Affiliate Marketing Tips to Increase Profits

Affiliate marketing involves having your own blog or website to generate traffic, and then sending your traffic to someone else’s site to buy their products or services. For every sales or positive action initiated by a link from your site, you can earn a sales commission.

Affiliate marketing is one of the top business opportunities online due to low startup costs and high earning potential. Affiliate marketers have more ways now than ever to decide on a marketing method. However, there are ways to improve your affiliate marketing strategy.

Here are step-by-step tips to increase affiliate marketing sales and to maximize conversion:

Educate Yourself about Online Marketing

You need to assess which skills you already have that can help you run a successful online marketing business. You may already possess some basic skills about Internet marketing. In order to be a successful affiliate marketer, you’ll need to generate targeted traffic to your site.

Internet marketing will require you to market online by various means, such as creating content on your site using search engine optimization, pay per click advertisement, social networking, article marketing, online classified, participating in forums within your niche, email marketing, banner advertisement, getting other sites to link to yours, and copywriting. The more you know or willing to learn, the more successful you will be.

If you become an affiliate of an already established company and try to sell their products or services in return for a commission, or if you plan to sell your own products or services from your site, the basic principal of online marketing would still be the same.

You don’t have to use every marketing medium, but the more area you know and willing to tackle, the better chance you’ll have to become successful. The best part about online marketing is that you can test and then repeat the process once you see some success. If one fails or is not enjoyable, you can try the other.

Create a Blog or Website

In order to start as an affiliate marketer, you must have a site so that you can place links to the products or services you recommend. You can obtain a domain name and hosting from a number of companies such as Network solutions, GoDaddy, etc. If you decide to create a blog, you can set up a free blog through services such as Google’s Blogger blog network.

Choose a Niche

Choose a niche you’re familiar with or you enjoy learning and working in. If you enjoy certain field even if you have no professional experience, your passion will force you to learn everything you possibly can and to become successful.

Create Content for Your Site

Design your site with the objective of being valuable resource for potential customers. Add useful content and try to get links from relevant sites. Make sure all your content are original. Search engines will penalize and lower your ranking for any duplicate content whether the content exists on your site or someone else’s site.

Learn about search engine optimization to drive free traffic to your articles. Make sure all your articles are relevant to the main theme of your site and specifically written for your target market.

Images can boost the quality of any marketing content, whether it is a web page or a blog post. You want your images to relate to your content and your brand. Be sure to choose high quality images with good resolution.

You can choose your affiliate site content to be information articles, audios, videos, posts, etc. And then keep adding new related content to give enough reason for people to return to your site.

You can also review products or services related to your niche by comparing and rate them to help your site visitors decide what to choose. For each product or service you review, provide a link that click through for sales on your merchant’s site you have decided to generate commissions.

Locate Products and Services to Promote

You can search for products or services related to your niche using Google search engine and then visiting each website. You can also visit affiliate networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, and many others. Affiliate networks exist to connect merchants with affiliates.

Generating Targeted Traffic to Your Site

In order to make money in affiliate marketing, you have to generate a lot of traffic to your website or blog. Some of your visitors may decide to click your affiliate links to be redirected to the merchant’s site.

You want to choose what area of marketing you want to pursue. The more area you pursue, the better chance you have to generate more visitors to your site. Here are some ways to attract targeted prospects:

• Free traffic through search engines: Organic or free traffic is your best choice to generate traffic. However, you must have original, valuable content. You also have to choose your keywords carefully and implement search engine optimization to generate organic traffic to your site.
• Free advertising: There are many ways to advertise free on the Internet. Craiglist is a popular free classified ad site and very easy to use. Be sure to read the guidelines carefully on how to use this site and to follow its rules to avoid getting flagged.
• Website directories: Some directories may charge you to post a link or article, but many of them are free to use. Once you have a site, submit your link to as many website directories. Someone might find and link to your site through the website directory. A link from a quality and relevant directory could boost your ranking in search engines.
• Become a member of online business associations: Clubs or associations list their members to help businesses getting extra exposure.
• Forum: Plan to participate in online forums where you can market to your targeted market. You can join forums related to your target market for free. Some posts will show up in search engines which can lead to some online traffic to your site. Make sure to read the rules about advertising and posting links. Each forum may have different rules and guidelines before posting.

• Blogging: One of the best marketing strategies for your affiliate marketing business is blogging. Install a blog on your website and make it interlink with the site. By providing your prospects with informative content, you can quickly establish yourself as an expert in your field.You can blog about your business or about news related to the type of business you do. Try to add fresh content at least twice a week in order to increase your website’s ability to be found on search engines if your blog resides on your company websites. The more update with useful content, the more you have a chance of getting noticed. Make sure you have a link to your website, or contact information on your blog.

• Guest blogging: You should also consider guest blogging because people are more likely to trust a real person than pure advertisement. Visit blogs related to your target market and contribute with valuable content to expand your reach. Most will allow you to link back to your blog or website. You can usually link to your website via author bio, making it easy for prospects to visit your site and take a look at what you’re offering.
• Viral marketing: Viral marketing can greatly increase your reach to potential customers. You can try to write a small, but valuable report relevant to your niche along with ad regarding your business and allow others to sell it.
• Article marketing: Article marketing provide the opportunity for you to build credibility as a reliable source and increasing the number of links leading to your site and generating traffic, and at the same time giving your site a higher search engine ranking. You can start with Ezinearticles and also creating useful article on your own site.
• Email marketing: Email is an important part of any successful online promotion. Make sure to place an opt-in subscription box on your site for your visitors to start receiving a weekly, bi-weekly or at least monthly newsletter from you. Email is critical to your business for staying in-touch and building relationship with your audience. If you have a special promotion or coupon code or something urgent, it’s best to let your subscribers know via your emails.
• Conduct webinars: Webinars are great for generating leads and building your list from those who viewed the live broadcast. Make sur your webinar is well organized, relevant to your target audience, and hosted by someone with experience in conducting a webinar. You can use email to invite your audience at least one week in advance to your webinar and be ready to answer any question that may come up.
• Use social media: If you have the time, try to use all major social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. If you’re too busy, then choose one or two social media platform that your potential customers engage with the most. Set up an account and start sharing your original content that’s helpful and relevant to your target market.

If you’re selling a highly visual product, try to regularly post images on Instagram and Pinterest. Posting is free. Twitter is an easy platform to use and you can post small messages for your followers to read.

• Create a Facebook business page: Facebook is one of the most important marketing tools that you cannot afford to ignore. Make sure to set up an account and create a Facebook business page relevant to your target market.

  You can set up a share button to allow your fans to share your articles giving you the opportunity to reach more people. Facebook provide a huge opportunity for you to build relationship with fans by sharing valuable content, and interacting by posting comments and liking fans’ comments. You can also join groups or create groups on Facebook related to your business and your target market.

  You should also consider Facebook advertising. You can target specifically who you want to see the advertisement according to demographics, interests, sex, age groups, and keywords. If your advertising campaign is not getting good results, you can cancel at any time you want.

• Pay-per-click advertising: PPC ad is an effective way to specifically target your potential customers to visit your site or your landing page. You have to make sure your ad copy headline, call-to-action message and your landing page are all relevant. You should also use conversion tracking to keep everything in the right order.is one of the most important marketing tools that you cannot afford to ignore. Make sure to set up an account and create a Facebook business page relevant to your target market.

Pay-per-click can become costly advertising if you don’t have the skills. Make sure to learn everything you can about PPC advertising before start using it. Once you’re knowledgeable and experienced advertiser, you can use Google AdWords campaign and Bing PPC advertising. Both are great advertising medium for an experienced affiliate marketer.

By John Stanford – 2019 – Update 2020
Copyright © 2019-2020 Allied Publishing
Provided by
Allied Publishing

For additional articles written by John Stanford, see alliedpublishing.com/affiliate-marketing. John Stanford is the author of
Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing Program published in 2019.