6 Expert Tips for Successful Affiliate Marketing

As a business owner, if you listen to expert advice, you can benefit immensely from affiliate marketing as a performance-based business model. This business arrangement simply involves three parties; Product Merchants, Affiliate Marketers and Consumers. According to affiliate marketing experts, these three parties in the partnership benefit one way or another from the partnership. Here is how! Affiliates help product merchants to market products to consumers in return for commissions from any sales they generate. Consumers get good quality products to buy while product merchants make more sales because of affiliate activities. Simple mutually beneficial relationship no doubt! Following are some expert marketing tips from experienced marketers as related to this partnership.

1. Carefully Choose Affiliates to Work with: Affiliates are independent business persons with their own responsive audience and individual online marketing channels. It is important to carefully choose affiliate marketers in your niche who have a strong online presence already. Such affiliates must be high-flying and already have a proven track record of success and are reputable. These are the kind of affiliates that can help you to make good money in affiliate marketing.

2. Promote High-Quality Products/Services: The demand and appreciation of high quality products/services is infinite. The success of your affiliate marketing program is directly tied to the quality of products/services you are marketing. This is why you must make sure you are offering products/services that are in demand and snugly meet the needs of your target audience. These are the kind of products that are capable of earning you good commissions as an affiliate marketer.

3. Offer Competitive Commission Rates: Online, affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive business. The commissions you pay out can give you an edge over your competitors. Therefore, to attract high flying and top affiliates to your business, it is important to offer competitive commission rates from a range of 5-50% CV prevalent in the industry. Besides the usual range of commission payments, it helps your business real good if you can give special consideration to offering a commission structure that provides higher commissions for affiliates who drive more sales. Doing so can give you some competitive advantage over your competition.
 
4. Build Strong Relationships with Affiliates: Every business is all about building relationships. The better the relationships you build with your affiliate partners, the more beneficial the affiliate partnership becomes. For this reason, building strong relationships with your affiliate partners is key to successful affiliate marketing business. You can nurture this partnership and strengthen it by offering support and marketing resources to help your affiliates succeed in promoting your business or products/services.

5. Stay Up-To-Date With Latest Industry Trends: You can lose your competitive advantage in affiliate marketing if you neglect to stay up-to-date with latest industry trends and marketing techniques. This is because the affiliate marketing industry is constantly evolving side by side with marketing techniques and internet technologies. You must therefore endeavor to keep up-to-date on industry trends and technologies. If you do, you can effectively adjust your marketing strategies as needed to ensure success in your affiliate marketing.

6. Measure Progress with Tracking and Analytic Tools: You can never know how well you are doing in affiliate marketing if you are unable to track and measure your progress. With the help of Google Analytics tools, you can effectively measure your progress and even the success of your affiliate marketing program. You can also track your sales with same tools to gauge the performance of your marketing strategies.

Wrapping Up

What comes out clean from the foregoing expert advice is that if you choose the right affiliates to work with, offer them support and marketing resources, set up competitive commission rates to enable them promote your products/services very widely, you will begin to witness a remarkable increase in your sales and revenue. That no doubt is affiliate marketing success.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Essentially, affiliate marketing is a three-party business partnership which participating affiliates can leverage to effectively market products/services and earn income. This partnership is usually between Product Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers. Affiliates provide the useful and beneficial link between Product Merchants and Consumers. They help to bring products from products merchants to the attention of consumers. When consumers make product purchases, the affiliate earns commissions from the sales for his marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is thus a performance-based business model. The more sales an affiliate generates, the more commissions he earns. 

Affiliate marketing relies on the skills of a range of people as affiliates who rely on their own audience and independent skills and marketing channels to widely promote products/services for merchants. For affiliate marketing to work successfully, there are three parties who must as of necessity cooperate for their own benefits. These are:

1.    Product Creators and Product Merchants
2.    Affiliates or Advertisers
3.    Consumers or Customers

1. Product Creators and Product Merchants

Every product creator and merchant always wants to sell products to make money. They need the services affiliates to do so successfully and they are willing to pay commissions for these services. A product merchant also known as a seller can be an individual, a company, a brand or a retailer who has a product/service to sell. Such a product could be a physical item or a service. When affiliates help him to bring these items to the attention of consumers and they buy, he shares profits with the affiliates in form of commissions. Since product merchants expect to make money from affiliate partnership because of increased sales, they are always happy to participate actively in and remain loyal to the partnership even though they may not be required to participate actively in the marketing. Product promotion and marketing is the main business of affiliates who are in the partnership. All the product merchant does in the partnership is to ensure the product is always available for sale in the quality and form it is advertised.

2. Affiliates or Advertisers

The affiliate in affiliate marketing partnership is also known as a publisher, advertiser or product promoter who helps to promote products/services for product merchants in return for commissions. Affiliates are the middle link in the partnership. Content creators, Bloggers and Influencers are foremost affiliates in affiliate marketing. They make product merchants happy by helping them to promote their products and also make consumers happy by bringing quality products to their attention. Technically, an affiliate is a person or a business that helps to promote a seller’s products to potential customers in an engaging manner. Affiliates do this by advertising the product/service with a view to persuading consumers that it is worthwhile or advantageous to them. If they in the process manage to convince consumers to buy the product, they earn a commission from the sales. 

3. Consumers or Customers

Consumers or customers drive affiliate marketing sales. If consumers don’t buy products, affiliate won’t earn commissions and merchants won’t sell products. Affiliates introduce consumers to products through several online channels such as emails, social media, blogs, YouTube videos etc. etc. When consumers purchase products, the merchant makes sales and the affiliate earns commissions. That is how affiliate partnership plays out. Affiliates promote products through various online channels using special affiliate links to products on a product merchant’s website. They use enticing CTAs on their content to get consumers to click on these links. If a consumer clicks on these affiliate links and makes a purchase on the product merchant’s website, the merchant makes a sale and the affiliate earns a commission. Affiliates market mostly to their own audience whom they’ve built some form of relationship with over time. Influencers leverage this relationship to endorse or even recommend products/services to their audience. That influence does instigate sales and the influencer earns commissions.

Last Line

If affiliate partnership is working well, Consumers buy good products which Affiliate Marketers promote to them. The Product Merchant thus makes sales and the Affiliates earn commissions from the sales. That in a nutshell is affiliate marketing.

Popular Models of Affiliate Marketing Based on Affiliate Connection

As most digital marketers very well know, there are distinct models of affiliate marketing based on the affiliate’s connection with the product they choose to promote. The affiliate partnership arrangement remains the same and all the models of the programs offer several similar benefits to both the merchants and the affiliates. In all the affiliate models, the affiliate is paid a predetermined commission for the sale of a product they are marketing on behalf of the product merchant. Through the partnership arrangement, a product merchant can leverage the wider reach of all its affiliates to reach a wider audience to promote its products. The wider the affiliate network is, the better and larger its reach. The larger its reach, the more it helps the product merchant to build brand awareness for its brand. 

The following are the commonest and most popular affiliate models peculiar to most affiliate programs.

Related Affiliate Marketing Model

In Related Affiliate Marketing Model, the Affiliate has some relationship with the product they are promoting. The Affiliate’s niche where he has some knowledge and expertise becomes useful to promote products. That is where the relationship is even though the affiliate himself may not directly be using the product. The knowledge and expertise allow the affiliate to have some influence over the general targeted audience of the product he is promoting. That is the influence the affiliate relies on to drive traffic towards the product merchant’s website. When that traffic converts and generates sales, the affiliate earns a commission.

Involved Affiliate Marketing Model

Involved affiliate marketing model is the type of affiliate marketing where there is a deep connection between the product and the affiliate promoting it. The affiliates’ influence on their audience is essential for the success of this type of affiliate marketing. This is because each affiliate must know the product very well, trust the product and genuinely use the product. This helps the affiliate to build the requisite trust and influence over the audience they’re promoting the products to. That way, the product’s reputation is linked with the affiliate’s reputation. To maintain this trust, the affiliate thus needs to be very careful when recommending the product to the audience.

Unattached Affiliate Marketing Model

Unattached affiliate marketing is the primary advertising model in which the affiliate has no presence, authority, or connection whatsoever with the product he is promoting. There is also no connection between the affiliate and the consumer. All the affiliate is required to do is to advertise or place product links in front of the consumers for them to click and buy. This is the model of affiliate marketing that is most uninvolved because the affiliate does not have any known skill/expertise about the product they are promoting. On the surface, such affiliates are actually in no absolute position to promote the product but they do and get results. This is why this model is about the most popular form of affiliate marketing. The affiliate does not necessarily have to build up a targeted network’s trust, and they can widely promote products without any responsibility to the audience/consumers.

Why Consumers Tend to Ignore Some Marketing Content

Content marketing is one of the most powerful strategies digital marketers can effectively use to cultivate beneficial relationships with existing followers and to reach new customers. The snag is, far too many brands/marketers neglect or fail out rightly to utilize this powerful technique effectively because many consumers tend to ignore their content. For best results, there is always the need for brands/marketers to deliver more valuable and engaging content to their customers. If you are a digital marketer, you’ll have a much easier time meaningfully engaging your customers if you pay due attention to the following marketing mistakes many marketers often make.

 
Poor Headlines on Content

The antidote here is to always ensure you use attention-grabbing headlines and CTAs, Calls-To-Actions in your headlines. No matter how good the content you create is, many consumers couldn’t care less about it if they don’t notice it. Only attention-grabbing headlines and CTAs on your content are effective enough to arrest the interest of your consumers most of who usually have only about two seconds or even less for them to be convinced to check out your content. Therefore, the more powerful headlines and CTAs your content has, the more likely it will get the attention that it deserves from consumers. Credible research evidence shows that about 80% of consumers read the title of a webpage, but only 20% read the main post afterwards. That is instructive.

The real objective of a content marketing strategy is to make sure your content marketing campaigns gain the right traction. This you can do by ensuring that your consumers pay more attention to your content and do not ignore them outright. You must therefore make sure that each and every content piece you create gets the right attention it deserves among your target audience.

What to do to get this result:

- Test different strategies to see which kinds of headlines draw the most attention and get the most clicks for your unique content pieces.
-Always use properly optimized headlines that are much more effective at engaging readers.
- Make sure that your headlines are long enough to draw attention and convey your message without being unnecessarily verbose.  
- Use more power words that prompt better curiosity with your readers.
- Use more of list posts which are shared about twice as often and are read more often as other types of content.

Poor Knowledge of Your Audience

It is virtually impossible to market effectively to an audience you neither know nor understand. Knowing your audience well enough will enable you to better focus your marketing messages on their needs. Because your entire marketing strategy needs to revolve around your customers and their needs, you must ensure your content is fully tailored towards them if you don’t want them to ignore it.

What to do to get this result:

- For effectiveness, you must deliberately focus every single piece of content you create on the needs of your consumers.
- You need to clearly define your target audience. This means that you must specify the demographic that you’re trying to reach right at the planning stage of your content marketing strategy. 

 

- The voice/tone you use in your marketing message must clearly resonate with the audience that you’re trying to reach.
- You must clearly identify your customers’ problems and use your content to offer the solutions they’re seeking.

Excessively Self-Promotional

Never make the marketing mistake of being excessively self-promotional if you do not want your consumers to ignore your message. There is usually a very fine line between proving that you’re cool with your brand and endlessly boasting about it. You must strike a distinct balance between both if you do not want your consumers to simply dismiss your messages out of hand. That is usually a clear possibility because most readers appear to be really skeptical and suspicious of overly-promotional content.

What to do to get the best result:

- You must better engage with your readers and earn their trust. To do this, you need to maintain a certain level of objectivity.
- You can accomplish this and earn more of their trust by using quotes and studies from other brands or by leveraging unbiased user-generated content.
- Your promotional messages must be subtle and supported by valuable content at all times.

Wrapping Up

As a digital marketer, if your content is not attracting the right engagement, it must be for a reason. The most plausible reason is usually that consumers are ignoring your content. If that is case, the foregoing tips can really be of help to enhance your customer engagement. Do not ignore them if you are really desirous to move your digital marketing activities to the next level.

How to Make Money from Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an intricate business relationship between Product Merchants, Content Marketers/Publishers and Consumers. In it, Content Marketers simply help to promote products from Product Merchants to Consumers and they get paid commissions for their efforts. It is mostly performance-based. Meaning, your earnings are in direct relationship to the efforts you put in. By this arrangement, there’s no limit to what you could earn but you’ll only get out what you put in. Simple!

First crucial step is to be a good content marketer. What that means is that you must regularly write and post high quality content on your website/blog to grow your audience. That content must be well optimized to make it search-engine-friendly. This is because if you want to make money from affiliate marketing with your content, this optimization is very crucial. It requires a very deliberate and diligent effort to get it right. Here is why. If for instance you want to create blogs or videos as your marketing content, you’ll need to include the right keywords to make sure your content shows up in search engine results. That way, your content gets to benefit from organic traffic coming through search engines. Organic traffic is about the highest quality traffic beneficial to affiliate marketers.

For traffic reasons as well, if you are marketing through social media, you’ll need to use hashtags effectively. Many social media platforms have in-house tools beneficial for affiliate marketing. For this reason, you must take advantage of and learn about how you can use each platform’s algorithm to get seen by more people. The more people see your content on social media, the more traffic you get. With time, you can get to build trust and more authority for your brand. That translates to more traffic.

Depending on your own expertise and preferences, you can make money from any of or a combination of the following hugely popular types of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing on Social Media

To make money on social media, you must strive to become a social media influencer. This is not by any means as easy as it sounds but it is doable. Influencer marketing campaigns are usually developed around a specific niche. It is through that niche you can begin to build an audience. That is the audience you will with time be able to positively influence with your affiliate marketing activities. However, it takes considerable time though to become an established influencer. It is within this time you really need to build a personal connection with your followers with a view to effectively influencing them along the line. For best results, you can open free accounts on the very popular social media platforms and start growing your audience by deliberate efforts. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest are great platforms for marketing activities. However, many influencers are characteristically very deft at using YouTube and blogs to promote affiliate products and they get very good results. Effective marketing campaigns on social media entail the use of or a combination of sponsored posts, including photos/graphics, videos, podcasts and live streams.

Blogging for Money

Yes indeed! If you have specialized information and you can write about it, you can make money from your blogs. Bloggers are unique content marketers in their own world. Blogging is a very effective way of making passive income through affiliate marketing. Depending on your expertise and preferences, you can build up your own blog or buy existing ones and optimize them to attract more organic traffic. For effective affiliate marketing, you can embed affiliate links strategically in your blog content. You can also actively review products in your blog posts and you get traffic through backlinks. If you do this consistently and you manage to get known as some kind of expert on a particular type of product, many brands may start coming to you for reviews in exchange for an affiliate link. However, to be a good blogger and be successful in what you do, you must be able to consistently create high-quality and engaging content over the long term. That way, you can build authority and trust with your audience to be able to influence them more positively.

Affiliate marketing on YouTube

YouTube has become one extremely powerful video marketing platform affiliate marketers readily rely on to make money. To make money on YouTube through affiliate marketing, you must first attract a whole load of subscribers on your YouTube channel. Next is to encourage them to watch the videos you post from time to time. You can then include affiliate links and discount codes in your video descriptions. You can also reference them in the videos. More and more people watching these videos means traffic and hopefully with your affiliate links and discount codes on the videos, you can manage to get more click-throughs and even make sales through these links. You earn affiliate commissions from such sales.

6 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Social media marketing is hugely popular with business owners. Nearly everyone actually wants their business on social media because of its popularity and ease of social media marketing activities. As a result of inexperience, many marketers tend to make avoidable mistakes when marketing on social media. Such mistakes stem from creating good content, sharing it online and engaging with social media communities. If you manage to avoid these social media marketing mistakes, your online business will do better even amidst the huge competition in digital space. 

If you are desirous to make some appreciable success in your social media marketing activities, here are six of the commonest mistakes you can do well to avoid.

1. Creating Content for Yourself

Many businesses are on social media posting only content they like not what their audience likes. That is a mistake. Content that helps to grow your business is the type of content your audience likes and appreciates. It is such content that gets them hooked up to you and your business because you are regularly giving them what they like to see and read. If you focus more on topics you are knowledgeable about and tailor your content to meet what your audience yearns for, the content serves a great marketing purpose. From your audience feedback and FAQs, it is easy to gauge what your audience wants to know. Creating content that answers questions/concerns from your audience is the best way to provide definite value for them. Such content is what helps to get good results for your business.
 
2. Random Postings

Posting content randomly is a great marketing mistake. What your business needs is consistent and regular content postings since social media algorithms tend to favor consistency in terms of both the number of posts and the type of content you regularly share. Aside from this, if your audience knows what content they expect from you, it helps them to connect better with your business.

3. Not Engaging Enough

When your social media content is not engaging enough, your audience/community cannot grow fast enough. Sporadic posting just for the sake of it never gives good results on social media. What works is what manages to get your audience engaged. You must never lose sight of the fact that social media platforms are primarily meant to cultivate useful social interactions among all shades of people. It helps brands to cultivate strong online presence. For most brands, such connections are the key to long-term relationships which generate leads and sales. Social media helps you to build a valuable audience free of cost provided you do your part to post high value engaging content regularly.
 
4. Absence of Calls-To-Action, CTAs

If you plan your content well enough and the quality manages to provide real value to your audience, it is great for your business. A follow up of such content with an appropriate CTA is great for selling your products/services. If a CTA is absent, many consumers may just read your content and move away. That is a great business opportunity lost. By placing a good CTA at the beginning or end of your content post, it tells your audience the immediate action you want them to take after reading your post. If this CTA is short, inviting and to the point, the audience acts appropriately. A good CTA helps consumers to make their buy decisions and to purchase from your business.

5. Not Editing Photos and Videos

The average human being easily gets attracted to visuals. Good products photos and how-to videos accompanying your content are good for business. With a lot of bad images out there on the internet, it is bad for business to add just about any photos/videos in your content. If you are not taking photos or shooting videos by yourself, be sure that any photos/videos you admit in your content are well edited to match your marketing message. Even if you are not a professional photographer or videographer, you can use online tools to tweak a few things up to make your marketing images/videos look much better.
 
6. Ignoring Direct Messages

If you want to connect easily with your audience on social media, never ignore Direct Messages, DMs from them. Ignoring DMs or comments from your audience is an indirect way of telling them they don’t count. And, that you don’t really care about them or whatever they have to say to you about your business. If you want to benefit well from social media marketing, you must spend quality time daily to engage with your audience, answering questions, and checking your direct messages. Sometimes, there are great questions and business opportunities you are likely to miss if you ignore DMs from your audience.

Tips for Creating a Viable E-commerce Brand

As most digital marketers very well know, e-commerce frontier is constantly changing. If you want your business to survive this constantly changing scenario, it is important to be able to adapt and ensure your brand has a competitive advantage over others. Your first step is to create an e-commerce brand that can help your business survive in extremely competitive business environment. What that means is to deliberate market your business in such a way as to enable more and more customers to know your name and, in turn, widely spread the word about your business online. This they can do mostly through product reviews and endorsements.

These, here tips can help you to get started in the quest to create a viable brand.

Regularly Post High Quality Content

It is just not enough to create a high quality content, you must endeavor to share it regularly and widely. That is what helps your brand to grow online. You can establish a posting schedule for your content. Doing so helps to, firmly establish that you are sharing high quality material often and that helps to boost the SEO rankings of your business. If your customers notice that, they take things from there and that is what helps to grow your reputation online as a relevant brand.

Provide Unique Value Product

It helps your marketing efforts online to establish your specialty by marketing a unique product. By specializing, you can clearly establish your niche as well as the value only you can provide to your customers. In addition, one unique type of product/service can easily help you with some competitive advantage over others. Competitive advantage is a great asset that helps your brand to beat your competitors. It can even serve as a very valuable USP, Unique Selling Proposition for your product/service.

Market with Authentic Branding

Is your brand authentic? If yes, that means the brand is true to all its intentions and what it delivers to its consumers. It means every action, product/service and advertisement all serve a common message linked to the brand. That confers authenticity and consumers easily take note. Product visibility gets a boost when consumers take note and that helps your brand.

Target Audiences Interested in your Products

With the right focus, you can easily build a thriving brand within e-commerce by deliberately targeting the right audiences/communities online. Your brand really needs people to properly survive and grow a target market. Take your business to them where they are if you want them to help your brand to grow organically. People can put out the word for your brand no matter which way they choose to do so. Online, you can locate the right audience through analytics, demographics and the statistics of the people who are buying your products and where they choose to place the reviews of your product. By simply running a Google search, you can easily see where your brand is popular. From that information, you can determine what you can possibly leverage to grow your brand better.

Leverage High Quality Content Across Multiple Channels

These days, consumers have more choices than ever before on what and from whom they want to buy. Many choices are also available to them about the content on your website and on your marketing channels. For these reasons, competing for their attention usually poses very huge marketing challenges for most marketers. What tends to make the real difference is how high the quality of your content is and from which media you are putting it out. That lends credence as to why you must always leverage high quality content across multiple channels. If you are leveraging mixed media, be sure to create a schedule for your videos and or podcasts. By doing so, you can reach consumers who might not otherwise know who you are. That can ultimately increase people's awareness of your brand. When it comes to channels selection, everything depends upon your target audience, your location and the goals you have set for your brand. For instance, your marketing mix can include the following channels used in whatever combination:

*Affiliate marketing
*Influencer marketing
*Search engine optimization (SEO)
*Pay-per-click (PPC)
*Social media marketing
*Email marketing
*Content marketing

These days, because your audience is inevitably scattered across many different digital channels, what works is multichannel approach to grow your brand. There are so many channels out there available to marketers. You can test them out to see what works best for your brand.

Highly Economic Ways to Boost Conversions

Most online businesses are always looking for ways to increase their conversion rates. For such businesses, affiliate marketing always comes in very handy because of its unique qualities of helping to boost conversion rates. It is economical too and advert budget friendly because it delivers effectively on a pay-per-performance model. What that means is that merchants pay commissions to affiliates only on the basis of the conversions they help to garner. That appears fair enough on the surface but merchants still have to experiment with different affiliate partnerships and sales strategies until they find the one that works best for them. That requires some unique strategies to get right.  When merchants manage to get that right, they can then expect a remarkable boost in conversions and ultimately business revenue figures.


 
Here are some strategic effects which help to enhance the process.

Effects of Someone Your Consumer Trusts

This comes into effect by simply targeting people your consumers can trust and bringing them on board your referral marketing chain. In this regard, bloggers and social media influencers are particularly effective because they already have a large following of persons who trust and rely on their recommendations to make a purchase decision.  These people are very effective at helping to grab conversions from their loyal and dedicated fans/followers on the basis of the relationship they’ve established which subsists on trust. To get the desired results, you must as a matter of deliberate policy try to build very strong relationships with your affiliates, be on the lookout always for affiliates who really like your product/service, are trustworthy and have a full engagement of a large following. Such affiliates help a great deal to boost conversion rates at very cheap costs.

Effects of Hyper-Targeting

In modern day online marketing, you get better results when your ads are specially designed to appeal to a very specific group of people. That is hyper-targeting. As a remarkable improvement over traditional marketing methods, marketers are now able to focus on a very specific demographic, down to age, gender, location, education, and even brand preference. The results of such hyper-targeting could be very impressive. When you introduce affiliate marketing in the mix, it not only allows you to control what message is sent about your brand, but also who sends it and to whom. That makes it imperative for you to work with affiliate partners who are closely aligned with your target audience. Doing so enables you to deliver at all times, a clear and powerful message to your consumers from someone they trust.  That is what helps to get the best results which reveal this method as a very effective strategy for boosting conversions. However, for it work satisfactorily, it is advisable that you know very well your target consumer at the outset. Research deep to find out your consumer’s core values as well as where and how they spend their time online using the right online tools which enable you to make changes in your marketing strategy as necessary.

Effects of Bolstering Valuable Content
 
Online marketers have since found out that one great benefit of affiliate marketing is that it contributes immensely to your presence on the internet and, ultimately, your search engine rankings. Influencers, bloggers and publishers who routinely write highly informational and educative posts about your products/services work in anticipation of Google’s need for user-friendly content that serves a useful purpose to the reader. When Google likes your content, it ranks it high on its SERPs. That gets it better noticed for greater readership and ultimate conversions. To be so favoured by search engines, affiliates must habitually write good content that people like to read. Such content must be SEO compliant for better rankings and merchants must regularly frontload their affiliates with vital and current information about their products/services.

Effects of Leveraging Special Promotions
 
Affiliate marketing can help grow your conversion rate by helping to attract new and repeat customers through special promotions. Most online shoppers depend on someone they trust to take most of their buy decisions. In that category are influencers, bloggers and publishers whom the buyers trust and are already following. Even if buyers are hesitant to commit on account of price or some other impediment, a recommendation from influencers or bloggers helps that process along for them to commit to buying. Special promotions which come highly recommended by these online influencers help boost conversions for the business.

Promo codes, discounts, deals and sales on their own may help grow conversion rates but without a good reach, their effects are severely limited. It is influencers and bloggers who help to provide this much needed reach and eventual boost in conversions. So, when merchants combine affiliate marketing with special promotions, they manage to get their promo deals in front of many more people as a result. That helps them to pick up more conversions from both brand-new and repeat customers. For this to work effectively, merchants must always look out for the best ways to regularly offer exclusive deals and discounts using affiliates special promo codes and partnering with such affiliates for freebies and giveaways.

Effects of Building Your Backlinks

Google maintains that, “having other sites link back to your site is like a vote for the quality of your site.” That appears to be why Google uses the number and quality of backlinks to a website as part of its ranking considerations. If your site has high-quality influencers/publishers linking back to it, Google is more likely to rank it higher on its SERPs. That alone can help in a great way to boost conversion rates for your site. Even though backlinks can help merchants rank higher on Google’s SERP, it is possible only if they’re done in precisely the right way. Expert Marketers advise adequate care when building backlinks to avoid “spamming” which Search Engines routinely and mercilessly penalize. For this reason, merchants must not ignore suitable keyword search and usage. All their affiliates must be provided with specific anchor texts for use on their sites and cross-posting actively encouraged among the affiliates. All these help the value of backlinks, search engine rankings and a boost in conversion rates.

 

Smart Ways to Identify Valuable Affiliates

If you’re an affiliate marketing newbie, it may at the beginning seem to you as if choosing an affiliate partnership is no big deal. Ordinarily it is, but with the preponderance of effective affiliate marketing software and tools on the internet, it really isn’t a big deal. No doubt every merchant needs to be concerned about who they choose to represent or market their brand since most consumers see affiliates as real extensions of brands. In addition to that, carefully choosing the right partners can save merchants valuable time, stress and expended efforts in dealing with evasive, unserious and at times very difficult persons as affiliate partners. It is for these reasons many expert marketers believe that it is well worth the while to spare some extra time and efforts to source for and find the right affiliate partners.


 
Because of the intricate relationship between Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers, the partnership arrangement is as good as the weakest affiliate. Every merchant thus needs a good affiliate who is already doing very well as an influencer on the internet. Such affiliates must be persons who’ve already built up a body of engaged fans and followers and have worked hard to gain and maintain their trust over some time. These are the types of affiliates you can really benefit from if you’re picky about whom you choose. In a well-chosen affiliate partnership arrangement, it is the affiliate’s job to personally refer a merchant’s business to his/her followers. The reason adequate care must be taken to make sure he/she is the right partner for the job. It is the duty of the merchant to ensure that the affiliates he/she settles for have the right capacity to bring real value on board the partnership since it is the affiliates who must act as true representatives of the brand. As such, they must have the right capacity to promote and educate others about the product/service they are marketing.

Here are some tips which can assist you to determine which affiliates are really capable of adding value to your business.

Dutifully Track Affiliate Performance
 
The only credible way to truly measure affiliate performance value is by way of in-depth analytics using available tools online. It is easier to make decisions on whom to work with when you have the correct performance data at your disposal. That is irrespective of whether the affiliate is a new, up-and-coming affiliate or he/she already has considerable experience in affiliate marketing. The data you get from the analytics helps with the decision to determine which affiliate is bringing in real value to the business.

Evaluate the Quality of their Content 

In influencer marketing, content remains king. It is good content which attracts readers and retains followers. In affiliate marketing, the best affiliates to use are the ones who are steadily churning out high-quality, heavily trafficked content on their website, blog and social media profiles. The key is to always look out for original, well-written affiliate content featuring rich imagery and graphics. That is, the type of content which major search engines such as Google like to rank high. That is what guarantees the much needed traffic every marketer craves for.

Examine their Online Presence 

Expert marketers believe that it is best to partner only with influencers and publishers who have a positive and commanding online presence. That is, online presence which is devoid of controversy or damaging criticisms. You can easily gauge affiliate reputation from the comments and replies to their contents on social media from the general public. Since it is best to work with affiliates who have solid online presence, it helps to look out for affiliates who are actively engaged with their audience by way of quick responses to comments/concerns and the quality of the responses. 


 
Pay Attention to their Ethics Indicators 
 
An affiliate partner is a very important link in affiliate marketing strategy. That is why it is good to make sure you know how much information affiliates willingly reveal about themselves and their business without deliberate embellishments. It pays to research this information as affiliates’ ethics indicators. Such indicators are usually voluntary disclosures on an affiliate’s website or social media posts. The more affiliates reveal about themselves, the better for the indicator judgements. These indicators are good for affiliate partnership because they help build trust between the consumers and the promoters. Affiliate marketing works well through personal referral which relies heavily on trust.  Personal referrals can be grossly ineffective unless there is trust in the relationship.

Actively Search for Good Affiliates

The internet has lots of individuals and enterprise affiliates who are actively looking to partner with merchants. An active and deliberate search on the web can unveil many good and reputable affiliates looking to partner with merchants. Some deep searches can actually reveal highly informative stats indicating how active and successful some affiliates have been with previous campaigns/promotions.

Evaluate Affiliate Communications 

Effective online affiliate communication is indicative of how active such affiliates are. It is possible to know even from the very first couple of e-mails whether or not a person is going to be a good partner for your business or not. A lot depends on how quickly affiliates respond to inquiries and how much sense their responses make. Their response time and meaningful engagement are indicative of how serious they are with their marketing business. Tardy and unintelligent affiliate responses to inquiries are real indicators of poor affiliates.


 

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Sponsoring a Podcast

 Sponsoring a podcast is another very effective influencer marketing technique. Podcasts have become mainstream entertainment, with influencers and YouTube stars joining the ranks of those producing this immersive audio medium. Advertising breakthroughs are a common option for sponsorships, or the episode could organically mention a product or service as part of the topic. For instance, a parenting podcast can be focused on outings with baby sponsored by a stroller brand.  One great influencer marketing technique no doubt!

Marketing experts have since discovered that the podcast listener tends to spend more at the grocery store on a weekly basis than the average shopper. That by all accounts is a very interesting discovery. This is because this audience typically spends more, getting your message in front of these consumers is a must. If you sponsor a podcast, you are inevitably getting the attention of persons who spend more in grocery stores not just as mere visitors but active shoppers. That does a lot for the brand you are promoting.