What are the best affiliate marketing strategies?
A better question might be what are the best affiliate marketing strategies that will always work? This is a bold question, but worth asking because you can come across many opinions that simply do not work anymore.
Gone are the days, when you can slap-up an ad on Google Adwords, lead the prospect to a capture page and then slam them with affiliate offers through email and sell a bunch of products. This actually worked back in the day. By the way, this does not work anymore. For several reasons.
- People no longer respond to sales pitch after sales pitch via email as much as they used to, even if they do open their email.
- Google Adwords, and now Bing Ads, no longer appreciate blatant advertising that leads to a typical capture page
- Blatant ads on Facebook pay per click are getting rejected at a more frequent rate
Another method that seems to be more popular these days is the typical page builder sales funnel. You know the type. Clever looking squeeze page followed by a crafty bridge page with a low cost offer, that then slams you with an up-sell high cost offer and then, if that is not enough, a huge flow of email after email selling you a different product with each email. They think they can sell you another product, because you didn’t respond to the first few.
Well folks, the reason this isn’t working as well is because most people grossly under-estimate the amount of traffic they actually need to make a decent number of sales. Not to mention the amount of money you are spending on solo ads and other paid methods because you can’t use these sales funnels in Bing Ads or Facebook PPC any longer.
Well, what is one to do?
Let me now lead you to what always work, no matter what flavor of the month marketing guru is trying to sell you on. Remember, most of these marketing gurus are in actuality selling the funnel software and getting you exited about it. This leads to what I believe is the 7 best affiliate marketing strategies, that will always work, and the order that you should follow them in.
The 7 Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Are…
- Authority Website
- Quality Content
- Search Engine Optimization
- Analyze your traffic (Google Analytics)
- Paid Advertising (Bing Ads, Google Adwords)
- Social media sharing
- Email Marketing (only after your website has daily traffic)
OK, now you know the best affiliate marketing strategies, but what do you do with them? First things first. You need to do them in this order. The first one, the authority website will develop as you go, but you certainly want to start off with your very own website. This occurs after you have found your niche and target market. To get more information on how this is done, you can read my blog post on how to sell affiliate products online here.
Authority Website
The best way to get an online presence is to build a website using the WordPress platform. There are a variety of website builders that make this process fairly simple. You can read about how to build a website from WordPress here.
I cannot stress the importance of owning your own website enough. It is the foundation of all affiliate marketing and will be needed no matter what happens with search engine algorithm changes or social media changes. You will always need a website. Plus, it is the easiest and most logical way to develop any kind of authority online. You simply need the online presence, and you cannot really do this with just social media. You need something that you can call your own on your own “property”. This way, no matter what happens, you can add or adjust or modify your own content.
Another point here is that, no matter what “flavor of the month” page builder comes out, you can find a better version of it on a WordPress plugin that will do it better. You get more flexibility with a good plugin for WordPress than you can ever get with a standalone page builder with fancy bridge pages, or whatever else they are trying to sell to you.
These fancy standalone page builders are simply a waste of money in my opinion. The people who are the most successful using these types of page builders are the ones who can afford to throw huge amounts of traffic at these pages. And believe me, you need a huge amount of traffic for this type of marketing to work. So, if you are determined to use this method, be ready to spend a bunch of money on traffic.
The most effective way to sell affiliate products is to offer value to people who are searching for answers within your chosen niche. Keep in mind people are on the internet to find quality information, and the best way to recommend products and services to these people is to first offer quality content to what these people are searching for. This brings us to the next strategy. Yep, you guessed it…
Quality Content
So, you now have our own “property”. You have a niche website with the sole purpose of offering good quality content to your readers. So, how do you deliver this content? Well, you use a good research tool to find out what people are searching for and base your content on those keyword phrases.
That is what is really cool about the internet. It is filled with good information. In fact, we can find out exactly what people are searching for simply by using the Google instant feature. In a nutshell, this means you start typing into the Google search engine and look what pops up underneath. Those terms you see is what people are searching for. Then you pop those terms into a good keyword tool like Jaaxy and write articles based on those search terms. After you research them, of course.
If you focus on writing this type of content and target at least 1500 words per post or page, you are on your way to becoming an authority author for an authority website. I would recommend at least three or four of these posts or pages each and every week. The more you do this, and over time, you will automatically develop your “property” into a huge profitable land mass of good fortune. Notice, how this is not quick and easy money, it is gradual and is based on foundational principles of marketing, not fly-by-night scammy crap that you see all over the internet these days.
I also recommend that you categorize your posts. For example, many of my websites are categorized into four main types of posts. There are informational posts, buying guide posts, reviews, and verses posts. You may be wondering what a verses post is. It is a post where you compare two products that have similar and different features. Two different watches, or two different beauty products. Here is an example of a post that compares two different fitness trackers for kids. It is entitled Fitbit ace 3 vs garmin vivofit jr 3. Check it out as a great example post.
Of course, in order to develop this profitable venture, you need visitors to your website. This leads us to the next evergreen strategy.
Search Engine Optimization
This is about the time when people start to get real freaked out. They read about how long search engine optimization takes and how hard it is to rank your posts and pages onto the first page of the major search engines. This is just not true. Ranking on the first page of Google, or one of the other search engines is actually easier now than it has ever been. Why is that?
Google’s algorithms are mainly based on offering better search results to their customers. Gone are the days when you throw a bunch of backlinks at a page and expect to get ranked. Google and the other search engines discovered a while ago, that people were trying all kinds of weird tricks and fancy software to get higher search rankings instead of simply creating valuable content. Googles ranking factors are now more in line with that end goal in mind. Providing good valuable search results to people who are entering keyword phrases into their search engines.
If you provide valuable content in addition to mastering the following 7 SEO ranking factors, you will rank well within the search engines.
Here are the top 7 SEO ranking factors:
- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- Keyword in content
- Alt Tag with an image
- Internal links
- External links
- Video Embeded
Keep in mind, in addition to these ranking factors, you need good quality content.
After using the strategies mentioned thus far, you should now be receiving traffic to your website fairly consistently, and that is a good thing for sure. Now it’s time to start analyzing the situation.
Analyze Your Traffic With Google Analytics
The nice thing about using all of these evergreen strategies, is that you don’t have to pay for some so called top-notch traffic service to determine were your traffic is coming from. In fact, the most sophisticated tracking system on the planet is free. Yes, Google Analytics is totally free and it is the best tracking tool every.
This tool will track each and every post and page you create. You can tell who is going to your website, how long they are staying there, what page they go to and what country they are from. The information you can get from this tool is simply invaluable. Think about the possibilities. If you knew which pages were receiving the most traffic, you could simply scale up the advertising to that page through paid advertising if you have the budget to do so.
But, having the knowledge of your analytics, gives you enough information to realize a good investment of paid traffic and what your potential profit would be. Look at it another way. If you were receiving affiliate commissions from a particular page from free traffic from the search engines, then you could simply scale up the traffic and get a good idea of your return on investment. Knowledge is power in this case!!
As you can probably tell, the next best affiliate strategy is paid advertising.
Paid Advertising
The best two sources of paid advertising in my opinion is Bing ads and Google adwords. That being said, I would recommend starting with Bing Ads. Bing Ads is the general ad network that is utilized to buy traffic from the following search engines: Bing, MSN and Yahoo.
Bing, MSN and Yahoo generate roughly about 30% of the search volume on the internet today. It is a good source of traffic and is much more cost effective than Google Adwords. But, in order to get a good bang for your buck, you want to use it wisely, or you can lose money. Some of the best training around can be found through the Wealthy Affiliate University. In fact, Wealthy Affiliate University provides the best training around for all the best affiliate marketing strategies. To learn more about the Wealthy Affiliate University, read A Wealthy Affiliate Review 2018 here.
The trick behind using Bing Ads is to lead the prospect to one of your posts relevant to a keyword in the ad you create. This should direct the prospect to the page or post with that particular keyword in the title. This way we have true relevancy. Which will contribute to a higher quality score within Bing ads, which will drive your advertising costs way down. Again, all of this is taught at the WA university.
Once you have learned how to use Bing Ads, you can then join the big boys and use Google Adwords, and yes the WA University teaches that as well.
Social Media Sharing
Back in the old days using backlinks was a major contributor to ranking in the search engines and was somewhat complicated and had a huge learning curve. Not to mention, running into risky and shady software vendors promising you the moon.
Fortunately for all of us affiliate marketers, backlinks are no longer a huge ranking factor. In fact, in many cases it does just the opposite. It can de-rank you website fairly quickly.
This has been replaced with a better and easier ranking metric known as social media sharing. It is a very easy concept to grasp as well. You write a page or a post and share the page or post link to your social media accounts like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
The most important one of these is Google Plus. Why you ask. Well, simple, Google love itself, and Google Plus is, of course, owned by Google. When you share a page or post on Google Plus, you are telling Google that it is important. This is truly a big ranking factor in today’s internet climate.
Email Marketing
OK, here we are. We have been told again and again by the so called guru’s that the money is in the list. They also tell you that you cannot make money online unless you start building your list first. This is entirely not true!
There is the funnel first method of email marketing and then there is content first email marketing. You can read all about the differences here. I do not want to get into all the difference in this post so feel free to read the article after you have finished this one, of course. LOL
The video below will show you the funnel first method to email marketing. It has its place, but is not the best way to make money in affiliate marketing.
Trust me on this one. It is far better to start to build your list after you start generating a good amount of daily traffic to your website. The idea here is to strategically place your form for a giveaway towards the end of your highest traffic pages and posts (remember Google Analytics) and gather your emails from there. Since you know these pages are receiving a lot of traffic, you know you will consistently build your mailing list and make a fortune in the follow-up, as they say. This is when you start to make 7 and 8 figures and quit your job and do this affiliate marketing thing full time.
That being said, please, if you have any questions or any comments, feel free to live them in the comment section below and I will be happy to respond.
Great strategies, email marketing is among my favorites. A list can bring in a very good ROI if you put in some efforts on creating a content strategy for the subscribers and promote offers from time to time. For me, a 45 day followup sequence works best!
that’s awesome Faith, a 45 day follow-up sequence works great I’m sure.
Thanks for laying out the 7 strategies that actually work. I’m working hard to implement these as I learn within WA university. You have described in detail what every affiliate marketer needs to now. I am about to start my training on PPC and I look forward to learning how to do this successfully as you laid out in your article.
Hi Donald, thanks for visiting my site. Yes, the PPC training is excellent. The thing I like about PPC is you can scale your business up. Once you know what works, it is just a matter of scaling to increase profits. You will definitely like the training.
Very well researched and ideas which can be profitably applied. Thanks so much.
Thank you Joseph for your kind words.
I have seen a shift in the affiliate marketing niche with people relying heavily on landing pages. And don’t get me wrong, they do work! I’m just not a fan of the whole sales funnel process of pitching product after product through emails.
My number one strategy right now is content creation and then social media sharing. As I continue to grow my blogs, I’m gonna start implementing paid traffic a little more.
So would you say that FB ads are still relevant or no?
Thanks for sharing these awesome strategies,
Diana
Hi Diana, I totally agree with your approach. The sales funnel process works well if you use the “content first” approach. In other words, provide valuable content before trying to sell anything at all. In fact, if one uses email marketing through a landing page, they should provide valuable content in the email. The best way is to just let them know about a blog article you just posted. That way you are leading them to your website to read your blog rather than selling in the email. Facebook ads are relevant if you use them properly. I prefer to share a post from my blog on Facebook through my Fan page and then pay to have the post boosted. If you are going to use paid advertising I would recommend Bing ads. This is great traffic because it can be very targeted if you use it correctly and follow the training exactly step by step that is provided in the Wealthy Affiliate training.
Tons and tons of great information that is very informative. You have gone in-depth and that is what we need because trying to make money with your website by monetizing it can be a challenge but what you are sharing here is such a great help.
Thanks again Norman! Yes, you have to remain teachable and stick with it. Eventually the light bulb clicks on and next thing you know, you are ranked in the top of the worlds most popular search engine.
Thanks for this great information on best affiliate marketing strategies. Another effective strategy is personal branding. Once you build a brand for yourself, you can sell whatever affiliate products you want to sell and make money from. But that’s a long term strategy for sure. It takes time to build your brand.
Thanks for your feedback Jerry. I totally agree with you in regard to personal branding. It’s certainly a long term strategy, however, every serious marketer should be practicing it.