Affiliate Marketing: 10 Simple Hacks for Beginners
Earning Passive Income with Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a popular and great way to generate passive income.Even if you have not business or product of your own. The best part is you don’t need lot of experience to start.
All you need is the right amount of information and commitment in your part. As long as you have a smartphone with internet connection, then you’re good to go.
In order for you to get the best results from your efforts, we have put together tips to help you start as a beginner in affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
In simple terms, affiliate marketing is the act of promoting goods and services for businesses and receiving a certain compensation when a sale is made.
It is a form of performance-based marketing where businesses offer rewards or commissions to affiliates for customer referrals generated from the advertisement made by the affiliate.
From a business owner perspective, the affiliate marketing model is a marketing strategy that involves third parties promoting products or services for a merchant, brand, or vendor and receiving a commission from sales or web traffic generated.
Who is an Affiliate Marketer?
Affiliate marketers are individuals, which consist of bloggers, YouTubers, and content creators, who carry out research and reviews on products or services that are relevant to a target audience and publish their findings as a form of promotion via their various channels. They are also known as publishers. These publishers engage in affiliate marketing to promote a merchant’s goods or services either via product integration, website content, or social media in exchange for a percentage of sales or web traffic.
As an affiliate marketer, you earn a percentage of revenue from sales or web traffic generated when you promote a business’s goods or services. To do this, you are required to form partnerships with businesses through their affiliate programs.
How to start affiliate marketing?
As an affiliate marketer you have to do your homework, get to know the audience you’re selling to.That way you’ll be able to develop creative contents that appeals to the audience you’re trying to sell to.
But first you need to have a channel that would serve as a promotion platform. You can decide to run a blog, start a YouTube channel, or position yourself on social media. Businesses look out for quality content that can pave the way for their product’s promotion.
Now lets get down to business, and uncover the tactics you can employ to get the most results even if you’re still a beginner.
Know your target audience
This is the first step to seeing any glimpse of success in your efforts t With comprehensive research on the product you’re selling and the people interested in it, you can nail a good number of sales.
The next step is to understand your target audience and determine their interests. Promoting a product that suits your target audience’s needs would encourage them to act on your promotional adverts.
To tailor your affiliate marketing strategy, you must develop an understanding of who your target audience is, their lifestyle, challenges as well as what can convince them to make a purchase decision.
This would give an insight into your content creation structure and how to establish a good relationship with your audience. The value you provide influences whether your target audience would be willing to go the extra mile in the sales process.
Select a niche/product
It is important to choose a niche to gain authority and develop an audience base. This helps you select the type of products to promote. Ensure your niche is something you find interesting and easy to create content around. There should be products available in this niche for you to promote—so keep that in mind when carrying out your research.
Also, note that the niche and products must complement each other. A finance platform should not advertise fashion products if the platform is dedicated to finance. Your target audience would be more inclined to finance products like saving and investments apps than the latest fashion collection. Promoting products that differ a lot from your niche would not attract the desired result from your affiliate marketing strategy. The relevance of your ads increases your chance to generate more sales and earn commissions.
You may find a niche that seems too broad or saturated, our advice is for you to niche down and find a specific area in that niche where you can thrive. For example, if you are looking to start a fashion platform, you can narrow it down to creating fashion content for pregnant women which gives way to promote products that pregnant women would find very useful and relevant.
Connect and build relationships with affiliate partners.
Many brands and businesses have affiliate programs in place as part of their online marketing strategy. With this affiliate program, they announce promotional offers for all affiliates joining the program and state the terms of each offer. This ensures you know what to expect when joining the program.
Find an affiliate program that offers relevant products you can promote on your channel. With an established and strong target audience base, you can reach out to affiliate partners (brands and businesses) to get exclusive discounts that would make you exceptional and different from other affiliates. This would help you gain incentives for your audience as well as urge them to engage with your affiliate links.
For example, a business offers a 14-day free trial before a subscription to their product plans—as an affiliate you can connect with the business to get your customers extra 7 days, making it a total of 21 days of the free trial before subscription. This helps you generate more sales leads while delivering value to the audience that engages with your affiliate link.
Do not limit yourself to just one affiliate program. The objective is to generate revenue– so be sure to diversify as this gives a sense of security in case one affiliate decides to modify its commission structure. Also, it gives more options to create more content.
Create compelling and honest product reviews and tutorials.
Reviews and tutorials are useful resources to generate leads and boost your credibility. Giving detailed content on how to use a particular product and how you perceive its value will help customers with strong desires to purchase conclude on the product.
Tutorial content provides value and generates traffic to your channel. Use this medium to keep your target audience engage and establish yourself as a valuable resource. People tend to stick around when you keep providing solutions to their challenges.
Reviews have helped 9 in 10 customers finalize their purchase decision. As an upcoming affiliate, your reviews need to be as honest as possible. Try not to raise a product bar higher than its reality as this can leave your audience disappointed and you will end up losing their trust.
You can update your reviews at any point you feel your opinion about the product has changed. Avoid repeating points found in common reviews of the product, it can discredit your review. Instead, try out the product and create your reviews.
When writing the review focus on the benefits of the product, that is, what the product can do for your target audience and not just the features. For example, if you are promoting a fan, you should focus on how it can help your target audience reduce the heat and cool off rather than its rotation speed or light blades.
Disclose your affiliate links.
Be honest and open about your affiliate links. Let your target audience know that you are earning a commission when they engage with your affiliate link. This helps to build trust and strengthen your relationship with your target audience. Since trust is a requirement to growing a loyal audience base, rest assured your target audience would trust your recommendations and review of the product you are trying to promote.
Do not mislead your audience by hiding your affiliate relationships. Let them know they are supporting you by using your affiliate link. Ensure to offer your audience incentives and bonuses to create a win-win situation when they use your affiliate link. Coupon codes convert people who haven’t tried the products into buyers.
Stay updated and keep up with trends
The world is always looking for new and better products, so if you can supply them with what they want, you’ll succeed. Whenever there’s a new product out there, people are looking for affiliate marketers who provide them with it especially when a discount is involved. You should keep track of affiliate program offerings and update your channel content as soon as there is a change.
It’s important that you keep your web pages updated. It is a good way to keep them relevant to both users and search engines. Also ensure monitor trends and search for relevant products to add to your channel.
The earlier you jump on a trend, the more advantage you must generate more revenue over your competitors. Ensure you remain on top of the latest trends to deliver valuable content to your target audience.
Track your performance
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable signals that give an insight into the performance over time of a project against its objectives. In plain terms, they are indicators that help you know if your affiliate marketing strategy is going well and producing the desired result.
Metrics like click-through rates— the number of visitors that click your affiliate link and conversion rates— the number of visitors that purchase after clicking your affiliate link can help you track the success of your affiliate marketing strategy.
Leverage email marketing and multichannel strategies
Email marketing can come in handy in affiliate marketing. You can share your affiliate link and recommend products via newsletters. Your email list is an asset that can get your affiliate link to your target audience in one click.
Use your social media pages to recommend products and generate traffic to build an audience. Blogs are useful tools to create relevant content that would generate the traffic you need for your website. Using these channels can help you succeed as an affiliate marketer.
Listen to your target audience recommendations
Your target audience is an important component of your affiliate marketing success. Listening to them can help you develop content that would keep them engaged and build a better relationship.
Take your time to learn what they would love to see. They can recommend products for you to review, guides, interviews to hold, and relevant things that spark their interest. This way you never run out of content and you make them feel valued and appreciated.
Use these tips to find out what the target audience wants:
- Engage them using a survey
- Engage with your target audience in the comment section of your channels
- Check in with blogs, groups, and forums in your niche
Run ads
Want more clicks? Run ads. Ads can help you get your affiliate links in the face of your target audience. If you are struggling with conversation rate, we recommend you run ads with your affiliate link.
Use peak periods as leverage. Festive seasons are peak periods that you can leverage to promote your affiliate link. Promote products during these seasons as you would generate more leads and have more conversations since your target audience would be looking out for discounts and good deals. This can be a good time to build an email list.
Optimize your affiliate link placement
Put your links in strategic places on different pages in your channel. Adopt the use of an ad rotator plugin to make carousel ads to promote your affiliate link.
Conclusions
Affiliate marketing requires patience and effort. To become a successful affiliate marketer, you need a solid affiliate marketing strategy. Get creative and do your research.
The hacks examined above will help you improve your content delivery and set you in motion to achieve your desired result. Practice them and keep learning.
