10 Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Beginners

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Affiliate marketing is a dependable full-time income stream, but you may struggle to earn consistent income without the right affiliate marketing strategies.

This is why it’s important to learn how to make it work so you can get the best out of it.

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 approach.

However, you must follow several basic guidelines to make the best out of your affiliate marketing campaign.

Affiliate marketing isn’t for bloggers alone to benefit from. Brands, small businesses, and merchants all benefited from affiliate marketing business.

Here is what the data says.

Affiliate Marketing For Brands and Small Businesses

According to Google Trends, the search for affiliate marketing has increased for the last five years. And it doesn’t seem to go down anywhere soon.

If you’re a business owner, consider using affiliate marketing programs as part of your product marketing strategies.

It helps to reach more customers, increase sales, generate more leads, improve SEO, and brand awareness, create social buzz, etc.

The more affiliate bloggers write a review post for your products, the more natural incoming links.

This helps increase SEO value, increase brand mentioning, generate more revenue, leads, social buzz, etc.

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

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 yearly.

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 marketer should consider.

1. Build Your Email List

With over 306.4 billion emails sent daily, email remains one of the Internet’s most performing activities—a direct means of communicating with your audience more personally.

Surprisingly, there are more email users than social media users worldwide.

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 were over 3.9 billion active email users worldwide in 2018—and 3.5 billion social media users in 2019.

Everyone (old or young) uses email, while 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.

Email campaign gives you direct access to your subscribers whenever you have something relevant to say.

Like when you just published a post, have special seasonal deals, and want your readers to benefit from 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 create a more friendly relationship.

Free email marketing services may be a good option if you’re a beginner.

Consider upgrading to a paid plan that gives you more control and useful email marketing features as you grow your business.

Many free email marketing services 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.
• GetResponse.
• Mail Octopus.
• OmniSend.
• Sending Blue.
• BenchMark.
• Send Pulse.
• Moosend.
• Moon Mail.
• Constant Contact

2. Optimize For Organic Traffic

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

But getting your share of the organic traffic is not easy, especially for new websites. But it does not mean you can’t rank for relevant keywords in the search engines.

Consider targeting keywords with less than 10k monthly search volume to rank your affiliate review posts. And optimize these pages for maximum search engine visibility.

Write honest and 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 many incoming links as possible to this page. If you can’t get links to it naturally, then buy it.

If the latter 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 the 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, the 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 determining who, what, and where your potential customers reside and their best descriptions.

Consider analyzing your existing audience database to help minimize advertising costs and save time.

Assuming you already have a blog running with significant 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 your keyword research process and gather more accurate data about your potential audience.

Data back a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

The more accurate data you gather about your audience, the better you can market your product to the right audience.

You must conduct proper keyword research to identify hidden opportunities within your market.

If you’re on top of your game, keyword research will reveal many opportunities to tap into audiences 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 allows you to educate your audience and get feedback on the product you want to promote. Also, it puts you in a position where your audience looks up to you as an expert.

For instance, you’ve partnered with an online marketer to sell a marketing course. There are hundreds of other marketers selling courses on online marketing too.

Do readers want to know why your course differs from other marketers in the field? Why should they buy into your course over others?

A webinar allows you to answer all these questions your audience seeks.

Inviting influencers to collaborate with you can make your webinar more engaging. 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 advance announcement and promote it across all your social media channels.
• Use paid marketing to reach a wider audience if you want to go big.
• Create a dedicated landing page for your webinar and optimize it for one main goal – lead 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 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 tough 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.

Many 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 very tedious work from you, patience, 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’s say you want to promote a certain WordPress plugin, but you’ve not used the pro version. First, look out for a friend who might have used the plugin and ask for his honest review.

If that fails, visit forums and look out for users with practical experience with such a plugin.

A forum is perfect for getting 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 will 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 researching the Internet and seeing what others say about the product.

You’ll know how valuable your intended products/services are in the market from all these steps.

6. Product Review

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

Smart affiliate marketers create blogs for the sole purpose of product/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 review products and services on my blog, despite not mainly being 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 different purposes and still don’t lose the feel and value it offers your regular readers.

Many plugins will turn your site into 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 are done in an effortless and elegant style.

7. Offer Bonus

I received one of John Chow’s offers (MOBE) via email newsletter and was tempted to purchase immediately.

I would have subscribed to the offer if I had had the asking price with me.

The offer is not why I’d wanted to purchase, but the bonus quality 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 promised if you didn’t like the paid product, you could keep his bonus offer and still get your money back.

That’s a smart marketing sales tactic.

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 having discounts, bonuses, and extras on their purchases. Please 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 listing all products and services you’ve used and still use in your day-to-day internet business activities.

Tools 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.

You’ll often need to refer to this page in your blog post, which should be included in the blog navigational menu.

This helps to tell users that you have actually used these products and not just promoted them for the sake of a 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.

To earn $100 on a $27 product with a 33% commission, you will sell up to 11 copies of that product – I hope my math is correct.

To earn the same commission on a product sold at $399 with a 33% commission, you’ll need to make just a single sale to earn $100.

That will even earn you more than a hundred dollars.

The only thing that may get you stuck 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 know how to sell a $27 product, you already have what it takes to sell a $1,000 product. You don’t believe you can.

Instead of settling for a penny; you learn how to find the right market for your high-ticket products and market them 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 affiliate marketers. Reaching out to your dedicated affiliate manager is very important.

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

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.

Most merchant websites have all the resources you need to write a comprehensive review post.

Reaching out to your affiliate manager can help you with your resources 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.