Affiliate Marketing Tips

Before we delve into our affiliate marketing tips, it’s important to know who’s involved in the affiliate marketing process.

There are three parties involved that make earning money from affiliate marketing possible.

Seller and Product Creators

The seller can be a worldwide business or it can be an individual shop owner. It’s the person or company behind the product that you’re including links for.

A huge company that can make you thousands of dollars is Amazon. Amazon will pay you every time somebody clicks a link and purchases something using your link.

The Affiliate or Publisher (YOU)

This is where you come in. A lot of products need a helping hand to sell, and the word needs to get out about it.
A common way that links are included is by doing “Top 10” articles and reviewing products.

Your job is to promote the product, including the link where relevant, and encouraging your audience that it’s a great product and that they should buy it.

Many affiliated have a specific audience that they market to. You may even want to create a website dedicated to a certain type of person who will buy a certain type of product.

This creates a niche, making it easier to attract customers who will actually purchase the product - as it’s relevant to them.

For example, you’re getting paid whenever anybody clicks your link and purchases bicycle helmets. How are you going to include that into your content?

You set up a website for bicycle enthusiasts and make the content worth reading so bikers go there to get their information.

Then, they’ll stumble across your Top 10 Bicycle Helmets article, and most likely want to give it a read.

The Consumer (your audience)

The consumer is the person that clicks the link and buys the product - earning you your money.

They may be completely oblivious to the marketing system behind the articles, but you may decide to disclose that you’re an affiliate receiving commission for sales made.

It’s really rare that a product will cost extra due to the affiliate getting a share of the money - the consumer is mostly completely unaffected by the system. They will just make purchases as normal at their own free will.

A Niche is a specialized market that only a select audience will be interested in - but there will be people out there that will be reading your content regularly.

For example, a website dedicated to caring for bunnies.

Not everybody will visit this website, which is fine because the audience is a select group - rabbit owners, rabbit enthusiasts or soon-to-be rabbit owners.

Once you’ve decided what you want the page to be about, do a keyword search. There are plenty of resources available on the internet to check keywords.

Here’s a list of recommended programs that will help you on your marketing journey:

Google Analytics

This is one of the most popular analytics tools available, and it’s completely free. This gives you in-depth information about your website’s traffic.

Google Search Console

Almost all affiliate marketers use this to optimize their website. This gives you direct data about how your website is seen by the search engine.

Keyword Research Tools

There are a lot of resources that will help you track which keywords are the most popular, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz Keyword Explorer. Most of these have a subscription cost.

CMS Platforms

You need somewhere where you can upload your content. A CMS (content management system) is one of the most important parts of the whole operation.

Most marketers use WordPress, which is an affordable CMS. There are over 50,000 WordPress plugins available to enhance your website.

Elementor

This is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress. It’s essentially a drag and drop page builder, allowing you to format your page to your liking, without having to worry about coding.

Yoast SEO

This WordPress plugin helps you optimize your content for SEO. It will give you feedback on keyword use, meta descriptions and overall readability.

Grammarly

Grammar is so important when it comes to content, so you may want an add-on that checks the grammar for you. It’s simple to use and can tell the difference between American English and Standard English.

There are both free and paid options available, so choose the one best for you.

If you’re an influencer on social media, think about who your audience is.

If it’s new mothers or pregnant women, then you’ll be including content about what it’s like to be a mother, and what products are best for your baby - so you include affiliate links to this type of product.

Use analytic software to see who is viewing your site. Google

Analytics will help you narrow down your target audience, their demographics, and interests. The best marketers will use this information to improve and tailor their content.

Find out which pages are the most successful on your site, and implement whatever you did on those pages on and newer pages.

Trial and error comes into this a lot, so it’s important to track everything.

Keeping an eye on the traffic is hugely important when it comes to affiliate marketing. Find out which links are the most successful and the least successful, and determine why.

There’s always room for improvement when it comes to online content.

Speak to your audience. Ask your audience to get back to you, to leave comments and engage in open discourse about the content.

Always ask for the opinion of your audience, and use their feedback to improve.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way of achieving popularity and boosting your site’s profile. The best affiliate marketers will be extremely skilled with SEO’s.

Be sure to get to know your competition, so you know what you’re up against. Maybe even get on the right side of your competitor - share links or space on each others pages. Use the competition to your advantage.

Affiliate Marketing Tips on Personality

Show Your Face

It’s a known fact that people remember faces more than names (unless you have an iconic name, like Cher or Sting), and including your face gives your readers a sense of who you are.

Some marketers use an online persona, which can also be effective and gives you the freedom to tailor your writing style to your audience.

Relate To Your Content and Readers

If you’re not passionate about what you’re writing about, it will show. If you include your real-life experiences and opinions to your content, then this adds something.

This will separate your site from other websites. People will value your opinion, especially if you have some degree of knowledge and experience in your niche.

Use Real Photos

Using real photos adds credibility to your site. The readers will know that it’s a legitimate site, and real photos that you’ve taken yourself make the site feel a lot more genuine.

Pictures taken by yourself also add personality - as opposed to generic Shutterstock images that are seen all over the internet.

You don’t want to let your repeat visitors down, which is why honesty is so important.

The aim is to build up regular visitors to your site, but if you get caught lying or straying from the truth, all credibility goes out the window.

If you promote a low-quality product and say it’s great, then your recommendations will mean nothing in the future - meaningless link clicks and ultimately less money from purchases.

You want to generate content that will add value to your viewers - not just lie to get them to buy something.

Disclosing Affiliate Links

It’s ultimately your decision if you tell your visitors that you’re an affiliate. The visitors aren’t impacted by the fact that you’re getting a commission for each sale, but when or if they do find out, they may feel like they’ve been scammed or betrayed.

If your audience feels betrayed but still want the product, they will search for it without using the link - cutting you out of the whole process meaning you get no commission for the sale.

Always follow FCT requirements.

You need to ask yourself why your readers would choose your site over your competitors. What do you have that they don’t? What can you be doing better?

You must be self-critical if you want to improve your income from affiliate marketing.

Grammar

Your viewers will notice if your content is full of spelling mistakes or dodgy punctuation. If you’re using the wrong “to/too/two”, then your readers won’t be taking you seriously, and most likely won’t be back on your site.

You might also want to consider your audience - if your audience is UK based, then you should be using UK English, and vice versa.

Always spell check your content before publishing it - as the smallest of errors can make a great article look subpar.

Is It Interesting?

When your niche is something like saucepan handles, the content may get a bit stale. There’s always a way to spruce up a dull article.

You may want to include a personal story or your opinion on the product. Here’s a list of things that can give life to a boring article:

• Pictures and videos
• Bullet points
• Graphs and Charts
• Personal stories and opinions
• Quotes
• Comments and Social Media Widgets

What Should I Include?

There are plenty of ways to integrate links into your content, but the most popular ways of doing this while still creating great content are:

• Product Reviews (including comparison tables and product roundups)
• Buyers Guides
• ‘What’s Your Budget’ Page
• Resource Pages

Natural Traffic

It takes skill, time and experience to get traffic flowing through your page naturally. It takes time to build your profile, but here are some things that will speed up the process:

• Commenting on other posts
• Encourage comments, conversation, and feedback
• Engaging in conversations with your competitors
• Post regularly
• USE KEYWORDS
• GOOGLE ANALYTICS
• Make the content GOOD and READABLE
• Use internal links to other pages on your domain
• Use social media
• Tag all pictures used
• Regularly update the site to make it relevant

Paid Traffic

Sometimes your content needs a boost to get noticed. You may want to advertise your page, and this can be done quickly and easily on high-traffic sites like Facebook or Google.

You may also want to sell links to your content to other bloggers and marketers.

For example, if you have an article on Top Ten Rabbit Collars, then you might want to explore the websites out there that specialize in rabbits, rabbit grooming, rabbit care, etc.

Some website owners will give the chance to either exchange links, or to buy a slot on their page with a link to your article - but this is only useful if it’s relevant.

It may take months to start earning money - it’s all about building your profile and gaining more and more web traffic.

The more web traffic your site gets the more people that are going to be clicking the links in your content.

Revenue from this business grows and builds in time - however, it may not be steady growth.

One month you may earn $500, and the following month you may earn $50 - don’t be disheartened if this is the case. Find out where you’re going wrong, use your google analytics and get back on track.

As long as you don’t let the frustration get to you and give up, and you continually create quality content, you will come out of this a winner.