11 affiliate marketing strategies for beginners

1. Know your audience

Learn about and select your target audience before you begin to create content. First, you might consider location, language, gender, education, income, favorite websites, and other critical factors and demographics. Next, you’ll want to consider where your audience is in the buyer’s journey, for example, the awareness, consideration, or decision stage.

Suppose your traffic is in the awareness stage, a listicle of the 10 best bread machines would be suitable. At the consideration stage, comparing three to five appliances makes sense. Comparing two items or a comprehensive review of one product at the decision stage could help the reader make a purchase, netting you a sale and commission. Consideration and decision stage content favors the most conversions.

2. Set goals

You should maintain a list of daily, weekly, and monthly activities that you want to achieve. For example, you will post on Twitter four-to-six times daily and upload three videos to YouTube weekly. The SMART framework will help you set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely objectives. 

Your goals and the successful execution of them will influence your annual results. As time passes, you can review your performance to understand how much traffic and clicks you must get each month to achieve your income targets.

3. Create a content plan

Content is elemental to affiliate marketing. Without it, you can’t attract traffic, clicks, and sales. A content or editorial calendar is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content and update existing articles. Many tools can help you organize and schedule content, including spreadsheets, templates, marketing software, and plugins.

4. Diversify

A goal or narrow focus to create content on one topic is the quickest way to run out of ideas. Also, it will limit your ability to attract a diverse audience and sufficient traffic. Although you don’t want to spread yourself too thin, covering various related topics will invite more people to consume your content, which will result in more clicks. For example, a financial blogger covers credit cards, insurance, robo-advisors, money transfers, loans, digital currencies, and banking apps.

Content diversification allows you to learn and expand your topical authority. By not having all your eggs in one basket, you can safeguard against decreases in interest for one or multiple content categories. Additionally, diversifying your content enables you to expand your affiliate partnerships and marketing opportunities, reducing your reliance on only one or a few merchants.

5. Be original

Who do you want to be as an affiliate marketer? For instance, do you want to be the 2,451st person to make a video about succeeding with Amazon Associates, or do you want to break new ground and cover something nobody else is talking about?

Original content and new insights are what will help you get noticed and build a loyal fanbase. By contrast, peddling old ideas and copying others will lead to insufficient traffic and undesirable results.

6. Be objective

Some marketers take one-sided and biased approaches to affiliate marketing. They will, for instance, only make positive comments about a product to increase conversion rates and sales. However, only listing advantages and benefits often raise more questions and can appear suspicious. Also, many people will continue searching for balanced viewpoints to make informed decisions. Therefore, affiliates should be honest, impartial, and comprehensive in their evaluations to increase sales. Secondly, affiliates should disclose their endorsements and marketing practices to build trust with their audiences.

7. Focus on quality over quantity

Publishing a lot of content for the sake of doing so won’t cut it in today’s environment. There’s simply no room for uninspired and below-average output. Moreover, lackluster content isn’t likely to rank high, be seen, or go viral. Alternatively, commit to producing high-quality posts, even if that means creating less content. On the positive side, having less content on your website means you’ll have fewer pages to optimize and keep up-to-date.

8. Capitalize on news and trends

News and trends permeate every industry and sector, such as a new product launch. Creating and sharing content about those events will position you as a “go-to” source. Secondly, following the news can help you pivot your business and activities much quicker.

Deep linking is how affiliates send traffic to specific web pages on a merchant’s website. It can replace the need to create new content while allowing you to generate commissions. For instance, you deep link a post about a new product feature and share it on social media.

9. Experiment frequently

Did Beyond Meat get their plant-based burger recipe right on the first try? Of course, not. It was an iterative process of many tests and experiments.

Successful affiliate marketers constantly research and conduct tests to discover what page layouts, ads, title tags, text, images, and CTAs yield the highest conversions. For example, they might try different color schemes for opt-in forms, call-to-action prompts, and email subject lines.

10. Follow the rules

Each merchant sets rules that affiliates must follow to remain in their programs. For example, affiliates cannot promote the merchant with a copycat website. Marketers who break the rules risk being barred from the program. Naturally, you’ll want to stay in good standing to maintain your affiliate marketing partnerships and commissions.

11. Monitor performance and constantly improve

Your results are what will matter the most, and your affiliate commissions will tell much of the story. However, other performance metrics are critical to track, such as traffic sources, clicks, impressions, conversion rates, sales, and refunds. Reviewing various data points will give you a complete understanding of how your business is operating.

Many bloggers use web analytics tools to determine their best-performing content, traffic sources, audience demographics, and so on. Social media marketers evaluate reach, engagement, views, followers, and other vital metrics. Email marketers assess open rates, clicks, new subscribers, and unsubscribes. Whatever data you track, analyze and understand it to improve your marketing activities. Then, as you find what works, do more of it while remaining watchful of new opportunities.

Join your first affiliate program today

Affiliate marketing is an exciting endeavor, and we’ve given you a lot of critical details and strategies to get off to a fast start. Many affiliates choose blogging and vlogging (via YouTube) to create content and distribute links.

However, affiliate marketing is so versatile that you don’t necessarily require a website if you focus on social media or email marketing. Although, email marketing may require a landing page or single-page website with an opt-in form to collect email addresses. Worry not though, creating a website from scratch is easier than you may think.

The advantages outweigh the drawbacks in affiliate marketing and since it’s low-cost, you have everything to gain.