5 Techniques to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are independent business persons who work to earn commissions. They help product merchants market their products and earn commissions from their efforts. They are not directly responsible for product manufacturing, warehousing/storage, product delivery or customer service. These are the responsibilities of product merchants.  The job of affiliate marketers is to simply direct traffic from their websites, blogs, newsletters, and online posts to the brands they are promoting. Affiliates earn money in form of commissions in exchange for driving traffic and/or purchases to the referring brand.

Here are some tested techniques affiliates use to earn money in affiliate marketing.

1. Coupon Sites

When product merchants want to introduce a novel or underappreciated product/service into the market, coupon sites come in very handy. For a limited period of time, you can promote a reduction on first-time purchases in an affiliate arrangement with a coupon website. These coupons can entice buyers to visit your website and sign up to become supporters of your brand. Commissions are paid for connections made in this process.

2. Bloggers/Influencers

If you connect with popular and established writers or social media Influencers in your business niche, they can directly help you through their separate audiences to expand your own reach. That makes your reach exponentially wider. If these writers and influencers help to propagate your marketing messages or write articles to promote or endorse your products, it directly enhances your sales. What they write or endorse, because of the trust they have built with their separate audiences over time, can directly attract people from their audience to look up the website of the product merchant. When these visitors make purchases, the writers or influencers are then entitled to be paid commissions relative to the sales made.

3. Review Sites

Products merchants take to review websites when they have high-priced products to sell. It is customary for buyers and customers to desire more information about any product before making their buy decisions. That is where review websites become handy to provide this additional information by way of product reviews. When businesses and authors on review websites willingly give a referral link to your product and rate it highly, it usually increases the likelihood that potential buyers will click through and buy from you. The referring parties earn commissions from their referral efforts.

4. Search Affiliates

Search affiliates are mostly independent business owners who spend money on ads to have their products shown in search engine results. There are affiliates who earn commissions through PPC on their ads. The ads can also be placed on popular social media networks, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or other online advertising networks. The more searchers click on these ads, the more commissions the affiliates earn.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may have been around for quite a while but it is still a very efficient affiliate marketing technique. It remains one of the most efficient methods to get individuals to sign up for a brand, a survey, a contest or a webinar. Affiliate marketers can send out a huge mass of emails with the contents having affiliate links to the product they are promoting. Once these links are used to sign up or make purchases from the product merchant, the affiliate earns a commission. Quite an effective affiliate marketing technique no doubt!

Wrapping Up

Earning money with affiliate marketing is a simple business model that is performance based. The more you intensify your promotional activities, the more commissions you earn. It is however unrealistic to expect to earn tonnes of money overnight. If you have the diligence and patience to set up the right techniques, money will gradually start to come in with time. Affiliate marketing is really a very simple legitimate business that requires perseverance, ingenuity, focus, and devotion over time. That is when appreciable income is expected to start to accruing to the affiliate marketer.

Benefits of User-Generated Content for Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, user-generated content (UGC) is extremely valuable for driving traffic, building trust, and generating leads for marketers. Affiliate marketing is a simple business model where affiliates help product merchants to market their products and the affiliates earn commissions from the sales they generate. It is all about building relationships and networking to earn money online. Many affiliates prefer to build a relationship with the businesses they work with, while others focus on building a relationship with their audience. Affiliates take advantage of UGC to build these much-cherished relationships.  UGC is a content created by users rather than professional marketers or publishers. It comes in such forms as comments/feedback, photos/graphics, videos, reviews and even blog posts. Many marketers hugely rely on UGC to promote their products and drive traffic to their websites. UGC helps affiliate marketing to work better and deliver more beneficial results. Here is how:

More Traffic

Even if the UGC is in the form of funny meme, adorable video or a heartfelt post about a personal user experience, if it is widely shared, it translates to valuable inbound traffic. Affiliate marketers cherish good traffic. This is because good traffic in quite helpful to their business. The challenge however is always how affiliate marketers can make their UGC more appealing and, therefore more shareable. To this end, marketers must strive to make their UGC more relatable than traditional marketing content. They can make it feel less like an advertisement and more like a conversation between friends, family or business partners. That way, UGC manages to provide a sense of authenticity that can be lacking in other forms of marketing. When shoppers see that other real people are using and enjoying a product, they can relate better and are more likely to try the product themselves.

Enhanced Trust

One huge challenge of affiliate marketing is always how to earn the trust of consumers. This is because many consumers don’t quite trust bloggers or websites promoting products. UGC usually comes handy to plug that trust deficit hole because it comes with a built-in level of trust. Consumers see UGC as coming from a real person rather than a faceless entity. The reason they relate well and better with such content. That helps to build trust. So, affiliate marketers can better enhance this relationship by rewarding their customers with deserved recognition through widely sharing their posts and even mentioning them by name. Great for trust building no doubt!

Higher Engagement

UGC is more likely to be engaged with than traditional marketing materials. You know why? It is because it is more authentic and relatable in the eyes of consumers. Smart marketers can use UGC to address poignant issues as well as disclosing more about their personalities and values. Most human beings crave recognition and always want to be seen to matter. This is why people are more likely to share content that’s relatable and not superficial. That translates to higher engagement.

More Leads

Typically, UGC can generate more leads because it can help marketers to reach a wider audience. The more people your marketing messages reach, the more leads you’re likely to generate. The more leads you generate, the more sales you are likely to make. UGC is highly effective to generate leads because it is more authentic than other forms of marketing. That helps to make it more trustworthy and persuasive in the eyes of consumers. Naturally, UGC often usually comes from people who are already customers or fans of a product/service.

Credible Ways to Get UGC for Your Affiliate Marketing Program

For your affiliate marketing business to take advantage of the foregoing benefits, you must first explore all credible ways to get UGC for the business. One of such credible ways to encourage UGC is to offer incentives, such as discounts, free giveaways or exclusive content. With these incentives, users will be more likely to share your content and help you promote your products/services as widely as possible. You can also encourage shoppers to share their own photos and videos or create contests and giveaways. The more fun and engaging your content is, the more likely people are to share it. You may also use influencers and reputable content creators, but adequate care must be taken to make sure the end result looks more like UGC and less like a paid ad. Many consumers do not take paid ads as seriously as they take UGC.

Conclusion

Even though UGC looks like and sounds like users are doing the entire job, it is not really the case. Deft and calculated marketing efforts from the business owner usually help to get the right UGC. Affiliate marketers must be sure they do their research well, make good plans and budgets, gauge strategies, and employ the best analytics tools to measure results. That is about the best way they can hope to get the real benefits of UGC for their affiliate marketing programs.