Whether you are struggling to make affiliate money from your website or blog or just planning to get started, given below are some of the most effective tips you can use to collect more affiliate sales.

Recommend Products You’ve Used
When getting started with affiliate marketing, you’ll come across a wide range of products, many of which will sound highly profitable. You might also be tempted to promote hyped affiliate products without thinking twice, because all you have on your mind is money. That’s not the right approach, my friend!

Rather than being extremely desperate promoting just any product that you think will bring you lots of money (but actually it won’t), you need to take a step back and think before you choose a product to promote. Always remember to promote only those products that you have used yourself.

If you promote product that you have used yourself, you’ll be very confident about promoting the same. And things will definitely work in your favor.

Stick to Your Niche
Again, you should always choose and promote only those affiliate products that are highly relevant to your niche. I’ve seen a lot of online marketers promote those products that are little or not related to their niche at all.

While choosing affiliate products to sell through your website or blog, you should have the needs of your target audience at the top of your mind. Why would your audience buy an affiliate product they don’t actually need?

Give it a thought!

Craft Your Own Story
When you are looking to increase your affiliate sales, you should also remember that it’s not a product that sales.

It’s actually the experience that sells.

Therefore, try to come up with a compelling story. Tell your audience in an expressive way how a product you are promoting or selling changed your life for the better. Sell an experience, and you’ll sell more.

Add or Include a Bonus
No matter what niche you belong, you are sure to face a lot of competition. Most of the profitable niches are competitive. Therefore, it’s an excellent idea to include an attractive bonus with the product you’re trying to sell.

If the affiliate commission is high, you’ll never hesitate to add a bonus to that specific affiliate product.

It really works, so give it your best shot.

Fine-Tune the Pitch (or Call to Action)
If you have chosen the right product, an affiliate product that’s relevant to the needs of your target audience, and a product that you have used yourself, you won’t necessarily need a sales pitch.

However, coming up with a good sales pitch or fine-tuning your call to action will quickly increase your affiliate sales. If you want more and more people to click your affiliate links, you should go ahead and ask.

Are you making enough affiliate sales through your website or blog? I would really like to know your experience.

While niche market research and testing affiliate products are important, there’s one more problem or mistake that you need to avoid.

I have met with a lot of online marketers who fail with affiliate marketing badly because they are promoting either too few affiliate products or too many of them. This is something that you need to avoid at all cost.

Too Few Affiliate Products
It’s advisable to start small, as an affiliate marketer. But as your site grows in terms of readership or traffic, you need to choose a couple of really good niche products and promote them to your target audience.

If you continue to promote only one or two affiliate products, it doesn’t go down too well with any audience.

Ask me why?

When you are promoting only one or two specific niche products, you send a wrong signal to your audience. Your target audience starts to think that you are forcing them to buy the same products, without giving them enough options or something new or useful. So, they get a strong reason not to return to your site the next time. That’s why you should never promote too few affiliate products.

As a great affiliate marketer, you must remember to give your target audience several alternatives or buying options.

Too Many Affiliate Products
When you are desperate to make a lot of money from affiliate marketing, the biggest mistake you can make is that you’ll start to promote as many niche products as possible. If you think ‘the more affiliate products you promote, the more profit you’ll make’, you are in the wrong boat.

The minus side of promoting too many affiliate products is that it will leave you the least time for each product. This will certainly reduce strength of the promotional campaign that you need to launch for each of your chosen niche affiliate products. Second, offering too many products to an audience simply makes it confusing to make a choice or buying decision.

There are a lot of online marketers who are making the mistake of promoting too many affiliate products.

You shouldn’t be one of them.

Promoting too many affiliate products is as big a mistake as promoting too few affiliate products. The best idea is to strike the right balance between the two and choose just enough products that you can promote efficiently. Also you should select those niche products on the basis of their usefulness.

Stop making mistakes that can easily ruin your reputation as an online or affiliate marketer. Think carefully and make wise decisions.

Please feel free to share your opinions or leave a comment.

If you are planning to enter the affiliate marketing arena and wish to achieve early success, you should avoid these deadly mistakes.

#1. Desperation to Make Money
Regardless of where you are or what you want to do, desperation can easily get you into trouble. The same goes with affiliate marketing. If you are desperate to make lots of money overnight, you won’t be able to avoid the pitfalls of this internet marketing industry. When you are desperate, you might end up choosing the wrong types of affiliate programs or products to promote. Affiliate marketing does make you money. But it doesn’t happen overnight!

#2. Lack of Content Assets
Have you ever wondered why most of the affiliate marketing websites don’t appear at the top of Google search results? Well, there’s a simple reason – lack of top quality content. If you site is there only to promote affiliate products, you need to pay careful attention. In order to make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts, you must feature real content on your site.

Google has great respect for its users. If your affiliate site doesn’t offer value-added content to users, Google won’t like to include your site’s pages in its search engine results pages.

If your affiliate marketing efforts are failing to make a cut, it’s time to have a closer look at the kind of content you have on your site. Identify the critical content issues and the weak links. Get ready to offer real value to your site visitors. They will trust you and be willing to buy the products you recommend.

#3. Starting Too Late with Email List Building
One of the most common mistakes that most of the affiliate marketers make is that they start too late with building their email list. With Google algorithmic updates becoming more and more frequent, it’s important to start building your email list as soon as you launch your site.

You never know what the next Google update might have in store for you. If your site is getting a good amount of traffic right now, you should utilize this opportunity effectively to make your email list as bulky as possible. In order to build your email list quickly, you can offer a free downloadable guide in the form of an e-book on your site.

#4. Quitting the Game Too Easily
There’s no guarantee that you’ll achieve success with your first attempt. You need to test the waters and get your hands dirty before you have learnt the essential tips and tricks of the trade. Most of the affiliate marketers give up very early or too easily. Even if you fail in your first attempt, you should stick there, evaluate what worked and what didn’t, tweak your strategy and get started again. And then, success will be right at your feet.

To become a successful affiliate marketer, you should look at this method of online marketing as a trial-and-error process. None of today’s affiliate marketers or super affiliates have achieved success without making mistakes. But they were smart enough to learn from their mistakes!

Are you making these mistakes as an affiliate marketer? If yes, it’s time to correct yourself and fine-tune your strategy.

If you haven’t heard of our Autolinker addon read this post for more info.

In short, the Autolinker addon is a special addon for ThirstyAffiliates that lets you automatically link up keywords and phrases with affiliate links throughout your website’s content.

The challenge put forth by our customer was to integrate ThirstyAffiliates with bbPress so that these automatic links would show up inside topics and replies when people participated in the forum.

We’ve seen similar add placement technology on other dedicated forum packages so it was immediately an interesting proposition.

It turns out it’s a simple two line code addition to your theme’s functions.php file and here’s how you do it:

add_filter('bbp_get_topic_content', 'thirstyAutolinkerContent');
add_filter('bbp_get_reply_content', 'thirstyAutolinkerContent');

Note that you must have ThirstyAffiliates, ThirstyAffiliates Autolinker Addon and bbPress plugins all active for this code to work.

So now you can enjoy automatic linking of affiliate links that you have in your ThirstyAffiliates with forum posts and replies in the popular WordPress forum plugin bbPress.

Enjoy!

Now, I’m going to generalise a little bit here, so please forgive me if this doesn’t apply 100% to your niche. Keep in mind that every website and every audience is different, but the following tip is a lot more universal than you might think and is great for people just starting to monetize their sites with affiliate marketing.

Getting More Clicks On Affiliate Links

How do you display your affiliate links to people?

Typically you’ll see new affiliate marketers relying almost solely on banner ads because that is what the affiliate networks give them to play with.

There’s a couple of reasons for this:

1. Companies get free “brand” advertising when you display their banners. Even if they aren’t clicked on they’re still getting exposure and that repeat exposure to their brand is what makes banners worth it for companies.
2. It’s the most visible method of affiliate marketing and they’re copying other people’s strategies. That’s why you see new blogs popping up with 8 * 125×125 pixel ad boxes in the sidebar even when they have no traffic yet.

I’m not saying that banners don’t work. They do, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. But for new affiliate marketers there is probably a better way.

A Better Way

The more effective way for someone new to affiliate marketing is to concentrate on building up content and traffic to their website and using text based affiliate links in their articles.

Using text based affiliate links actually embedded inside your regular blog posts encourages people to take your recommendation as a personal recommendation for that product/service.

There is an inherent trust factor when you drop a link inside a blog post where you are talking about and praising the product in question. It’s kind of like evidence that the visitor should click through.

It’s a fine balance though, so I recommend if you’re new to affiliate marketing only drop a link once. It’s more effective than loading up your posts with a dozen affiliate links.

So if you’re new to affiliate marketing or you are a blogger considering affiliate marketing, give this strategy a try. It’s a nice, non-invasive way of monetizing your website with affiliate marketing that will ensure you not only get more people clicking through but you’ll get the right people clicking through too.

It’s been an interesting ride over the past few years as an affiliate marketer and it’s certainly been a tale of three competing objectives: Making a living, pleasing your customers, and pleasing the big G.

To say the relationship affiliate marketing has had with the overlord of search has been tumultuous is an understatement.

Sometimes it seems they love us like when Google invests millions of dollars into the industry, but sometimes it seems they hate us such as when they wiped out thousands of affiliate’s adwords accounts overnight with no explanation.

Maybe the left hand of Google doesn’t know what the right hand is doing

Perhaps this infographic from search engine optimization website SEOBook will give you some clarity of how affiliate marketing is seen in the eyes of Google:

If you’re new to affiliate marketing then you’ve probably been looking for a guide to affiliate marketing that can teach you the basics of what you need to know to get started.

Today we’re featuring a neat little infographic that does exactly that. It was created by Eric Welke, but we found it here.

It shows the 8 steps you need to follow to begin your relationship with affiliate marketing. Check it out.

But today we want to showcase something a little different than your usual “how affiliate marketing works” article.

We recently came across this brilliant piece of work by Commissionfactory, an Australian company working in the affiliate marketing space that shows the lifecycle of how affiliate marketing works in an infographic.

You can see here exactly each step in the affiliate marketing process:

Along with any new industry it takes a long time to settle on terminology that is used by it’s members to promote common understanding.

HasOffers recently published an infographic showing some of the more common affiliate marketing terminology used in the industry by affiliate marketing professionals.

We hope it helps you get your lips around the correct lingo when talking about the industry:

Advertising has it’s place, don’t get me wrong, but affiliate marketing is often a better choice for driving targeted traffic to a products that they actually want to buy.

Affiliate marketing has become one of the best way to monetize blogs in recent years because of a few reasons:

The high earning potential

Firstly, affiliate marketing has a much higher earning potential than straight ads like Adsense.

While ad revenue sharing systems like Adsense allow you to make a more consistent income on your traffic it really does rely on having a large stream of traffic. If you don’t have that it will take a long time for the 40c you earn on each ad click to add up to something significant.

Affiliate marketing on the other hand has a much higher potential for earning more per click.

Some offers can be as high as 80%, though it ranges anywhere from 4% of the sale and up depending on the network and the conditions of the affiliate program. For example, our affiliate program offers our partners 50% of the revenue of a sale. It’s important for us to get new customers and offering this larger incentive insures the popularity of our affiliate program.

For websites that exist in niches where related products are higher priced goods like TVs for example, the return on an affiliate commission of even 4% can be quite good whereas an ad click might bring a few dollars, you might get 10x the revenue by using affiliate marketing to monetize your blog.

Ability to control what is shown to your audience

Unlike adding advertising where whoever bids highest gets to put their ad there, products promoted with affiliate marketing is controlled by you the website owner.

Blogs live and die by their audience. Knowing what kind of material you are exposing to your blog’s audience is crucial to ensure that you aren’t showing them something that will turn them away unknowingly.

Control can be regained by using affiliate marketing in place of in addition to straight ad monetization.

Better still, affiliate marketing usually occurs by making recommendations to the reader inside the content of your articles which is gives you the opportunity of controlling the timing as well.

Targeted to your audience

Ad explained briefly above, what is shown to your audience when you use advertising to monetize is usually at the mercy of the highest bidder.

With affiliate marketing this isn’t the case because you are the one deciding what offers to promote to your audience and as such you have the ability to target more specific offers.

Targeting can really boost your conversion rate of people clicking on these links because you can target offers towards people that are predisposed to buy.

Rising Popularity

Big organisations are now following the lead of other internet companies like Amazon and setting up affiliate ventures with bloggers.

There is immense power in the blogosphere as a semi-personal recommendation engine for the viral spread of products.

It’s for these reasons, the combination of companies cottoning on and bloggers looking for better ways to monetize, that affiliate marketing is getting more popular as a way to monetize your blog.