Affiliate Marketing Tips to Increase Sales and Conversions for Bloggers

Affiliate marketing: A word which almost all bloggers and webmasters recognize, but many fear to tread into. And many of them give up after a while even after trying their hands at it. Why? Because they do not get any sales and conversions. Why? Mainly because they fail to learn a few small tips and tricks that can increase their earnings rapidly.

So What Is Affiliate Marketing? What Is This Hue and Cry All About?

Probably, if you are a webmaster/blogger, then you have come across this word a numerous number of times in your web life, and probably almost all of you know its definition or meaning. And for those who are completely “blank” about the meaning of affiliate marketing, let me cite a simple definition of affiliate marketing by Problogger, Darren Rowse:

Perhaps the simplest way to explain affiliate marketing is that it is a way of making money online whereby you, as a publisher, are rewarded for helping a business by promoting their product, service, or site.

Or you can also refer to a more technical type of definition by Wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.

Ok, I Get It! Now Tell Me, How Does This Affiliate Marketing Thing Work?

Basically, when you sign up as an affiliate of a website or a product, you are given one (or more) affiliate/referral links using which you will have to promote that product on your sites and blogs. You get commissions/rewards when someone follows your links to the website/product you are promoting and then buys that product. Alternatively, you may also get commission for referring someone to take action; for example, referring someone to sign up and give their details (Pay-Per-Lead affiliate programs). There are a few other types of compensation methods available; you can read more about it here: Affiliate Marketing Compensation Methods. Let’s face it, just placing a simple affiliate link or an affiliate banner on your website is not going to land you any sales. You will need to do a lot of promotion and also need to follow a few tips and tricks that are going to increase your affiliate sales, which I am going to discuss below.

Additionally: Affiliate marketing works best when it is blended naturally with useful content instead of being pushed aggressively. Readers are more likely to convert when they feel they are being helped rather than sold to.

How To Increase Affiliate Sales?

Choose The Best Affiliate Program:

Yes, you are right, the first and the foremost thing when it comes to affiliate marketing is to choose the most appropriate products to promote. You really cannot promote weight loss products on your technology blog. It does not make sense. You will never get any sales. So you will need to recognize your niche, find out what your visitors search for, do some analysis, and narrow down to products that match your website’s niche. There are a number of affiliate networks like ShareASale, ClickBank, etc., that have products of almost all niches. Join them and find the best product of your niche and promote them. Alternatively, many websites/products have their own affiliate programs, and instead of joining affiliate networks, you can also narrow down to a particular product of your niche and join its affiliate program.

Promote Only Trustworthy Products:

Affiliate marketing, unlike what some people think, is not about promoting each and every product you get. One should try to confine themselves to only promoting products which they have used themselves or about which they have heard enough positive reviews. Never promote products which are unreliable and have negative reviews. Since this may cause the person who bought the product through your link to lose confidence and trust in you and never buy from your links again.

Gain The Trust Of Your Readers and Fellow Bloggers:

Well, this has nothing to do directly with promoting products. This is what I would call a “social engineering” way of getting sales. Social media has nowadays given us bloggers a great platform to connect and communicate with each other. Leverage it and make friends with bloggers who pertain to your niche and are maybe interested in the products you promote. Connect with them, communicate with them, build a trust-based relationship with them, help them with their queries when they need it, and maybe sometime later in your blogging life, if they get interested in any product, they may buy from your links because they may have seen you promote that product. The same goes for your blog visitors—reply to their comments, maintain a friendly relationship with them, and gain their trust. The trust factor really does play a very important role in internet marketing. This will certainly land you a lot more sales.

Instructions:

Before promoting any affiliate product, create a simple checklist—verify product reviews, test the product if possible, read affiliate terms carefully, and decide where the link fits naturally inside your content. This small habit can prevent poor conversions and protect your credibility.

Write Review Posts:

Writing review posts about the particular product that you are promoting will certainly land you a lot more sales than what you can get from just promoting banners or promoting it in any other manner. And if you can do proper SEO on your review posts and bring them to the top of Google search results, then certainly that post is going to bring you a whole lot of sales. It should be noted that whenever you make a review post, you should do proper keyword research and find proper long-tail keywords which have a good amount of search queries. Words like “review,” “discount,” and “coupon codes” are searched a lot when someone wants to buy a product, so adding those words will help you bring a good amount of sales.

Build a List:

Building a list is another great way of getting a large number of affiliate sales. When you have a list, you have a set of people who are interested in your niche and are the probable customers of the products you promote. It is important that when you have a list, you do not send only promotional and affiliate emails but also emails containing information that is helpful to your subscribers. This is really important because you need to gain the trust of your subscribers and show them that you really have a good grip on your niche. If you do that, you can mix and match and send affiliate emails along with those emails. Thus, having a lot of targetable subscribers can certainly bring you a lot of sales. You can add pop-up plugins like Popup Domination and MaxBlogPress Subscriber Magnet to boost the number of subscribers on your blog; also, you can give out free products to gain more subscribers.

Case Study: A beginner tech blogger started reviewing web hosting tools with detailed pros and cons instead of banner ads. Within three months, one optimized review post started ranking on Google and generated consistent monthly affiliate commissions, proving that focused content beats random promotions.

Use Social Media for Promotion:

If you are a power web user, then you certainly know how much social media we use in our everyday life. Social media in today’s world helps you market your work, thoughts, and products to a large number of people online, which can never be possible in the offline world. Leverage the power of social media and try to gain more sales by sharing your affiliate links on your social media sites. A few of the social media sites that you can target are Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Digg, etc.

Cloak Your Affiliate Links:

Many bloggers and affiliate marketers forget to cloak their affiliate links while promoting products. Why is it necessary to cloak your affiliate links? Well, most advanced web users understand and can recognize affiliate or referral links, and many of them really do not want to let others earn commissions from what they buy, so they just delete the affiliate/referral ID and visit the main URL of the product without clicking through your affiliate links. You can get many free plugins for WordPress to cloak your affiliate links; one free plugin that I recommend is GoCodes. You can also consider buying a premium affiliate cloaking WordPress plugin which will offer more advanced features. You can check Ninja Affiliate, Pretty Link Pro, and WordPress Link Cloak, which are some premium link cloaking plugins that give you more advanced features to work with.

Hide Your Coupon Codes:

If you are writing any review posts and promoting coupon discounts to your readers, then you can hide your coupon codes using JavaScript buttons (you may have seen these on coupon sites like RetailMeNot) so that the reader needs to click on the button to reveal the coupon code. Thus, whenever the reader clicks on the button to reveal the coupon code, they get redirected to the product’s website through your affiliate links. Please note that not all product owners allow these kinds of tactics, so please read their affiliate terms and conditions before trying these methods. There are two plugins that will enable you to do this—one is CouponReveal and the other is Coupon Code Plugin.

So above are a few tips that may help you earn a whole lot more from your affiliate marketing campaigns. If you find any of the above tips helpful, then do comment. Also, if you want to add any new tips, then you are most welcome. Do sign up for our feeds for more such tips on affiliate marketing.

Conclusion:

Affiliate marketing is not about shortcuts but about trust, relevance, and consistency. By choosing the right products, helping your audience genuinely, and applying these practical tips, you can steadily grow your affiliate income over time.