Did you know that 95% of Affiliate Marketers fail? Although Affiliate Marketing is a $12-billion industry, 7 out of 10 Affiliate Marketers fail to generate any income.
I know it is frustrating when you have a great product to promote to your audience, but without a proper strategy, you fail to generate the sales and commissions that you expect. I know how you feel. I had to wait for 9 months to generate my first commission.
I want to help you, but the truth is there is no “secret formula” that will make you rich overnight. I know you hate my answer, but even the pro Affiliate Marketers face this challenge.
Fortunately, there are a few proven methods that you can take advantage of. After studying more than 50 Super Affiliates, I learned the top strategies used by them to generate more sales and, consequently, more commissions.
(1) Provide Value To Your Audience
Whether you are promoting digital or digital products, you must aim to provide value to your audience through your content.
As an Affiliate Marketer, do not directly sell to your audience. Instead, you must create content about the product that solves their problems, provides value, and helps them.
The process is simple: Create content that addresses the benefits of the product(s) and solves their problems.
Providing value to your audience must always be your top priority and when you provide value through your content, they are more likely to buy.
Now, you will ask: Why can’t I sell directly? They will find everything on the sales page.
Well, dear Affiliate Marketer, you must provide value because hardly anybody buys the product without researching.
Now, answer this: Will you blindly buy a random product I suggest? Won’t you ask me questions? Won’t you research? Won’t you look for cheaper alternatives?
Your audience will do the same. They are looking for solutions to their problems, therefore, I suggest you create content that solves their problems. You should create content in a way that presents the product as a solution.
Try to include the benefits of the product, but don’t miss the drawbacks – no product is perfect!
The most crucial part of your content should be data. If you are promoting digital products or tools, share the precise data with your audience about how much money and time they could save, how easily they can do important tasks, how easily they can use the tool, and so on.
SEE THIS: How To Create Content For Affiliate Marketing Like A Pro?
(2) Interact With Your Audience
Nowadays, people are inclined towards brands that interact with them. Hence, if you want to build trust with your audience and drive more sales, you should encourage them to comment on your posts and videos, and like and share them.
Interacting with your audience makes them feel connected to your brand and builds trust and authority.
You can interact with your audience through the following methods:
- In the comments box below blog posts
- Conducting surveys
- Asking for reviews
- Questionnaires
- Etc.
Answering your audience’s questions related to the product will show that you are familiar with it and will come out as an expert.
You can encourage audience engagement with Calls to Action, such as:
- Please share your takeaway.
- Do you have any questions related to the product?
- Do you have any queries about the product?
- How do you think we could have made the content better?
- Please share your feedback in this form.
- etc.
SEE THIS: How Can Affiliate Marketers Build Trust & Make More Sales?
(3) Utilise Email Marketing
According to research, e-mail marketing gives a return on investment of about 38x. We are talking about investing $1 and drawing $39.
So if you are not using e-mail marketing, you are missing a great opportunity!
Although many marketers believe that social media is the most effective way to reach their audience due to the increase in the number of users on several platforms, e-mail marketing is still, by far, the best platform!
And, I am not saying this for the sake of saying. What we do not know about our gold old e-mail is:
- 4 billion users use e-mail worldwide and there are 7 billion e-mail accounts.
- 3 million e-mails are sent every second!
- Data breaches and privacy concerns have forced people to exit some social media channels. Hence, when it comes to connecting with customers, there is no channel with a wider reach than e-mail.
- There are three times more e-mail accounts than Facebook and Twitter combined!
- People see e-mails! You know, 90% of the e-mails are delivered to your inboxes, whereas only 2% of your friends or followers see your posts in their News Feed. This means that your message is 45 times more likely to be seen using e-mail. Moreover, to register on Facebook and Instagram, you’d need to enter your e-mail, isn’t it?
Look, when it comes to Affiliate Marketing, email marketing is extremely important to build trust and generate more sales. Thanks to email marketing, you can grow your audience without much effort and you can keep them informed about new products, blog posts, videos, and so on.
With email marketing, you can promote products to your audience multiple times, which means, you have multiple chances of generating sales.
An exceptional benefit of email marketing is segmentation. According to DotDigital, “Email segmentation is the division of email marketing subscribers into smaller groups based on specific criteria.”
For example, consider a tool that works well with the people from India. With this data in mind, when you promote another similar tool, you can segment only Indians and send emails to them about it. A broad example, but I hope you get the idea. Segmentation alone is enough to optimise your marketing and limit marketing to unrelated and uninterested audiences.
You can use tools like Moosend to create email marketing campaigns for maximum efficiency and cost-saving.
SEE THIS: Moosend Review (2022): Do Not Use Moosend Until You Know This
(4) Look At Your Analytics Data
Almost every Affiliate Marketer utilises the power of analytics to study their visitors’ behaviour. You can view your audience’s demographics, age, gender, which device they use, which is your most popular blog post, etc.
I use Google Analytics to analyse my website’s visitors and I recommend you use it, too.
The analytics tool will give a better idea of your target audience. I closely analyse my analytics data and I suggest you do the same. Do a weekly or a monthly audit, and note down changes in your audience’s behaviour, interests, demographics, etc.
Another important point you should check is your popular posts. If you have 10 blog posts on your website, analytics will provide you with a clear understanding of the most popular post. If you discover that post 3 and post 8, for example, are performing the best, you should place your affiliate links within them.
This strategy could result in more clicks and, possibly, more sales!
(5) Use Social Media To Generate Traffic
If your target audience is below 35 years, chances are they are active on social media. This is where you should establish your presence, too.
You can create your brand page or accounts on the below social media platforms to create awareness and build your audience:
(a) Facebook
The first platform where you can generate organic traffic is Facebook.
To generate traffic from Facebook, you can promote your blogs and videos through Facebook posts, stories, direct messages, and so on.
You can also join a group related to your niche and post blogs and videos.
By posting in groups, I do not mean blindly posting the link. Write 3-4 lines telling people what the blog or video is about and how they benefit from it.
Before posting anything anywhere, answer the audience’s question: What is in it for me?
Give people a reason to click on your link and read your blog or watch your video, okay?
(b) Instagram
The second platform where you can share your content is Instagram. You can generate traffic from Instagram in a couple of ways:
The first approach to sharing content on Instagram is to put the link of your blog or video in your ‘bio’ section.
The second approach is to update an Instagram story with 3-4 lines telling people about the blog or video and then adding the link.
(c) WhatsApp
You can follow the Instagram approach for generating traffic from WhatsApp.
Write 3-4 lines telling people what the content is about and how it will help them and then put the link below. You can also use this strategy while sending a message or posting a status.
SEE THIS: Now You Can Generate Traffic Without Banging Your Head!
(6) Do Not Place Affiliate Links Anywhere
Placing your affiliate link is crucial for generating sales, but that does not mean you place them anywhere within your content.
As per my experience, you should place your affiliate link only where it is appropriate. For example, if you create content about the best webinar platforms, you must not insert your web hosting affiliate link in the hope of generating sales. Placing links where not needed could look like direct sale attempts and your audience will not click it anyhow.
Focus on creating valuable content and after finishing it, you can place links in suitable places. This will ensure that your website visitors will find answers to their questions first, i.e., they will find what they came looking for, and then through your content, they could make the buying decision.
(7) Generate Traffic Fast Using The Paid Sources
If you can invest money, you can run ads on Google and Facebook, buy traffic from influencers, SoloAds, and so on.
The paid sources will help you generate traffic to your website or affiliate offers in as little as 24 hours!
SEE THIS: Now You Can Generate Traffic Without Banging Your Head!
(8) You Can Reach Out To Social Media Influencers
There are platforms like Shoutcart where you can select the influencer of your niche, allocate a budget, upload your banner and set the schedule.
Once you complete your payment and share the banner image, they will publish and launch an ad that drives traffic to your website, okay?
The influencer traffic works as follows:
Step 1: There are influencers on social media who have a huge following. They may have 1 lakh followers, 5 lakh followers, 10 lakh followers, or 50 lakh followers. You go through the list and select one who will promote your product to their followers.
Through influencer traffic, you step into the world of social media influencers and after paying a certain amount they will promote your product and send visitors to your website.
Step 2: Suppose you choose an influencer with 1 lakh followers and you pay them ₹3,000 to send their followers to your website, okay?
Step 3: Now, after paying the amount and setting up a schedule, out of 1 lakh followers, suppose 1,000 visit your website or the landing page.
Step 4: On the landing page, you have a lead form that was filled out by 50 of the 1,000 people who visited the site.
Let’s say you have designed a funnel that guides visitors to the sales page.
Step 5: Upon reaching the sales page, 5 of the 50 people who filled the lead form purchased your product.
If the cost of your product is ₹5,000/-, you will make a total of ₹25,000.
For maximum results, you can retarget the remaining visitors who did not purchase.
So, to summarize, you paid ₹3,000 and ended up making ₹25,000. That’s a Return on Investment of 7.33x. Isn’t this fascinating?
And when you generate traffic from influencers, please make sure to choose an influencer who is related to your niche. So, if your niche is fitness, do not request traffic from a business influencer, okay?
(9) Optimise Your Content For Search Engines
Search Engine Optimisation is the most crucial traffic source for every website and Super Affiliates pay special attention to it.
If you are a beginner and don’t know how to optimise your website and content for SEO, you could install an SEO plugin. The SEO plugin will provide a checklist of points that you must cover within your content.
To generate traffic from SEO, you should put in the effort to do keyword research. Keywords are terms that your target audience types in the search engines.
You can do keyword research on Google’s Keyword Planner or platforms like AHrefs, Semrush, etc.
(10) Experiment, Analyse & Modify
If you want to make sales and commissions, you cannot rely only on one medium for content creation and traffic generation.
For me, my blog generates more traffic than YouTube videos, so I focus on publishing blog posts regularly. For you, YouTube or social media could work better. In Affiliate Marketing, there is no “one size fits all” strategy.
Initially, create videos, blog posts, and social media posts for one month. Then analyse and see which medium performs the best. Then, modify your strategy and focus more on the medium that returned the best results.
Now, if you are a beginner, you might ask: What type of content shall I create?
Good question!
You can create how-to guides, listicles, product demonstrations, checklists, and product reviews.
SEE THIS: How To Create Content For Affiliate Marketing Like A Pro?
I have covered this question in one of my YouTube videos. You can watch it here:
You can also share product information in the following ways:
- Video tutorials
- Conducting a Q&A session with your audience
- Social media posts
- Instagram Reels
- YouTube short videos
You need to keep your audience excited and creating a different type of content will keep them excited for more.
Conclusion
Although Affiliate Marketing is a $12-billion industry, 7 out of 10 Affiliate Marketers fail to generate any income.
I know it is frustrating when you have a great product to promote to your audience, but without a proper strategy, you fail to generate the sales and commissions that you expect. I know how you feel. I had to wait for 9 months to generate my first commission.
I want to help you, but the truth is there is no “secret formula” that will make you rich overnight. I know you hate my answer, but even the pro Affiliate Marketers face this challenge.
Fortunately, there are a few proven methods that you can take advantage of. After studying more than 50 Super Affiliates, I learned the top strategies used by them to generate more sales and, consequently, more commissions.
In this blog post, I covered the top 10 strategies that will help improve your Affiliate Marketing effort. We discussed the methods for providing value to the target audience, traffic generation, brand awareness, trust-building, and utilising email marketing for maximum leverage.
