A-Z of Affiliate Marketing

A-Z of Affiliate Marketing

1. Add Value

To boost your conversions and set yourself apart from what your fellow affiliates are offering, you need to add value to the offer. This means providing a bonus in the form of product or service to anyone who buys through your link. For example, you might offer a free guide, video, access to a membership site, app or more.

Be sure your bonus has the following characteristics:

• It’s something your audience really wants.

• It’s valuable – something you could sell as a standalone offer.

• It’s easy for you to deliver.

• It’s highly related to the main offer.

• It’s unique.

2. Blogging

Too build relationships with your audience and presell products, you need a platform such as a blog.

Check out these tips for starting and running a successful blog:

Offer a variety of content.

• Create high-quality content that keeps people coming back for more.

• Certainly publish regularly so your blog doesn’t look like an outdated ghost town.

• Use your blog to establish your authority and expertise.

• Generate sales by publishing preselling content.

Bonus tip: spend time creating attention-getting, benefit-driven titles for your content, as these titles will determine whether people will read what you’ve written.

3. Campaign Strategy

If you’re sending your traffic directly to the vendor’s sales page, then you’re wasting most of your traffic. That’s because only a very small percentage of people will buy the first time they see an offer – as little as 1% – and if you didn’t capture their email address, you have no way of following up with the prospect.

What you want to do instead is create a two-step campaign strategy. This is where you send traffic to your lead page FIRST so that you can build your mailing list. You then follow up via email to promote a variety of affiliate offers.

4. Display Ads

Placing paid ads is a great way to get targeted traffic, especially if you use a platform that lets you select a narrow audience.

For example, you can use the Facebook ad platform to choose the demographics and audience that will see your ad. Likewise, you can use a pay per click platform (such as Google Ads) to get your ad in front of people who are searching for highly targeted keywords.

5. Email

Another must-have platform for affiliates is an email list. In order to build your own highly effective and profitable list, you need to snap in place the following pieces:

• Create a high-quality, in-demand lead magnet that’s highly related to the offer you’re selling.

• Craft a compelling lead page that persuades people to exchange their email address for your lead magnet.

• Upload an initial autoresponder sequence that builds relationships and promotes your offer.

Be sure to stay in touch regularly with your list (at least weekly) to build and maintain top-of-mind awareness.

6. Funnel

A sales funnel is designed to get your prospects onto your mailing list, turn them into buyers, and then turn them into repeat customers. To that end, you’ll want to put these pieces into place:

• Lead magnet to bring people onto your list.

• Low-cost tripwire to turn them into customers.

• A premium-priced core offer.

• A variety of backend offers.

You can create the lead magnet yourself, and then use a variety of affiliate offers to fill out the rest of your sales funnel. Just be sure to create bonuses for each offer you promote.

7. Guest Blogging

A good way to leverage other people’s traffic and direct it to your own lead page is with guest blogging. Follow these tips:

• Do your due diligence so that you’re only posting on high-quality blogs.

• Create something fresh that blog owners will want to publish and blog visitors will want to read.

• Use your byline as a mini advertisement to drive readers to your lead page.

8. Hard Sell

Plenty of content you create for your affiliate business is going to be of the soft-sell variety. However, from time to time you need to do hard sells – this is where you directly tout the benefits of an offer and tell people to buy it.

• A good hard sell includes these pieces:

• A compelling, benefit-driven headline.

• An opener that engages the reader immediately.

• A list of the benefits of the offer.

• A call to action telling people to purchase the offer.

For example, you might do a hard-sell to promote a flash sale or even a new product launch.

9. Interview

Doing an interview with the vendor is a great way to promote the vendor’s product, for two reasons:

1. The vendor often helps you generate traffic by promoting the interview.
2. You’ll use your affiliate link in the interview, so you both make money when someone buys.

Many product vendors welcome interviews and even encourage affiliates to conduct them. If you don’t have a vendor openly soliciting interviews, you can send them a proposal outlining the benefits of doing an interview with you.

10. Joint Venture

A joint venture is all about working with other marketers in your niche for mutual benefit. The interview mentioned above is one such JV. Here are other ideas:

• Co-promote your partner on your respective platforms.

• Swap content and be guest authors on each other’s platforms.

• Do a webinar together.

• Create another type of lead magnet together.

• Just be sure to do your due diligence so you select high-quality partners.

11. Keyword

A good way to drive traffic to your site is to select keywords that your audience is searching for in Google and elsewhere, and then optimize your web pages for these keywords. You can find these keywords by using a tool like WordRecon.com.

The key to this search engine optimization strategy is to write for your human audience first, NOT bots. Google is all about playing favourites by delivering the best rankings to the sites that produce high-quality content, so be sure yours is top notch.

12. Lead Magnet

A big key to your success as an affiliate is to create an irresistible lead magnet that people in your niche are eager to exchange their email addresses for. This lead magnet can take any number of forms, including:

• eBooks/reports.
• Audios.
• Videos.
• Memberships.
• Checklists.
• Templates.
• Swipes.
• Gear/resource lists.
• Planners/calendars.
• Cheat sheets.
• Spreadsheets.
• Worksheets.
• Mind maps.
• Process maps.
• Apps/software.
• Plugins.
• Coaching/consulting.
• Courses.

Be sure to create something that’s highly related to the offer you’re promoting, valuable, and has a snazzy title that gets people’s attention.

13. Marketing Tools

You can make your job as an affiliate quicker and easier by using marketing tools and platforms such as:

• Social media tools that help you find trending content, schedule your own content and track performance.

• An email service provider that includes automation and built-in tracking tools.

• Graphic tools and services so you can add polished graphics to your products, blog post and other content.
• Tracking tools so you can optimize your campaigns.

For example, HootSuite.com is a great all-in-one tool for streamlining your social media campaigns.

14. Nurture

A big list alone isn’t going to deliver big affiliate commissions to you. The key is you need to develop a good relationship with this list. i.e., you need to nurture this list.

You do this by:

• Promoting only the best products. If you’d be embarrassed to a promote a product to your best friend, then don’t promote it to your list.

• Publishing only your best content. You want to impress your prospects, grow their trust in you, and train them to keep opening your emails.

• Put out a newsletter regularly. You can’t build a relationship if you’re not touching base at least weekly.

15. Optimize Conversions

To maximize your profits, you need to know what’s working in your business and what’s not. The way to do this is with tracking, tweaking, and testing.

Here’s the key: you need to focus on the small number of factors that have the biggest impact on conversion rates. This includes:

• Email subject lines.

• Headlines on sales letters and lead pages.

• The products themselves.

• Calls to action.

Just be sure to test one variable at a time so that you can be confident in your test results.

16. Presell

One big key to boosting your affiliate commissions is to presell any product you’re promoting before you send people to the sales letter. You can do this with:

• A mini sales letter.
• Product review.
• Product comparison.
• Case study.
• Inspirational story.
• Objection-handling article
• The “proof” article.
• The incomplete article

And similar type of content. The key is to get prospects excited about the benefits, prove your claims, and handle any objections. To that end, a series of articles usually works best to boost conversions.

17. Quality Content

Your content is the face of your affiliate business and often what makes the first impression on a new prospect, so you want to be sure everything you publish is of the highest quality. To that end, follow these tips:

• Create compelling titles, as this is the most important part of your content.

• Use a conversational tone, as if you were writing to a friend.

• Format for easy readability, such as by including plenty of white space.

• Engage readers emotionally with stories, intriguing questions, etc.

• Proof and polish to make a great impression.

18. Ready

Is your website ready for prime time? Find out by reviewing this list:

• Be sure your design looks professional and polished.

• Use a responsive, mobile-friendly design.

• Ensure your site is user-friendly, including accessible for those with disabilities.

• Arrange your site around your primary goal.

19. Social Media

Both your competitors and your prospects are already using social media, which means you should be too.

The key here is to select the best platforms to suit your business. You can pick the best two or three from among Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Secondly, be sure to interact with your audience. This is social media, not a monologue where you blast content out in one-sided conversation. Interacting helps you build relationships with your audience faster, which in turn makes them more likely to join your list.

20. Target Market

The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be for you to create content and ads that really resonate with them and create a big response. To that end, learn as much as you can about your audience, such as:

• Age.
• Gender.
• Location.
• Occupation.
• Educational level.
• Marital status.
• Children or no children.
• Own or rent.
• Income.
• Hobbies.
• Wants/desires.
• Needs.
• Hopes.
• Fears.
• Any sort of jargon they use.
• How they spend disposable income.
• How much they spend in your niche annually.
• What sort of products they’ve purchased.
• What they like about those products.
• Why those products haven’t worked for them.
• Where they get their niche information (what blogs, social media pages, books, videos, etc.).

You’ll need to do some research and perhaps even some surveying to figure this all out, but it’s well worth the effort to boost your conversions.

21. Unique

If you’re publishing the same content as everyone else, no one has any reason to read your blog, newsletter, or social media pages. That’s why you’ll want to create unique content using these strategies:

• Compare seemingly unrelated items.
• Coin a new phrase.
• Chronicle personal stories.
• Create a case study.
• Contribute unique tips and examples.
• Challenge an assumption.
• Critique something in your niche.
• Complete an interview.
• Create a formula.
• Compile an alliteration.

Your audience will take note of your fresh content, which will keep them coming back for more.

22. Vet

One of your most valuable assets is your reputation, which is why you need to fiercely protect it. The primary way you do this as an affiliate is by vetting products, so that you only promote high-quality offers to your audience.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Review the product to be sure it’s a high-quality solution.

• Research the vendor to be sure they have a good reputation.

• Read the sales page and make sure there aren’t conversion leaks or commission hijacking.

23. Webinar

Doing webinars has a lot of benefits, including generating leads, building relationships with your audience, and preselling your affiliate products.

You can do a high-quality webinar using one of these popular formats:

• Slide-show presentation, with one benefit being that you can offer your slides as a bonus to anyone who joins the webinar.

• A talking head video, where you look at the camera to deliver the information. This is a very personal format which builds trust.

• A demonstration video, where you show viewers how to do something as you explain it. This format is exceedingly useful for viewers.

Just be sure you practice your webinar beforehand, but don’t read every word from a script (or you’ll sound over-rehearsed and unnatural).

24. Xerox

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to grow your affiliate business. You can learn a lot by “Xeroxing” (copying) other people’s good ideas.

I’m not talking plagiarism or theft. I’m talking about being inspired by what others both inside and outside of your niche are doing. For example, if you see an affiliate in another niche holding a weekly coaching session and apparently making a bunch of sales every time they do, you may decide to swipe this idea and start offering coaching sessions in your own niche.

25. Your Products

While we’ve been talking about tips for building your affiliate business, here’s something to keep in mind: it’s almost always more profitable to sell your own products versus selling other peoples’ products. (Plus, you also get the buyers list, which is extremely valuable.)

One advantage you have as an affiliate is that you already know what your audience wants. You know what they buy. If you create something similar but better than what they’re already buying, you can bet they’ll line up to buy your product too.

Tip: You can dip a toe in the water almost right away by replacing one of the affiliate offers you promote with your own offer. For example, you can quickly create a tripwire offer in a day or two and start testing it in your sales funnel.

26. Zero (to Your First Sale)

How do you pull all this information together to go from zero to your first affiliate sale? Here’s a quick rundown of what you need to do:

• Select a niche.
• Pick a product.
• Add value to the product by creating a bonus.
• Create a related lead magnet.
• Craft a compelling lead page.
• Upload an evergreen email series to promote your offer.
• Promote, promote, promote!

After you get that first sale, then you’ll be well on your way to building a profitable business!

Affiliate marketing done the right way, with the right strategies and products, can be an extremely lucrative path to follow.

If you’d like to learn more about how to become a better affiliate who pulls in bigger commissions then you might want to check out Affiliate Marketing Profit Principles.

To Your Success!