How To Start Affiliate Marketing | Part 2
In How To Start Affiliate Marketing Part 2, I’ll discuss the:
- Common Types of Affiliate Marketing Channels
- Tips To Help you Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer
- What are the Top Affiliate Marketing Trends of 2023?
- What Affiliate Marketing Strategies Should You Employ in 2023?
- Common Types of Affiliate Marketing Channels.
If you haven’t read Part 1 of How To Start Affiliate Marketing, I suggest you CLICK HERE before you continue.
In Part 1 I wrote about:
- What Is Affiliate Marketing
- How Does Affiliate Marketing Work
- How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid
- And the all important Why Be An Affiliate Marketer
Let’s begin Part 2 with:
Common Types of Affiliate Marketing Channels
Most affiliates marketers share common practices to ensure that their targeted audience is engaged and receptive to purchasing the affiliate’s products. However, not all affiliates advertise or promote the products in the same way. Here I’ll show 5 different ways in which affiliate marketers promote their products.
1. Influencers.
An influencer is an individual who holds the power to impact the purchasing decisions of a large segment of the buying audience. This person is in a great position to benefit from affiliate marketing.
They already boast an impressive following, so it’s easy for them to direct buyers to the seller’s products through social media posts such as, blogs, Pinterest, Instagram, and other interactions with their followers.
2. Bloggers.
With the ability to rank organically in search engine queries, bloggers excel at increasing a seller’s conversions. The blogger samples the product or service and then writes a comprehensive review that promotes the brand in a compelling way, driving traffic back to the seller’s site. The blogger is awarded for his or her influence spreading the word about the value of the product, helping to improve the seller’s sales.
3. Paid search focused microsites.
Developing and monetizing microsites can also garner a serious amount of sales.
A microsite is an individual web page or small cluster of web pages that act as a separate entity for a brand. … Microsites can be used to help brands achieve a number of things. For example, some companies have used them to highlight a specific campaign or target specific buyer.
For example, is the Häagen-Dazs website a microsite because the product is a part of Nestlé ?
These sites are advertised within a affiliate partner site or on the sponsored listings of a search engine. They are distinct and separate from the organization’s main site. By offering more focused, relevant content to a specific audience.
Microsites can lead to increased conversions due to their simple and straightforward call to action.
4. Email lists.
Despite its older origins, email marketing is still a viable source of affiliate marketing income.
Some affiliates have a large email lists they can use to promote the seller’s products. Others may leverage email newsletters that include hyperlinks to products, earning a commission after the buyer purchases the product.
Another method is for the affiliate to cultivate email lists over time. They use their various marketing campaigns to collect emails en masse, then send out emails regarding the products they are promoting.
Two important point to make here is Never Spam Your Emails. And two, Never Buy Emails. Buying emails does not target your buying audience. You are simply buying a list of people many of which could care less about you or your product.
5. Large media websites.
Designed to create a huge amount of traffic at all times, these sites focus on building an audience of millions. These websites promote products to their massive audience through the use of banners and affiliate links.
Affiliate links are exclusive URLs used to track the traffic sent from your website to the advertiser’s website. Each affiliate marketer has their own individualized URLs, which contain specific identifiers such as a randomized series of numbers and letters, your username, or other means of identification.
This method offers superior exposure and improves conversion rates, resulting in a top-notch revenue for both the seller and the affiliate.
Tips to Help You Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer
1. Develop a rapport.
When beginning your affiliate marketing career, you’ll want to cultivate an audience that has very specific interests or a niche. This allows you to tailor your affiliate campaigns to that niche, 
increasing the likelihood that you’ll convert that person into purchasing your product.
By establishing yourself as an expert in one area instead of promoting a large array of products, you’ll be able to market to the people most likely to buy the product.
Marketing to a niche is much easier than appealing to a broad market, since a niche has much more in common in terms of needs, wants, or preferences.
Selling handbags is a huge market, for example, and there are many niches with many different uses for a handbag within it.
You might have new moms who want a handbag that can be used as a diaper bag, you might have college students who need a bag to hold their books, single women in need of an evening bag to hold their phone, keys, and credit cards, vacationing moms who want a large beach bag to hold their family’s gear, and many more.
But understanding the different needs of each niche makes it possible to speak directly to them in your marketing – you will have a greater chance of attracting a buyer’s attention and winning their business by making it clear that your product is for them specifically.
2. Make it personal.
There is no shortage of products you’ll be able to promote. You’ll have the ability to pick and choose products that you personally believe in, so make sure that your campaigns center around truly valuable products that buyers want, need and will enjoy. You’ll achieve an impressive conversion rate if you target your product or niche to a specific target audience.
3. Start reviewing products and services.
Focus on reviewing products and services that fall within your niche. Review other websites, your competition and any other media to get an idea of how others are promoting the product or service. Then, leveraging the rapport you have created with your target market and your position as an expert.
Show your audience why they would benefit from purchasing the product or service you are promoting.
Almost anything sold online can be reviewed. If there is an affiliate program, you can review physical products, digital software, health care or even services. Most importantly, make sure you are generating detailed, articulate quality content to improve conversions.
4. Use several sources.
Instead of focusing on just an email campaign, also spend time with making money with a blog. Reaching out to your target audience on social media, and even looking into cross-channel 
promotions. Test a variety of marketing strategies to see which one your audience responds to the most.
Facebook is by far the most desired form of marketing your product. YouTube is growing in popularity because people like seeing videos as opposed to reading. Pinterest and a host of other marketing channels can be use to promote your products.
Word of caution: Only use one marketing channel at a time when your new. Trying to do all of them will only cause confusing and frustration. Master one media then move on to another.
5. Study the demand with care.
No matter how good your marketing skills are, you’ll make less money on a bad product than you will on a valuable one.
It is important to know your market. “Market to everyone is marketing to no-one.”
Choose your niche carefully. Know who is buying that product. Direct all you marketing to that target audience.
Take the time to study the demand for a product before promoting it. Make sure to research the seller with care before teaming up. Your time is worth a lot, and you want to be sure you’re spending it on a product that is profitable and a seller you can work with.
6. Stay current with marketing trends.
There is serious competition in the affiliate marketing sphere. You’ll want to make sure you stay on top of any new trends to ensure you remain competitive. Additionally, you’ll likely be able to benefit from at least a few of the new marketing techniques that are constantly being created.
Be sure you’re keeping up to date on all these new strategies to guarantee that your conversion rates, and therefore revenue, will be as high as possible.
What are the Top Affiliate Marketing Trends?
- Facebook May Be Peaking
The good news is that Facebook is still currently the #1 social media platform in the United States, with an impressive 41% of its users being over the age of 65.
It’s important for future digital marketers to really look at who their target market may be, because Facebook may be very unsuitable for some campaigns, especially as it continues to trend downwards with younger demographics. Make no mistake, Facebook is still massive, and many Americans continue to check in on it, but be more judicious with who you’re marketing to, and make sure they’re still on Facebook, or you’re targeting the wrong social media platform.
- Instagram is a Hit with the Kids.
Fortunately for Facebook, their greatest threat is no threat at all since they bought Instagram. The image and video-based social media platform is optimized to make it very easy for users to share photos and videos from their phone, which is now the most ubiquitous computing device on the planet and rapidly growing as the computer of choice for the general public.
Instagram’s meteoric rise has already passed one billion users, an impressive achievement. That means it’s one of the most rapidly growing social media platforms and, perhaps more importantly, much of its user-base is the coveted younger demographic, especially under 30,
- YouTube Video
A total of 73% of all Americans engage with YouTube. That means more than half of all Americans are watching videos, and a lot of those videos are created in the service of digital marketing.
While 
YouTube may be the most popular way to consume videos, even more popular than Facebook, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be putting videos on Facebook or any of the other social media platform for that matter.
- Blogging Platform
Good Content Still Matters. Content marketing continues to be an essential component of digital marketing, although there’s an increasing emphasis on nuance in content. The quality is always going to matter a lot, but now there’s a renewed interested in looking more deeply into who the intended recipients are.
Digital marketing, simply put, cannot be ignored. No one is disputing the power of effective digital marketing.
An effectively executed marketing and advertising campaign can serve the needs of any business and increase the demand for the product or service that they offer.
But times have changed, and while the need for marketing is still essential, where that marketing is most effective has changed a lot.
If you want to go where the people are, you need to be active online.
The influence of the digital landscape, or ‘cyberspace,’ has been steadily growing since the 1990’s, and now, just a few decades later, it is a major virtual environment for the vast majority of people on the planet.
Social media, streaming content, and the ease of creating or consuming digital content have made the internet the place to be.
- Influencer niches are becoming targeted with long-tailed keywords
In the past, large affiliates were the mainstay, as catch-all coupon and media sites gave traffic to hundreds or thousands of advertisers.
This is not so much the case anymore. With consumers using long-tail keywords and searching for very specific products and services, influencers can leverage their hyper-focused niche for affiliate marketing success. Influencers may not send advertisers huge amounts of traffic, but the audience they do send is credible, targeted, and has higher conversion rates.
- Affiliate marketers are getting smarter.
Merchants receiving a large percentage of their revenue from the affiliate channel can become reliant on their affiliate partners. This can lead to affiliate marketers leveraging their important status to receive higher commissions and better deals with their advertisers, and affiliate marketers are in the driver’s seat.
What Affiliate Marketing Strategies Should You Employ?
1. Only recommend products you are extremely familiar with.
Building trust with your audience is paramount in affiliate marketing, and the quickest way to lose trust is to recommend products either you haven’t used before or that aren’t a good fit for your audience.
Also make sure you never tell anyone to directly buy a product, you are simply recommending the product. The more helpful you are and the more you make quality recommendations, the more likely your visitors will come back for your affiliate business.
2. Promote products from many different merchants.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you only promote one merchant’s products, you are stuck with their commissions, their landing pages, and ultimately, their conversion rates.
It is important to work with many different merchants in your niche and promote a wide range of products. This affiliate marketing strategy will diversify the amount of commissions you make and create a steady stream of revenue when building an affiliate website.
However getting to wide can become a nightmare to keep up with. If your new, pick your niche product and stay with it until your more familiar with marketing. Once your comfortable, choose another niche.
3. Constantly test and optimize your conversion rates.
Let’s say you have a promotions page where you’re promoting a product via affiliate links. If you currently get 5,000 visits/month at a 2% conversion rate, you have 100 referrals. To get to 200 
referrals, you can either focus on getting 5,000 more visitors, or simply increasing the conversion rate to 4%.
Which sounds easier?
Instead of spending months building domain authority with blogging and guest posts to get more organic traffic, you just have to increase the conversion rate by 2%. This can include landing page optimization, testing your calls-to-action, and having a conversion rate optimization strategy in place.
By testing and optimizing your site, you’ll get far better results with much less effort.
4. Focus on your affiliate traffic sources.
It’s important to know where your traffic is coming from and the demographics of your audience. This will allow you to customize your messaging so that you can provide the best affiliate product recommendations. You shouldn’t just focus on the vertical you’re in, but on the traffic sources and audience that’s visiting your site.
Traffic sources may include organic, paid, social media, referral, display, email, or direct traffic. You can view traffic source data in Google Analytics to view things such as time on page, bounce rate, geo location, age, gender, time of day, devices (mobile vs. desktop), and more so that you can focus your effort on the highest converting traffic.
This analytics data is crucial to making informed decisions, increasing your conversion rates, and making more affiliate sales.
Summary
While what you just read may sound complicated, it really is not. Like riding a bike, you take one step at a time. As you become familiar with your product, marketing, social media and your target audience I guarantee you will find that affiliate marketing is a great platform for earning a good income.
Affiliate marketing is an ideal solution for those looking to gain control of their own income by focusing on performance-based revenue options. Working in tandem with a seller, a motivated affiliate marketer will be able to achieve a passive income from the comfort of their home without worrying about producing their own product or service.
Although the success of the job does depend on the affiliate’s marketing skills, it can prove to be an effective way to meet your income goals.
Knowing how to market your niche product and producing an income can be skill that many fail to enjoy.
I recommend you review other articles in my Planning-4-Success site and look at the TABS above for my recommendation of the best affiliate programs available.
Here’s to your affiliate success,
About the Author
Bill
Bill Fletcher is an experienced marketer and coach. My goal is to help anyone who is interested in building a business through a systematic approach to success. With a professional team of experts, we will guide you with some of the best articles and coaching program available anywhere. I have available some of the best coaches in the area of affiliate marketing willing to help and guide you to success. it is safe to assume that I am an affiliate for products that I recommend. Please note that I will make a commission if you buy through my link.
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