You already know what affiliate marketing is. But are you unable to turn in a successful affiliate marketing business? Maybe you need to know a little bit of how affiliate marketing works in terms of minting money.

Let me share my learnings that will help you drive consistent income through affiliate marketing.

If you are a beginner to affiliate marketing, skim through what is affiliate marketing and how does it work before you learn how to earn from affiliate marketing.

How to Propel your On-Going Affiliate Marketing to Make More Money Online?

Let us look at definitive steps and ideas that when put to use will pump up your earnings consistently.

Choose Your Field of Interest In Which You Want To Do Affiliate Marketing

Do you like the niche you chose for affiliate marketing? I mean, are you passionate about the field of business you are engaging in?

If not, it’s time to choose what type of business you like to do. Concurrently, do a cross-check to find out how popular your niche is and how many marketers are competing for it? For example, the “weight loss” affiliate market has many contenders.

Thus make sure you have enough of room to compete.

Furthermore, find out the user-demand or interest for your niche. Apart from reading your blogs and viewing relevant content about your niche, the audience, at the same time should be willing to buy the products that you recommend. This is an important criterion to get sales and make your efforts purposeful.

Now, that you have chosen your niche and want to promote products, we move on to the next step.

Where to Find the Products or Services that You Want to Promote?

Obviously, this is your next logical question. But then there is something called as Affiliate Programs that you would have heard. You have to become an affiliate first by signing up with any of the affiliate programs.

Once you sign up, you get access to promoting a product that is listed in the affiliate programs. So the next question is what are those affiliate programs. They are,

• ShareASale
• ClickBank
• CJAffiliate
• Rakuten Marketing
• Impact
• FlexOffers
• Amazon
• Etsy
• eBay
• Target
• Walmart
• Aliexpress
• Newegg
• Overstock
• SEMrush
• StackPath CDN
• MyThemeShop
• ThemeForest
• WP Rocket
• Freelancer
• Refer WordPress
• OptiMonster
• LongTailPro
• Elementor
• HelloFresh

Some Points to Look For When You Choose an Affiliate Program

• Just look for other sellers who are using the affiliate program you are about to select. This will make clear your chances of success in affiliate marketing.
• Look for affiliate marketing programs and products that offer you higher commissions and ones that have a high gravity rating, i.e., products that have huge demand.
• For CPA (cost-per-action) programs, commissions should be more than one dollar and products mustn’t be too restrictive in how you can promote them.
• Look for commissions more than $40 for physical products.
• Choose products and services that are trustworthy
• Be sure that the affiliate program offers you good customer support.

Content Strategy

Assuming that you already have a website, what should be improvised in the content in order to drive traffic?

• First of all, there is nothing called evergreen content. You have to consistently produce high quality and unique content in order to drive traffic to your site.
• Write product reviews then and there.
• Pen blog posts that address common audience problems related to your niche. Raise relevant questions related to your niche and solve issues affecting your target market.
• Doing keyword research before writing blog posts will help you to identify what is that your audience is interested in and what they are searching for online.
• Another important content strategy is, giving away informational products such as an e-book, an email series or a mini-course. You give all these and more after prompting consumers to provide their email addresses. Thereafter, using the email list, you can dive into email marketing strategies to sell to your respective audience. Significantly, email marketing is also useful to win over targeted traffic.

Now we jump to the next important criteria that I call hunting for the audience or where to exactly find and catch your audience.

Where and How to Exactly Catch Your Audience?

Your affiliate marketing is dead without the audience. Assuming you already have a good site, how do you build an audience to your site?

• First, build an audience for your website through social media. Based on the type of your niche and industry, you can choose from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other niche and location-specific networks. After you build an engaged following of audience on social media you can promote your products and services to them.
• Write guest posts for bigger third-party sites. By doing this, you showcase your expertise in a particular niche to another audience and this will bring more traffic to your site.
• Organic search is an important source of traffic for your website. So you need to optimize your website for search engines as well. The main optimization technique that you have to learn is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Eventually, if your site appears in search results for terms relevant to your niche, it will boost your audience build up and of course your sales.
• You can invest in paid advertising. Paid advertising on social media is a good place to start with. You can also invest in, inexpensive banner ads on small niche sites. Based on what your niche is, Google Ads can also be a good option to get paid traffic to your site.

An extension of all the above points is the next one, i.e., promoting affiliate offers.

Promote Affiliate Offers

This part of your affiliate marketing is the most crucial one. Now, you have to fully concentrate on promoting products and services that will be useful and helpful to your audience. Some ways in which you can promote your products are,

• By writing real and honest product reviews. Along with your writing, add compelling images. Also, mention the uses and benefits of your products or services. Eventually, your product review can link to the page, with your affiliate ID attached, where your audience may make a purchase. If the purchase is made- then Hurrah! this is your first sale.
• Another way is to put up banners on your site. In most of the cases, affiliate programs usually provide their own creatives when you sign up for their offers. Your only job will be to insert the banner on a high traffic page (your affiliate tracking is usually embedded within the code). Moreover, placing banners in the right locations will drive optimal sales.
• Place in-text content links. Furthermore, these in-text links blend with other content on your site and is a good way of promoting an offer within your content.
• If you have an email list, you can promote your affiliate offers through email promotions. Importantly, the emails you send must contain your affiliate links to products, so that when your audience click through, the sale is attributed to you.
• Significantly, affiliate programs will often run promotions with good discounts and giveaways that attract your audience. For example, if you are an Amazon Associate and the site has a big holiday sale then you have a good opportunity to promote discounts to your website visitors.

A Snippet of Other Proven Ways to Drive Sales Using Affiliate Marketing

Following are doable strategies to incorporate in your affiliate marketing business to earn money.

• Use webinars to promote your affiliate products
• Don’t try to sell products straight away. Just recommend it to your audience by stating its benefits and uses.
• Use, strong call to actions (CTA).
• Do competitor research. This involves three things, namely, finding out your competitor’s ad copies, finding out the keywords your competitors use to generate more traffic to their sites from search engines like Google and finally to find out the backlink sources of your competitors which will help you to find ways to attract more links to your site, ending in more sales for you.
• Start vlogging
• Start a podcast
• Release newsletters
• Do comparison posts
• Create tutorials
• Bookmark affiliate static pages in your browser
• Provide SEO rich snippets
• Gather evidence like social proof, reviews, and testimonials
• Use YouTube videos
• Try maximum to avoid Google AdSense as it will make your site slower and is not good for monetization.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing is a long term investment. It is also a great source of passive income. Promoting affiliate products through affiliate networks takes a lot of effort as discussed above. I want to end the discussion with a few quotes to motivate your affiliate marketing efforts,

• Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires. – Bo Bennet
• In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide. – Thornton Wilder
• The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be. – David Ogilvy
• Commit to a niche; try to stop being everything to everyone – Andrew Davis
• Content is King but engagement is Queen, and the lady rules the house! – Mari Smith

Over to you now to make consistent efforts in affiliate marketing to get the expected ROI.

Share your success stories in affiliate marketing by implementing the above discussions.