Affiliate marketing is one of the ways of making money online if you are a blogger or a website owner. In fact, affiliate marketing can provide a decent earning for you as online personnel. We all know that even before the internet started, people have been marking money through a program called a referral. Although this program is very much in use in today’s world. However, as the internet space began to gain more popularity, business modules started changing and this gave birth to affiliate marketing. Which is like an upgraded version of the old referral program. The great thing in this module of business is, you don’t have to deal with customer service or creating new product ideas or inventories.
Today, affiliate marketing has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry on which marketers all over the world capitalize every day. Promoting other companies’ products or services, or allowing them to advertise yours, extends the overall audience reach and significantly enhances sales. This business module can also create passive lines of income for years to come.
If you have huge traffic for your blog, affiliate marketing may be a good fit for you to start your monetization strategies. But you want to do it well. Otherwise, it could damage your reputation or become a giant hassle. Take the time to do it right. Keep these dos and don’ts of affiliate marketing in mind.
Post Contents
The DOs in Affiliate Marketing
Make Sure you Do a Proper Research
Although starting an affiliate marketing website is very easy and can be done within minutes, this doesn’t mean that you should jump into it blindly without any planning or whatsoever.
You know that this is a new business module you are embarking on, so you need to do proper research and come up with a good business plan for your affiliate website.
You need to figure out what you want to focus on, what niche will work best for you, who your target audience would be, and how you can reach these people to satisfy their needs. Think about how you’ll want to promote links, how much you’d like to be making, and what types of efforts you’ll need to put forth to try and make that happen. Just because you set up an affiliate site doesn’t mean the money is going to make its way into your wallet immediately. You need to take all things into consideration and also put in the work.
Chose a Product or Service that You Love
The worst thing you could do on your affiliate marketing journey is jumping on the bandwagon to promote a new product or service only to hear from your readers or followers that the product or service is of poor quality. As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t want your fans sending you nightmare messages about their bad experience with a product or service that you recommended to them. This is why you need to do really good product research and make sure you work with a product or service that you love.
If it’s a product you love to work with, you need to spend time looking through reviews and checking on the reputation of the company. You need to also, check with other bloggers who partner with that company; see if they recommend an affiliate arrangement or not.
You can also ask to try the product; many companies will give you access to it in some manner.
Be Honest with Your Contents and Reviews
Promoting your affiliate links should be all about shouting and raving about the products and services you’re affiliated with. As hash, as it may sound, doing this, may come off as in-genuine. What your consumers really want is to read honest reviews and get truthful information about things they want to buy before they click the purchase button. Will you be able to give them that honesty?
Rather than just shouting about how great a product is or how much you loved a certain product or service, talk about it as if you were talking to your best friend. What did you like? What didn’t you like or felt like could be improved? When did you use it? What were your reactions to it? Who do you think it’s good for?
In a nutshell, as a beginning or even experienced affiliate marketer, you really shouldn’t promote links that you don’t like or are not sure of the product. Also, if all you say are positive things about the things you share, sooner or later, your site visitors will start to wonder if you’re telling the truth or more concerned with just making a sale.
Use A Good Call-to-Action
When your readers are going through your website or newsletter, it’s a good practice to always try to convince them to click through to an advertiser page. The trick is to seduce your visitor with an attractive button or link.
This is known as call-to-action. This call-to-action button or text must be clearly visible to every visitor at a glance. You can do this by working with a completely different color than the rest of your content. Most times, buttons are used with a bright orange or green color, depending on the colors that you are currently using.
The messaging in your call-to-action button is also very important. It must be attractive for the visitor to click through. The text must call the visitor to take action, literally.
Words such as ‘Click here or ‘Send’ do not do the tricks anymore.
A number of examples of a good call-to-action subject line:
‘Request a free quote,’
‘Get the FREE eBook Here’
‘Check out the coupons’
‘Try 1 month free now! Etc.
Want to know more about Digital Advertising? Go here… Digital Advertising
Use High Conversion Campaign for your Affiliate Marketing
Choosing the right campaigns with a high conversion rate will most likely generating a good amount of income from your visitors. We always think that going for a campaign with the highest commission will give the best result. However, the big question should be – whether this campaign also converts well. Affiliate networks often provide insight into the campaigns with the best conversion, but the stats are often misleading.
For instance, credit card offers have the highest commission rate and often a very high conversion. A regular affiliate marketer may be tempted to grab the offer and start promoting, only to find out the offers don’t measure up.
Why?
Because affiliates who promote credit card offers are often large firms (or even banks) with a huge advertising budget, which you can never beat. They have high conversions because they pay for PPC campaigns and deal with a highly expensive and targeted audience. Hence, the high conversion rate.
The Don’ts in Affiliate Marketing
Do not Rush Your Affiliate Marketing Business
Irrespective of the fact that you want to make money online, you should understand that affiliate marketing is not a way to get rich quickly. Lots of people go into it with the mindset of making hundreds of thousands in their first month or two. To tell you the truth, this is just not realistic at all. It can take months before you start to see any money coming in, and people who do get paid early on aren’t simply lucky people—they likely put in a load of hard work to make it happen.
There’s definitely nothing wrong with putting in all your effort and hard work on this, especially if you’re a beginner affiliate marketer. But you need to understand that your income won’t exactly match up with your efforts at first. This is why people who have too high expectations for their paycheck end up being disappointed, and then usually abandon their efforts after a few months. But with more realistic expectations, you’ll be much more able to stick with it.
Do not Only Share Popular Products Or Services
Competition is good for businesses, but sometimes, you need to step aside from the competition and try standing alone.
We all know that in affiliate marketing, everyone wants to go for the hot-selling products because they feel that’s where the money is. But when you can, it is advisable to branch off and share things that not everyone else is talking about.
When you do this, it will make you look more knowledgeable about your niche. Indeed, anyone could really hop on Google and pick out a few popular items in a category to promote, but if you’re sharing something in a niche that fewer people have heard about, you’re clearly much more in the know.
Also, this will give you less competition. When people go online to know more about a product before they buy it, you have a much higher chance of popping up in search engine results. When you have to compete with other bloggers and affiliate marketers, your information could get lost in the mix. If you are, however, one of the few options that come up, there’s a higher chance you’ll lock in the sale.
Read Also… Top 10 ways to monetize a website
Do not Advertise Products That Aren’t related to Your Niche
This is very simple and straightforward. All products or services you advertise on your site should be relevant to your readers. Don’t advertise hair products on a weight loss page and do not advertise baby products on an adult site. Doing this may be very misleading to your audience. Be sure the things you promote are of value to your specific audience. If, for example, your environmentally conscious readers start seeing advertisements for a new muscle car on your blog, they will probably wonder about your ethics and take their readership to a different site.
Do not Promote Dozens of Products on 1 Page
It will be a bad habit if you are among those websites with ten or more (affiliate) advertisements on a page. This can of information would easily distract the readers of your blog or newsletter. When you recommend too many different products on your site, your visitor would soon be irritated and annoyed by the oversaturated page and may bounce and probably not even come back.
this is a common mistake made by affiliate publishers that results in disappointing results.
It is wise to choose to promote fewer campaigns may be between 1-5 that smoothly fits into your blogging niche.
By keeping the focus on your blog or newsletter with very few campaigns, you will see that you generate more clicks and achieve better results.
Check out the Top 5 topics you can start blogging on today to make more money
Do not Engage in Click Bait – Misleading Information to Generate Clicks
This is a very big “NO” in affiliate marketing. Providing incorrect information as an affiliate publisher to your followers is a quick way to send your blog or site to the dust.
A classic example of this is when you promote service as “FREE” but once the visitor has registered, it suddenly asks you to pay. Or, you offer discount/coupon codes as clickable through an affiliate link however, these coupons are inactive.
All this is done with only one goal in mind, to get the visitor to click through the affiliate link as promptly as possible.
Click baiting is absolutely not how affiliate marketing should be done and you should avoid it.
The advertiser will not be happy with false advertising information about his product, and the visitor is confused and will be left disappointed.
So, you should always carefully check the content you display on your site and show accurate information on your website or in your newsletter.
Conclusion
In this content, I outlined 10 tips overall for you to look through. 5 DOs and 5 DON’Ts. Hopefully, the above 10 tips can help you as an affiliate publisher, and you will keep them in mind in order to achieve good results. Remember to choose properly fitting affiliate campaigns and avoiding common mistakes. Good luck as you succeed on your affiliate marketing journey.
