10 Ways Your Blog Will Transform Affiliate Marketing

10 Ways Your Blog Will Transform Affiliate Marketing

Before I explore the 10 ways your blog will transform affiliate marketing, I want to start with some affiliate marketing basics.  I’m going to make an assumption that you already know some affiliate basis, however, it is too easy for us in the business to forget that some people literally have no clue what affiliate marketing is or how it work.

Affiliate marketing is really a very simple business model for anyone interested in making money with a blog or making money on the Internet.

To begin with a successful affiliate marketing business consist of 3 entities:

1. The Affiliate Member (You and I).
2. Second, the company or advertiser (Any company that offers affiliate programs).
3. Third, the buyer or consumer (Anyone who purchases a product).

With that out of the way here are the affiliate basic:

What is affiliate marketing?

There are a wealth of brilliant articles on our website covering the many various aspects of affiliate marketing in depth, however, for those of you who are completely new to the concept, I’m going to go back to basics and explain exactly what affiliate marketing is, and of course the 10 ways your blog will transform affiliate marketing.

Brilliant articles:

• Affiliate Marketing How To Start Part 1
• Affiliate Marketing How To Start Part 2

Affiliate Marketing Explained

So, what is affiliate marketing? Well, it’s the practice of recommending a companies products or services to potential customers, generating a sale and earning a commission in return (very basic).

The process of affiliate marketing generally involves three parties: the affiliate, the affiliate company, and the buyer.

Here is how the affiliate marketing program works. The affiliate marketer (You and I) has developed a website/blog. The website/blog may hosts several banner ads or links, with the affiliate ID of the advertising companies. The idea is to direct the visitor to the advertiser’s site for an intended activity like purchase or filling out a form etc.

Whenever a visitor is taken to the advertiser’s website and makes a purchase, the affiliate marketer earns a commission.  Most of the affiliate programs offer commission, only after a purchase has been made. But there are other affiliate programs, that offer commission to the affiliate marketers.

One such way is a potential buyer is directed to the advertiser’s site by clicking on the ads or link.  When the buyer clicks on the banner or link and lands on the company website, the affiliate marketer receives a commission for the lead.

If you are looking for a lucrative affiliate marketing career, consider joining a reputed internet marketing company that offers affiliate marketing programs. By working with one such company, you will gain in necessary experience and training. This will prepare you for starting your own:

home based affiliate marketing business.

10 Ways Your Blog Will Transform Affiliate Marketing

Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to ramp up your affiliate marketing strategies. If you want to make extra money by putting a few extra hours, energy, commitment into your marketing strategies so you can enjoy a little more financial freedom here are the 10 ways  your blog will transform affiliate marketing.

In this article we will learn HOW TO:

• Build a Loyal Targeted Audience
• Optimize Your Conversion Rates
• Discover New Products
• Build Relationships with Merchants
• Stay Ahead of Emerging Brands
• Take on Guest Bloggers
• Promote Products You Don’t Create
• Increase Brand Awareness
• A Second Blog?
• Monetize Your Email Subscribers

1. Build a Loyal Targeted Audience

By picking the right products and services to sell on your blog, in time you will build your readers’ trust.  Your audience will get used to the idea of taking your *advice and buying the products you recommend. Your relationship with your audience is the most important asset you can bring as an affiliate.

While your blog content will get people to visit your site, your advice, product knowledge, and well written content will get them to stay.

As an affiliate marketing blogger, you must invest the effort and time to build trust with your targeted audience and foster a helpful community of like-minded individuals.

*Advice — Never SELL your product or service.  Always RECOMMEND your product and service.

2. Optimize Your Conversion Rates

Let’s say you are promoting a specific product 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 60 referrals, you either have to get 1,000 more visitors by:  increasing your SEO efforts, paid traffic, social media marketing or providing more blog content per week or month.

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 copy, change 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.

3. 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 your market research, new products will emerge that you can take advantage of for your target audience.

Check out these affiliate programs if you’re on the hunt for good affiliate products:

• Amazon Associates
• ClickBank
• Rakuten
• ShareASale

4. Build Relationships with Merchants

Merchants are always looking for affiliates to promote their products. You as the affiliate for that company receive a commission for each sale that is made. Once you join a merchant’s affiliate program and have a number of sales from tor recommendations, reach out to the company and set up a quick introductory meeting.

During this meeting, tell the merchant how much you enjoy promoting their product, ask them about their highest converting landing pages, and see what commission bumps you could expect to receive to promote them more on your site.

This simple conversation could result in a commission bump resulting in getting more revenue from each sale that you create for the merchant.

Building a solid relationships with merchants is a fast way to improve your blog by having a better understanding the products you’re promoting, which will create more sales and with some merchants, receive some free products.

5. Stay Ahead of Emerging Brands

As an active blogger, 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 and authority on the product or service.

When you use the appropriate SEO terms, you’ll also gain recognition with Google, which looks favorably on unique content. By blogging about brands that have just hit the market, you’re not competing with as many content-driven sites, improving your SERP ranking for your target keywords.

6. Take on Guest Bloggers

If you Google “Guest Bloggers” you will find page after pages of available companies that offer guest bloggers.  Do your research here.  If you have a guest blogger on your site, be sure they have a good command of your language, their blog content follows your personal theme.

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 your visitors, 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.

Use your available resources to offer a change to your readers and make connections with other affiliate marketing bloggers.

7. Promote Products You Don’t Create

It’s much easier to promote a product that already exists than it is to create something from scratch.   Launching a marketing campaign by utilizing an affiliate company’s program, you avoid the hassles of product development, shipping, and inventory.

Your focus is on promoting products or services that you have experienced or have knowledge or niche.

By promoting products you don’t create you have no cost of goods, no shipping fees, no customer support, and no overhead.  This means you can give your customers instant access to what they are searching for and want.

8. 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 percent 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 or product comparison, or product experience, your audience increases in size because your brand is being seen by some who otherwise wouldn’t have visited your blog.

9. A Second Blog?

Let’s say for example you started a blog and your were new to affiliate marketing and blogging.  Your first blog was your training tool.  You made some mistakes, errors and you got some traffic.

Your first blog is likely an experiment that may not work perfectly—a completely natural part of the trial and error process.  The second blog can be a culmination of all that you’ve learned from your first efforts.

You now know about SEO, Search Console, writing better blog articles, a defined target audience, and marketing strategies.  The second blog is now your main platform to develop a larger more targeted audience.

One other benefit is that your first blog may have been in a niche that at that time you were interested in.  As you gained more experience you may have come across a new niche.  First, don’t give up on your original blog.  That blog will still drive traffic.  Just keep it by injecting new content.

The second blog is where you will be spending more time and energy.  As I said, the second blog can be a culmination of all that you’ve learned from your first efforts.

Many successful affiliate marketers have multiple blog that they are promoting.  Each blog will be promoting different products.  The advantage is, if one of the products begins to loose value you have other blogs.

A good example of this is when the “Pet Rock” came out, many affiliate marketers developed a good income.  However, when the “Pet Rock” lost public interest, these same marketers lost momentum and sales.

By having multiple blogs, you have an income from the others while you stop promoting the lost public interest such as the “Pet Rock.”

There is a disadvantage to this concept:  If your relatively new to affiliate marketing and/or blogging, having multiple blog sites can become a nightmare.  Best advice is to stay with one blog, become a master blogger, SEO and social media expert.  When you do, then create a second or even a third blog.

This is where the term “Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket” become your watch word.

If you’re thinking about starting another blog, don’t forget that you are human and that there are only so many hours in the day.

You’ll have to post regularly, write in all categories, take care of social media promotion, along with emails and newsletters. That is challenging enough with just one blog, so consider the time and energy you will have to invest into two.

10. Monetize Your Email Subscribers

Positioning yourself as an expert in your niche and promoting products through affiliate marketing blogging means readers depend on you for regular blog 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.

As you gain increased traffic and hopefully your visitors leave you their emails you can capitalize on the emails.

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 your visitors have signed up for your email list, treat your email list like GOLD. You can send an automated welcome series that will guide users on a specific journey, with the end goal of monetization.

Your first welcome email should thank the visitor for subscribing, discuss their specific pain point (and how you have felt it yourself), and develop a narrative around solving the problem. Once you’ve developed a rapport, further emails can include affiliate links, which will monetize your emails quickly and efficiently.

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.

Finally

Affiliate marketing is one of the absolute best ways to make money online with your blog, but in order to be successful and build yourself as an authority in your niche, you must create valuable content and build a relationship with your audience. Monetizing your blog through affiliate marketing can help grow your reach while creating a lucrative and evergreen revenue source.

By utilizing the 10 ways your blog will transform affiliate marketing you have a head start on becoming a good affiliate marketer.  However to become a great affiliate marketer, I highly recommend you click on the BENNER below.  This will take you to Wealthy Affiliate’s unique 7-Day Starter Program.  For 7-Days learn affiliate marketing the way it should be done.

No fluff, high pressure and no credit card, just plain training.  Like what you see become a member….your choice not Wealthy Affiliate.

I hope that by using a few of these affiliate marketing tips, you get a tiny bit closer to realizing your dreams. Whether it’s generating a passive income and traveling the world, making some side cash so you can spend more time with your family, or just delivering your message to the world, I want you to be successful.

Here’s to your success!