A successful blog is an excellent way to supplement your unbound income and affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to enhance your blog until it takes off. Out of all the many ways to make money from your blog, promoting affiliate products is one of the most effective.
By choosing a trusted affiliate program and promoting it correctly, you can create a decent income stream in the long-term. If you have been unsure about affiliate marketing in the past, it is possible that you were afraid to take the leap. With this post, we’ll explain how to incorporate affiliate marketing into your strategy and hope to make you feel comfortable enough to revive your enthusiasm and start making some passive income. We hope you love it!
But What Exactly Is Affiliate Marketing?
Many companies, especially online services or software companies, afford people like us the opportunity to earn a commission whenever we help them close sales. The basic steps are as follows:
- You sign up with an affiliate program.
- You choose a relevant product or service to promote, and place their code on your site to create a banner ad.
- When someone clicks on the ad on your site and buys from the company, they pay you a commission.
It benefits the company, because it basically gives them free marketing, and it benefits you because you don’t have to create products and services from scratch.
You can find products or services to promote directly through companies, or through affiliate websites. Sometimes, it is better to work directly with the company, because they are likely to offer a higher rate with fewer steps. Simply visit the site of a product or service you enjoy, and look on their website for a Partners or Affiliates link to learn more about the program.
The Best Affiliate Products and Services to Promote
With millions of affiliate products to choose from, it can be difficult to find the right ones to promote on your site.We have 3 rules when it comes assessing affiliate programs:
We have personally used and loved the product or service.
We find it unethical to promote a product we have not had personal experience with to the people who read my blog and trust me.
The company offers fantastic service.
This rule applies to products that we buy and use ourselves, so it must apply to whatever we promote on my site. We only promote companies who offer quality support, preferably 24/7 support, but they must at least have live chats or respond to their emails quickly.
There’s a money-back guarantee.
Any reputable company should offer a money-back guarantee or at least a free trial. Sometimes we buy something that just doesn’t work for us. Knowing that our readers are protected, gives us peace of mind.
Make sure it is relevant.
Few things put readers off as quickly as a website plastered with irrelevant ads – or any ads for that matter. Choose products and services that are relevant and valuable to your readers.
Put your readers first when you decide to implement affiliate marketing into your blog strategy. Don’t focus on your short term gains, but rather on your audience’s best interests.
How to Incorporate Affiliate Marketing Into Your Blog Strategy
Now that you have chosen the right products or services, How do you successfully incorporate it into your blog strategy?
1. Offer Genuine Recommendations
When it comes to selling your affiliate products, a link alone is not enough.You need to promote it actively (in a non-spammy way!). Be honest whenever you promote affiliate products. Tell them what you love about it, and tell them when you direct them to an affiliate link. Most often, honest reviews deliver the best results. After you have posted a review in a blog post, refer to it in other blog posts, as you see fit.
2. Location is Key
While you can place your affiliate links anywhere on your site, some areas work better than others. We like including them in blog posts as text-link ads. You could also place banners above and below each post, and in the website header, which is clearly visible on every page visited.
Above-the-fold content always has a higher impact.
3. Try Contextual Advertising
Programs such as Google Adsense are great in that they create ads that are relevant to your posts, which adds to your authority and makes people more likely to click on it. For instance, if you’re writing a review on a particular coffee machine, the most effective affiliate program to link to within the post, would be a page that sells coffee machines. The Amazon Associates site is a great tool for setting up those posts.
The most important thing to remember when you do affiliate advertising is that you need a lot of traffic to convert readers into buyers. The more people see your link, the more likely someone will buy.
Do you have any questions about advertising on your site? Please leave a comment below with your question, and we will get back to you.