7 Steps to Successful Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways of making money online. A company offers commissions or incentives to third parties to generate revenue and boost sales.
Even though it is easier than most other marketing methods, this article gives you 7 tips to help you become a successful senior affiliate marketer
If you are a beginner, or you’ve tried and not had much success, you can follow these steps to set up or improve your affiliate marketing business.
1. Choose Your Platform
Affiliate marketing can be done on any platform. You can publish your affiliate links on a website, blog, or social media pages. Studies have shown that you can build a loyal audience and increase your revenue through two channels: a YouTube channel or a blog.
It is both easy and cheap to start a blog. Starting a blog will only cost you a few dollars each month for hosting and a domain name. Once you publish your content, you can add affiliate links.
YouTube is another platform you can do affiliate marketing. This platform is free to use. This makes it suitable for many people. You need to optimize your content for SEO and add affiliate links in the description.
If you are using your blog or YouTube channel to promote affiliate campaigns, you are required to disclose that. It is advisable to be transparent from the start.
2. Decide On Your Niche
There are so many affiliate marketers out there and there is stiff competition. If you want to become successful, you need to choose your niche correctly. Some competition is a good thing as it means there is a market for products in a niche. Too much competition can make it very difficult to break into the market and too little can mean there is no market and no buyers in that niche.
A niche is a specific category in an industry. By choosing a niche, you can focus more on your audience, build authority, and rank higher in search engines.
If you will be writing the content by yourself, you should choose a topic you are passionate about. The main reason affiliate sites fail is that owners do not have passion for the niche. When you have a passion for a given topic, you can easily write content and post regularly.
3. Find Affiliate Programs
There are different types of affiliate programs to consider. For instance, there are low-volume, high-paying affiliate programs. These include brands that sell business software. They offer huge commissions but have a limited pool of buyers.
Also, there is stiff competition for brands that offer high commissions. As a beginner, you should avoid such affiliate programs.
The other category is high-volume, low-paying affiliate programs. The good thing about these programs is that there are lots of products to sell. A good example is Amazon Associates. You can get up to 10% commissions on Amazon products.
In this case, you will get a commission even for the products you did not recommend. You will however need a lot of traffic to get a reasonable amount of revenue and feel like a successful senior affiliate marketer.
There are also high-volume, high-paying affiliate programs. Some examples include health supplements and credit cards.
There is a lot of competition in these affiliate programs as you will be competing with affiliate marketers with a lot of expertise.
I like to focus on digital products such as ebooks, video training, and business services. You can keep your finger on the pulse of this niche by visiting muncheye.com and previewing upcoming product launches.
4. Create Killer Content
Your main goal with affiliate marketing should be to create high-quality content and place your affiliate links naturally. You should not just curate products and write reviews about them. Instead, you should show how the product solves the customer’s problems.
Content is king and it will always be. There are different types of content formats you can use for affiliate marketing. These include reviews, tutorials, product comparisons, and resource pages.
Reviews and tutorials are widely used because they provide an insightful review of products and how-to guides respectively.
5. Drive Traffic
A website without traffic is dead. You cannot make revenue if your website does not get visitors.
There are different methods for driving traffic to your website. These methods include SEO, PPC, and social media marketing. Some are paid methods, as in you give someone money and they send you traffic. Other methods are called ‘free’ traffic. With these, you invest your time instead of money.
With PPC or paid traffic, you can start generating sales as soon as you create your website or landing page. However, it has its downsides. For instance, you might spend more money on advertisements than the profits you get. Another con is that once the money is gone, the traffic stops.
The best option is to invest in search engine optimization which takes your time when you are creating your content. If you can rank higher in search engines for your target keywords, then you will get passive and consistent traffic. Your content will remain available and continue to drive traffic, often for years. Be aware that it takes time for ‘free’ traffic to work.
6. Optimize for Conversions
Conversions are important in affiliate marketing, well any marketing actually. The click-through rate is the first type of conversion. This is where you have control. You can use different tactics to increase your chances of getting clicks.
The other conversion type is when the visitor purchases the product, called the conversion rate. You are not in control of this, the merchant is. When choosing your products to promote, you want to make sure the conversion rate is good and that the amount earned is worth the effort you put in.
7. Replicate Your Success
This is a trick used by many expert affiliates. You can also use it to dominate the niche and make more money.
If your first site is successful, you can build other sites in the same niche or you can diversify to other niches to increase your revenue.
The research and preparation you do as well as your marketing skills all combine to help make you a successful senior affiliate marketer.
