What is affiliate marketing
Affiliate Marketing is performance based marketing in which a business rewards an affiliate marketer for attracting visitors or customers to a business website and generates sales for the business.
Read more: What is Affiliate Marketing
How to implement affiliate marketing
When we talk about affiliate marketing, I believe most people will think about Amazon Affiliate Programme (also known as Amazon Associates) and ClickBanks (affiliate marketplace) the big names in affiliate marketing.
What are the secrets of effective affiliate marketing strategies that can help you grow revenue?
It’s all about Engagement.
If you have affiliate products on your page that rank high for searchers in the buying model, it means that your engagement rate is high.
You need a trusted and authoritative website to achieve this goal, which means lots of rich content and affiliate links.
Keep in mind that the same content will attract regular readers first.
However, if you want to build an authoritative website that attracts new subscribers, you can get more than one shot from affiliate marketing.
First, you will favour direct readers who trust you and then continue to generate revenue over time due to the strategic placement of cross-links and search traffic.
There are multiples affiliate marketing strategies and the lowest form of it is engagement, to paste an affiliate banner ad on your website.
We’re not saying that you won’t profit from these banner ads, but it’s not the smartest and the most effective way to leverage your relationship with your audience.
Banner ads won’t rank in search engines after all.
So let’s take a look at these four affiliate marketing strategies that can bring you immediate and long-term benefits from affiliate:
1. Endorsements
Being an affiliate marketer means you are in the group of early adopters (imagine you are KOL, or you already are). The things you share will affect the early majority group’s (your followers) decision to purchase the products.
Assuming that your audience loves your opinions, a personal endorsement would be the strongest way to promote affiliate products.
Effective endorsements must be sincere and enthusiastic based on real experience with the product or service.
However, it is a dangerous game though. If the product or service is not good (probably you introduce the products without experiencing it or just for money), you will undermine your audience’s trust.
Endorsement is more focused on product benefits instead of product functions.
You may find it easier to choose the most compelling benefits in your endorsement because you have experienced these benefits personally.
Sharing how the recommended product or service improves your life will naturally bring benefits.
2. Reviews
Reviews are different from an endorsement in tone and structure, but in the end, you’ll end up with an endorsement nonetheless.
Endorsement mostly talks about the positives of the products. But reviews can be positive or negative.
Writing a negative review may be a good way to vent, but it’s not the smartest revenue affiliate marketing strategies.
The similarity between reviews and endorsement is, you also look at the products and services you use and benefit from.
From the copywriting perspective, you can point out the flaws of the product (nothing is 100% perfect, nothing!) or service to increase credibility and then explain why the flaws will not harm your perception and enjoyment of the product or service.
3. Tutorials
A few years ago, the easiest way to truly implement content-based affiliate marketing was to publish a free e-book containing affiliate links and watch its spread.
This strategy can still be used, but usually, the content must be stronger and the promotion of the affiliate more subtle.
Another long-term strategy is the mini-course through a newsletter, where you can deliver tutorial-style content strategy through an autoresponder and ultimately promote one or more related affiliate products.
Nowadays, making video tutorials showing how to use products or services effectively promotes affiliate products.
Remember, teaching and selling are closely related, so it’s wise to have “how-to” content that may satisfy buyers naturally.
In addition, you can use the broader tutorial content strategy as an “ethical bribe” to attract a new audience to subscribe to your blog or targeted sub-lists so that you can provide multiple related offers over time.
Read More: How to Develop High-Quality Content Marketing?
4. Bonuses
Using bonus or preferential trading methods is a good way to increase audience attention uniquely.
For instance, if people buy products through your link, they will get a special discount, or you have reached a promotional deal (let say S$100 discount for the first 100 purchase) with the merchants, and these offers are only exclusively for your audience.
You can then work the extra value into your endorsement or review with a great headline and benefit-oriented copywriting.
You will find that this strategy is used a lot in the highly competitive pay-per-click situation and in the large-scale product launch process, where many products are promoted at the same time.
But this is one of the very powerful affiliate marketing strategies because it shows that you are focusing on adding value and providing great deals to your audience.
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For more guidance and useful tips on affiliate marketing, check out our other articles.
- 10 High-Converting Ways to Promote Affiliate Products
- Can you make good money with affiliate marketing?
