The typical 9 to 5 jobs are no doubt intimidating, and the urge to quit becomes hard to stem. Affiliate marketing can be your way out from this drudgery. It is one of the oldest methods of making money online where you promote different products in order to earn a commission (And you can do it all without even stepping one foot out of your room!).
Who doesn’t dream of making a huge sum of money! We all have thought of it at some point in our lives, isn’t it? Affiliate marketing can help you build a full-time income stream online in no time. Though earning the first few sales might be a struggle, you will soon be making thousands of dollars each year if you are genuinely invested in learning its strategies.
Can’t wait to learn the techniques to make the most of this field? Then without further ado, let’s delve right into the top 10 commandments for affiliate marketing (that you must implement).
Follow these top-notch tips to maximize your income and expand your followers base:
1. Have the right expectations
Let me make myself very clear, though you might be working from home and will mostly work on your own terms; affiliate marketing is NOT a doorway to make some fast and easy money without putting in much effort. It just blows my mind that how many marketers get into this field, thinking they will earn buckets of money by investing only five hours per week in the job. Please have realistic expectations before you invest your time and money in it.
A realistic time frame to start making money generally varies between 6 to 12 months and sometimes it takes even longer. So it will be of utmost importance to set your expectations right, from the very beginning.
2. Know your audience
The most appropriate way to use affiliate marketing will be to promote offers, products and services that match the needs of your followers. You must pay close attention to why someone visits the company’s (that you are working for) website, follows the brand on social media or joins the email marketing list of the company. In short, monitor their every move and make sure your affiliate marketing provides direct solutions to your audiences’ problems.
An interesting way of looking at affiliate marketing will be this: educate your audience about the relevant services and products they might be interested in. You can also use the demographics, psychographics, and other information on the brand’s customers to target the audience while advertising a product on Facebook. In case you are a newbie and still unsure about how to target a vast audience base, read this article and learn to pick a profitable niche for your online business.
3. Be 100% honest and trustworthy
You must never exaggerate to make a quick sale (What I mean to say is, do not underestimate your readers). Once you take advantage of their visit with too many ads, consider you have lost them forever. Though heavy advertising may seem like good business, it’s more like an annoying distraction for the readers.
Too many ads will dampen your sites visits as the viewers will have to struggle to navigate through the page with endless pop-ups appearing now and then. Once you solely rely on pop-up ads as a source of income from your website, your visitors will leave immediately and never come back.
And it is the repeat visitors who drive the traffic. Once you build a relationship based on genuine content and information, your audience will provide you with the much-needed backlinks, word of mouth promotion and recommend the website as the go-to place for authentic information.
Also, it never hurts to explain the downsides of the product as well, as it proves that you are being sincere and honest. This will help you build their trust, and you will be making money with repeat sales in no time.
4. Learn about SEO and keyword research
You will not only have to create content that is friendly for your website visitors but also need to ensure that it appears on the top list of search engines like Google or Bing. Learning how to optimize your pages for search engines through SEO will be crucial to your success.
A significant part of SEO strategy will be to focus on finding the right keywords to promote your product. This way, you will be building content that people “want” to find. The right keywords will help you climb past all the other search engine results and hit the coveted No.1 position.
You can visit the websites https://keywordtool.io/ or https://app.kparser.com/#/ to find the high opportunity keywords and include them strategically in your write-ups. For example, say you are writing for a company who sells ‘designer t-shirts’, you can use the aforementioned tools to generate appropriate keywords. Some of the keywords will be ‘new t-shirt design for boys’, ‘design t-shirts for ladies’, ‘men’s t-shirt with collar’, ‘printed t-shirts’ and so on.
SEMRush is also a fantastic tool for advanced keyword research that allows you to spy on the competition and gain insights to what is already working for others.
So even if ‘keyword research’ or ‘SEO’ is a foreign word to you at this moment, you will need to develop expertise in it eventually. Affiliate marketing thrives when enough people are searching for your niche, and useful content with strategic use of SEO will definitely aid the process.
5. Get familiar with WordPress
While there are many platforms you can use to build a website, I mostly recommend WordPress to new affiliate marketers. It will be essential to get the hang of WordPress at the earliest. Even if you start with a free domain, play around with different themes or something else just to try things out.
Here’s a list of some easy-to-use WordPress themes that will help you achieve fantastic results irrespective of whether you are an utter beginner or a skilled professional:
- Soledad,
- Jevelin,
- Divi,
- X Theme,
- Foodica,
- Kalium,
- Total,
- Bridge
You won’t need much coding experience to use WordPress. Still, in case you feel too overwhelmed to tackle this on your own, here’s a tutorial video for you that might deem helpful.
6. Remember to Gently nudge the buyers
At certain point of time, you will come across people who are late in the buying cycle and just need a little nudge in the right direction. Strategically speaking, review sites work wonders to direct the disoriented buyers in the right direction. Take my word for it; most of your revenue will come from the reviews you publish on your blog.
Though there is no shortage of reviews on the internet, there is a significant lack of authentic reviews that provide in-depth analysis of a product. So invest your time in writing genuine reviews that will truly help people to make well-informed decisions.
People keep looking for the ‘best’ product within their niche, and you can quickly nudge them by highlighting the services and products.
7. Make use of coupons and discounts
Never underestimate the role of coupons and discount codes in your affiliate marketing program. Just like the paper coupons, one uses in the supermarket; e-commerce coupons also play an essential part to elevate the revenues drastically. People love discounts. And in this shopping-obsessed world, consumers want nothing but to make the most out of their shopping experience. This is what makes the discount coupons a prime opportunity to attract more traffic towards your site.
Moreover, besides boosting the overall sales and directing new customers towards the targeted website, coupon campaigns will also help you to build a good image of the brand you are promoting.
But before diving head-first into the coupon-campaigning-program, you must primarily consider whether it fits with the affiliated brand, its products and also your overall marketing strategy. Here’s one piece of advice that will help you to stay on the right track, ‘start small at first to keep track of your coupon campaigns’.
You can also conduct A/B tests to see what discount works the best and what doesn’t. You might also consider using software like Everflow and Voucheify to create and track your coupon codes.
Here are some tips to make those discount coupons stand out from the crowd:
- Give it an eye-catchy design
- Keep the copy short, crisp and concise
- Include an expiration date
8. Be experimental with the programs
Your chosen strategy or program doesn’t seem to be working as you had planned? Bunk it and try another one. Affiliate programs are not the same, and the marketing and sales materials keep differing. One vendor might provide a lifetime payout while the rest only serve your purpose for 30-90 days.
Once you start testing different programs continually, you’ll be able to observe which ones convert to the best sales. Focus on the ones your audience responds to the most, and in no time, you will be increasing your overall sales and conversions.
- Give the audience multiple options for using a product
This link tactic will demand you to get creative. Brainstorm and research to come up with unique content that provides a different perspective on the product that the readers haven’t yet explored.
- Record a screencast or video to provide a quick demo of the affiliate product
A screencast is not as complicated as it sounds. It’s quite easy to create and will be super fun once you master the software. Screencast, which is simply a recording of your computer screen, can be used to walk people through the various key features of a product you are promoting.
- Guide your followers through a step-by-step affiliate product tutorial
Though this is a bit similar to the previous point, instead of recording the computer screen, here you write down step-by-step instructions. This works wonders while promoting physical products as you can give specific instructions like, “four-step process to use a dishwasher”. By including keywords in your text, you will also be able to gain search engine traffic.
9. Write timeless content
Even if your old content is not on the front page, it might still be a valuable source of information. To make the most of your long-term opportunities, make sure you invest in crafting timeless content. Say, by chance a visitor comes across your old content, only to find it provides outdated information. They will leave right away.
Of course, information keeps moving forward, and as a result, even the most relevant content might become outdated the very next morning. However, you can easily make your content timeless by simply adding updated information on the older ones. Updating your older articles will also deem helpful in maintaining your search engine rankings. Evergreen content will give you extra mileage and drive traffic for years to come.
Another useful strategy is removing the dates from your blog posts. Even if the content was written a few months ago and the information is completely relevant, people will simply dismiss it just by looking at the date. Removing the dates from your blog posts will quickly solve this problem.
10. Be patient and don’t give up
As I’ve already mentioned earlier, the affiliate revenues grow and build with time. The only people who fail are the ones who give up quickly. So your motto must be, “I won’t give up no matter how long it takes or how many mistakes I make along the way.”
Do not let failures demotivate you and hinder your path to success. Failures are what makes you strive for the best and help you to improve and polish your original strategies. In short, it will pave your way to success. So instead of giving up, figure out where you have gone wrong and correct yourself at the earliest. If you love what you are doing, you will definitely come up with a great solution with renewed confidence instead of quitting (and never stop until you have fixed your problem).
Affiliate marketing tests your patience. Believe me; most people around you will quit right after the first attempt. However, one who travels the distance will definitely succeed.
On a parting note,
Remember your content is the foundation of your website. It is the lifeblood on which your website exists. Once you focus on providing valuable content, the monetizing strategies will work out effectively. But if you start compromising with your content, you will immediately lose the opportunity to receive earnings from any of your ads, (be they referral-based CPM or CPC).
Also, don’t get stagnant (being dependent on a single channel sometimes becomes disastrous for affiliate marketers). If a usage policy suddenly changes, or worse, an account gets banned, you will be out-of-business overnight. Work with least two advertising channels, for example, AdWords and Facebook, to add stability and diversity to your strategy.
About the Author
Olaila Lee is a marketing expert who is working for an MNC for the past 6 years. She has been associated with Myassignmenthelp as an academic expert for a couple of years and provides assignment help services Apart from writing engaging blogs on marketing, tech and education trends, she likes hiking and surfing when not wooing her international clients with amazing marketing advice.
