6 Superior Affiliate Advertising Methods To Strive
You have invested a lot of time creating a blog. You regularly post content and start building an audience.
At some point, you probably want to monetize it, right? Why not let all the hard work pay off?
So you're diving into affiliate marketing, which has a lot of earning potential. A study by VigLink (now Sovrn) shows that affiliate marketing is the biggest revenue generator for publishers after Google AdSense.
Once you start affiliate marketing, more advanced affiliate methods can help you get more sales.
What is Advanced Affiliate Marketing?
Before we dive into more advanced affiliate marketing, here's a quick refresher on how affiliate marketing works.
Affiliate marketing is an effective way for anyone who follows a blog or social media to make money. Basically, these are commission-based sales. You promote a product to your followers, and when they buy through your affiliate link, you get a cut in profit.
Many affiliate marketers use networks like Amazon Associates or ClickBank to find products to advertise. With a wide variety of products available on these networks, it is pretty easy to find things that your audience might like.
Many people view affiliate marketing as a way to make easy, passive income. That is only partially true.
Of course, you can make some money just by putting a few links on your website. However, if you really want to benefit from affiliate marketing, there are some considerations and strategies you need to make.
So "Advanced Affiliate Marketing" could be defined as Use sophisticated strategies to get more out of your affiliate marketing.
What does that mean in practice?
This could mean, among other things, finding the best niche to advertise, choosing products that your audience likes, and finding effective ways to promote them.
Below I am going to explain how you can use advanced affiliate marketing to make more money from your online content.
6 Ways To Integrate Advanced Affiliate Marketing Into Your Business And Increase Sales
Already created an affiliate marketing website but want to take your website to the next level? Here are six advanced affiliate marketing strategies to try out.
Customize your products to suit your audience
This one is very important: make sure you are promoting things that your audience wants.
This can be more complicated than you might think.
Choosing great products to advertise is about more than just choosing categories that generally match your blog. It's about understanding your audience and their psychology.
For example, you can assume that a new high-tech stroller will be a great product to advertise because you have a blog for parents. But maybe you have drawn a lot of budget-conscious readers with your posts on meal planning, coupons, and budgeting.
If you are promoting a product that is outside of most readers' price ranges, they will not be bought. More importantly, you may look fake and too salable, which will put people off and hurt your brand.
When it comes to understanding your readers, data and analytics are your friends. Use them wisely.
If you don't already know who is reading your blog, there are steps you should take to find out. Software like Quantcast can show you this data or use the "Demographics and Interests" feature in Google Analytics.
Demographics and interests can show you:
In addition to getting actionable data from Google Analytics, you can use various other methods to better understand your target audience.
Social media is an excellent source of data. Some social media platforms have built-in analytics that make it easy for you to understand who is following you.
If you have a Facebook Page, you can go to Manage Page> Insights:
Then click People> Your Fans.
You can also do this with Instagram Insights if you have a business account or YouTube's channel analytics tools.
If you want to get a more detailed picture of your social media analysis, there are tons of third-party tools that you can use too.
And if you have a specific question, why not just ask your followers?
Submit a poll asking what kind of content they want to see. A more personal affiliate program means happier followers as well as more sales. So it's a win-win situation.
Be transparent with your partner efforts
If you want to make money from advanced affiliate marketing, you need to be transparent.
You should let your readers know when to use affiliate links for several reasons. First, it can help you stay on top of the regulations and avoid potential legal issues.
Second, it helps you build and maintain your readers' trust. If your audience suddenly "finds out" who they are marketed to when they haven't noticed, they will be upset and you will lose your following – meaning you are not making any money from your affiliate program.
A third reason you should be transparent about affiliate links is to make your website look legit and less spammy. This is important when trying to avoid search engine penalties.
Don't forget that Google penalizes "thin affiliate pages" and is therefore transparent. You should also make sure that your affiliate links are embedded in interesting and valuable content.
Choose great products in a profitable niche
You may want to create new content based on partner products. If so, then you should make sure that you pick a niche where you can make money.
If your market is receptive to quality products, this is a good place to start. When you earn a commission, selling something more valuable will get you more.
Of course, a product of little value can also be interesting if it's very desirable and you manage to sell a lot of it.
I covered the basics in a previous post, including how to choose a profitable affiliate marketing niche. One of the tips I gave was using Google's Keyword Planner to identify in-demand keywords (and therefore potentially valuable products that are worth the money to advertise).
Another tip is to search for products and categories that are currently trending. If something goes viral, there is no better time to promote it with an affiliate link or product review.
To check if a product is currently hot, you can use BuzzSumo and Google Trends.
Take a look at what happened to fidgety nuts:
The middle of 2017 was the perfect time to enter this market.
And the search for face masks peaked in June 2020, and interest waned towards the end of the year:
Place affiliate links where the most traffic is
You don't have to keep creating new content to make more money from affiliate links.
Another advanced affiliate marketing strategy that is very easy to implement is to search your existing content to see which of your pages is currently having the most traffic. You can do this with Google Analytics.
Once you've identified some high performing sites, add affiliate links to them.
You can also promote individual pages with paid social ads or Google AdWords. As you drive more visitors to these pages, you will get more clicks on your affiliate links.
However, be strategic. Try to pick sites that are already doing reasonably well and making affiliate sales so you don't waste money trying to promote underperforming content.
A / B Test your affiliate links and banners
A / B testing is an important technique for any online marketer and can also help you optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Take two different versions of an ad, landing page, or other marketing asset and see which one does better. In the case of affiliate marketing, there are a few different ways you can use A / B testing.
If you are using affiliate links, you can test the links to see how they work in different positions on the page. For example, links at the top of an article may be more visible and therefore get more clicks.
If you have affiliate banners, test them like any other ad from A / B to overcome the blindness of the banners.
Different ad positions and colors may behave differently than expected, as colors can have a surprising impact on conversion rates.
Customize your links for different countries
Is there anything more annoying for a user than clicking on something they're really interested in only to see a big popup that says "This is not available in your country?" To see.
Or are the shipping and customs fees so high that they are more expensive than the cost of the product itself?
This is exactly what you want to avoid with your affiliate links.
For example, if you only link to Amazon's US store, your readers outside of the US will likely click the page and search for the product again in their local store. You then lose this affiliate sale.
With advanced affiliate marketing, you can make the experience easier for your international users by using a tool like Amazon OneLink or by geotagging your affiliate links. This way users are automatically redirected to their local site.
Amazon OneLink is a script that can be configured on your website.
Geo-tagging (also known as geo-targeting) can be done with a plug-in, a short link, or a code snippet.
Advanced affiliate marketing software and tools
If you want to improve your affiliate marketing game, advanced affiliate marketing tools can help you speed things up and get better results. Here are some popular options:
Nice links:: This tool is specifically designed to help affiliate marketers manage links and redirects. Redirects are essential for several reasons. They help your links look better (hence the name of the software), they help you organize things, and they prevent bad actors from finding your affiliate links and trying to change or poach them.
AnyTrack: AnyTrack is useful if you want to know more about where your affiliate clicks are coming from. You can integrate and track your links in Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
CAKE: With CAKE's affiliate marketing software, you can optimize your campaigns to increase your traffic and revenue.
Advanced affiliate marketing training and courses
You may want to dig deeper into more advanced affiliate marketing. For more information, see these courses and other training resources:
Neil Patel YouTube Channel:: I do marketing on YouTube and affiliate marketing is no exception. I've made a lot of videos on affiliate marketing. So feel free to go to the channel and check them out.
Udemy courses:: Udemy is a great learning resource, and they have courses on just about anything, including affiliate marketing. Here are some top-notch courses in advanced affiliate marketing at Udemy:
Matt Diggity's partner lab:: This course is specifically designed for creating and monetizing partner websites.
Conclusion
If you've been into affiliate marketing for a while, you're probably looking for insights beyond just adding a few links to your website.
The truth is that advanced affiliate marketing is like any other type of digital marketing. It's about strategy, understanding your audience, and having the right tools.
If you put the time and effort into A / B testing, review your analytics, and invest in the right software, you will get better results with affiliate marketing.
Can you think of other advanced affiliate marketing techniques? Share them in the comments!