Being part of an affiliate marketing program allows you – the affiliate – to get paid for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. The amount of money you earn should be regulated by the contract you have with the merchant and depends on the number of clicks through to the merchant’s site, completed purchases or fulfilled CTAs on your website.
Here are the 10 ways affiliate marketing can transform your blog or even the entire website.
1) Build a loyal audience
By picking the right products and services to sell on your website, you build your readers’ trust. Your audience gets used to the idea of taking your advice and buying what you recommend. Your relationship with your audience is the most important asset you can bring to the table as an affiliate. While your content will get people to your site, your community will get them to stay.
2) Increase brand awareness
While you’re promoting certain products through affiliate marketing, you also get your blog in front of a larger audience. With the additional traffic generated through Google searches about an affiliate product, your personal brand awareness increases.
By building brand awareness, you can also increase your market share. Building an audience through brand awareness is more valuable than direct sales for more than 70% of brand managers. Your audience begins to recognize you as the go-to for information they can use in your specific niche. Whether it’s a product review, life hack, or the best way to post to Social Media, your audience increases in size because your brand is being seen by some who otherwise wouldn’t have visited your blog.
3) Stay ahead of trends and emerging brands
By having an active blog, you’ll be among the first to see emerging brands in your niche. When you’re one of the first affiliate marketing bloggers to get behind a brand, you become a trusted voice of authority on the product or service.
When you use the appropriate SEO terms, you’ll also gain traction with Google and other search engines, which looks favorably on unique content. By blogging about brands that have just hit the scene, you’re not competing with as many content-driven sites, improving your SERP ranking for your target keywords.
4) Discover new products
As an affiliate marketing blogger, you’ll develop an eye for new products and services that hit the market in your niche. Whether it comes at the recommendation of an affiliate program or a fellow blogger, new products will emerge that make your life better (and you get to share that with your audience).
5) Build relationships with merchants
Merchants want affiliates to promote their products and they most likely have a number of different commission rates based on the volume of traffic the affiliate generates and their current relationship with them. Building real relationships with merchants is a fast way to improve your sales funnel, understand the products you’re promoting better, make more per sale (and even get some free products).
6) Take on guest bloggers
Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI, but those blogging efforts don’t have to come just from you. As you build your trust with readers, you have an opportunity to partner with guest bloggers.
The good news is, the majority of bloggers are eager to guest post or have you post to their sites. According to Curata, 57% of business bloggers outsourced blog posts from contributed non-paid or guest posts. So, use your available resources to offer a change to your readers and make connections with other affiliate marketing bloggers.
7) Monetize your email subscribers
Positioning yourself as an expert in your niche and promoting products or services through affiliate marketing blogging means readers depend on you for regular email updates with valuable information. They’ll want to know about new products you’re using, your thoughts on certain brands, and read your reviews so that they can make informed decisions.
By incorporating an email sign-up within your blog posts, in website pop-ups, sidebars, and on your homepage, you can grow your email marketing database. Once users have signed up for your email list, treat your email list like a CRM. You can send an automated welcome series that will guide users on a specific journey, with the end goal of monetization.
The return on email marketing is well worth the time spent. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38. So don’t limit your affiliate marketing to just blog content, you can utilize newsletters and email blasts to stay engaged with your readers and make even more money.
8) Optimize conversion rates
Taking part in affiliate marketing will force you to examine your blog’s conversion rates. Let’s say you are promoting a specific product or service via affiliate links on a landing page. If you currently get 1,000 visits/month at a 3% conversion rate, you have 30 referrals. To get to 60 referrals, you either have to get 1,000 more visitors to the page with blogging, SEO efforts, paid traffic or Social Media marketing. Or you could simply increase the conversion rate to 6%.
Which one sounds easier to you? Instead of spending all of your time and effort to get new traffic, you just have to optimize the traffic you already have. Optimizing your conversion rate can include testing your calls-to-action, testing your copy, editing your UX, color schemes, and page layouts to maximize impact. By doing some simple A/B testing and optimizing your landing pages, you’ll get quicker results with much less work.
And there you have it! You are now ready to be part of an affiliate marketing program. Or we can be an affiliate for you. Contact us today!
