Affiliate Marketing is one of the ways bloggers make money. If you’ve been on this blog before, you probably must have come across Harsh’s eBook on Affiliate Marketing and Income Reports.
The eBook is an excellent resource if you are starting the business or just want to add more knowledge to your arsenal.
I do make money with Affiliate Marketing. As a matter of fact, I have written a highly resourceful eBook on affiliate marketing for bloggers. Quite frankly, I bought a copy of Harsh’s and still found massive value to add to my knowledge.
I recommend you grab a copy of his book here.
The income report series on this blog is a clear demonstration of the power of Affiliate Marketing. Quite evidently, this money making model accounts for the biggest share of this blog’s monthly income.
These are just some of the earning reports where affiliate marketing is the biggest gainer. You may want to click here for more of these highly encouraging income reports.
Why Affiliate Marketing Stands out
As a matter of fact, there are several other ways to monetize your blogging activity. On my blog, I have written a detailed post on 15 ways bloggers make money. Some of these methods require a lot more work from you. You will have to do the things you do in affiliate marketing and even more.
There are only two things you do in affiliate marketing:
- Select a relevant product to promote
- Drive targeted traffic to the product.
While these seem like a mouse-click exercise, there is more to it. The first point of selecting a relevant product is where some bloggers fail. And that completely negates the rest of their efforts.
Coming to point two, it takes knowledge, skills, smartness and hard work. It’s never easy to drive that targeted traffic that translates to affiliate commissions. But if you can drive some drops of visitors to your blog, follow my simple steps below to see a boost in your income.
But why Affiliate Marketing?
Doing business online is not just about choosing the right business idea, creating the business and driving traffic to your business website. There is more to that, and these include:
- Service/Product maintenance and upgrade
- After-sales services
- Product delivery
- Customer support
- Taxes, etc…
These are not things you are ever going to do with Affiliate Marketing. All you do is select the right product and keep driving traffic. The product owner pays your commissions and handles the product maintenance and after-sales services.
That’s what makes affiliate marketing more exciting and relatively easier to do. But it’s even more challenging because of changing consumer behavior and competition.
So what’s my proposed new approach towards Affiliate marketing?
To help your understanding of my idea, let’s examine some traditional methods to do affiliate marketing. These are things most of us do and without a considerable amount of traffic, we end of with somewhat discouraging earnings:
1 – Affiliate Product Reviews
Whether you like it or not, bloggers are making a lot of money using this evergreen method. You simply choose a relevant product and sign up to its affiliate platform. Study the product a bit and write about it on your blog.
Writing review blog posts that challenge your competitors requires skills. Review posts with a high conversion rate have three things they focus on:
- Product features
- Product Uses
- Case studies
On this blog, there are a lot of affiliate product review posts that account for the massive earnings in those reports. This is actually working for Harsh and the huge amount of natural traffic he gets on this blog.
However, in a couple of minutes, you will be reading about my proposal to completely turn your earnings around too. Do take advantage of schema markup WordPress plugins to stand out in search results.
2 – Affiliate banners
Do they still work?
Yes! Affiliate banners can generate good affiliate income. But the effectiveness of this affiliate marketing model is threatened by banner blindness.
This is a situation where your readers unconsciously ignore banners on your blog. These banners are generally on sidebars where they become less targeted. Make sure to rotate the ads and use techniques so that your ads are not blocked by ad blockers. You can use a plugin like WP Advanced ads.
3 – Affiliate links
This involves turning keywords in your articles into affiliates links. You are either doing this manually or using a plugin that automatically scans your articles and creates the links. Yes, it does work if your article gets read but using the plugin can sometimes make your writings really messy.
If you don’t control the number of links per page, the plugin can go wild and make your articles really nasty. A well-designed affiliate marketing links plugin should allow you tweak some settings to control how it does the conversion exercise.
We know how tough competition goes these days. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to attract more readers to our articles that will click on those links and become customers.
4 – Newsletter Market
We’ve been told that the money is in the list and that’s true. There are two things that can make affiliate marketing with list building a huge success:
- The size of the list
- Relevance
Size is important but targeting is what makes the sales. If you have a huge list of irrelevant subscribers, you may never make any affiliate sales mailing to it. I’m not talking about list building in this post so I won’t go into any further details.
5 – Email signature
While I use my email signatures for branding, I have seen some users adding affiliate links to theirs. Of course, some affiliate product owners recommend this method. And if some folks still use it, it means they are getting results.
These are some of the ways we traditionally do affiliate marketing. For websites with high traffic, it gets easy to place targeted banners on sidebars and generate sales. But if you want to affect your blogging income positively without a necessary increase in traffic, apply these smart techniques.
How you should do affiliate marketing differently
Trust me if you do these things, you will see different results. The reason I’m so confident about it is because I have been applying them and seeing results. This is also practical and has a psychological push.
There are people reading your blog because they trust you and like what you do. They believe you are a success. This is crucial. If you know this, you can use it to your own advantage. Here is what to do in steps:
1 – Select relevant product and own a copy
I mentioned earlier that this step is very decisive. If you make the wrong choice, you may end up not getting any commissions at all. But if you’ve succeeded in locating a product that’s super-targeted to your niche, get a copy and use it.
The reason is that using a product gives you the best level of experience and marketing power. It gives you the required amount of data to share with your audience and drive them near a purchase action.
There are two ways to own a copy of any product you want to promote:
- Buy it from the vendor
- Negotiate and get a free review copy
Once you’ve gotten your own copy, use it to its fullness. Exploit all its features and record the results you get from using the product. This leads us to point two below.
This is what Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome says:
Do you see why these guys are making crushing figures while we chase the flies?
2 – Showcase your results
Here, you are beginning to smell the commissions. By sharing your results with your audience, you bring them closer to buying the same product.
Share the problems you faced and how that product helps you get the solution. If you use the product appropriately as I recommend above, you will be able to come up with enough data and information to prove its effectiveness.
3 – Teach your audience how to
Now, this is the most exciting, connecting phase. Your readers who want the same results as you and would want to clone your methods for the results.
That’s how humans function. We have the innate tendency to want to copy what works for others. When you do multiple how-to posts, based on your experience and couple with your data-backed results, you will be able to achieve a high boost conversion rate.
That’s just it.
It’s how I’m doing it and turning my readers into buyers. Harsh installed Thrive comments. Look at the comment section on this blog. After having the practical experience, he wrote this review. It will be difficult not to make sales!
Wrapping up!
Let me know what you think about this Affiliate Marketing working method. Share your comments below.
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