Affiliate marketing: A word which almost all bloggers and webmasters recognize but many fear to tread into. And many of them give up in a while even after trying their hands on it. Why? Because they do not get any sales and conversions. Why? Mainly because they fail to come to know about 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 amount 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 in your sites and blogs. You get commissions/reward 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 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 in your website is not going to land you any sales. You will need to do a lot of promotion and also need to follow few tips and tricks that is going to increase your affiliate sales which I am going to discuss below.
You may also like to read : Affiliate Marketing Strategies You Should Follow
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 in 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 program 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 some people think, is not promoting each and every product you get. One should try to confine to only promoting products which you have yourself used or about which you have heard enough positive reviews. Never promote products which are unreliable and which has negative reviews. Since this may cause the person who bought the product through your link to loose confidence and trust upon you and never buy from your links again.
Also see : On Way To Make Money with Affiliate Marketing!
- Gain The Trust Of Your Readers and Fellow Bloggers: Well this has nothing to do with promoting the products. This is what I would say 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 and maybe sometime later on 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 with your blog visitors, reply back to their comments, maintain a friendly relation with them and gain their trust. The trust factor does really play a very important role in Internet Marketing. This will certainly land you a lot more sales.
- Write Review Posts: Writing review post about the particular product that you are promoting certainly will land you a lot more sales than what you can get from just promoting the banners or promoting it in any other manner. And if you can do proper SEO on your review posts and bring it to the top of Google Search results than 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”, “Coupon Codes” are searched a lot when some one wants to buy a product so adding those words will help you bring a good amount of sale.
- Build a List: Building a list is another great way of getting a great number of affiliate sales. When you have a list, you have a set of people who are in fact interested in your niche and are the probable customer of the products you promote. It is important that when you have a list you do not send just promotion emails and affiliate emails but also emails containing things which are helpful to your subscribers. This is really important because you need to gain trust of your subscriber and to 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 target-able 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 of your blog, also you can give out free products to gain more subscribers.
- Use Social Media for Promotion: If you are a power web user then you certainly do know how much of social media we use in our every day life. Social Media in today’s world helps you to market your works, thoughts and products to such 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 in your social media sites. 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 the product. Why is it necessary to cloak your affiliate links? Well, most of the advanced web users understand and can recognize an affiliate or a referral links and many of them really do not want to let others earn any commissions from what they buy, so they just delete the affiliate/referral id and just visit the main url of the product without clicking through our affiliate links. You can get many free plugins for WordPress to cloak your affiliate links, one free one that I will recommend is GoCodes. You can also consider to buy a premium Affiliate Cloaking WordPress plugin which will offer you some more advanced features. You can check Ninja Affiliate, Pretty Link Pro and WordPress Link Cloak which are some premium link cloaking plugins which will give you some more advanced features to fiddle around with.
- Hide Your Coupon Codes: If You are writing any review posts and promoting any coupon discounts to your readers, then you can hide your coupon codes using Javascript on 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 kind of tactics, so please read their affiliate terms and conditions before trying your hand on using these kind of methods. There are two plugins that will enable you to do that, one is Couponreveal and the other is Coupon Code Plugin.
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So above are a few tips that may help you to 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. Signing off for today or you can also join our Digital Marketing course for more.
