For bloggers, affiliate marketing has been one of the most popular ways of making money since it appeared. Affiliate marketing offers a great way to monetize content. It’s becoming even more popular as pay-per-click programs have begun to lose their effectiveness. Affiliate marketing at its core means making money by promoting other people’s products. For each sale you achieve, you get a commission. It is that simple.
You don’t need to worry about the selling part either. The goal is merely to refer your readers to the product sales page. The product owner creates the page that turns your referrals into sales. While that sounds easy, and it is easy to understand, it is important to note that it requires effort to be a success. Like any business, you have to work at it to achieve your goals.
What about AdSense?
If you have a blog or website and have AdSense ads on it, you are probably wondering why you should bother with affiliate marketing. With AdSense, blog owners can receive a check of between $0.5 and $1.5 per 1000 visitors each month, but that revenue is shrinking. The fact is, with more and more people using ad blockers, or just ignoring ads completely, AdSense is not what it was.
Google is also very particular, with a lot of rules, and it’s far too easy to get into problems unintentionally. If you do, they can ban your account in seconds. Setting up an AdSense account can be a challenge. These difficulties are why more and more are turning to affiliate marketing instead.
Improving your affiliate marketing
But, while it is easy to learn the basics of affiliate marketing, there are some tips and tricks that you can do to be more effective. The best thing is, these are not complicated, and any blogger can do any of these quickly and. As with anything, it is just a matter of understanding what to do. So, here are five tips for improving your affiliate marketing campaigns on your blog.
Getting your message out there
You can rely on natural visitors for an income, but it is not likely to make for regular or god earnings. The key to affiliate marketing is numbers, and the more people see your content, the more people will click your affiliate links. That means more sales and more significant commission payments. There are two very effective ways to improve your traffic, search engines and social media.
Optimizing content to rank in search engines gets excellent results. Choosing keywords carefully and placing them effectively within the content can deliver high search rankings and a lot of new visitors. Likewise, social media promotion of content reaches beyond your audience. It is a great way to bring unique visitors. Short posts on Twitter or Facebook can be beneficial.
Understanding your audience
To be an effective affiliate marketer, you need to be offering products that are of interest to your audience. If your blog is discussing sailing, then products relevant to that may be sailing clothing, new books or software to aid sailors and so on.
The crucial part is that they are products that your audience have an interest in. To know what they want, that means a little research, and why the niche you choose is essential.
Choose your Niche Carefully
Your niche is the subject or industry you focus on. That could be something as broad as cooking, or as narrow as model trains. There are two critical aspects of choosing your niche, and the first is your knowledge. While you can blog about a subject that you don’t have a lot of experience of, it is much easier to pick a niche you know. Remember, you will be writing about this a lot, so having an interest in it yourself is very helpful.
In addition to that, when choosing a niche, look at the kind of affiliate offers that are available, it is no good picking a niche and then finding you don’t have the right affiliate offers to go along with it.
Picking the right affiliate programs
There are numerous affiliate services to choose from, Clickbank, Amazon Associates, Commission Junction and so on. Some are complete programs with many applications, others offer a variety of individual affiliate offers for specific products or services.
Choosing carefully means finding the affiliate programs that give you support, such as the right marketing materials. They should also offer prompt, reliable payouts. Nothing is worse than continually chasing money.
Finally, the quality of the products. Although as an affiliate you are referring your readers to other people’s products, quality still matters. As an affiliate, you want to build a reputation for good consumer advice, so your audience trusts you when you tell them something is worth buying. The quickest way to lose that is by giving your readers an offer for an inferior product. Always look for quality.
Patience
This is not a tip, more advice for starting with affiliate marketing, or indeed any online method for making money. Be patient. Affiliate marketing takes time to build as an income. Remember, it is a numbers game. The more people who see your offer, the more of them click. The more who click, the more who buy.
Initial earnings may be small, but the key is to keep going, keep growing your audience and continue providing content. You will see the results you are after with a bit of work.
