Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money by promoting other people’s products and services. It’s a great way to make money online, but it can be hard to find success.
Even the best affiliate marketers are always looking for new ways to grow their business and drive more sales through their affiliate links.
This means choosing the right promotion strategies. This blog post will go over 10 different strategies that you can use to promote your affiliate offers so that you can get more traffic and make more sales with less work.
I’ve been an affiliate marketer since 2007 and have seen amazing levels of success. But affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick program, it takes time, determination and consistency in order to succeed.
These 10 affiliate marketing strategies will help you to do that.
Table of Contents:
Filter your traffic
But first, you need to understand buyer intent. There’s no point in promoting an affiliate offers to anybody that will listen – you need targeted traffic.
Unless you’re promoting affiliate offers to your own audience, chances are it’s going attract a lot of random clicks that might not have buyer intent.
This can throw off your metrics, and be harmful to the vendor by negatively impacting their EPC’s, making it difficult for them to recruit more affiliates.
EPC stands for earnings per click and is a key metric for affiliate marketers, that helps them decide if an affiliate productis worth promoting.
Products with a low EPC are often removed from marketplaces, so it’s in your best interests to help keep them as high as possible.
That means you need to filter your traffic by limiting the number of clicks to only those that are have buyer intent.
The best way to filter, or clean your traffic, is with a bridge page, landing page, or content page that sits in between your traffic source and the affiliate offer.
Only people who are likely to buy will click through, keeping EPC’s conversion rates high.
Your own Facebook groups
Promoting your affiliate link in a facebook group is one of the easiest ways to make sales. If you have your own facebookgroup, all you need to do is post it in your group and monitor for responses.
If you don’t have your own Facebook group then what are you waiting for?
Facebook groups are quick and easy to make, and free. You can create a group around your niche that helps your audience to solve a problem.
You can also pin posts in the group to make your affiliate link stand out and get more clicks.
Growing a Facebook group can be hard work, and you never really own the audience. It makes more send to build your own asset, which I’ll explain later on.
Other people’s Facebook groups
If you don’t have your own Facebook group then you can tap into other peoples, however, you need to be careful as some groups might view your posts spam and will get deleted.
It’s essential to read the rules of each group before posting.
Now, the fact is most groups won’t allow you to post a direct affiliate link. And the ones that do are likely to be filled with spammy posts, with little genuine engagement.
But, that’s okay because there’s another way to promote your affiliate offers without a direct link in the post.
The best approach is to link to useful content.
Because you’re sharing content that benefits the community, without attempting to sell, it stands a higher chance of being accepted.
Your facebook business page
Sticking with Facebook, posting on your own business page is an effective way to promote your affiliate offers.
Start by creating a post including an image, your affiliate link and some useful information about the offer.
Images are very important for social media because they can help increase your click through rate (CTR).
Combined with relevant hashtags, you can increase traffic very quickly.
Remember to pin your best performing posts to the top of the page. It might be worth your time boosting posts from your business page, so you can get your content out to a wider audience.
However, you will need to use a bridge page, content page or landing page to filter the traffic and stay in good standing with Facebook’s terms of service.
Youtube marketing
Youtube is a powerhouse of traffic, when used right.
I’ve made over $1,000 with a single affiliate link in the description of a single video. And best of all, that video will continue to produce revenue for years to some, without any extra work.
That is completely passive income.
There are a couple of ways to use Youtube in content marketing.
The first way is to create videos specifically for promoting affiliate offers, such as product reviews or unboxing videos.
These types of videos have high buyer intent.
Another way to use Youtube for affiliate marketing is to create helpful content that addresses people’s problems, and helps them to find a solution.
Having a call to action (CTA) in your videos is essential, don’t rely on people to instinctively scroll down to the description and click your affiliate link. You need to tell them during the video presentation.
Review articles
This is a very popular approach for affiliate marketers because it attracts visitors with high buyer intent.
Writing an in-depth review about the affiliate product you’re promoting is an effective marketing strategy.
Include the pros and the cons. While it might be tempting to just focus on the positives, don’t forget to mention the negatives as well. Readers want all of the information before they decide whether or not to purchase a product.
By including some of the cons you’re giving your audience a fair balance, which increases your authenticity. People don’t like being sold to, but they do love buying.
So don’t go for the hard sell.
If you can include a damaging admission or two, you still come off as trustworthy and authentic.
And even better, if you can spin the damaging admission into a reason to buy, you’ll increase your conversion rate.
The key is to target the right keywords; ones you have a decent chance of ranking for. Then you need to optimize your content so it ranks in search engines for those terms.
This is a slow-burn approach, as there is a long feedback loop. It can take months for your articles to be indexed and ranked by Google.
But if you’re in it for the long haul, this is a great strategy.
Resource pages
Having a resource page listing all the tools and services you’re using is a great way to drive traffic to your affiliate offers.
People who want to know what you’re doing behind the scenes will be interested in the products you’re using.
These are quick and easy to make. Just write a list of your favorite tools and services and add your affiliate links.
While Amazon might be the only affiliate network that offers a commission on some of your chosen offers, bear in mind that commissions will be very low.
In my business, I generally only use Amazon Associates when promoting more expensive products because the affiliateearnings are insultingly low – and decreasing all the time.
But that is the nature of promoting physical products. It’s better to promote digital products, in my experience. Commission rates are always higher, but the conversion rate might be lower, as Amazon has powerful brand trust.
Email marketing
Email marketing is by far the most powerful affiliate marketing strategy today.
It’s low-cost and you have the potential to reach thousands of people in one go with your message.
Email marketing is also a great way to increase brand awareness, drive traffic back to your site, and create raving fans who will buy the products you recommend.
Instead of sending traffic to an affiliate offer or content page, send it to a landing page where they can subscribe to your email list.
This approach takes the most up-front work, but is the most effective long-term.
It’s essentially a sales funnel that delivers a mix of informational content and promotional content to your target audience, via an email sequence.
While it does take a while to get up and running, the entire system can be automated so you just need to promote the landing page.
Now you’ll have your own asset, as opposed to social media marketing like Facebook, were you can only ever borrow an audience.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is is another strategy to help you get more traffic and sales.
An influencer is basically a micro-celebrity who can sway the opinions of their followers with one post on social media or an Instagram pic.
Find out what people in your niche are talking about, identify some top influencers, then reach out to them and offer them a fee in exchange for promoting your link.
The offer needs to be closely related to their niche, and something of high quality that genuinely benefits the influencer’s audience.
Webinars
Webinars have been consistently proven to convert cold traffic into customers.
They’re also a good way to establish yourself as an authority in your industry.
All you need is a webcam and some video recording software, then market the webinar via email, social media campaigns and ads.
You can even do live events with people from all around the world or you can pre-record them for automated, evergreen affiliate sales.
Webinars are a great way to demonstrate your knowledge and get direct feedback from your audience. They also allow you to discover common questions and objections.
To create a successful webinar, you need an excellent presentation that people will find very engaging.
You’ll also want some slides with your information on it so participants can follow along.
It’s a good idea to do live webinars for a few months until you gather enough questions and objections so you can fine tune your presentation.
The more time you spend refining your presentation, the better. You might want to do some dry-runs to make sure your webinar is as engaging and concise as possible before launching it live.
You’ll also need a good follow up sequence after the event to re-engage people who didn’t purchase the products or services you offered the first time around.
CPC
CPC stands for cost per click.
In other words, it’s the cost of getting someone to click on your link.
You can drive traffic by advertising in various places like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads and you set a daily budget for how much money you want to spend per day for these ads.
Generally speaking, the more expensive the ad, the more people will see it – but that does vary from niche to niche.
The thing with CPC is that you’re bidding against your competitors to get eyeballs on your ad.
You can set a bid at any amount you choose, but if your competitor bids higher than what you’ve selected, then they will take over your position in the rankings.
Most CPC networks won’t allow you to link directly to an affiliate offer, instead you’ll have to link to a bridge page, content page, or for best results a landing page.
Because you’re paying for this traffic, it makes sense to convert them into leads first so you can follow up and build a relationship so they have a reason to trust your recommendations.
Again you’re building your own asset instead of relying on someone else’s.
Conclusion
Now you have some of the best marketing strategies to help you become a more successful affiliate marketer.
Now matter which affiliate partnership you choose, it’s going to require work and dedication to get the best results.
Make sure to stay consistent and be patient. If you’re putting the needs of your target audience above your own, you’ll begin to see success.
And leveraging these affiliate marketing strategies will help you take your traffic and sales to the next level.