Lets get a gist of Affiliate marketing before discussing about Affiliate Marketing Strategies.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an efficient method to get started with online marketing. It enables to earn commission by selling someone else’s product online or earn direct money by selling our own product.

Affiliate Marketing Chain

Affiliate Marketing is based on Performance based marketing & Revenue Sharing. Merchant gets benefitted by selling own products or can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. Whereas Publisher gains commission by promoting other’s products and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer. Affiliate(Publisher) acts as Mediator between Merchant and Customer.

Affiliate Marketing Chain

You can be a Merchant….

If you already have a website and are keen to market your website on other high traffic websites, you can reach out to portals like Vcommission / Tyroo in India. You need to check with them if they can take you as a merchant. They will then find relevant bloggers / publishers to promote your deals. The commission model that publisher can use to advertise your products on their relevant business websites is CPA/CPS/CPL.

The following website gives information on Top Affiliate plugins that are best suited to start affiliate marketing on website created on wordpress Free WordPress Affiliate Plug-ins.

If the website is built on WordPress, then the supporting plugin found at VCommission Auto Import Coupondealswill assist in filling coupon importing tool form in VCommission & CJ API.

Being an Affiliate is easier compared to being a Merchant. Affiliate can be a single individual or entire company.

Let’s focus on Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Strategies:

Affiliate Marketing by Affiliates

1. Promoting Products

An Affiliate promotes one or more Affiliate Products. It can be on any channel it seems fit. It can be on a social network or through content marketing or a blog. In order to become an Affiliate, search for similar products of your niche and build an email list. Choosing Niche is very crucial.

Choosing Niche

Finding out problems people have and providing solutions to their problems is the first step. Solution can be in the form of selling ebooks or creating videos. Videos are more appealing than Text and Audio. (Or) Niche should be a topic one is passionate about, in order to build interesting, good and regular content. You might not be knowledgeable of dog training but having knowledge of best quality dog products is a plus. For example, you can write newsletter on dog training and link it to dog training products.

Next step is to decide, if the Niche of passion is going to make money. If not research on a topic that makes money. Choose a profitable niche and good quality products that have great payouts and high conversion rate. If the Niche is popular, analyse competition with already established marketers. Make sure products of chosen Niche attract audience. Niches can be like Health, Wealth, Personal development and Hobbies.

Money Magnets

Successful Affiliate sites are called Money Magnets. Those sites are simple websites with great information on products. They will contain way of capturing leads through offers like free E-books, Videos, Audio Tracks or free reports of high quality. Affiliate Marketing can be implemented through Email marketing, as it is a powerful tool to drive traffic. Automated emails twice a week is a better option to make people opt-in for the product.

Affiliate Marketing is flexible. You can add as many products as you want or can change Niche at any moment.

Affiliate can earn money based on Cost/Acquisition. Acquisition can be lead/ sale. Affiliates may use SEO to optimize web page to convert lead to sale, thus achieving higher conversion rate. Affiliate Networks like Clickbank guide Merchants on how much to pay affiliates. Attending conferences on Affiliate Summit enable Merchants decide Price of product, Price to sell and Incentives to be given to affiliates.

Crazy Egg Tool

Crazy egg tool helps in knowing the regions of webpage that visitors are visiting or clicking on. This information helps to optimize those regions to convert lead to sale. Affiliates doesn’t have to create any product or be an expert. They only require sharing the product link and is of less risk. Affiliates can get free Affiliate Link from Merchants. The link is unique to everyone. It allows the Merchant to track sales made by Affiliates. Affiliate Marketing is a Win-Win with very little Affiliate effort. If you already have a website, for example related to health, you can promote health related products through Affiliate link.

Affiliate Programs

Amazon has free Affiliate program called Amazon Associates, that anyone can join. It provides affiliate link to promote Amazon products. The link can be placed either on our blog, facebook, email, twitter or youtube. Ebay also has Affiliate programs.

Affiliate Marketing on Social Media

2. Affiliate Network

The next step is to research on Affiliate Program/ Affiliate Network like Paypal/ ClickBank that’s preferrred by similar sellers. Choosing Affiliate Program thats relevant to the Product plays a major role. For example a Network with heavy hitting coupon and Search marketing affiliates is a proper choice only if Affiliate is allowed to do PPC [Pay Per Click] or promote products using coupon codes. Its mandatory to select an Affiliate Network that has proper security measures to prevent fraudsters from creeping in. Please make sure the Affiliate products that Affiliate promotes should be “The Best” in Quality.

3. Building Site

The next step is to “Build site preferably on WordPress”. Build a website containing free content and build a squeeze page to promote your offer. In order for the site to be up and running,”Buy a Domain from Godaddy or Namecheap”. Hosting is also needed along with Domain. Domain indicates the address of site on internet. Hosting represents the exact location of the domain.

4. Setup Domain & Hosting

“Purchase and set up hosting” from reliable providers like “Godaddy or HostGator”.
If purchase of Domain and Hosting are from different providers, linking of Domain and Hosting together is important. Once the site is ready, creating Content relevant to Niche is crucial. The content of site should be interesting and Search Engine friendly. “Content is King”, hence it should be unique and of high quality.

5. Brand Awareness

Work towards builiding “Brand Awareness” to educate audience and make sales through live webinars.

6. Follow-up Emails

Create a strong follow up newsletter sequence through properly scheduled emails.

7. Driving Traffic

Drive traffic to the squeeze page, that promotes your product.

8. PPC Advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising [PPC] can be implemented to grow Affiliate Business.

9. Re-invest Money

Reinvest money that comes to your wallet in improving the website.

10. Ways to increase Traffic

Ways to increase traffic to your website are to Advertise, Video marketing, Onpage SEO,
Target long tail keywords, Get social, Irresitible headlines, Referral traffic, Link internally, Post content to linkedin, Email marketing, Compatibility on all devices, Easily Accessible- faster Downloads and Examining Analytics data.

Hope the Top Affiliate Marketing Strategies are helpful.