Affiliate marketing is an essential part of online business planning, but understanding it and finding a good affiliate program can be tricky. There are all kinds of products and budgets to make sense of and choose the right one. Here are some steps you can take to ensure you get the best affiliates for your online business.
Remember that as an affiliate it is only your job to drive someone to a company’s product. It is not your job to sell the product. If you attempt to sell the product and advertise it at the same time, you may end up losing more commissions than you gain. Allow the company to do the selling.
Affiliates creating websites are going to need to link their sites directly to the main company’s site, so this means you will need to know a little bit about site-building and link-building. Take your time to create an attractive, functioning site, and make sure that your links work well and lead straight to the pages your customers need to see.
If you’re an affiliate marketer who operates a blog, you definitely want to keep tabs on which blog posts are more popular and which aren’t receiving any feedback. You don’t want to delete unpopular blog posts, but you will want to stick with the working themes and add more content that your visitors appreciate.
Develop different site for different affiliate programs, especially if the products that you are advertising are very diverse. You can use subdomains to cut doen on cost. If you have 10 different affiliate programs going, do not try to make them all fit within your one site. You may confuse your visitors.
Find out the exact location of what is driving your readers to click on your affiliate links. Is it the links within your content or your sidebar? Did it come from a video you posted or a review of a product? When you discover what is driving the traffic, focus on that content.
If you are giving a particular affiliate a large amount of business, take some time and see if you can increase your commissions with them. A lot of companies will be willing to discuss an increase, if they see that they are getting a lot of traffic from you.
Look for “hot pages” that generate an unusual amount of traffic relative to other content on your site, and customize your affiliate pitch for those pages. A lot of affiliates market their products the same way on all pages of their site but, integrating affiliate links more tightly into a hot article can increase conversions more than focusing on a site-wide marketing campaign.
It’s a good idea to ask for a generous commission from an affiliate program. If they only offer you 5% to 10% on each sale, you may want to hold out for a better offer or look for another program. 20% to 50% is a more reasonable share of each sale.
Once you have been in business long enough to build up a positive reputation with affiliate vendors, you can request sample products from them. You can use these samples to form your own opinion of an affiliate’s product and advertise and endorse it. Be reasonable in these requests; make sure the vendors you contact know that you can be a valuable partner.
Inquire about what kind of support the company offers for you if you should decide to join their program. They should offer you all the help that you need to get things started and to make the most out of your time. If you are making money, so are they, and they should be willing to help you earn the most.
If you have done your research and partnered into good affiliate marketing networks, you should take advantage of the marketing managers these networks employ. Your manager is an expert in affiliate marketing, and because you share profits with your partners, your manager has a vested interest in helping you make more sales.
Protect your affiliate links from being hijacked. Many unethical people are using stealware to grab other peoples’ affiliate commissions. Anti-stealware software protects you by using cloaking and other methods to protect your links from internet thieves. Check your affiliate reports on a regular basis to monitor your commissions and get familiar with the type of activity you should expect.
Communicate with your affiliate selling team. These are the people publishing content that gets your product out there and makes sales, putting money in your pocket. Many relationships grow stale and die because they are starved for communication. Send clear, frequent communications to your affiliate publishers through the channels they prefer — email, instant message or for your top people, a phone call.
If you already run your own business, becoming an affiliate marketer can be a great way to earn additional income. First, you should choose to market a product that is in line with the industry that your business is involved in. You can then subtly advertise the product to your clients through your already established business communication channels.
The old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” can apply to how you deal with your workload for affiliate marketing. Do the things you hate doing every single day, because it’s likely you don’t like doing them because they’re a lot of work. If you get to it daily, you’ll find that they become less work as time goes by.
As you read, affiliate marketing is incredibly important to your current and future business planning and so is understanding all the different kinds. This is so it makes it easier for you to understand what programs fit your personal needs. Following the above tips, is a very good starting place.
