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When you're Googling around for ways to improve your affiliate marketing campaigns it's hard to see through all the generic advice sometimes.
Recently I came upon a gem of advice and that is to make use of best seller lists with affiliate marketing. It's something that seems so obvious when you look back on it, but it's a very under-used strategy.
Who Should Use Best Seller Lists?
The best kinds of sites that suit this strategy are websites promoting a larger number of products. It doesn't really work if you only promote a handful of products.
If you're promoting dozens, or hundreds or even thousands of products (something that our plugin, ThirstyAffiliates, can handle without skipping a beat by the way) then this strategy is a really great way to call out which products are popular with your community based on your sales data.
How To Use Best Seller Lists To Earn More With Affiliate Marketing
How I use this strategy is in conjunction with the bigger networks (like Amazon). You can also use it in any case where you can reliably report on data across a number of networks that promote your products.
You can usually get some pretty detailed reports about what products have sold via your tracking ID. This data is great to use in these reports to compile your best selling products from the previous quarter.
Once you have the data about what the top products are (I just go with the top 10), this then gets put into a list and linked up with our affiliate links using ThirstyAffiliates.
All in all it takes about 20 minutes to do and gives some really great data to your audience. Lists like this are great to have right at the top of your website as a item in your menu. We've even seen some success in using these best seller lists in the sidebar of websites.
Programmatically Creating Your Best Seller List
Some people choose to have these lists populated programmatically. Many affiliate programs have API access, so you can hook into this and pull out the most popular products this way for particular niches.
I like manually populating these lists though because I can see what is popular with our audience rather than the program as a whole. This all helps when tailoring information on your site as well and since it's a list that you really only need to update every month or quarter then you'd probably spend more time coding it than it's worth.
Earning More With Best Seller Lists
There's plenty of good advice out there, but there's also some really dodgy advice. This is one of the good ones for sure. Since I implemented it on my own niche sites it's revealed another key bit of information to my audience that has resulted in a further uptick in sales.
It's a great way to give more information to your audience and help them in their buying choice, which at the end of the day is what affiliate marketing is all about.
