Ways to be successful in the affiliate marketing industry
Affiliate marketing, which is a form of “helpful advertising”, sees marketers offer content to an audience in search of a specific product or service. Whether it’s in the form of a blog post, social media posts, or a YouTube video, the content produced functions to answer the questions of the audience and convince them to purchase the product or service.
Affiliate marketers need to be an authority on a specific topic to be successful. To establish yourself as a successful affiliate marketer, you should follow these steps and tricks:
Find brands/customers that match your product or service expertise
Brands need high-ranking affiliates that offer benefits to them and their customers. Most brands will start off by looking for affiliates in their niche, so decide which area you want to specialise in and be the best in that category. For brands, finding an affiliate that works in their niche and that has a strong audience will is a massive win and guaranteed to set you up for success.
Drive diversity in your audience
To be successful, you need to have a wide audience with a range of different interests. When starting out, you may have a very limited audience, but as you progress you will need to build a more diverse offering for your clients. Brands will be evaluating your performance every two to three months, so make sure you are always growing your audience and that your audience is diverse and representative of your clients ‘perfect’ and desired customer.
Create impactful content
To make a living off affiliate marketing, the content you create needs to meet specific standards. You will need to know how to write and communicate in a way that’s broad and easily understood while answering the questions of each target audience. You will also need knowledge of how to utilise calls to action so that it is informational and transactional. You also need to develop a respect for your customer’s brand if you are using their logos to attract interest to your campaigns.
Keep track of your success
To prove that the content you produce is achieving the desired results, you will need to track your affiliate marketing’s success. Tracking your content will also shed light on what content has worked and what hasn’t worked.
You should focus on visitor analytics to form a closer connection with the audience you reach. Visitor analytics will reveal what percentage are new versus returning visitors, which pages or content get the most attention, and which links in your navigation bar get clicked. Mostly though, you will need to be tracking goals that are aligned with your clients’ objectives and your revenue. Usually, affiliates are paid per lead or per closed deal or sale. Decide on the model that makes more sense to you financially and then spend 20% of the time setting up campaigns and 80% of the time analysing and reporting on results. Not enough focus on results and analytics is why most affiliates fail.
Study your products or services
Affiliate marketers specialise in making recommendations so that products and services can be sold. Brands will likely use a range of different affiliate marketers. This means you will have competitors marketing the same products and services for your client, which makes your job a bit more difficult. To succeed and separate yourself from the pack, you need to know your client’s product or service inside and out, know your market, and understand your audience. This will allow you to market it originally and thoroughly.
Stimulate engagement
To maintain and stimulate engagement on your page or platform, you need to communicate with your audience in a frequent but meaningful way. Whether you have a blog or post most of your content on social media, allows for and can stimulate commentary.
At the end of the content pose questions like “Let me know if you would like to know more!” or “Let me know what you think in the comments”. These types of calls to action stimulate interaction and engagement. This will also be a good sign for like-minded visitors when looking for a like-minded community.
Collaborate with an influencer
Utilising your audience combined with an influencer’s audience can be extremely profitable, but remember, the influencer does not have to always be big. Brands and affiliate marketers with a smaller budget have been successful by focusing on micro and nano influencers. When partnering with an influencer you need to ensure that the two brands correlate and that the product or service is presented in a way that is easily digestible for all audiences.
In closing, affiliate marketing is a highly specialised skill. Focusing on what your client’s objectives are and aligning them to the correct audiences is the foundation for success.