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Affiliate marketing borrows many of the techniques used in regular internet marketing.
The idea for the affiliate is that they can reach audiences that the business would find cost prohibitive to go after themselves.
Some of the methods include:
- PPC (pay per click) advertising
- CPM advertising
- Blogging
- Reviews
- Email marketing
- Syndication
- SEO (both organic and paid)
- Social media
- … and many more.
Strategy for online affiliate marketing
Having a strategy for doing your affiliate marketing is very important, otherwise it can be a bit like shouting into the wind.
Matching the right visitors up with the right products is part and parcel of our job as affiliate marketers.
Think about what kind of traffic is visiting viewing the links you’re publishing and see if you can bring more relevant people to that page.
At the end of the day, people are buying products on your recommendation and if you want to convert visitors into customers of that product or service you’re going to want to be talking to the right people.
The best strategy tip I can give for affiliate marketing is that you need to ensure your traffic is pre-qualified, this means the people clicking on the link will be more likely to buy and you don’t need to struggle quite so hard to convince people they should buy.
Step by step affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing as a process can be described in a few steps:
- Pick a product, service or business to promote
- Sign up for their affiliate program and download the special link required to send a visitor to them
- Promote their product/service on using your own marketing methods. Reviews are good for this, as are recommendations to people in your circles among many other methods.
- Collect your commissions for sending pre-qualified leads that turn into sales
The third step is obviously the difficult part that most affiliate marketers struggle with. If you can nail the marketing of a product and pitch it to the right people however, it can be quite lucrative.
Affiliate marketing traffic
Getting traffic can be among the hardest challenges facin an affiliate marketer.
There are several methods you can use to get traffic for affiliate marketing and they include things like:
- Writing a blog
- Building a list to market to
- Advertising on other websites
- Forum participation
- Guest posting on blogs
- Social media
- … and many more.
Sometimes affiliate marketers need to get creative with the techniques they use to get traffic to their websites. Sometimes creating link bait can be an effective strategy to get large amounts of attention in a short amount of time.
Other times, affiliate marketers can leverage events and optimize their website using SEO to garner traffic during peak seasonal times (ie. Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc).
Taking Charge Means Taking Responsibility
As I've often mentioned here on this blog, if you want to be successful in the affiliate marketing industry you need to stick at it. I seems like everyday you hear of people making overnight riches with affiliate marketing.
But the skinny truth of it is that it takes a lot of time to build up the audience, get traffic and build trust with these people so they will take your recommendations.
Stick at it, ask questions, listen to your audiences needs and wants and you'll be successful.
Learn more
There is mountains of information to learn about affiliate marketing. Our affiliate marketing blog brings you the best information we can muster, stick around for more.
Click here to find out more about our affiliate link management tool for WordPress.
