacture. For example, if an affiliate does mostly beauty content, chances are, most of their consumers love beauty information. So, there is no way you can use such an affiliate for marketing hardware items because they don’t have the right crowd for hardware stuff.
Also, the affiliate shouldn’t be marketing competing products because how will they convince a customer on which product to buy. But going for someone with whom you share interests helps you convert their audience into actual customers. So again, the aim is to look out for your company’s best interest.
Outrank Competition
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best place to start if you want to outrank your competitor in Google search results. It includes improving your website’s visibility in search engine outcomes. In addition, it involves improving your website visibility to attract an audience. While SEO can be complex, affiliate marketers need to develop SEO skills to help promote affiliate products.
Website visibility helps drive traffic to your website, which is good for business since you make more sales. Look for experts to help with SEO tasks but have a basic understanding of how it works.
Shorter Affiliate Links
The main reason for using affiliate marketing is to share your affiliate links with your audience and track click-throughs on the links. So, the links you put on your page for a product should be direct, unnecessarily long, and attractive.
Learn how to shorten your links since there are apps for doing such work. For example, if you’re promoting a product through social networks like YouTube, post the link in the description bar. Also, avoid using links that look spammy to increase the number of visits.
Banners
Most affiliate marketers even use banners where they promote their client’s products. Banners are straightforward and work on autopilot. Since this is affiliate marketing, whenever a client visits a company to buy a product because they saw a banner, the affiliate company should get a commission. But the thing with using a banner is you see it, then you forget it.
But to influence a vast crowd using a banner, you should place it strategically where people can see it and take action.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is an easy side hustle that can help you subsidize your other job. Interesting, if done well, affiliate marketing can generate a steady flow of revenue for you. As an affiliate company, you don’t have to go the extra mile to test all the products you’re promoting. All you need to do is identify the right products with good ratings then promote them to your followers.
But affiliate marketing isn’t just a walk in the park; you have to adopt the best strategies when starting to build an audience and keep them engaged. First, you must use the above ideas if you want to expand your reach. Then collaborate with well-established businesses to grow your audience and keep the sales skyrocketing.
The key to a successful affiliate company is establishing itself as a valuable source of insightful content. This helps you earn trust from your audience and makes it easy for you to introduce any product to them. In addition, you can now ask for a higher commission since you’re sure of your ability to drive sales.
The bottom line is to be creative if you want to be highly competitive and stay at the top of your game and stand out from your competitors. Gather your ideas and use them to generate income.
About the Author
Alisha Haqie is a writer for enests.co – a leading business listing site. She enjoys writing different topics about search engine optimization and digital marketing.
