Affiliate Marketing Strategies – The Best 10 Tips

If done right, affiliate marketing has the great potential to be a dependable full-time income stream. But without the right affiliate marketing strategies, your efforts may not result in anything significant.

If you’re not doing affiliate marketing the right way, it may take longer to earn significant income from it.

Selling other people’s products is one of the most reliable business models to earn passive income. However, without an effective affiliate marketing strategies, it could be a very daunting task to make money from this internet business model.

This is why it’s important to learn how to make it work so you can get the best out of it. It only needs that you approach it with caution, patient, concrete marketing plan and nicely-executed strategies.

The strategies you apply would depend on your type of niche and your audience type. It doesn’t have to be a one size fits all something. Likewise, there are some basics guidelines you’ll have to abide with if you’re aiming to make the best out of your affiliate marketing campaign.

However, affiliate marketing isn’t for bloggers alone to benefits from. Brands, small business and merchants, all benefit from affiliate marketing business.

Why Brands and Small Business Should Consider Affiliate Marketing.

According to Google Trends, the search for the term affiliate marketing has been on the rise for the last 5 years. And doesn’t seem to go down anywhere soon.

If you’re a business owner, consider tapping into affiliate marketing programs as part of your product marketing strategies. It helps to reach more customers, increase sales, generate more leads, improve SEO, more brand awareness, create social buzz, etc.

The more affiliates bloggers write a review post for your products, the more natural incoming links. This helps to increase SEO value, increase brand mentioning, generates more revenue, leads, social buzz, etc.

And above these, it’s a more cost-effective marketing strategy. Since it’s a performance-based marketing.

There is a lot of money to be made for brands, merchants, and bloggers in affiliate marketing. The graph below shows how affiliate marketing spending has increased from year to year.

This is a good indication for brands to utilize affiliate marketing programs as a core part of their marketing tactics.

Below I have compiled a list of 9 proven time-tested affiliate marketing strategies every affiliate marketers should consider.

1. Build Your Email List.

With over 306.4 billion emails sent per day, email remains one of the internets most performing activities. A direct means of communicating with your audience in a more personalized way.

Surprisingly, there are more email users than social media users in the world. Almost everyone with a social media account owns at least one email account. But not everyone with an email account owns a social media account.

According to TheNextWeb, there are over 3.9 billion active email users in the world in 2018. And 3.5 billion social media users in 2019. Every age group (old or young) uses email while the use of social media varies among age groups and platforms.

This is one of the reasons email marketing is an essential marketing tool for your affiliate marketing success.

You need to build a healthy email list of active subscribers. People who are interested in your blog topics. This is because mostly, you’ll be promoting relevant products and services to this audience.

Email campaign gives you direct access to your subscribers whenever you have something relevant to say. Like when you just published a product review post and needs people to read it. You’re one click away from reaching your audience.

With email campaign, you have access to traffic on-demand whenever you need it.

Trust plays a lot of factors in building a successful affiliate marketing business. Apart from your blog content, email communication with your readers will build a more friendly relationship.

If you’re beginners, free email marketing services may be a good option to start with. As you grow your business, consider upgrading to a paid plan that gives you more control and useful email marketing features.

There are lots of free email marketing services that let you grow your email list to a certain number before upgrading to a paid plan. Consider one of the listed email services below.

10 Free Email Marketing Services.

• Mail Chimp.
• GetResonse.
• Mail Octopus.
• Omni Send.
• Sending Blue.
• BenchMark.
• Send Pulse.
• Moosend.
• Moon Mail.
• Constant Contact

2. Optimize For Organic Traffic.

For every business, the search engine is the best source of the traffic to their website. Affiliate marketing is not exempted.

But getting your share of the organic traffic is not going to be an easy task. Especially for new websites. But that’s not to say your webpages can’t rank for relevant keywords in the search engines.

To increase your chances of ranking your affiliate review posts, consider targeting keywords with less than 10k monthly search volume. And optimize these pages for maximum search engine visibility.

Write honest in-depth product reviews that users find extremely useful. Make it the best-in-class content. Provide maximum value. Give users a reason to believe your recommendation will help them make a better buying decision.

Then, get as much as possible incoming links to this page. If you can’t get links to it naturally, then, just buy it. If the later advice doesn’t suit you, well, sorry, that’s how it is on the internet.

The big guys do it. Your favorite marketers do it. SEO professionals do it. If you’re caught, only then you’re guilty as charged.

Links signal and content quality remains two most important Google ranking factors.

3. Identify Your Audience.

One of the best and easiest ways to earn money in affiliate marketing is by identifying potential customers. The people you want to market your affiliate product to. This is the target market for your product or services.

It is not enough to say XYZ product/service will sell better to India, United States, Nigeria internet users, etc.

No.

Such geo-targeting won’t bring you the maximum return on investment. You can be more accurate and precise by figuring out who, what, where exactly does your potential customers reside and their best descriptions.

To help minimize advertising cost and save time, consider analyzing your already existing audience data base.

Assuming you already have a blog running with readers engagements. Look into your audience profile in your Google Analytics dashboard. This will give you an idea of what’s already working for your type of content.

Once you discover what’s already working, you can work on this data to expand on your keyword research process and gather more accurate data about your potential audience.

A successful affiliate marketing campaign is backed by data. The more accurate data you gather about your audience, the better you can market your product to the right audience.

You need to carry out proper keyword research to identify hidden opportunity lies within your market. If you’re on top of your game, keyword research will reveal many opportunities you can tap into both in terms of audience and the best affiliate product.

4. Host a Webinar.

Knowing more and interacting with your audience is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies. The live webinar presents a great opportunity to make this possible.

It gives you an opportunity to educate your audience and get feedback on the product you want to promotes. Also, it put you in a position where your audience looks up to you as an expert in the filed.

For instance, let say you’ve partner with an online marketer to sell a marketing course. Obviously, there are hundreds of other marketers selling courses on online marketing too.

Readers wants to know why your course is different from other marketers in the field? Why they should buy into your course over others?

Webinar gives you the opportunity to answer all these question your audience are looking for. You can make your webinar more engaging by inviting influencer to collaborate with you. It will help improve the value of your webinar and boost audience sign up.

Here are a few tips when hosting a webinar.

• Email your existing subscribers to join the webinar.
• Promotes the webinar on your blog so anyone visiting can learn about it.
• Make an announcement in advance and promotes it across all your social media channels.
• If you really want to go big, use paid marketing to reach a wider audience.
• Create a dedicated landing page for your webinar and optimized it for one main goal – leads generation. Make it easy for people to complete the registration process.
• Listen to your audience’s response during the webinar and answer their question.
• During the presentation, highlight product features, benefits and what makes it stand out from other competitors.
• Don’t forget to share your affiliate links at the end of the webinar. This is your main target.

5. Only Recommend Products You Trust.

This will be a very difficult task for many newbie affiliate marketers.

While I wouldn’t recommend you start promoting products/services you’ve not personally used, I also know that not everyone has the financial power to buy a product just for the sake of experiments.

Lots of upcoming internet marketers can’t afford to buy themselves tools that will aid their own blog growth. Not alone to say buying tools for the sake of recommendation.

But there are ways to go about it and it will require a very tedious work from you, patient, extensive research and comparison before you can finally take what’s best for your audience.

How to Recommend a Product You’ve Not Used.

Let say you want to promote a certain WordPress plugin but you’ve not actually used the pro version of it. First, look out for a friend who might have used the plugin and ask for his honest review.

If that fails, then visit forums and look out for the users who had practical experience with such a plugin. Forum is a very good place to get real and valuable first-hand information on related topics.

With the kind of member’s quality and experience in a forum like Warrior, NairaLand, etc. You’re bound to get enough details on any internet marketing tools, software, services, etc. If possible ask for a sample of such products or if the person is kind enough to let you see how it works from his side.

Then don’t stop there, take it a bit further by carrying out some research on the internet and see what others are saying about the product. From all these steps, you’ll know how valuable your intended products/services is in the market.

6. Product Review.

Products and services review are one of the best affiliate marketing strategies that could result into bumper sales and consequently increases your commission level by wide margin.

Smart affiliate marketers create blogs for the sole purpose of products/services review. These blogs are well-targeted and optimized for search traffic.

Though this does not take away the fact that you can review products/services too on your non-product review blog. I do review products and services on my blog too, despite it is not mainly a product review blog.

One of the good functions of a blog is the ability to adapt to different purposes and usage. You can have different sections on your blog for a different purpose and still don’t lose the feel and value it offers your regular readers.

There are many plugins that will turn your site to a product review blog with one click. Or your regular blog post updates can have the feel and look of a review post. One good plugin for a review post is WP Product Review. 

This plugin has many useful features like the option to insert your affiliate links, product rating, product image, pros and cons, and overall rating. All done in a very simple and elegant style.

7. Offer Bonus.

I received one of John Chow’s offers (MOBE) via email newsletter, I got tempted to make the purchase right away. If I have had the asking price with me at that moment, I would have subscribed to the offer.

The offer itself is not the reason I’d wanted to make the purchase, but the quality of the bonus if you purchase through John Chow’s affiliate code.

It was a bonus that alone stands to be offered as a paid product but John Chow gives it out as a bonus for buying through his affiliate link. John promise if you didn’t like the paid product, you can keep his bonus offer and still get your money back.

That’s a smart marketing sales tactics.

The bonus offer is a downloadable product. Obviously there is no way you return the downloadable product without having a copy of it on your hard drive. So basically, the bonus offer is a temptation to buy the original offer.

The reality is that this kind of affiliate marketing strategy works. People love to have a discount, bonuses, extra on their purchase. Take advantage of it and increase your sales.

8. Create A Resource Page.

To market your most trusted affiliate products/services to your blog readers and increases your chances of earning more from your one-time effort. You’ll need to create a resource page on your blog where you list all products and services that you’ve used and still using in your day-to-day internet business activities that have made achieving success less painful and ease your task.

This will be a static page on your blog that readers will see once they arrive. And more often you’ll need to be referring to this page in your blog post. This page should be included in your blog navigational menu.

This help to tell users that you have actually used these products and not just promoting them for the sake of small commission attached.

You can see my resource page here.

9. Promote High Ticket Products/Services.

You may think it’s easier to sell a product that costs $27 and make a $5 to $10 commission but harder to sell a product that costs $299 or even $1000. But if you understand what affiliate marketing is all about and the rules to richest you will go for high ticket priced products.

To earn $100 on a $27 product with 33% commission, you’re going to sell up to 11 copies of that product – hope my math is correct?

To earn the same commission on a product sold at $399 with 33% commission you’ll need to make just a single sale to earn $100. That will even earn you more than a hundred-dollar.

The only thing that may get you stock here is if you don’t know where your potential audience resides. How to locate the ready to buy audience for your high ticket offer.

But the truth is, if you already know how to sell a $27 product, you already have what it takes to sell a $1,000 product. You just don’t believe you can.

I would advise instead of settling for a penny, learn how to find the right market for your high ticket products, and market it to them. This will help you scale up the ladder to riches in a quick time and save you from frustration.

10. Reach Out to Your Affiliate Manager.

If you didn’t take anything from this post, please, I want you to take this one close to heart.

Especially for beginner’s affiliate marketers. Reaching out to your dedicated affiliate manager is very important.

Sometimes, affiliate terms and agreements are not straight-forward to understand. Your dedicated affiliate manager is the best person to get answers from.

If while writing your review post, you need some external resources to back up your claims, your dedicated affiliate manager is the one to reach out for help. The thing is, most merchant website has all the resources you need to write a comprehensive review post.

Reaching out to your affiliate manager can help you with the resources you need to make your review post more visually appealing and trustworthy.

Some affiliate managers will even go the extra mile to help you map out a better content strategy. And make your review post better.

Conclusion.

Internet marketing involves testing and tweaking things around. Test drive the above 10 affiliate marketing strategies to see what works for your type of blog.

If you discover what’s working, do more of it.