Secrets of Affiliate Marketing

          10 Affiliate Marketing Secrets

In the end, as in almost everything, the trick for things to go well is to follow a series of steps and take care of every little detail. In this list you have 10 recommendations to follow if you want to do affiliate marketing:

 

1. The key to success of affiliate system

The explanation for why the affiliate marketing promotion system succeeds is two fold:

• Advertisers are looking for marketing strategies whose investment is linked to results and this affiliate system perfectly fulfills this premise.
• For the affiliate, this system is fully compatible with other activities, online projects and even with other monetization objectives that the web has.

 

2. The importance of choosing the niche to work

Although it is far from the only way to approach it, it is usually very wise to choose a vertical sector , especially if the traffic capture is going to be done through search engine optimization. But as we said, affiliate marketing can also work for horizontal markets .

When we choose market niches or micro niches, we must try to ensure that they comply with the following:

• Sufficient market size . If we are going to choose to capture traffic through SEO and / or SEM, we must verify that in this niche search terms are used with enough volume to guarantee traffic. The Adwords keyword search engine can help you
• Acceptable competition . The fact that there is competition is usually scary but it is inevitable (and even positive that it exists). However, it is also true that we must assess whether it is going to be impossible for us to get a piece of the cake. SEM RUSH will help youCheck the product life cycle . With Google Trends you can check what phase the product or service is in based on the trend in its search volume.

 

3. Advertiser's conversion capacity

The commissions that the affiliate obtains, among other things, depend on the ease of conversion that the advertiser's website has, especially in the case of sales retribution. In turn, the advertiser's conversion capacity will depend, among other things, on:

• Brand awareness in its sector. Here the advertiser can contribute if they carry out a good branding strategy.
• Design and usability of the web.
• Good quality / price ratio of your products or services.

 

4. Affiliate conversion

It is not enough that you generate many visits to your website and place a banner in the sidebar or sidebar. It is not only a question of the amount of traffic. It is very important to focus on the quality of it. We must be able to capture traffic of people interested in the product or service that we are recommending. These tips will help you get there:

1. Provides value. If we make an article in which we answer a question that someone may have who may need to buy the product or service, and we get this person to read it (through, for example, SEO for the article) we will have more chances of conversion in our website and the traffic that we have passed to the advertiser's website is also more likely to "convert".I do not mean that the amount of traffic is not important (which it is), but if it is also of quality, the results will be much better.
2. Take care of the design of the banners. The image we transmit is also important for our conversion. Also take care of your design, both for the image we transmit and for the conversion strategy. Although this advice seems obvious, the design of the web should not be adapted to the needs of the strategy, of the sector in which we are. Colors, typography, font size, white spaces, image size. All this will influence the conversion levels we achieve.

5. Fitting of the commissioning system

I mean that you must be clear about what or what are the objectives for which the commissions will be generated. We should not direct the same traffic or put the same calls to action if we want them to fill out a contact form, if we want the user to make an online quote or if we want them to subscribe to a newsletter.

In this case, we must assess whether the strategy that we have to carry out for this objective fits us (for example, for sale), because there may be another affiliate program that commissions for another type of objective (for example, by subscriber or lead  achieved).

6. Duration of the conversion window

If you are comparing affiliate programs, one of the factors you should consider is the duration of the conversion window generated by the cookie. There are affiliate programs of major advertisers that only save the cookie for 1 day, except if the user has left the product in the shopping cart (in this case they extend it up to 90 days). It is common for the conversion window to be set to 30 days or more .

7. Minimum income to start collecting

Each affiliate platform and each affiliate program can have different minimum amounts of commissions to start charging them. There are € 5, € 25, € 30, € 50, and so on. In addition to this minimum amount, it is also important to know the frequency of collection or the means of collection (transfer, paypal, check, ...).

8. Use the advertiser's resources and creatives  

They are very good at improving conversion rates. I am referring to the following:

•  Very useful banners for websites or for display ads, for example.
• Email creatives if you are going to use email marketing.
• Text links and keyword policy (SEM).
• "Deep links".
• Newsletters.
• Videos.
• Catalogs to integrate (xml feeds).
• Product widgets and search engines.
• Online pricing.

It is usual that the advertiser itself or the affiliate platform can help you with this.

9. Bet on "long tail" keywords

In the event that the contribution of visits to your website you are going to look for through SEO or SEM, my recommendation is that you choose and work with "long tail" keywords for the following reasons:

In SEO they are easier to position than generic search terms or "short tail"

In SEM they are cheaper in terms of cost per click.

In both SEO and SEM, the conversion is much higher. For example, we will be much more likely to get visits that come from terms such as "calculate car insurance price online" to fill in the fields of an online pricing system than if we bet on "car insurance".

With the positioning of the long tail we usually respond to doubts or information needs of users. Therefore, what you should do is think or investigate the information that the advertiser's target audience will demand to respond to it. When we have earned your trust by having solved it is when we will include the call to action link and we will have more chances of conversion.

The "long tail" keywords are + easy to position in SEO and + cheap in SEM

10. Use YouTube as a channel to attract traffic

If you are able to take advantage of the traffic potential that YouTube has, you will be able to drive traffic to your affiliate program. Nowadays, you cannot place affiliate links on YouTube, but you can redirect from your website and take advantage of it.

 

                      Alternatives to earn income with your website

Although the post is focused on affiliate marketing, I think it may be interesting for you to know other formulas to obtain income from a website, such as:

• Put third party advertising banners on your website in exchange for a fixed amount of money.
• Allow Google to show ads from the adwords display network on your website. This is Google Adsense.
• Make your website an online store or an e-commerce.
• Dropshipping, which is something very similar to e-commerce but without the storage and logistics of orders.
• Sale of info-products.
• Selling links.

I hope you liked the article. I have tried to summarize what I consider most important and the basic knowledge necessary to get started in the world of affiliate systems. If I have managed to help you understand it better it will have been worth it.

Perhaps I have also awakened in many of you, the desire to launch yourselves to monetize the blog. It's easy, you just need to have a good blog that you can learn to create from scratch and if you want to know more about the affiliate issue, I recommend you to always come back for more information. And to invest in yourself to be that person you dream of.

Now it's your turn. What do you think of affiliate marketing as a strategy? Do you know any other recommended program?  You already know that you can tell me what you want in comments. I will be happy to read you and know your opinion. Share on your social networks if you liked it!

Thank you very much!!!