There are various ways how to make affiliate marketing work for you. Depending on your interests and abilities, you can build a website which focuses on your passion and place affiliate banners on that site in order to sell other people’s products. This is the nuts and bolts of creating a sales machine. By doing this you have basically created an online vending machine.
How to make affiliate marketing work – marketing
The main problem with most online enterprises which use this model is: they don’t sell anything! The reason: they don’t have any traffic, or if they do it’s not targeted traffic. The model above works in theory and if someone lands on your website or blog, likes what they see and decide to buy one of your products, you will earn a commission. Just by having a website with affiliate banners on it, doesn’t mean you have a business. You need thousands of interested people landing on your website daily, and sharing your articles and products, because your website is so good!
The main sticking point for affiliate marketers
Everyone wants a piece of affiliate marketing simply because, well who wouldn’t want to be able to quit their day job, work from home in their pyjamas and make money while they sleep?! Most people will start out following a plan to:
- Build a website or blog,
- Find something to sell on it which relates to their interest – an affiliate product
- Put up banners on their site promoting the goods
- Sit back and wait for the money to roll in!
The problem is you have simply created an online ‘vending machine’, but there will be no customers. Your main job as an affiliate is now to drive targeted traffic to your “online vending machine”. You may even have been blogging for a while and still have no traffic. This is because you need to work smart as well as hard to make affiliate marketing work for you.
Driving targeted traffic to your affiliate products
Targeted traffic is very different from ‘traffic’. If people find your website by mistake when looking for something else, that’s just traffic – people who are not at all interested in what you have to offer. Likewise, if you’re blogging about something which doesn’t relate to your products in some way, you will get the wrong sort of traffic to your site. Your blogging must relate in some way to your services and products, otherwise, you will be wasting your time. People will find your site and may even find your content useful. But if there is no clear link as to why they should be interested in your product they will leave without a purchase.
How to make affiliate marketing work – No traffic at allÂ
If you throw up a website and some affiliate products, don’t expect people to be banging on your door for service. There are millions of websites floating around the internet which have little or no content and are simply trying to sell other people’s products. Google doesn’t like these sites and will punish them accordingly – by not ranking them on their search engine.
Writing articles for your blog
Depending on how competitive your particular chosen subject matter or niche is, you may be able to rank for certain keyword chains in Googles search engine – the most used of the search engines. Many niches are now very much over subscribed so if you find yourself in a niche which easily ranks you have chosen either a very rare niche or something which is very hard to monetize.
In most cases you will have some competition so will you need to write articles based on your chosen topic which target long tail keyword chains. Have a look at your niche in Google’s keyword planner. The keyword planner allows you to find chains of keywords which are currently already being searched for. If you scroll to the end of the search results your will find the ‘low hanging fruit’.
Finding low hanging fruit for your articles
Many affiliate marketers try and aim for the most searched for phrases for their blog titles. This is a mistake because there are many websites which have years of authority and multiple articles and back links to their site. You haven’t a hope in hell of competing in most cases. Instead you should aim to write articles around the long tail keywords which are found in the keyword planner at the end of the listings. See this video to learn how to do this.Â
How to make affiliate marketing work – content, content, content
As an affiliate marketer your job is to drive traffic to products. It’s easy to get caught up in the building of banners, linking to products and making your website look pretty – none of which is actually going to make any money on it’s own. Most important is getting the right kind of traffic to your affiliate products – either through adverts or by creating useful content. Ideally you want your content to be so good that your visitors want to share it and sign up to your email list. When people start sharing your content on social media, you start to get more traffic to your website, people start to sign up to your email list because you can help them!
Ranking videos on YouTube
Creating video content is a much better way on the whole to get people back to your website, than just by doing article marketing. There’s much less competition on YouTube and you have more chance of finding people and sending them to either a landing page or your website. Offer value and provide good content with information which people want to know about. Choose titles which are already searched for and place the title in your description and tag box when uploading. See video below for more details.
Email List – how to make affiliate marketing really work!
The top affiliates all have email lists – so you should too! The reason they do is traffic! They control their list and so once they have built a huge email list, and build some trust with their subscribers, they can send out a single email and make thousands from selling one product to hundreds or even thousands of people through their list.
Trying to rank on Google can take time and can be difficult. Google can, and frequently do, change the game whenever they want or even ban your site if they don’t like you. Building a list of subscribers allows you to take charge of your audience.
How to make affiliate marketing work – paid advertising
Which do you value most – money or time? Building content and building a list is a sure fire way to build an affiliate business – providing you work hard and smart. Paid advertising is by far the fastest way to make your affiliate marketing business work. However, there will be some testing needed before you find a particular advert works for a particular product. There are a number of variables to consider with paid advertising, and before you raise your advertising budget, you will want to have proved it works first. You will know it works when you have made more than you have spent. Start with small budget daily and test, test, test! This will of course cost you money, before you get it right so be frugal in the first instance.
Super affiliates – how they make affiliate marketing work
Super affiliates sell thousands of products online and have cracked the ‘affiliate code’. Many of them use paid advertising but not all do. Some simply build links and rank their products and others get traffic from other methods. Many super affiliates have spent thousands on advertising before they even break even. If you don’t have the cash it’s probably worth using less expensive methods and building up your business slowly.
Use time and money
Use your time well with an internet business. Find what works for you and keep doing it day after day. Success in affiliate marketing doesn’t come easy for most people. Those who get it to work have worked hard at learning how to become an affiliate marketer, and keep working at it! Keep chipping away at it and if you do the right things consistently, and never give up learning, you will make affiliate marketing work! Try things you haven’t done and don’t keep doing things the same way if they aren’t working. At the same time you still need to keep doing things for a long enough time for them to gain any ground. Things like article writing will take time. Advertising will show results faster.
Get the right education
If you’re struggling with your affiliate marketing business you could be spending your time as a ‘busy fool‘ rather than concentrating on money producing activities. After all, it can be very easy to get distracted when working online. Join a community and get some accountability to your actions. Get yourself a mentor, get your affiliate marketing business going, and save yourself a lot of frustration and wasted time.