Top 10 Method of Affiliate Marketing

Ten best practice tips for a profitable affiliate marketing business

Affiliate marketing can be a big source of revenue. The key to maximizing your affiliate earnings is engaging your readers. The action might be something as simple as signing upfor a newsletter to submitting their zip code information up to having a sale completed. Regardless, you are not paid until you've compelled your readers to take some type of action.​​

With that in mind, here are the Top 10 Commandments for affiliate marketing success.

01  Know Your Audience : The most successful way to use affiliate programs is to only promote products, services, and offers that match the needs and wants of your audience. Consider why they are coming to your site, joining your email marketing list, or following you on social media. If you are writing about sports, don't put up affiliate ads for printer toner just because everyone has a printer and those programs have a high payout. The people who are coming to read commentary or get stats for their favorite teams aren't thinking about those things when they're on your site.

02  Be Trustworthy : Readers are savvy. They know an affiliate link when they see one. If you break their trust by promoting a product you don't believe in or take advantage of their visit with too many ads, they will leave and never come back. It is your repeatvisitors that will drive traffic. They are the ones who will give you linkbacks, spread the word, and recommend your site as the go-to place for valuable content. You need to build a relationship based on genuine content. If you promote products and services that aren't high value, they'll lose trust in your recommendations and stop acting on them; costing you sales and profits.

03  Be Helpful : Think of affiliate ads as additional resources that complement your content. Give value to your content by making it helpful, useful, and informative. Don't put up a list of your favorite books, hoping people will click on the affiliate link, purchase the books (just because you listed them), so you can cash in on a sale. That's what affiliate ads are for. If you write a great review recommending a book and readers buy the book because of it, you should get affiliatesales sales credit for that.

04  Be Transparent about Affiliate Relationships :  Always disclose your affiliations. Your readers will appreciate your honesty and will feel better about contributing to your earnings. Honesty and full disclosure is a necessary part to building a loyal reader base (and it's also the law!). In some cases, not only do you want to be transparent about your affiliate relationship, you may even want to offer a bonus or some type of incentive if they take action and use your affiliate link.

05  Select Affiliate Products Carefully : Put some thought into which products or services your readers may need or like. Also, change the ads around often, try different ones, and use different graphics and text to see which are the most effective. It may take some time before you figure out the best formula, and you may also find that you need to continually rotate ads to attract more attention. Also consider promoting higher priced products as well as products that renew monthly to get higher commissions and ongoing monthly commissions.

06  Try Different Programs : If one particular program doesn't seem to be working for you, try another one. Affiliate programs aren't all the same. They offer different products, services, and payment structures. Some programs will have a lifetime payout on sales while others will limit it to 30-90 days. Some programs allow much more flexibility in the types of ad units available, as well as colors and design so it fits better on your site's layout. Also, check your favorite vendors to see if they run their own affiliate program. Sometimes you can go directly to the source. You're not limited to big affiliatenetworks. By continually testing different programs you'll see which ones convert the best and which ones your audience responds to the most - increasing your overall conversions and sales.

07  Write Timeless Content : Your old content can still be valuable even though it's no longer on your front page. If visitors come across your older content first and find that it offers dated information, they will leave right away. Of course, information moves forward, so relevant content changes quickly. Many platforms allow you to show "most recent" or "most popular" or "related articles" on every page, so no matter how old the article is, it will always show access to your new ones. This will give you more mileage out of your content and drive traffic for years to come, and you can always change up the products you are promoting related to the content.

08  Be Patient : Affiliate revenue grows and builds up with time. Remember that some programs offer lifetime payouts. Also, as long as you have referral links still active in your old posts, they may still payout for you. If you focus on promoting recurring billing / continuity type products (as mentioned above) you can continually earn commissions every month on the same products which can add up over time. As an example, if you promoted a product or service that pays a $5 commission every month and referred 100 sales; you'd make $500 in that month. At the same rate and assuming all the sales stick; after just one year that would translate into a monthly recurring revenue of $6,000.

09  Stay Relevant : Keep up to date on the latest offerings of your affiliate programs. New ad units, advertisers, and tools are constantly being added to improve usability and be more visually appealing. Small changes go a long way in motivating action by readers. You may be left out in the dust by being complacent with your strategy.

10  Content Comes First : Above all else, your contentmarketing strategy must be your highest priority. Once you start compromising your content to cater to the affiliate programs or any of the other ways to makemoney online, you will lose your readers. Once that happens, you will lose the opportunity to receive any earnings from any of your ads, be they CPM, CPC, or referral based. It can't be stressed enough that the quality of your content will be the single biggest factor in the credibility of your website, blog, or business.