6 Tips to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Wanting to do business online? Affiliate marketing is one great idea worthy of your consideration. All you need to get started is just a little extra time to learn the rudiments. You don’t really need any considerable monetary capital outlay or experience. You can start by making it a side hustle at the beginning but it can as well turn to full time income if you gain hands-on experience in the business. With the rise of influencers and social media platforms, affiliate marketing can quickly become one of the largest online income sources for you. Quite simple to get started really! All you need to do as an affiliate marketer is to actively promote offers/products from product merchants and you get paid commissions for your efforts. To get started quick time, just get yourself an internet connection and a social media account and pronto you are in business. You can promote either through your own website/blog or through a full-service affiliate platform or a reputable eCommerce website.

The following tips can help you to get started with a bang and to make the most impact.

1. Market to the Right Audience

The right audience must be deliberately targeted for best results. You can grow a personal blog audience or a social media audience for better targeting. You can segment this this audience through demographics and thereafter promote what fits your demographics best. Because you already have considerable control over the audience you’ve built over time through your content, marketing to the audience becomes fairly easy to do.

2. Take Advantage of Social Media

These days, social media appears to be where everyone is at 24/7. That makes social media a huge market place. First is to have accounts on your preferred social media platforms particularly the very popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest. Next is to expand your following beyond family and friends with the help of your content which you depend on to help grow your following. You can thereafter engage with other people that have interests similar to yours and your market base grows from there. For better ads targeting, you can segment your audience by way of demographics and you direct your messages with pinpoint accuracy.

3. Promote Creatively

The Internet is such a huge market place that you must always seek creative ways to get things done if you want good results. Proven and provable authenticity is one of such creative ways. On the Internet, the more authentic you are when you promote products, the better your chances of getting conversions and making sales. Unlike influencers, affiliates have a lot of latitude to choose how they post content to promote their unique affiliate links. Affiliates can for instance do what most other affiliates do but they must do these things more creatively to get better results. 

4. Promote Your Products Multichannel

As an affiliate, you must resolve to explore as many channels as possible to get your messages out. It is fully within your powers to decide what channels to use. Experience and analytics results can help you make these decisions accurately with time. You can decide to promote through Google-My-Business, GMB, social media, emails, newsletters, podcasts, and webinars and so on. If you can spare a little expense for paid online ads, you can create native/display PPC ads to target people outside of your social media and email circles but who have an interest in your niche.

5. Hone in on a Specific Niche

Expert marketers do not advise affiliate marketers to promote any and all types of products. It is best to promote products that sell well and people want to buy. The reason it is better to hone in always on a specific niche of your choice. That helps you to quickly build authenticity. If you have previous certifications, do not fail to use them to help your authenticity. Such certifications come in really handy when partnering with brands/products. If you have a passion for a particular niche, you can look at the content you regularly post and determine what themes are present that will interest your audience. That helps your authenticity a great deal.

6. Target Fringe Products to Market

If you want to be an effective affiliate, always have an eye for fringe products to promote. This is because one of the best ways to easily distinguish yourself from other affiliates is to look for fringe products to market. These are products/brands that are not way too common with too many other affiliates. The reason is to avoid a heavily crowded market where every marketer is in a rat race to survive. Affiliate programs that are already crowded typically don’t usually offer high-paying commissions and you are in affiliate marketing to make money. Isn’t it?

7 Effective Strategies to Promote an eCommerce Offer

Affiliate marketers earn better commissions if they are able to effectively promote products and instigate more sales. To do this, they need good strategies to get results. With the aid of a fitting associate offer and good promotion strategies, they can maximize leads and sales from their marketing efforts.

If you own an eCommerce store and you want to get the most out of your eCommerce affiliate programs, do not ignore the following strategies if and whenever you want to promote an offer.

 
1. Decide on Your eCommerce Offer

This is one vital decision you must take before you start looking for affiliates to help in the promotion. It is hugely important to decide at the outset what you are going to promote and what results you expect. What you decide on will serve as your offer. It is this offer you can use to attract affiliate marketers. For affiliate marketing purposes, the details of the offer must include, your product/brand/business, the commission rate, shipping information, product descriptions and images/graphics related to the product/brand.

2. Position Your Website Landing Page Well

The landing page of your website is the first point of call when visitors hit your website. For this reason, it must be captivating enough to hold visitors’ attention for a while. As a rule of thumb, it is not advisable for the homepage of your eCommerce store to be its landing page. The reason is because most of your website visitors may not pay enough attention to your homepage before they get distracted. Exception however is if you are able to arrange your homepage in such a way that it serves as your products page too. The goal here is to be sure this page helps you to convert as many leads as possible to sales. For best results, marketing experts recommend that your homepage must be eye-catching and interesting enough to hold visitors’ attention a few seconds longer. To guarantee this, your main headlines must be bold, grabby and punchy. The page must have a social proof and of course a CTA. It must have eye-catching media content particularly graphics/images as well as videos. Your marketing story-line must be compelling enough with clear products benefits and features. With these seemingly little but important details in place, you can make your landing page even more effective to help procure more conversions.

3. Track with the Right Tools

The most popular tools in the business for now are Google Analytics tools and many are free to use. With these tools, it is fairly easy to determine exactly how affiliate marketing impacts your eCommerce site. From the insights garnered from the use of these tools, you can have a very distinct idea of how many people click on your ads/links, how many of those clicks turn into prospects and how many of those turn into conversions. For most marketers, such data amounts to a hugely important trove of information that allows them to effectively measure the direction and even success of their affiliate marketing campaigns.

4. Promote with Videos/Visuals

To instantly grab the attention of your website visitors, you need good visuals. The more visitors’ attention you can grab, the better for your business. Technically and for marketing purposes, visual content usually works better than written words because visuals tend to grab attention faster and better. The higher the quality of your visuals therefore, the better they attract the attention of visitors. You can even get better results if you effectively combine videos and written content perfectly. Most affiliate marketers appear to be used to that sort of combination. For this reason, eCommerce store owners should always endeavor to create and share high-quality visuals with their affiliate marketers.

5. Choose a Promotion Strategy

For a successful product offer, strategy is very important. You must decide on a suitable promotion strategy for your offers and get your affiliate marketers to key in. If for instance you decide to go with an advertising network like Google, it is imperative for you to provide all necessary information about your offer and your affiliate marketers will decide for themselves how  best to promote it. Same strategy applies even if you decide to work with larger affiliate networks. However, creating the best affiliate offers naturally starts with the right products. Next is to identify which segment of people would be better drawn to your products. This you can determine by drawing patterns from their online behavior. From this pattern, you can better target them where they can be found then tailor your ads to their biases. That way, you get the best results.

6. Direct the Right Products to the Right People

This requires audience segmentation. Without it, you risk marketing haphazardly with very poor results. A good strategy is to make sure the bulk of your marketing activities are directed towards meeting the right demands of your consumers. For effectiveness, you must always identify the right products that meet the needs of each set of consumers based on segmentation. Characteristically, most online users are always quick to disregard unspecific ads/campaigns that are irrelevant to their current needs. This is why, for effectiveness, online advertising must be targeted with pinpoint accuracy.

7. Promote with Time and Location Consciousness

The Internet is a worldwide 24/7 market place. This is why time and location are two critical factors in eCommerce marketing. You must time and direct your ads in such a way that they have a very high chance of being seen by the people you are targeting. So, you must give very careful consideration to time and location when developing your marketing campaigns if you want to get good results. You must pay careful attention to differences in time zones around the globe. That is what determines when your prospects are most likely to see your ads. In addition, your ads should be shown only to those prospects within the geographical reach of your distribution services. Promoting a product to people you have no means of serving amounts to wasted efforts which you can least afford as an eCommerce store owner.