Best Strategies For Affiliate Marketers

I’m going to kick things off by setting the stage for what affiliate marketing is all about. At its core, affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model where you, as an affiliate, earn a commission for promoting someone else’s products or services. Why is this worth your attention? Because when done right, it can be an incredibly effective way to generate income online.

That includes adopting strategies that are pivotal for achieving success. And don’t worry too much about the complexities; I’m here to help you navigate through them. Even though the landscape of affiliate marketing is constantly changing, the core elements of every strategy remain the same. Staying true to the fundamentals is just as, if not more, important than keeping up to date with the changes.

When you embody the fundamentals of marketing, you stand out in this dynamic market. Attention is what makes you money with affiliate marketing and this involves more than just posting affiliate links. It requires crafting a comprehensive approach that encompasses everything from selecting the right products to creating valuable content and leveraging data to reach the right audience. It’s ensuring every step you take is aligned with a thought-out strategy.

The Fundamentals

Relationships

At the heart of affiliate marketing is the relationships between the customers, the affiliates, and the companies. Customers are looking for people they like, know, and trust. Companies are seeking people who would benefit from buying their products or services. As an affiliate, you are the matchmaker that brings them together.

Knowing the customer is the most important aspect for you to know as an affiliate. You should know what their problems and desires are. To do this effectively, you have to select a niche where the problems and/or desires are the same. An example of a niche is fans of a sport, team, or player. Another could be expectant mothers. Now you can research and talk to people in the niche you select to get to know as much as possible about them.

Now that you know their hopes and struggles, you can begin looking for solutions that would help them. Do your due diligence for everything you recommend because your reputation is on the line. You can bring a hundred great items to someone’s attention, that they purchase and enjoy, but sending them something that isn’t relevant can be all it takes for them to unsubscribe.

Getting the customer to know, like, and trust you now becomes your main objective once you’ve determined the niche. Let’s look at what it takes to nurture this relationship with customers which always starts with leads.

Leads

There are 4 ways to get leads:

• Cold Outreach
• Warm Outreach
• Content Marketing
• Paid Marketing

All can be effective, so it is really up to you to determine which is going to work best for you. Often it is going to be a blend of strategies that may change as your business scales.

The first one is most people’s least favorite. Cold outreach is sending messages to or calling someone you have had no interactions with. This tends to be a numbers game as the response rate is very low. However, if you know your audience, you can quickly connect with them. Social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn are common for cold outreach. If your niche is a profession, such as realtors, you can easily find their emails to reach out to them that way.

The second may have a much higher response rate because you are reaching out to people who already know you. These could be your best friends if they are part of the niche you are targeting. For introverts, this strategy may still be quite uncomfortable, but is still a skill that could be developed with practice.

The third, and arguably the most popular among affiliate marketers, is creating content that attracts people to your offers. This can be done in a blog or social media. This method takes consistency and persistence as it takes time to build an audience of people who know, like, and trust you. Even if you are doing outreach, I strongly suggest creating content as well. There’s a reason some of the most well-known brands in the world create content every day.

The last, but certainly not the least, is paid marketing. This can include paying to have people see or click on your ads or paying for leads in your niche. This can be expensive, especially if you do not have the language dialed in. This is the strategy that you should be aiming to get to after successfully implementing one or a combination of the first three.

Conversion

You’ve chosen a niche and have been consistently creating fire content and sending messages. Congratulations! Leads are great to have, but they still don’t get you paid. That changes when they turn into customers.

So, how do you convert leads into customers?

It takes 2 steps:

• Nurturing the relationship
• Making an offer

You may have a lead that finds your content and is already at the buying stage. The review you wrote about a product they were interested in was all they needed to persuade them to buy it. Other leads may come when they are early in the process. They may not fully grasp the depth of their problems, but over time as they read your emails, they become aware of them and are ready to buy a solution that is going to work for them.

Your responsibility as an affiliate marketer is to connect them with products and services that enhance their lives. In the case of a sports team fan, you may come across a unique collectible that will make them the envy of their friends when they see it hanging on the wall during the next watch party. You may help someone discover the root cause of chronic pain they have been experiencing and the class that can help them heal it.

The offer can be as simple as sharing the link, but every product and service is going to be different. A T-shirt offer may be as simple as an image of the shirt and a link to the store, whereas a $5000 fitness training program is going to require compelling prose, video, and testimonials to encourage them to sign up.

The fact will always remain, however, that if you do not make an offer, the answer is always no. Not all of your content has to have an offer, but it can be strategically added as a P.S. if you so choose. A good rule of thumb when it comes to content is to offer value at least 80% of the time and the rest can be an offer. The next foundational skill you should lean into is organization and tracking.

Tracking

It is extremely helpful to monitor statistics for all of the marketing efforts you are putting out there. If it is cold outreach, how many messages do you have to send to get 1 lead? How many leads do you need to follow up with to get 1 sale?

While most affiliate programs show you how many clicks and sales you are getting, that is only a small portion of the data you could be looking at. This is where a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) comes into play. You don’t need fancy software to do this, either, especially when starting out. You could keep track of it in a notebook, but more likely you would use a spreadsheet program like Excel. You can keep notes of when they first became a lead, their last date of contact, said yes to an offer, and how much it was.

Why is this data important? It helps you determine which activities to spend your time and energy doing. If you discover that you earn $50 for every hour you put into warm outreach, but only $5 an hour writing content, which are you going to focus more on?

This data is also going to help you test your wording. Attention is the currency right now and you have 8.25 seconds to grab it. You may be sharing an inspiring story that brings the reader to tears in your email, but if they never open it, they can’t be inspired to click the affiliate link at the end. Make sure you are testing subject lines and headings on landing pages to determine which ones work best.

There are a lot of software programs out there like Syseme.io that let you do A/B testing. This is where you have 2 different versions of a web page that you use one link for and it divides the traffic in half. You can use this data to determine which one converts better.

All of the data you collect can be used to make your job easier. You can automate tasks, and move into the paid marketing category. When you have a page that converts, you can use it to turn advertising dollars into revenue times 10.

Putting It All Together

It’s up to you to create a strategy that is going to work for you and to follow it. Yes, there are affiliate programs out there that offer you a strategy that they promise can make you big bucks. These are almost all in the making money online niche and very few help to make anyone wealthy other than the founders. Be careful with the programs you choose to recommend. (One program I do recommend in this niche, because of the training, web-hosting, keyword research, AI tools, and the helpful community it has is Wealthy Affiliate.)

This strategy is for you and your brand. More than one product or service can be recommended. In fact, I strongly encourage it. The foundational elements laid out in this article should be in your first strategy and every iteration as you grow and expand the strategies you choose to employ. The fundamentals are simple:

• Who is your audience (niche)
• How do you connect with them
• What are you offering them
• Plan for tracking leads, clicks, sales, etc.

Keeping it simple saves time, energy, and headaches. I hope that you find this article empowering as you navigate the affiliate marketing landscape. It’s a continuous learning process that’s part of the fun and challenge of this industry. Thanks for reading, and I’m eager to see how you’ll implement these ideas to create your own success stories!