Key Steps To Follow to Succeed As an Affiliate Marketer

Key Steps To Follow to Succeed As an Affiliate Marketer

An affiliate marketer is someone who’s in a unique position to leverage the business trends in the market to boost their sales and business profits while not necessarily partaking in the venture directly.

And affiliate marketer can stand as a middleman or third party between the producer and consumer and thereby deriving passive income as long as the business model is sustainable.

According to Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.

The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer.

In the ever growing web based market, the need for affiliate marketing can not be over emphasized! They, to an extent gives a business more visibility than even the traditional advertisement methods.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising.

On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales.

At this point, let’s dive in to the purpose of the article, which are the key points for succeeding as an affiliate marketer in affiliate marketing ecosystem.

1. Join only affiliate programs that you feel you can trust. Get to know the provider before you decide to offer their products. Do your research, find the best relevant product, and you’ll enjoy a much higher conversion rate, which means more money for you. Write a personal review backing the product to help promote it. When you believe in the product, writing the review won’t be that difficult and your visitors who trust you will take that into consideration and are more likely to buy.

2. You need to spend time focusing on building your traffic to your website. That means you need to do your SEO work so that your site ranks well organically in the search engines. Make sure you are following the rules outlined by the affiliate and do not breach any trademark policies that merchant has put into place. For example, many companies won’t let you bid on their brand name.

3. Make sure your website has some great content. Customers are not coming to your site to see ads. They are there to find out information about the product and to look at recommendations. Use both text links and banners and see which work the best on your website. Make your review promotional.

4. Make sure you are honest and disclose the affiliate relationship. This is required by the FTC – you must disclose that you are being compensated when your traffic clicks on an ad link and makes a purchase.

5. Take the time to do plenty of testing to see what works on your site and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to try to promote your product using different venues and programs. For example, try Facebook ads and Google ads to see which work best. Try different banner placements to see which works best. Try different ads. You get the idea.

6. Take the time to get to know your affiliate manager. They are there to help you and should be happy to review your site and give your some feedback about what you can do differently to be more successful.

In conclusion, affiliate marketing can be a very profitable niche if one can harness its full potential, upto to the point where it becomes the primary stream of income. The only hassle is it requires patience, consistency and a very loyal followers who trusts your judgment and ideas. I’d advise you to try it out and know if it works perfectly for you.