Affiliate marketing is one of the most reliable monetization strategy to earn passive income from internet marketing and blogs. However, without an effective affiliate marketing strategies, it could be a very daunting task to make money from this internet business model.
Affiliate marketing is an ideal business model for any size of blog and traffic level because it doesn’t require a massive amount of internet traffic to make significant money from it. It only needs that you approach it with caution, patient, concrete plan and nicely executed strategies.
The tactics and strategies you apply would depend on your type of blog, niche and your audience type. It doesn’t have to be a one size fits all something. But there are some basics and general guidelines you’ll have to abide with if you’re aiming to make the best out your affiliate marketing campaign.
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Affiliate Marketing Tips For Smart Affiliate Marketers[/caption]Below I have compiled a list of 12 proven time-tested affiliate marketing strategies that were mostly used by Super Affiliate like Pat Fyln, John Chow, Tyler Cruz etc.
I hope you enjoy it.
1 Build Your Email List.
I will consider this as your first and most critical step towards a successful affiliate marketing career. Without a guarantee set of audience that are readily available to listen to what you have to offer, it will be a very difficult task finding targeted market for every of your affiliate products/services each time you need to promote one.
Building an email list is not going to be an easy task at the beginning, things won’t look good and getting people to subscribe to your email list will be a every difficult hurdle to climb, but keep trying and testing different methods of increasing your opt-in rate; sooner enough you’ll find your best fit.
To get started with your email list building, I would recommend you sign up with Getresponse email marketing services. This will allow you to try the system FREE for 30 days; during this time you can learn, understand and master how everything works and how you can get the best out of it.
And its important you do things the right way so as to increase your chances of making money from affiliate marketing – this is why you’ll need a reliable auto-responder email marketing services like Aweber, Getresponse etc.
2.Optimize for organic traffic.
As a starter who haven’t earn much from affiliate marketing or on a shoe-string budget, it will be best that you learn how to drive traffic through search engine and not pay-per-click advertisement or any other paid ads.
Not that paid ads are bad for you or the business model, No! But it won’t be a wise idea if you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing and start throwing money at Google, Facebook, Reddit etc.
Learn how to optimize your content for search engine traffic; though this is much easier said than done – but it is not impossible either. There are several tools that will help you get your site both on-page and off-page SEO right without you breaking the bank.
One of such tool is SEO PowerSuite search engine optimization software, you can download the FREE version first and see how it can help you correct many errors on your site.
This will put one of your foot on the right path to better search engine visibility and when you can afford the premium SEO software, go for it.
3.Identify your audience.
The best and easiest way to earn money in online affiliate marketing is to before anything else identify your potential customer(s) – the people you want to market your affiliate product to.
It is not enough to say I want to market xyz product/service to India, United State, Nigeria internet users. No, such geo targeting won’t bring you maximum return on investment; you can be more accurate and precise by figuring out who, what, where exactly does your potential customers resides and their best descriptions.
Let assume you want to market “search engine optimization software” that cost $499. Your ideal customer for such product are not just SEO enthusiasm but you should go for professional SEO experts/agency that earn their living from performing search engine optimization task for small business owners.
Bloggers and SEO’s in the making may not be your ideal customers despite the fact that these people need your product also, they may not be ready to or not having such money to purchase your product.
Consider the category of people your product will fit best by matching certain criteria about your affiliate product to your ideal customers such as:
Age. Gender. Interest. Nationality. Geographical Location. Price. Education. Profession. Hobby.
Match all these things and many more information you could gather to determine if your product will be good for your potential audience so you don’t waste money, energy and time promoting snow to the Eskimos.
4.Learn.
Once again if you’re just starting out or you’ve not reach that peak where you wanted to be, is best you go all out to study successful affiliates marketers like John Chow, Pat Flyn, Tyler Cruz, Ewen Chia etc. These men are consider “Super Affiliate”, they earn thousands of dollar every months from their individual affiliate marketing business and never stop doing it each and every month.
There are tools, strategies, systems, programs that makes marketing and making sales in affiliate products more easy that you’ll need to discover and implement them into your own affiliate marketing strategies to increase your chances of earning more commission.
From this effort you could discover what products is best to promote at the moments, what strategies is converting at high rate, and which program could best fit your marketing tactics. Learning is an ongoing thing and you should never stop at doing it every single day.
5.Be Patient.
In all honesty, marketing on the internet is never an easy business and to make money from affiliate marketing is just way too hard for many of us. But it is not an impossible mission either.
All you need is the persistence, focus, determination and will power to never give up to temporary defeat because if you stay long enough taking the right positive actions that will lead you to success – you will eventually be successful.
Monitor your progress, your statics, evaluate each and every actions you’re doing towards achieving your goals. Continue testing different options and regularly tweak things around to see which is working and what is not working. Bear in mind that success never comes to anyone overnight, it takes time and consistent positive efforts to achieve success.
6.Only Recommend Products You Trust.
This will be a very difficult task for most newbie affiliate marketers; while I wouldn’t recommend you start promoting products/services you’ve not personally used, tested and can confirm its quality, 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 best for your audience.
Let say you want to promote a certain WordPress plugin that happen you’ve not actually used. First look out for a friend who might have actually used such plugin and ask for his honest review.
If that fails, then visit forums and ask for who have had practical experience with such plugin – forum is a very good place to get real and valuable first hand information on related topics.
With the kind of quality of member’s experience in forum like Warrior, NairaLand, 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.
7. Be Honest.
Nothing destroy a marketer in internet marketing like not being honest and trust worthy.
Once your readers discover that you’re not worthy enough to be trusted, that’s it, you’re gone! Everything you’ve worked for years may collapse in a second. If you’ve not used a products and only recommending it based on your research, let your readers know about it.
There is no big deal in that.
Tell them that actually you’ve not personally test this product and only recommending it based on your research, believe, popular vote and acceptance by the public.
8.Don’t say “Buy”.
Be careful of how you use the word “Buy This Product”, telling someone to buy a product you’re not the creator of it is a very risky statement you should avoid saying. Instead use the words “I recommend this xyz product/services based on my personal experiences”.
This will put you on the safer side in-case things went ugly in the end.
By recommending a merchant product on your website, you have automatically position yourself as the merchant partner or sales representative. Don’t make it appear as if you’re just after the purchase and not caring about the your readers safety.
It will destroy you quickly than you can even imagine.
9 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 and this makes it targeted and optimized for search traffic when users are looking for review on products/services.
Though this does not take away the fact that you can review products/services too on your non review blog, I do review products and services on my blog too, despite it is not mainly a review blog.
One of the good functions of a blog is the ability to adapt to different purpose and usage. You can have different sections on your blog for different purpose and still don’t lose the feel and value it offer your regular blog readers.
There are many plugins that will easily and instantly turn your site to review blog in a second or your regular blog post updates can have the feel and look of review post. Such plugin that will allow you to turn your regular blog post into review post is WP Product Review.
This plugin has the option of inserting your affiliate links, product rating, product image, pros and cons, and over-all rating. All done in a very simple and elegant style.
10.Offer Bonus.
When I subscriber to one of John Chow’s offer, I got tempted to make purchase right away if I have had the asking price with me at that moment; and not because of the offer itself did I wanted to make this purchase, but quality of the bonus John offer for if you purchase his program.
It was a bonus that alone stand to be offer as a paid product and you know what? John Chow said even after you purchase his program and you don’t like it and want a refund, you can keep the bonus products and will still get back your money.
Hey! look at deeply.
Is there any way you can return a downloadable product without having a copy of it stored on your hard-drive? But still this marketing sales gimmick has been proved to be working ever since and still work till date.
11.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 on your blog through the navigation bar, and more often you’ll need to be referring to this page in your blog post.
This help to tell users that you have actually used these products and not just promoting them for the sake of small commission attached.
12.Promote High Ticket Products/Services.
It is easier to make a sale on product that cost $27 and make a $5 to $10 commission and harder to make a sale on a product that cost $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 make $100 on a $27 product with 33% commission, you’re going to sale up to 11 copies of that product – hope my math is correct?
To make same commission on a product priced at $399 with 33% commission you’ll need to make just a single sale to make a $100 and that is even more than a hundred-dollar. The only thing that may get you stock here is if you don’t know where you potential market resides.
In this case, I would advice 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 quick time and save you from frustration.
Conclusion.
Internet marketing involve testing and tweaking tings around – and when it comes to what affiliate marketing strategies can best bring you the positive result you want, there are countless of options more than all I said above.
You just have to continue testing, adding and removing, changing till you get what you want.
Would love to here from you...