6 Strategy Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success

Doing business online is hugely competitive. Affiliate marketing is no exception since most people who want to make money online easily turn to affiliate marketing. Many marketers know that affiliate marketing is not only a highly effective way to earn income online; it is also a very simple business model to get involved in. The business simply requires an affiliate to partner with product merchants to promote their products/services and the affiliate earns commissions from the sales they help to generate. It is technically an advertising model where an enterprise will compensate persons/affiliates by way of commissions for generating business for them through their affiliate websites. It is the lure of earning these commissions that motivates affiliates to rigorously promote these products. Here are six of the most effective strategies that can help affiliates to succeed in their marketing activities.

 
1. Offer Discount Codes

As an affiliate, before partnering with product merchants, make sure you understand their terms and conditions well enough. That includes making inquiries about their active discount codes (if any) that are redeemable on the products/services you want to help promote. Technically, promo codes are great tools for attracting buyers to products/services. If these codes exist, you can widely share them with your audience through your affiliate website, email newsletters and social media. These codes can help to lure consumers to try the products you are recommending if the consumers know they’ll receive a discount for trying them out.

2. Highlight Product Reviews

Online, over 90% of consumers rely on product reviews before making their buy decisions. For this reason, if you regularly post reviews for affiliate products that are search engine optimized, it increases the chances of your posts reaching consumers already searching online for such items. Search engines direct such searchers to your website through organic traffic. You can deliberately target a keyword/phrase that is already quite popular with searchers in your reviews. This means that such popular term/phrase is already searched by thousands persons looking for a similar product. The result is that consumers who are already interested in the product out there online when directed to the product may be more likely to purchase. If this happens, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale.

3. Nurture Your Target Audience

Affiliate marketing success is hugely dependent on a steady, loyal and engaged audience. This audience must trust you enough to really care about your products. You can bring this about by having a direct relationship with your audience which you must constantly nurture and maintain. That is the kind of audience that can be easily impacted with your advertising messages. The best audiences you can easily target and nurture are your blog website audience, your social media audience and your incentivized and segmented email list. You can rapidly grow your email list by adding a pop-up box linking to your website in return for people subscribing to your newsletter.

4. Advertise on Social Media

With over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one great market out there on the internet. It is relatively cheap and mostly free to advertise in most of the platforms and you can reach a very wide audience very quickly. Sharing promos and marketing messages can easily go viral to the advantage of your marketing efforts. Depending on the products you are promoting, you can determine which platform best suits your marketing interests among the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok. These platforms have various in-house marketing tools as well as specific audiences they appeal to. For instance, LinkedIn and Twitter appeal much more to older professionals, whereas younger audiences dominate Facebook and TikTok. Selecting the appropriate social media channels to market from is essential to your affiliate marketing success.

5. Target Peak Shopping Seasons

This strategy is fairly well used by marketers. All over the world, there are periods and seasons which consumers prefer to shop real good. As an affiliate marketer, if you create ads around these seasons, you significantly increase your chances of making more sales. You can therefore draw your marketing inspirations from peak shopping seasons if you want to make more sales. In the US for instance, you can target peak shopping times like Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 4th of July, Christmas season and New Year eve. As an affiliate marketer, if you invest extra efforts and resources on advertising at these peak shopping periods, you are likely to reach millions of shoppers looking for deals and bargains. You stand a good chance of making more sales as well.

6. Disclose Affiliate Links

Earning the trust of your audience is hugely essential to your success in affiliate marketing. If your customers trust you, they are likely to trust the products you are promoting. So, anytime you are recommending products, be sure to come clean. If customers have cause to doubt your recommendations, they are not likely to make purchases. Some may even avoid your website altogether if they are not comfortable with your disclosures. Disclosing your affiliate links and connections is one great way to put your customers at ease. Make sure you are operating within the rules/laws of products recommendations as well. In some countries like the US for instance, the FTC has stringent rules on misleading customers with product endorsements. You must therefore endeavor at all times to come clean with your customers by presenting the facts as you know them, making full disclosures and being transparent with your marketing/advertising efforts. Doing so helps to build customer trust and consequently more business from such customers.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing is one great way to earn money online by promoting a product merchant’s products through your own platform. Such platform could be your own website/blog or your social media account. You get paid affiliate commissions for your efforts when sales are made. Payment of these commissions is made easy because affiliate marketing sales are usually tracked by affiliate links or through special discount codes.

Affiliate marketing is usually a tripartite business arrangement between product merchants, content marketers/publishers and consumers. The business of the affiliate is to help product merchants promote their products to consumers and once sales are made, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed terms and percentages. It is the business of the affiliate therefore to help product merchants promote their products to a wider audience as partners with influence and a large online audience.

In most cases, affiliates usually get paid once they generate a certain number of clicks, sales or leads. When affiliates promote products through affiliate marketing, they earn revenue mainly in the following ways.

Pay-Per-Click, PPC: In PPC, affiliates get paid for diverting traffic to the seller’s website.
Pay-Per-Sale, PPS: In PPS, affiliates get paid every time a consumer buys a product by clicking through your affiliate link or using the affiliate code.
Pay-Per-Lead, PPL: In PPL, affiliates earn revenue by creating leads for the seller. Such leads usually have to do with consumers signing up for newsletters, an online course or downloading free guides or some other desirable marketing activity.

From the foregoing income sources, affiliate marketing is usually a great avenue to earn passive income if you are diligent and consistent enough in your marketing activities. These activities relate directly to how you promote products and generate sales. Your products promotion efforts depending on your preferences and expertise could be multi-channel through your own website/blog, via your YouTube channel, social media platforms, email newsletters, podcasts, or a combination of them all.

However, to make money in affiliate marketing, you must promote mostly products that sell well since your main duty as an affiliate is to bring these products to the attention of consumers. Affiliates can join popular and reputable affiliate marketing networks too to leverage on their reputation and wider reach to promote products. The main duty of affiliate networks is to match marketers with products to promote. These networks allow affiliate marketers to sign up to advertising campaigns from a range of different brands/merchants and affiliates can leverage on their in-house marketing tools to do a great job.

Affiliate marketing is easily a preferred choice when people are keen on making money online. It is cost-effective and you don’t need any huge financial layout to get started. For this reason, you can get started quickly and work your own schedule as you please. You don’t even have to get involved in some other marketing related issues like customer service.

If you elect to become a successful affiliate marketer, here are some key questions you must have to properly address right from the outset.

What type of products will you be promoting?
Exactly how are you going to promote these products?
Do you have a big enough audience to earn money?
Do you have the influence to encourage consumers to buy products?

If you have the right answers to the above questions, you’re good to go in your affiliate marketing activities. Next is to ensure you are using the right techniques. Affiliate marketing techniques aren’t just limited to individuals with a huge following as audience or even a strong social presence. You need tools too to measure your progress and to track your campaigns. Data tracking tools do assist marketers to optimize their marketing approach and targeted strategies for every campaign. If you elect to market on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok where you can easily open free accounts, you stand a very good chance to greatly enhance the affiliate commissions you earn. Some Affiliate marketers who work on a commission or percentage basis tend to make thousands of dollars by marketing brands and products through this process.