Affiliate marketing is a great tool to increase your passive income, but not without its challenges. To do this effectively, you need a good strategy to optimize your marketing efforts and increase affiliate sales.
We have completed simple yet effective affiliate marketing tips and tricks that you can now apply to help you increase your audience, increase your results, increase your authority and increase passive income. These tips are useful for anyone working with affiliates, regardless of the program and brand they are working on.
Are you ready? Street!
Table of Contents
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a marketing business model in which the affiliate promotes products or services on behalf of the company. The subsidiary earns an agreed percentage or rate for each sale generated by its unique tracking code.
Affiliate marketing offers huge profits to everyone involved, including businesses, networks, and affiliates. It is not surprising that this type of marketing has had an eruption in popularity over the years and no signs of slowing down.
By 2022, affiliate marketing spending is projected to reach $ 8.2 billion in the United States alone. For more information, read our article on affiliate marketing details.
Affiliate Marketing: Simple Yet Effective Affiliate Marketing Tips For Beginners
Learn about strategies you can implement directly and indirectly to increase your passive income through affiliate marketing.
1. Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor your success
It’s great to get a lot of clicks from your affiliate link, but do these clicks lead to sales? Do not waste your time with vanity metrics. Pay attention to the important numbers.
Key performance indicators (also known as KPIs) are criteria used to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. KPIs can tell you which campaigns saw the highest sales, which campaigns did not provide any return on value, and which campaigns needed improvement.
Here are some criteria to look for:
CTR or Click-Through Rate: Number of clicks and number of views. Use this metric to review the performance of your digital ads, links, calls-to-action, and more.
Conversion rate: Number of conversions and number of clicks. If conversions are related to sales in affiliate marketing, we can technically define conversion at any stage you want your visitors to take. This includes downloading an ebook, signing up for a newsletter, or signing up for a demo.
Revenue from traffic source: Total revenue from various sources. Use this metric to determine which of your platforms (website, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) is the most monetized.
Average time spent on the page: Average time spent by website visitors on a specific web page. Use this KPI to determine which pages are valuable to readers and which should be reviewed.
Pay close attention to your KPIs regularly and use these analytics to help you increase your affiliate sales.
2. Link to the optimized landing page for conversion
Clicks do not automatically switch to sales. Drive your traffic to the appropriate landing pages to increase your click-through potential and increase your chances of creating more affiliate sales. Here’s how to make your own with WordPress.
Your landing page should not only be relevant but also provide a lot of conversion opportunities for customers.
For example, if you are affiliated with a travel company and your travel blog is related to vacation packages, place a direct link to the company page where customers can purchase those packages immediately.
3. Write (or update) product reviews
The reviews are powerful. 93% of customers read online reviews before purchasing a product. Your reviews will help generate traffic and increase your authority in the industry by providing value and expertise.
And yes, you guessed it. They can also boost your affiliate sales!
Not sure what to include in the review? Here are some tips to get you started:
- What problems did the product or service successfully solve?
- Does it live up to expectations?
- Is it worth the price?
- Would you recommend this to other people?
- What are your favorite features?
- How can a product or service be improved?
Most importantly, the reviews are honest and accurate. Affiliate marketing is all about relationships. And creating a stellar review for a product less than stellar is a quick way to lose the trust of your community.
If you already have reviews, check them out to make sure your opinion about the product or service has not changed.
4. Use A/B tests to determine your best performing content
Perform an A/B test to find out which version of your campaign works best. Apply the A/B test to web pages, blog articles, banner ads, emails, etc. to find the best place to create the most affiliate sales.
Here’s how to do the A/B test:
- Choose which element you want to evaluate. Common options include title copy, call-to-action, illustrations, and layout.
- Determine which KPIs measure test success. For example, if you are testing your email subject, you probably want to see the open rate.
- Select the sample size (number of trials required to determine a winner).
- Create two versions of your test that differ only in the element you want to test.
Run your test.
Evaluate your results based on predetermined KPIs. Note any external factors that affect your test.
5. Create comparison pages and lists (or both)
Comparison articles and lists are very successful materials in the affiliate industry. Like reviews, they increase your web traffic, power, and help you build more affiliate marketing.
A comparison article is a well-organized collection of notes on two or more products or services. They provide readers with the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision.
As their name suggests, list articles (often appearing under the list name in English) are articles submitted in list form. This article you are reading is a great example of the list.
Content writers like them because they provide so much value with less effort. Most importantly, readers will love their easy navigation, simple texture, and catchy highlights. For example, read our huge article “25 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website“.
You can also create a hybrid article that combines the features of comparison articles and listings. This article on Best WordPress Hosting, created by one of our partners, is a great example of how to effectively combine the two styles.
Add links to conversion-optimized content to increase your chances of creating affiliate marketing.
6. Highlight external reviews (for consultants)
If you are a freelance developer or a consultant earning affiliate commission, you know how difficult it is for your customers to subscribe to a new tool.
Backing up your recommendations with reviews from other happy customers or third-party sites is a great way to strengthen your offer. So you also increase your chances of earning affiliate sales!
External reviews vary from industry to industry. Websites of some brands may have separate pages for reviews.
Third-party review sites like G2 and Trustpilot are also great places to look for reviews.
7. Add Call-to-Action (CTA) to your Long Form articles
Long format articles usually contain content of 2000 words or more. These articles allow you to explore topics in-depth, adapt to evergreen content, and share more than just average articles. They can also generate nine times as many leads.
Call-to-Action (CTA) encourages people to interact with your site. Most commonly, they are hypertext text, buttons, or images. In affiliate marketing, CTAs almost always redirect customers to a sales-focused landing page.
Add CTAs to your long articles to distribute conversion opportunities across your content. Adding a CTA at the end of the article is standard good practice. We also recommend adding something at the beginning and in the middle depending on the length. This way, you reach out to all readers, whether they are reading a section or an entire article.
8. Improve search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) means making your content visible at the top of relevant search results.
This is important because 75% of people never cross the first page of a search engine. Improving the SEO of your website can have amazing results such as putting you ahead of your competitors, increasing your organic traffic, and improving your customer experience.
Keywords, URLs, alt-text, image file names, links, and site speed are just a few of the many ways to improve your site’s SEO. We will cover this topic extensively in our article WordPress SEO: 58 Tips to Increase Organic Traffic by 197% (and More!) In 12 Months later.
While this may not have a direct impact on affiliate marketing, improving SEO means making your website and its content visible to a wider audience. The more people involved with your content, the more likely you are to increase affiliate revenue.
9. Make the most of the marketing resources of the company you are affiliated with
Many affiliate programs provide promotional materials for their affiliates to use at no extra cost. These assets include website banners, product brochures, logos and usage guidelines, email templates, text examples used to sell the product, and more.
Increase your conversion opportunities by adding these images to your website and adding hyperlinks to conversion-optimized web pages. Contact the person who is coordinating the affiliate program to discuss the best ad placement on your site.
In general, do not miss any news about your affiliate programs by following the affiliate blogs of the companies you follow.
10. Drive traffic to localized sites
Data shows that consumers prefer to browse and shop in their native language. If you drive customers to a localized site, you are likely to make money through affiliate marketing.
Try to offer your content in different languages i.e English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, and Japanese.
In addition to languages, companies may have different sites for different countries. For example, Amazon affiliates must recognize that Canadian Amazon customers shop on amazon.ca and US Amazon customers shop on amazon.com. Although it may seem small, these different URLs can make a huge difference to the user experience and your affiliate revenue.
11. Create Your mailing list
Build your community with email marketing. Not only do you use it to reach new audiences, but it’s another way to keep track of your valuable content, which leads to more affiliate sales.
While it may be tempting to only include affiliate links in your emails, this is a quick way to lose the trust of your audience and get associated with spam. Instead, focus on providing value. Encourage your audience to click on various articles, and from there, direct them to conversions with your affiliate links.
12. Turn on the podcast
Video and audio podcasts are a great way to generate revenue through affiliate marketing. In fact, 54% of podcast listeners are likely to consider the brands they promoted in the episode.
Encourage affiliate marketing by adding relevant links and content to your podcast notes and description, as well as naming these brands during the conversation. In this case, less is more.
There are some limitations to remembering podcasts. The links your listeners want to see may look different depending on the platform you use to listen to. Our advice is to include links in your podcast notes and descriptions and to let listeners know how to find your content.
Links are not the only way to earn affiliate revenue on podcasts. As your podcast grows, you may want to ask those brands to sponsor your podcast, for the episode or for the entire series.
13. Utilize the power of Facebook groups
Affiliate marketing is about building and developing relationships. This is important because growing your community means more people will learn about your content that has affiliate links.
Facebook groups have many ways for you to build and develop relationships.
Create a private Facebook group: Connect with your community by answering questions, linking to relevant blog articles or videos, and connecting with like-minded people. This group may be open to anyone or accessible only to a specific section. For example, members of the online class you teach or people who have signed up for your email list.
Join an existing Facebook group: Connect with a group pre-formed in your niche to strengthen your brand authority.
Join the Facebook group of your affiliate program: Learn more about affiliate marketing and increase your sales.
14. Maximize your presence in Quora
Quora is an online community of user-created questions and answers.
Since direct affiliate linking is not allowed, it is easy to ignore Quora as a platform to increase your affiliate sales. In fact, Quora is a perfect example of how much giving and receiving are needed to effectively build a community.
At Quora, you can enhance your presence and authority in the industry by answering popular questions with comprehensive answers to your blog articles. Be careful not to add too many links as Quora Moderation will quickly remove and ban accounts that they consider to be spam.
It may not lead directly to sales, but it will pay off in the long run with the right you get.
15. Republish your content on Medium and LinkedIn
Medium & Linkedin are popular blogging platform that allows anyone from amateur writers to large organizations to tell their stories online. Its audience-oriented platform makes it a great medium for affiliate marketers to reach new audiences through long-form articles. In the medium, you can upload a previously published article on another platform or create a new article from scratch.
16. Hide your affiliate links
Affiliate links can be very long, complicated, and sometimes scary, especially for people with low technology. These links also do not provide information on where the user will end up after clicking on them, which will make people more hesitant.
To increase the chances of the user clicking on your affiliate link, create clean affiliate URLs with link clicking. Don’t forget to include transparent communication about your affiliate on the page so customers know that your promotions are paid ads.
In fact, as we saw earlier in this article, clicks are only half the battle. Make sure your URLs lead to proper conversion-optimized landing pages. And track your link KPIs to log success and optimize your strategy as needed.
The Bottom Line
Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn a living, but there are a lot of things to do before you start calculating your commission earnings. You need to find the product or service you want to promote, identify the needs of your target audience and adjust your website or social media for affiliate marketing purposes.
Fixed passive income comes only from well-planned and executed activities. Working hard enough on all channels will help you establish yourself as a trusted promoter and reviewer, a position that every affiliate marketer wants to achieve.
