Want to learn practical affiliate marketing tips to use as a beginner to get more sales? This guide shares secrets that you will not find in any other place.
Before we get started, let me give you a short story.
Just like any other beginner, when I started doing affiliate marketing, I thought this would work superbly – starting a blog, creating content, dropping my affiliate links all over my blog posts, and then share them vastly on social media.
After all that much “hard work” I got not even a single conversion. Here’s a snapshot of a product that I promoted.
I had 200 people clicking through my affiliate link but not even a single person who purchased the product. Very sad indeed! I was disappointed and went to the extent of wanting to quit blogging as well as affiliate marketing.
If you are in such a condition, don’t give up yet. Because this guide will teach you how to make more affiliate sales as a beginner. That is, from making zero sales to this…
Let’s get started.
What is affiliate marketing anyway?
Affiliate marketing is a contract between a publisher ( blogger, the marketer) and the merchant ( owner/seller of the product). In this agreement, the merchant agrees to pay the publisher a certain percentage of revenue when the publisher refer potential buyers to the merchant’s website and having made a purchase.
Source: https://digitaladsonline.com/
Usually the publisher is given a special tracking link which they use to refer the clients to the seller’s website. Now to simplify everything about affiliate marketing let’s use a brief example.
Say John owns a company which sells fashion products online. Then here comes Jane and she loved the products from John’s company. She goes ahead and asks John if he can give her a commission when she referred her friends to buy John’s amazing fashion products.
What follows is that they make a contract and draft rules regarding their agreement. That is, how much Jane will earn for recommending each of John’s products, duration of commission maturity and how each referral is tracked to a qualified purchase.
All that is what affiliate marketing is all about. You join, get an affiliate link, promote the products and for each qualified purchase you earn a commission.
9 Best Affiliate Marketing Tips For Beginners To Earn More Money in 2021
From this section I will be giving you valuable tips to to help you become a Successuccessfuliate marketer.
affiliate marketing tips for beginners
1.Understand Your Audience Very Well
One problem What a beginner has is getting a valuable audience that is likely to convert. You might think that each person is viable for converting you will, but you’ll be doing zero work. That is why I insist on you taking time to learn about your audience to target them rightly.
For example, you can’t join a Facebook group purposely meant for dating and then start dropping your links which are affiliated to dogs food. It won’t work. In fact, that’s what we call spamming.
As a result, you need to go places where to find the best customers—knowing want and how the product you are promoting will help them solve their problem. Quora is a gold mine for understanding your audience very well. Here is one Quora user who asked this question.
Actually, the chances of such an audience converting are very high. But you have to do one thing. Answer the question asked by the user more compellingly. The problem is pretty much straight forward; they want your recommendation (actually based on experience) which vacuum cleaner is the best to buy from India. Anything way from that would not have satisfied their needs.
With that said, you should also focus on what your audience wants to learn and critically analyze their buying intent.
For example, when a person asks this question, their intent is not based on purchasing. This Is why you shouldn’t answer the question with your affiliate link. You will be annoying the person who asked the question. It’s probably that the person has the product already, and they are excited about having it.
2.Create Content That Teaches Not Content That Sells
Sometimes, you may get attempted to create content that directly nudges your audience to convert. You are not alone! When I began affiliate marketing, I used to write content and make sure that I get somewhere to force in an affiliate link.
Even if I wrote an article on dogs, I would try to fix a Bluehost affiliate link. I thought I was smart – as per my conscience, but it turned out to be irrational. Or else, on my “dog article,” I would relentlessly find a product-related to the topic and see if it has an affiliate program.
If so, I wouldn’t get the post live until being approved as an affiliate to link it within my content. And when the “buyers” read my article, they would click on my link, buy the product, and myself earn a commission.
As usual, it never worked.
If you want to earn more affiliate sales, you must learn how to create content that gives teaching a priority. People buy a product because they understand it. They are sure that it will make their life simpler.
Whether you are running a blog, a YouTube video, or a podcast, it’s no an exception that you have to learn answering your audience questions. People read your blog, continue watching your video or listen to your podcast because they believe what you are sharing is valuable.
Actually, if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing I would advise you, not to include any affiliate links in your content. This will help you focus your energy on delivering a quality message rather than getting obsessed to make a sale.
Get the product that you want to promote. Take time to know how it works and if it’s a perfect fit for your audience. Create a cool video or a blog post that walks through your audience on how to use the product to make their life easier.
Then get honest with the product by showing them both the bright side of using the product as well as the dark side. That is the pros and the cons
Don’t be afraid of losing the audience because you highlighted a con about the product in your content, even if they don’t buy, you would have sold them something valuable to them. And that is YOU.
3.Master The Basics Of Copywriting.
You have found a perfect product for your audience. Created awesome content that shows them how the product will help them, but how do you get them buy it?
What will attract them to your blog posts and not just read the headline and leave but the whole post. The answer is copywriting.
Copywriting is the art of salesmanship.
In a simpler explanation, copywriting is a skill of using words to prompt a reader to take action on your website.
Say for example you are offering an online course. You will have to create a landing page, maybe use pop-ups to entice readers who are interested to join your course.
That skill of using words to persuade your readers to join your course, open and click on your emails, or even click on your affiliate link is what we call copywriting. Learning copywriting is one of those valuable skills you need to take your affiliate marketing business to another level.
The art of creating, eye-catching headlines. Crafting engaging post introductions. The skill to engage your readers throughout your copy, among other things is what you can use to boost your affiliate sales without spending and extra dollar.
4.Make Your Audience Trust You
Imagine this.
You were having breakfast with your family and suddenly hear a knock on the door. Going to check, you find out that it’s a man who say that they are offering pest fumigation services.
Probably, you have a company which you entrust them with the services. Maybe twice a month.Sincererly speaking would you accept his service?
Quite obvious, no!
Why? Trust. You actually don’t know of the guy and his services.
That’s what it looks like when you as the affiliate marketer tell your readers to buy a product through your link. They don’t know you! They aren’t sure of your expertness and if whatever you are recommending is a perfect solution for their problem.
But what if the man says that they were referred to you by a friend of yours! Would you still accept his services? Damn it, of course baby. The same game-rules apply in affiliate marketing. You have build credibility. Remember you are dealing with people that you have never met before.
As a matter of fact, they won’t buy from strangers. They are uncertain of your legitimacy and whether the product you are recommending meets their requirements .
Then, how do you boost your affiliate marketing business’s trust.
Guest posting on niche related blogs. Build a warm friendship with bloggers/affiliate marketers in your niche and ask for a recommendation.Build friendship with your audience. If they send you an email, a message on social media or comment on your blog, can you reply.Work hard to be featured on media publications or on other blogs with authority.I repeat, recommend only the products that you know very well.Be honest and disclose that you earn a commission for recommending a product.
5.Build Your Own Community.
If you are just getting started with affiliate marketing start build an online community right away. A community enables you turn your readers into real friends and ambassadors of your business.
“ Oh James! Do you mean that I should start creating an email list, a Facebook Group, and whatever!”
Sure! That’s where I am heading.
Do you know why people like Pat Flynn make thousands of dollars each month from affiliate marketing! It’s because, they have their own community.
Some of us think that getting at the top Google results page for keywords about the product guarantees an online purchase. As beginner, seo is not a one day process. Neither a month. If you have been sacrificing your entire efforts on the alter of SEO you are losing more sales than you think.
Am not against SEO, don’t get me wrong please.
In fact, if you want quality evergreen traffic, invest on SEO. Research shows that 53% of buyers make a Google search before making a purchase. As a beginning blogger, SEO takes time and still very competitive.
Which will be better if you create your own community and get started with affiliate marketing. After you have your own community, you will at least have funds to take your SEO to another level. Such as paying for premium SEO tools like SEMrush and Moz.
Go join those Facebook groups. Create informative posts and answer questions in a professional way. You will arouse some interest to those group members and they ask you , “ Hey James, do you offer training on so and so, I would really love to join your inner circle.”
That is a pretty much qualified lead.
Begin now. Create a Facebook group and turn it that group into an resource hub. Go hunt for valuable leads from other groups related to your niche.
Create an email list. There are free tools like MailChimp that are free to get you started with email marketing. Start a YouTube channel to diversify your content consumption methodologies.
What’s cool about building a community is that you stand a chance to make recurring commissions. Whenever you find a new product, try it and find out how amazing it is you can easily recommend your friends to try it out.
6.Use tools to effect your marketing.
Marketing can be tiresome if you are doing it all alone. You can imagine, creating content all alone, promoting it, replying to comments on your posts, creating marketing copy all by yourself.
In short, you need a tool for better content creation, curation and distribution. You also need tools to convert your visitors into leads and automate your email campaigns. Relevant affiliate marketing tools helps you save your time and money by developing a better content marketing strategy.
Here are best affiliate marketing tools to make your affiliate marketing journey smoother and profitable.
Semrush – it’s an all in one pack SEO tool. With this tool, it makes your keywords researching easier, backlinks analysis accurate and even helps you create awesome content with their SEMrush writing assistant.Ahrefs – the best Semrush’s alternative. It’s a powerful web crawler tool, a great baclink analysis tool, an also an excellent keyword tool.Answer The public – we all understand how SEO is very competitive. Creating content primary optimized for the seed keyword as a new blogger is waste of time. Solution, find longtail keywords. Answer the public is the a tool to help you find longtail keywords that you can easily rank for as a small business blog.Rankmath – it’s a mostly free WordPress SEO plugin. This tool assists you optimize your web content for search engines.MailChimp – it’s a valuable email marketing tool that you can use to collect an email list and send newsletters for free up to 2000 subscribers. Sendinblue – an excellent email marketing tool and a good alternative for MailChimp. They allow you to collect unlimited emails and allows to send 300 emails per day for the free plan.ConvertKit – best designed for creaters and marketers. It’s the friendliest email marketing tool that I have personally tested. It’s easy to use and has high delivery speeds. They have a free plan starting at 1000 email subscribers.Leadpages – a perfect tool that helps you create great landing pages.Unbounce – the Leadpages best alternative. It’s a perfect suit for small businesses who want to invest on leads generation.Google sites – still find it difficult spending an extra dollar on creating a landing page, Google sites suits you well. They give you an opportunity to create a landing page for free. MonsterInsights – a gem in the market of the lead generation. This tools helps you turn each visitors on your site to an email subscribers. From MonsterInsights, you can create popups and optimize it for a specific target audience. They also have a powerful Exit Intent technology that you can implement to turn a leaving visitors into a subscriber.Pretty links – it’s a free WordPress plugin that modifies your messy affiliate links. For example when you join an affiliate program you end up been given such an affiliate link. https://yourcompany.com/aff.php?aff=52316255. This’s a too long link to keep on adding on your site. Instead if all this, Prettylinks makes everything simple. It let’s you set your affiliate links in from your domain. For example, I can shorten that link into https://bloggingjoy.com/visit/yourcompany. That’s makes sense already. Hotjar – it’s a heatmap tool. This tools help you understand how your visitors are interacting with your site and there by gives you a hint on regions of your site to optimize your affiliate links or the leads magnets. Hotjar has both a free plan that’s super cool to get you started as an affiliate marketing blogger.
7. Learn & Apply SEO Techniques
Search engine optimization is gold worth affiliate marketing technique that you would ever think of. In SEO, it gives an opportunity to generate evergreen traffic for your blog. Apparently, the more people come over to your blog, the higher would be your odds of conversations.
Actually, as per Google research, it indicates that 57% of online shoppers make a Google search to affirm their purchasing decisions. Am pretty sure some of you have been into the same. Before you buy a product or pay for a service online, you opt to Google it to find out if the involved product will help you fix your issues.
Here are SEO basics that you can implement for your affiliate site.
Speed is critical. Optimize your site for speed. If your site is as slow a snail, your site will record a bad user experience. Poor user experience is a bad signal for Google.Optimize your content for longtail keywords.Earn backlinks to your site and blog content. Perform a site audit using a tool like SEMrush or Screaming Frog to understand the errors that are making your site not rank on Google.Optimize your meta data for your targeted keywords. That is, make sure you include your focus keyword in your SEO title and meta descriptions. A WordPress plugin such as Rankmath or Yoast is an ideal choice.Use short and descriptive URLS.Pass the juice by internally linking related web pages.Make sure that your site is mobile friendly.
8. The Power of Videos
Videos have got their magic. This is because, they are the easiest content format to digest.
Usually, videos give a real picture of what that product is and how it works without trying to navigate through giant-compiled written texts.
According to Wyzowl, 96% of consumers to opt to watch a video to learn more about the product or the service. Furthermore, 84% of them say that they have been convinced to buy a product after watching the brands video.
It’s no brainier that videos are getting much popular in the business not just in entertainment. Which makes YouTube the second largest search engine after Google. That being said, if you want to boost your affiliate sales, give videos a shot .
Host a webinar to teach your audience.
Create an amazing video about the product, share it to your consumers. Turn each blog post into a video. That is why, you see the big brands such as ahrefs, embed a video version of the masterpiece into their blog.
9. Test & Optimize
After promoting your affiliate products, through several channels – i.e blogs, YouTube, emails and social media, you will have a clue of which traffic channel possessing a higher conversion rate. From the data and results that you get, you can focus on getting a step further to boost your conversions.
Let’s say, on overage you have 6000 traffic source from Facebook. Out of that, only 1.5% convert by buying the affiliated product 3% who become your leads. That is 90 people purchasing the product and 300 people signing up for your newsletter.
You can decide to test and optimize your marketing copy to improve the conversion rate of your traffic source from social media. That is boosting affiliates conversions from 1.5% to 2% and email list from 3% to 4%.
A simpler test is by running an A/B test of your copy’s headlines and your CTA buttons.
How? Say for example you have a post on best puppy food. And this was your title,
✓ 7 Best Puppy Foods In 2021.
How about if you make a simple tweak to this and see how it works.
✓ 7 Best Puppy Foods To Buy ( Advise From 5 Dog Training Experts).
At least the second title seems more appealing. But I would advise you to also contact those dog trainers to get a more compelling recommendation.
That doesn’t only apply to title only. You can also increase the chances of your affiliate link being click in your content by using call to cation buttons in your blog posts. Buttons are easily scanned than a mere text link. The current WordPress Block Editor has the a button block in their editor.
Wrapping Everything Up
Affiliate marketing is one if those lucrative ways that you can make reasonable income online. The biggest secret behind everything is treating each product as you own. Then make people know how that product can help solve their problems. After that strategize your marketing criteria.
The rest, become a non issue.
Now, I would like to hear from you. Which of this affiliate marketing tips piques you most? It’s it building a community, or creating a video for your affiliate product. Or would you need help in advance. Leave a comment and let’s keep gliding.
James Njoya is a freelance writer for hire. He specializes in WordPress, Digital Marketing and Business Productivity. You can follow him to his blog or connect with him on Twitter.
Read more: bloggingjoy.com