Whether you are a beginner or aspiring affiliate marketer or even an expert, follow the dos and avoid the don’ts and soon you will be successful in this business.
The Affiliate Marketing Do’s
1. Stick to your niche
Most affiliates make the mistake of trying to promote too many diverse services and/or products hoping to earn more money. For the more established affiliates, this can work. However, if you are new in this industry, it is more advisable to focus on a few products relevant to your brand and niche.This builds an overlap between your audience and the products you are promoting, thereby increasing your chances of making high-quality referrals and earn more revenues.
For example, a fitness blogger would focus on promoting products such as vitamins, protein powders, workout equipment, and more, rather than just promoting electronics and software products. Always try to stick to your niche and then include your related affiliate links in your posts.
2. Provide compelling content
All successful affiliates have one thing in common – creating compelling content! This is what attracts steady traffic and make them return to their sites in the future. This is a great practice for all affiliates looking towards success in this business.Always ensure that you create high quality and engaging content that adds value to your visitors in your site, blog, email or video. This way, you build trust with your visitors as a reliable source of valuable information.
When you do this consistently, then you can easily start promoting the related products and services and drive more sales to your affiliate programs. Always try to use real examples while clearly guiding your audience on the benefits and how-to-use the products you are promoting.
3. Ensure you place affiliate links in appropriate positions
This may seem obvious to many people, but it happens that some affiliates don’t do it properly. To earn commissions from the sales you drive, you must include the links for your audience to click in order to visit the merchant’s website and purchase the product you are promoting.In all your promotional materials (blog posts, emails, videos, etc.), ensure you include enough affiliate links in appropriate positions such as the sidebar or at the end of the content.
For example, whenever you write the brand name of the product or use relevant keywords like this – (Fresh Title & Title Analyzer – Private Discount ( Save $60 ) ), make sure you include a hyperlink under it.
This makes it easy for your visitors to navigate to the referred website via these affiliate links, because the potential customers may not be able to read your post to the end. The more traffic you refer to an affiliate program, the higher your potential commissions.
4. Be patient
Success in affiliate marketing does not come in a night shift. Sometimes, it takes several months of testing and promoting different products to earn good commissions. Know the effective positions to place your affiliate links; this may take a lot of time to test too.Remove whatever that doesn’t work and improve & increase the visibility and relevance of the CTAs in your social and blog posts.
At the same time, learn the interests of your audience and the types of content that suits them the best. Persistent testing and enduring time will lead you to high revenues.
5. Work hand-in-hand with your affiliate manager
In most cases, you are paired up with an affiliate manager whenever you register for an affiliate program. This manager oversees the program and can guide you on the best effective practices. Additionally, you can get a wide range of resources designed to help you make successful referrals and earn huge income. Use all the available tools such as video ads, banner ads, and many more. Then, ask your affiliate manager to help you with reliable practices and insightful ways to convert your traffic into sales. This way, you end up earning more income.Also, remember this:
• Try several different techniques. Always try different methods of affiliate marketing and be prepared to change if something isn’t working. The effectiveness of each method may differ depending on the product niche and the target market. A product that worked well in the past might not work the same in the future. In addition, this business is dynamic and hence, be ever ready to adjust as the market trends change.• Use unoffending username for your affiliate account. Your target audience can possibly see it in your link (can differ from one program to another). Therefore, ensure it looks non-offensive to prevent potential customers from using this as an excuse.
• Preserve a copy of all of your affiliate links with their correspondent products/services in your computer or any other secure location. Some affiliate networks do not store your affiliate links’ copies. Note them somewhere for easy access.
The Affiliate Marketing Don’ts
1. Do not be spammy
In order to maintain steady traffic returning to your website, avoid posting spammy content and sending spammy emails. This refers to any information that is not relevant to your audience, or beyond their expectations.To ensure success in the affiliate marketing business, make sure you post ONLY the content that is relevant and adds value to your audience. If you are spammy, you will possibly lose a significant amount of traffic and attract poor conversion rates. Even the affiliate marketing sites will become hesitant in working with you. So, avoid being spammy in your postings and emails.
2. Do not be sales
Rather than trying to sell services/products on every post, focus on being educative and helpful. Explain your success stories with the services/products you are promoting. This is likely to result in more sales compared to simply explaining the advantages of the product and it suits everyone.Clearly, depict the value and convince your audience that the particular product will be of great help to them, as it was to you. Again, try not to promote products on all posts and emails. Sometimes, you can post other informative content related to your niche to keep your audience engaged and excited.
3. Do not violate the terms of service of the affiliate program
In any affiliate program, you will find the terms of service upon which the program operates. You are required to agree with them before joining the program. These rules explain what you can and cannot do while promoting the products offered by the program. They may include referring your own sales, bidding on advertiser’s branded keywords on search engines, etc.Violating any rule will have unfavorable consequences on you. Always ensure you follow these agreements and refer to them in case you are not sure about something. Once you neglect the terms, your affiliate program will email you to inform you that if you don’t stop what you are doing, you risk the closure of your account and/or reversal of the commissions earned.
Additional things to avoid:
• Don’t anticipate to attract huge traffic in the beginning especially if you use free promotional methods such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media and email marketing (can be paid) tactics.These techniques are capable of bringing you tons of traffic eventually, but in the beginning, you might not get much traffic with them. It needs a lot of efforts and time to enhance your brand reputation as well as search engine rankings.
• Avoid using black-hat SEO tactics. This can result in banning of your account from the Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs) and increase the chances of losing the affiliate opportunity. This time you earn nothing.
• Do not hesitate about changing things that aren’t working. If a certain technique doesn’t bring the expected results, shift and try a different one. Check the customers’ reviews to see what products have problems and provide the best alternatives. This is likely to reestablish the trust in your earlier advice.
• It isn’t mandatory to buy any product so that you can promote it. Though it has been proven to be very helpful, it is not necessary to purchase the products you are promoting. However, using them gives you the opportunity to explain it better in a persuasive honest way and also get new promotion ideas.
• In case you offer bonuses, don’t offer cash or related gifts to those people who buy any product through your affiliate links. Instead, you could give them things like extra eBooks, help guide, training videos or other bonuses.
Final Verdict…
Those are the top do’s and don’ts for affiliate marketing. Focus more on the do’s as you avoid the don’ts. Always keep them in your mind as you progress with your affiliate marketing efforts to enhance success in this business.Thank you!
