Arguably, affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to monetize your content and make money online. It helps publishers receive a commission for every sale driven to a merchant as a direct result of someone clicking on the affiliate link. In this affiliate marketing guide for beginners, we will explain how affiliate marketing works, what you might need for your blog’s monetization strategy, and how to maximize your affiliate earnings.
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: Essential Marketing 101 Tips
In the Admitad network alone, there are over 2,000 advertisers – including famous brands like Adobe, AliExpress, Marriott, Shutterstock, Canva, etc. – that choose to promote their services and products on publishers’ sites and drive extra sales.
While publishers can add as many affiliate links to a post as they like, they will need to build each individual link manually which can be a daunting task.
However, if they work with ConvertSocial, they can quickly convert any link to a merchant with Admitad.Extension or Admitad.Bot into a referral link and begin earning commissions when their readers take some sort of action on a website. It can even be a newsletter subscription, a purchase through your affiliate links, or even joining a Facebook group.
Affiliate marketing is pretty simple and can be very successful if you know the basic affiliate marketing rules and utilize them in the right way. So without further ado let’s dive right in with the first affiliate marketing tip!
1. Choose A Niche
First things first, you need to know what you’ll be writing about. When choosing a niche it’s important to know the content layout that suits your needs most. It will help you to cover a topic in detail and divide it into other subcategories if necessary. Your followers and readers will also identify your expertise and your blog as the main content source. In that way, whenever you recommend something on your blog, your audience will respond.
If you want your followers to read more about the products you promote try to cover the following things:
- Have you tried the product/service yourself?
- How satisfied are you with products/services?
- How can using certain products/services benefit people?
- What are the pros and cons of using such products/services?
- What are the drawbacks of this product/service?
- How affordable is it?
All it starts with choosing a niche and building an audience. Write about specific products that you know about and pick a group of products/services that resonate best with your niche to obtain the best result. Avoid promoting everything that comes your way if you don’t want to lose your audience’s trust.
Once you’ve established the basic topics you want to write about, begin creating more content, and add referral links in it, then you can start thinking about an expansion plan for the topics you want to write about.
2. Understand Your Audience
If you want your marketing campaigns to succeed every single time make sure you know and understand your audience well. While there’s a ton of different strategies and techniques out there, knowing your audience is one of the most important.
Publishers that don’t know who their audience is, don’t have a set plan, and try every tactic they can think of don’t stand a fighting chance to survive. Without identifying your target audience, you won’t know what strategies or media outlets to utilize, and there’s no way you’ll know what messages to give them or how to retain and maintain customer loyalty.
When it comes to affiliate marketing try to only promote products that your audience is interested in buying. Dig deep into your audience’s pains, needs, and challenges.
Consider all the reasons why people are following your social media channels or blog.
How can you help them?
Make sure the affiliate products you’re recommending solves their problem;
If you run a fashion blog, don’t put up affiliate links for dog foods because you are a pet owner, or possibly dog foods convert well. The readers who are coming to your blog for confidence in their style and fashion advice are not interested in dog food. Promote fashion accessories, clothing, and similar products instead.
The bottom line here is to make your blog a reliable source of information so that people could trust you while you could solve your reader’s problems more effectively.
3. Implement a Good Affiliate Marketing Strategy
Creating an affiliate marketing strategy is a win-win solution for both brands and publishers. A merchant gets more product exposure while publishers get more targeted and high-quality traffic. A good content marketing technique helps generate qualified leads and drive sales.
Bloggers and influencers don’t have to invest time and resources to create a great up-and-coming product. They don’t have to spend time and effort trying to develop a unique product and then testing it in the market. It also eliminates the necessity for evaluating and finding out whether the product will be met with high demand too.
That complicated task is already being taken care of by the brand. Therefore, the initial setup cost for an affiliate is negligible.
Now let’s take a quick look at steps to affiliate marketing strategies that demand your immediate attention:
- Create authentic and high-quality reviews of the products you want to promote;
- Build engagement with your readers by encouraging them to leave a comment and discuss;
- Share the review across all your social media channels and add the affiliate link in your social media posts;
- Interact with your audience by hosting a live webinar;
- Collect email addresses from website visitors to send them valuable, engaging, and educational content;
- Create a PPC ad that focuses on a specific goal;
- Launch promotional offers.
4. Create Valuable Content
Focus on adding value to your content. Invest time and hard work in generating outstanding content because otherwise, you’re going to have a hard time engaging with the audience. You don’t really want that.
First, think about what makes your content different. You need to know what makes the product you promote look attractive and why would your readers come to your content over anyone else’s. Look at your engagement statistics, measure and analyze your content performance, and start to repeat that format.
Then you can start writing commerce content. In the first place it needs to be top-notch content and second of all, to make it commerce content, you have to create the content that helps people feel more comfortable with the purchase decision.
So whenever you mention a product or a brand, add referral links to where readers can find them. Your writing style is equally important. For example, the difference in conversions between the phrases “click here” and “buy here” is 60% in the latter’s favor. To cater to readers of all budgets, you can add a price comparison chart and add options that feature similar cheaper products.
Essentially, your content should be working toward the following marketing goals: it should educate readers about the product/service they’re making and encourage people to make a purchase right after they’ve read the article.
5. Think About SEO
When you start creating content it’s essential to think about SEO and how you can make your commerce content rank well in Google. About 45% of large publishers’ revenue on ConvertSocial comes from posts that are more than 60 days old. When you start writing very specific content, think about using very specific keywords. This is exactly what search engines look for when they’re deciding how prominently to rank content in search results. Create posts with the use of these keywords and you should see an increase in organic traffic as some of them become indexed, and people discover them.
Consider using other channels too.
Repurposing content is a great idea so you can use it for email, social media, and other channels to eventually improve your search coverage. If you’re an expert, it only makes sense people will want to find your content, and get trustworthy advice on purchases they’re making. Ultimately, you may want to learn how you can generate interest in your content from other traffic sources than search alone.
6. Earn Your Readers’ Trust
Building trust with your readers is paramount in affiliate marketing. Your audience needs to know you give out honest and genuine recommendations about what product/service they should acquire and why they need it.
Thus, when creating commerce content keep a few things in mind:
- Would you genuinely buy the product?
- Do you actually like the brand and its products?
Ideally, you should test the product before recommending it to your readers to make sure it’s exactly what your audience is looking for. When you believe the product is good enough to be recommended your content will be perceived in a positive light. Choose affiliate products wisely so your readers will eventually come to trust you and learn about products they want to buy, and begin buying based on your expertise.
7. Choose Good Products and Brands to Promote
As mentioned brands will pay publishers a certain commission when they’re directly responsible for sending traffic and/or sales their way. So when you look for a product/service to review, keep in mind what commission rate they pay. The better the rate, the more money you’ll make when you convert leads into buying customers. Make sure that you are recommending the best products from reputable brands.
Sometimes brands offer a high commission rate, but if they have a low conversion rate, it means people rarely buy their products and that reduces your chance of making a sale.
Try to find the brand that offers a high commission rate and a product you believe in.
You can access this information and more through the Admitad Google Chrome extension.
8. Be Trustworthy
Some publishers add affiliate links only for profit, not to benefit their readers. But if you want to become a successful affiliate marketer you have to be trustworthy so that your audience has trust in what you say.
Needless to say, the product or service you’re promoting should be relevant to your audience, otherwise, your readers might feel you are trying to scam them or take advantage of their readership.
Remember, it is your loyal, repeat visitors who can make the difference between success and failure for a website. Repeated visitors might give you backlinks and recommend your site, growing your customer base. Be honest and ethical with your readers, building relationships with unique and engaging content. If all they see is a profit motive they won’t be back.
One way to acquire new followers and retain the old ones is to address any weaknesses of affiliate products or services. Seriously. First, you highlight the strengths, then address a weakness to gain trust. However, you should mention the way it works regardless of the weakness, and note that almost all similar products or services share this weakness.
The Bottom Line
Now that you have these affiliate marketing tips for beginners, you are ready to monetize your content! With the help of ConvertSocial monetization platform you’ll discover products and brands that will nicely fit into your content. Create quality content, build your audience, leverage social media marketing and get rewarded for the role you play in shopping journeys.
Have you used any affiliate marketing tips to earn more money? Share your thoughts, and tips in the comments section below. We would love to get your input on this post.
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