Six Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success
Affiliate marketing is a growing industry that allows thousands of people to make excellent money working from home. To make that money, affiliate marketers promote a product or service belonging to another business online.
There are three different methods to the affiliate madness: pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, and pay-per sale. With pay-per-click, the marketer gets paid every time someone clicks on a link to the affiliate business on the marketer’s website. With pay-per-lead, the marketer gets paid whenever the business collects a prospect’s contact information through them. And with pay-per-sale, the marketer gets a percentage of each sale made through their site.
It’s a great deal for everyone: the business doesn’t pay the marketer unless it gets new customers, and the marketer can make generous profits if they do a good job. But not every affiliate marketer finds success. Here are a few things you must do to make sure your affiliate business succeeds.
Like your product. If you don’t like the product you’re marketing, you won’t be able to sell it convincingly. The search marketing demands of affiliate marketing require that you build an entire site around this product, with quality content, blogs, mailing lists, and more. If you’re doing all this, you’ll have to be passionate about the product.
Don’t just pick the first thing that comes along. Look to your natural interests. Contact businesses and ask for a free trial or sample. If you explain that you’re interested in their affiliate program, they should be willing to do this.
Ask lots of questions. When picking a business to partner with, it’s best to be picky. Ask plenty of questions, and if a business can’t or won’t give you thorough answers, move on to the next one. Here are a few key questions to ask:
- What’s your sales site’s conversion rate? – Does it cost anything to join? (It shouldn’t.) – How do you pay: per click, per lead, per sale, or some combination of these? – How do you keep track of my referrals? – Can I track my own referrals through your site? – What’s your payment schedule? – What help can you give me to get started? – What kind of support do you offer affiliates?
Invest in search engine optimization. If you can’t get traffic, you won’t get paid. Search engines love websites with a lot of user value: relevant, frequently updated content that attracts outside links. You have to make your site a source of information. If you’re not search engine savvy, hire a professional-the investment will pay you back tenfold.
Write well and often. If you want good traffic, you have to serve up good content. Write informative articles. Run a blog. Put out a weekly e-newsletter. Pick topics your readers will be interested in, and stay timely. Send your articles to article websites with a link back to your site to generate some good back links.
Build a dependable mailing list. A good mailing list is pure gold. It’s crucial to make sure your mailing list is composed entirely of people who have willingly signed up-avoid opt-out lists, as people easily mistake opt-out email for spam.
An opt-in list is more powerful anyway, because all of those people have a strong enough interest in your industry or product to give up their email information. To entice people to join your list, offer something in return: freebies, discounts, or entry into a contest.
Leave the hard sell to them. The most effective affiliate marketers are masters at the art of the pre-sell. Pre-selling involves crafting a website that speaks to the interests of those who’d be likely to buy your product. This involves blogs and articles, podcasts and videos, discussion forums, and other changing content about the industry.
It doesn’t involve a hard-hitting sales letter. The Internet business whose product you’re promoting will have one on their own site, and users will see it after they click on the paying link on your site. Your site needs to be trustworthy and valuable to them, without a focus on selling. Gain customer trust, and they’ll buy the products you recommend.
Many people have made rewarding, lucrative careers out of affiliate marketing sites. But it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. Like any business, affiliate marketing involves a considerable up-front investment of money and time. Do it right, however, and you’ll be rewarded for years to come.