Affiliate Marketing seems to be the easiest way to make money online but it really is not. The reason is that a lot has changed in recent times and the activity is becoming more and more complicated.
The evidence is clear: even with those banners and review posts on your blog, you’re still not making sales. Many bloggers who were promised that earning money online through Affiliate Marketing was simple have since given up. It’s often portrayed as a click-and-earn venture. However, we need to mix hard work with smart strategies to achieve success.
In this post, I want to help you with some result-driven tips to take your Affiliate Marketing business to the next level.
Expert tips to make money with Affiliate Marketing as a blogger
1 – Build a market place of targeted readers
One of the things many Affiliate Marketing teachers don’t tell their students is that they need a marketplace. That’s why as soon as they start a new blog, you see them obsessing over earning commissions and every empty space on their blogs is filled with some banner.
You need to realize that the money you earn from your blog comes from real people. Your blog alone won’t make money without these readers. A group of targeted readers consists of visitors who explore your site because they seek answers to their questions. These are not individuals who visit your blog just because they are classmates or friends. You must draw in the kind of readers who find your articles because you provide exactly what they need.
Here are few tips to build a market place of targeted readers:
- Constantly publish articles aimed at fixing a real problem.
- Optimize your articles to drive traffic from search engines.
- Publish as often as possible evergreen content.
- Capture your readers to an email list.
- Build an active social media presence and draw traffic to your blog.
- Make use of any opportunity to guest post on relevant blogs.
- Organize or attend offline blogging events to connect with like-minded marketers.
- Resolve any technical issue with your blog as soon as possible to avoid unnecessary downtime.
- Remove distractions and annoying elements from your blog.
The size of your market place determines how much money you can make with Affiliate Marketing. The larger the size (all things being equal), the more your affiliate marketing commissions. That’s why your income is expected to grow with time as your audience size increases.
2 – The choice of the products you promote
This is a very tempting area and many newbies fail at this point. There are many products are there to pick from but that doesn’t mean anything that looks good can generate commissions.
There are many product networks to signup to but you have to pay attention to a couple of key points:
- Do they pay commissions to your country? This is so important for International marketers
- Does their checkout page convert well?
- Are there some negative reviews?
- Etc.
If you’ve decided to work with any of these affiliate marketing platforms (Clickbank, CJ, Shareasale, etc), the next question is which product should I promote?
Here are some tips to help you:
- Always do not promote products that everyone else is promoting. Chances are that people who read your blog have been on other blogs where they saw (and maybe have bought) that same product. If you must however promote the same popular product, make sure you use unique creatives. Because readers often suffer from banner blindness, that may affect your sales and income.
- If you can be the first to start talking about a new product, that will be a massive opportunity to generate sales.
- Avoid promoting products with bad customer reviews. You can always find those reviews from review sites and forums.
- Promote products that pay recurring commissions. That means you generate sales one time but get paid month after month. This is the case of membership platforms where you are paid a commission each time your referrers renew their subscriptions.
- Promote products you have used and had experience with. With this, you can connect more with your audience from a point of experience.
3 – How you promote these products to your market
If you’ve found an interesting product to promote, how do you take it to your audience to make them buy so that you can earn the commissions?
You may start by:
- Posting banners on your blog.
- Adding links to product from your content.
- Doing full-blown review posts.
- Mailing your list.
- Sharing on social media
- Etc
These will probably work and help you earn some commissions. But one of the reasons these methods fail for some of us is because we do it the traditional way. Here are some smart ideas used by experts:
- Create an article showing your readers how to resolve a certain problem at home or manually. Then show them a product that will resolve the problem in a more efficient way. Link to the product on your affiliate link. This has proven to work.
- If you’ve used any product successfully, share your success story with your audience. Share your results and show them the various products you’ve used. Link to these products on your affiliate links.
- I have seen some good products with very little information to help users. If you have experience with such a product, go deep and provide a series of helpful information to educate your audience on how the product should be used. Again, don’t forget to use your affiliate link.
- Get to the product authors for an interview. Publish it on your blog while linking to it on your affiliate link.
- One thing that works well is a product comparison post. Make a list of different products and show your audience how they differ and which is better at different point.
- You can also do a negative review post showing your audience why they should not use a certain product while recommending an alternative on your affiliate link.
- Create a free product to offer your audience. Recommend premium tools in the free product. My friend Anil of Bloggerspassion writes free ebooks and courses on blogging and SEO. In his books and courses, he educates on the need to upgrade while recommending platforms as an affiliate and generates massive commissions from this.
Conclusion
The days when a few lines and sentences generate huge earnings are over. You need to pull above the average and stand out to see results. The good news is that if you stand tall and add value to your blog, it will generate handsome earnings for you.