Affiliate Marketing Strategies and Tips for Success

Affiliate marketing is a hugely popular choice for people trying to earn a living online. With affiliate networks providing links to hundreds of well known Merchants, offering all manner of products and services, it certainly looks at first glance to be a good option to earn decent money.

Of course when you break the surface it turns out that affiliate marketing is actually quite difficult; quite difficult to get right at least. Only a very small percentage of publishers that join affiliate networks generate enough income to earn a living from it. So, what’s the difference between these ‘super’ affiliates, and everyone else?

One vital difference between the super affiliates and the masses is the amount of work invested. No online revenue stream offers a short path to a pot of gold and, as with any other line of work, becoming successful at it requires a lot of effort. Given that, here are a selection of the strategies and tips that when applied with an equal measure of effort, can lead to affiliate success.

Understand Your Audience

Critical to affiliate marketing success is to understand your audience. Without this understanding you won’t know what they’re more likely to be interested in buying, and guessing is a sure fire route to low conversion.

Your understanding of your audience doesn’t need to start out very complex. You can learn and get more sophisticated in your analysis as you progress, but you should at least have a starting point. For instance, if you have content about a sporting event, relevant merchandise from sporting goods suppliers is going to convert better than house insurance.

Start simple, and build on your knowledge of your audience as it increases.

Be Honest With Your Audience

When you’re thinking about implementing affiliate links never try and trick your visitors into clicking on them. Trust is an important issue in maintaining a loyal following and breaking that trust by disguising affiliate links, making false claims, or otherwise fooling your audience is guaranteed to lose you traffic and sales simultaneously.

It’s your audience, you need to cultivate them and build a relationship based on trust. If they don’t trust you they’re not going to recommend you, give you back links, or even become repeat visitors, and they’re certainly not going to trust your affiliate links.

The more honest you are with your audience, the better. Tell them that you use affiliates that are carefully chosen to match their interests, that when they buy through these merchants they’re supporting your site. You could even ask them for feedback on whether they agree with your choices of merchants. Surveying your visitors can offer affiliate options you hadn’t even considered before. So if you’ve already got a loyal visitor base, it’s well worth asking the question.

Be Selective With Your Merchants

It’s not simply a case of teaming up with the one Merchant you can find that sells “Blue Widgets”. You’re exposing your visitors to this Merchant by recommendation so if the merchant turns out to have terrible customer service, that reflects back on you.

If you can only find one merchant that sells a particular product but you know they have a bad reputation, don’t use them anyway. Independently approach their main competitors and explain your predicament, (I want to sell Blue Widgets, but the only partner I can find I don’t like. Can you help?) When you put a question like that to them you’ll almost certainly get a favourable response.

Not every company advertises for affiliates so it’s always worth approaching merchants you want to work with directly, even if they don’t appear to have an affiliate program. They could simply be screening so they don’t have to waste time with less serious affiliates.

Build a Relationship with Your Merchants

When you’re working closely with your merchant partners you can gain an advantage over your competitors. As you start to prove your worth through selling their products, your partners will share more and more information with you.

You can use this information to generate interest in new products early, offer promotions on products they want to sell off, or get some “insider information” on upcoming trends to share with your visitors.

Your merchants will be happy to provide you with this because they want your visitors to know about these developments. Ideally, you get free content ideas that also generate you further income.

Grow Your Relationship with Your Audience

Don’t forget in all of this though, your visitors come first. Don’t force promotions and offers that they’re unlikely to be interested in. Remember, you own the relationship with your visitor base and while merchant partners can come and go, your audience is where your value lies.

Integrate your affiliate partners into your site in this way, treating it more as a value added service for your visitors than merely a revenue stream for you and you should start to see your earnings through affiliation increasing. How much they do, is down to how hard you’re prepared to work to make it happen.