Affiliate Marketing Tips: Earn Money Online on Huge Scale

Affiliate marketing is an easy way to make money online so here is 15 Actionable affiliate marketing tips & strategies. Affiliate marketing industry is thriving and has become a multi-billion dollar industry in many key markets such as the United States.

According to a recent study, 80% of brands and 80% of publishers have joined affiliate marketing programs.

The benefit of Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs have the vast reach and they are backed by a ready to tap audience and most affiliate programs do not require any payment to join.

In simple terms, the principle behind affiliate marketing is offering of the commission to affiliates by merchants as a thanks-giving for sending customers for exercising their own marketing efforts.

The bridge between Merchants and Marketers

Affiliate programs work like the bridge between affiliate marketers who promote products and services and merchants who offer the products and affiliates programs.  Publishers put banner ads, buttons or links to the merchant’s website site to drive promotions. As soon as a visitor clicks on a link or makes a purchase through the link, the webmaster is offered a commission.

The advantage is that affiliate program is easy to set-up and any niche is advisable. All you have to do is sign-up, and paste the tracking code to the site.

Why Affiliate Marketing Tips?

Knowing affiliate marketing tips are essential as the majority of affiliate marketers earn poorly compared to experienced marketers who take a home six-figure commission every month.

This explains the huge disparity between strugglers and winners in affiliate marketing industry where the latter is strong in affiliate marketing tips.

Why Right Strategy Makes a Winner

The reason why most affiliates fail to get the best results is the ignorance of the correct affiliate marketing ideas and inability to apply best affiliate marketing tips to earn handsomely.

Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners

As far as affiliate marketing tips for beginners are concerned about choosing the right products is the crucial step. All best products must be high on the acceptance level of the audience.

Obviously, affiliate marketing tips with favourite brands will be more comfortable to work with as Amazon or Apple. But the products need to be loved by the audience. In affiliate marketing, promoting products that cater to the taste of audience heightens the success and conversion rates.

How to Find Products?

By joining an affiliate network, it is easy to find suitable products and services. For example, office supplies go to companies selling office supplies and use filters to arrive at the desired product.

Keyword Research: One of the most important affiliates marketing secrets is the brilliance on keyword research with latest tools like Long Tail Pro to attract more people into the content, generate commissions and in finding the best products to promote.

Select keywords with low to medium competition. They must be high in search volume in a month with a good profitability score. In case the keywords related to the product under promotion fail to meet these criteria, better abandon that product and look for something else.

Inserting and Tracking Affiliate Links: Before testing the affiliate strategy in the wider market, copy-paste codes in content and track performance. Most affiliate networks and programs have tools in the dashboard as in WordPress where link plugins offer updates on clicks, best pages etc.

Popular Techniques for Marketing: For becoming a top affiliate marketer, a good number of customers need to be referred to the affiliate website under a promotion method.

Among the many ways to promote a product, let us look at some proven marketing promotional methods.

SEO: Among the affiliate marketing tips and tricks, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important n terms of hiking visibility of a website or a web page in search engines in the unpaid or algorithmic route on search results. But do not expect instant results though it can be extremely rewarding in the long run.

PPC: In PPC relevant keywords are bid which is related to the product being marketed. To excel in PPC knowledge of AdWords and idea on keywords that make faster conversions is essential.

Incentive and Referrals: In incentives and referrals customers are rewarded for coming back to a business frequently and for recommending the business to friends. Incentive websites offer affiliates points, cash, donations to a charity, and even merchandise.

Email marketing: Using monthly newsletter is a good way of internet marketing promotion. But common affiliate email efforts include sending content via email, promoting special or new products and offering free products. For affiliate email marketing plans, a series of email templates and their strategic rotation to reach people will help.

Coupon: Many online shoppers want discounts while shopping and they search for discounting websites. That is websites like Groupon, RetailMeNot and Coupon Cabin are making a splash.

Social Media Presence: In affiliate marketing tips the huge clout of social media needs to be leveraged for promotion.

Powerful Content: Affiliates can also publish content to a destination website. Many affiliate marketers use blogs as a vehicle for promotion which is also useful for SEO targeting.

Publish Reviews: Reviews are sought after by consumers and can be a very effective method for affiliate marketing. Write about a product and drop a link to where it can be purchased, or feature that product on your social media/blogging platform.

In return, the reviewer can get a discount or a free product to try out in exchange for the honest feedback.

Important Affiliate marketing tips

There are many pearls of wisdom by industry experts on affiliate marketing tips.

Beat the Competition: According to Mícheál Brennan, Content Marketing Manager, at Design Wizard, affiliate marketers need to concentrate on SEO more to ensure surging traffic for their sites.

Brennan says the best way to become a successful affiliate marketer is to be an SEO shark and get into in the top three spots in search results.

To beat the competition, white hat SEO is best as black hat may end up penalizing the site even if traffic grows. More visitors to the site will mean more clicks on affiliate links and good revenue.

Making an email list is advisable as it will pay off even if a site is penalized for any black hat tactics. Even in that case, the revenue will not be affected as the offers keep coming from the list.

Opt for Most Profitable Affiliate Program: In the words of Dhruv Patel, co-founder of SalesHandy amidst the plethora of products on the market, select only the very best to promote.

The most important thing is that the product must fit into the niche where you are good. That suggests avoiding the mistake of chasing popular products or megabrands where high competition prevails and conversions become hard.

To be sure of success, choose a product that has low competition and higher chances to convert from the audience you are building or has developed already.

It is also important to choose products that yield recurring commissions. For a high return on investment always work with a limited number of products and be aggressive in the promotion.

Have Faith in the Product Marketed: In the view of Aaron Hall, Content Specialist at best company be strong faith in a product or service affiliated is the recipe for success in affiliate marketing. If the webmaster is unsure of a product, the audience will not accept it and the campaign will go to waste.

He notes that relationships with companies get stronger from a commitment to being a loyal customer. Authenticity will translate as loyalty to the brand.

Low-cost Marketing Campaign: According to Megan Headley, Research Director, TrustRadius one advantage of affiliate marketing is the option of using low-cost tools.

One can use free email marketing tools such as MailChimp to build an email list and send out a good number of newsletters or offers to the audience.

In order to assess the quality of affiliate partners social media monitoring tools like Mention can help.

There are also many free surveys and pop-up tools in understanding what type of content the audience is interested in. To test the efficacy of a campaign, track and compare with other affiliate marketing initiatives such as Google AdWords.

Mistakes to Avoid in Affiliate Marketing

Gayathri Ravichandran, marketing lead at Freshworks cautions that the small mistakes committed by affiliate marketers can turn costly.  She pinpoints to certain areas of failure.

One blunder is an affiliate going overboard and bombarding followers with too much on the product. Second is pushing the product in irrelevant groups and forums by constant emailing and messaging to user groups with no result in sight.

Another grave mistake is the affiliate not leveraging opportunities coming up during holiday seasons by offering coupons and other freebies.

The basic failure comes from not devoting enough time to research and finding the right target audience for the product. Also, there might be lack of mechanisms in ensuring that people trying a product are equipped with the best information.

Affiliates also must pay enough attention to social media. They must exercise good patience in the early phase as building a strong affiliate marketing structure takes time and should not quit during the initial stages of becoming an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing Trends 2018

Affiliate marketing is not only evolving but thriving. However, the landscape of affiliate marketing is fast changing, and the top trends are evident now. As affiliate marketing continues to thrive, 2018 is becoming a year of changes with the industry getting smarter and strategic.

Affiliate Marketing is for Specialists: The days of catch-all approach, offering traffic to thousands of sites, with no authority is gone. In 2018, advertisers have more focus on smaller groups which are credible, targeted and have a good influence.

Focus on Native Ads: Native advertisements with look and style in sync with the platform they appear are edging out banner ads.  Therefore, marketers leveraging social media including Instagram are showing ads that are hard to differentiate as ads.

According to a study, consumers see native ads 53 percent more regularly though display ads are providing 74% of the ad revenue. It means creating native ad experiences is important in capturing customers.

Advertising beyond Display: Affiliate marketing is already high in mobile ads and it is growing into video, voice and other areas. According to Business Insider forecast, the video will capture 82% of all internet traffic by 2021 with live video taking an upper hand.

Mobile Advertising and Customer Focus: The affiliate marketing industry is shifting toward mobile, with 50% growth in 2017 came from mobile purchases. The focus of 2018 will be integrating mobile with other aspects of the customer journey.

Popular Affiliate Programmes

Now let us know some of the most popular affiliate programmes.

Terra leads: It is a direct advertiser of Nutra showcasing the beauty, health, and adult products. The approval rates are high backed by call-centres where native speakers operate.

A TerraLeads partner will get 24/7 multilingual support, can track leads in real time, and there is withdrawal facility of money on a daily basis by multiple e-payment systems.

Clickbank: Clickbank has a vast inventory of digital information products. This huge online retailer has 6 million unique products that reach 200 million customers across the world.

Wide Markets: Wide Markets Ltd is noted for cross-channel advertising solution for eCommerce. Advertisers can sell goods and services by way of native products created by Wide Markets.

RakutenRakut: This erstwhile Buy.com, is one of the top three e-commerce companies in the world with 38,500 shop owners and 20 million customers in tow. Japan’s e-commerce site Rakuten Ichiba is the largest e-in the in terms of sales.

CJ Affiliate by Conversant: This was Commission Junction in the past. CJ Affiliate by Conversant reaches millions of consumers shopping online through affiliate marketing network.

The Conversant, Inc. companies include Commission Junction, Dotomi, Greystripe, Mediaplex, and ValueClick Media.

Types of Affiliate Commission Payments

Now the channels of payment can be looked into. Most affiliate programs use three types of payments.

Pay-per-Sale: This popular payment option comes as commissions from the merchant when each time a client is to the merchant’s website and an actual purchase is made.

Some affiliate programs offer a percentage of the sale as commission while others have a fixed rate as a payout.

Pay-per-Click: In Pay-Per-Click affiliate marketers get fixed rates depending on the number of clients who click on the links on the affiliate website linked to the merchant website.

Here purchase is not essential to earn commissions, the customer only needs to click on the link and spend half a minute on the merchant website.

Pay-per-lead: Here the affiliates are paid on the basis of how visitors come to the merchant website and sign up as leads. For the visitor to sign up leads, visitors must fill out the information request form on the merchant site.

Although affiliate programs offer a good earning online, choosing the best affiliate program may not be easy for newbies.

Famous Case Studies on Affiliate Marketing

Thousands of affiliate marketing success stories are out on public domain. One is moneysupermarket.com making its founder a billionaire.

This shows web properties can monetize by affiliate marketing with campaigns becoming a great way to spin fast money.

It may be understood that affiliate marketing is basically a business model that has multiple ways to make generate money. That is borne by the success of consumer search.

Consumer Search was into reviews aggregation. It made money without charging subscription fee by pushing traffic to Amazon.

The site was so successful that the founders sold it to the New York Times for $32 million.

Consumer Search spots out the products of high quality that can develop high consumer trust.

They publish reviews after filtering out one and five-star reviews and take up the reviews in the middle as they are more honest and build high credibility.