Affiliate Marketing | How To Promote Products

Affiliate Marketing Basics: How To Promote Products

Congratulations! You’ve developed your blog produced content and are generating some traffic – with some traffic you are now thinking, “How to make money as an affiliate marketer?”  To start, you can begin by monetizing your blog with affiliate links.  Now your thinking, “How to promote products?”

Well once you sign on with affiliate marketing programs, don’t think throwing up a few banner ads will allow you to rake in the money. It takes skill, effort, tracking, determination, and at times, reevaluation, to turn affiliate marketing blogging into a steady income.

Before we begin on how to promote products, let’s investigate the different ways you can promote a product on your blog.  You must consider how you first find the best products for affiliate marketing.

First and foremost you must know your audience:

1. Know Your Audience.

You must know who your targeted audience is before you can select products to promote. Who is your ideal blog reader?  Why do they want from your content?  What will they benefit from purchasing your products?  Is my pricing competitive?  Will my product solve a problem?

You must really know your audience before you can answer the questions.

If your blog is about the latest weight loss products and you’re promoting automotive supplies, you’re not only going to miss the mark, but you’re likely to lose the trust of your audience.

Again, know your audience and choose products you know your audience will love and can solve the problem they have.

Next is your niche:

2. Specify Your Niche.

Once you have a firm understanding of your audience, dive into your niche even further. For a healthy cooking blog, explore which brands coincide with your philosophies. Will you only support brands that use natural ingredients, are vegan-friendly, biodynamic, or responsibly sourced?

Decide what principles you’ll follow to determine the best products for affiliate marketing through your blog.

Connect with your blog visitors on a regular basis.  Answer question they may leave you.  Communicate with your visitors and ask questions.  Find out if they received the information they were seeking.  Ask if your products solved any of their pain points.  Be a “friend” by making recommendations.  If your products don’t meet their or solve their issues, make a recommendation to visit a competitors products.

Not only will they appreciate your kindness, you just created a follower.  They may not have purchased your product today, but they might come back tomorrow.

Know your niche and understand the problems you’re solving, the more successful your content will be, the more money you will make.

You must use your product:

3. You Need to Actually Use the Product.

If you don’t know this by now, please be aware that your audience can sniff out a scheme blog post faster than you can hit them with a sexy retargeting campaign.

If your not using the product or you don’t completely understand how it works, what it does, or the company that makes it, do not promote it. Period.

The fastest way to lose blog readers is to produce content that’s clearly only created for the money.

When you know your audience, understand the brands in your niche that match your principles, and have used the product to know you fully support it, it’s time to promote.

Again using the example of heathy cooking, if you don’t know want healthy cooking is all about, how can you promote it?  If you don’t know through your own experience, how can you convey that to your audience?  Let your audience know want benefit you have received by using the products.

You have now defined your audience, you know your niche and using the products, you now must place affiliate links in your blog:

4. Place Your Affiliate Links in the Right Places.

There are a number of different ways a blogger can drive sales through their affiliate links. The most common is text links in blog posts themselves.

Here is an example of a affiliate link within the text:  Affiliate Test Link

In the example, I took you to Wikipedia for a definition.  If this were a real affiliate link it would have taken you to a product.

When writing content about a product your promoting, place affiliate link in the product titles to send traffic to the merchant’s website.

Here’s another example:  In my title….“Affiliate Marketing Basics: How To Promote Products,” I could have placed a link to an affiliate company.

Successful bloggers use affiliate links in a number of other ways.

• Banner ads above, and below your blog
• Banner ads throughout your blog are a common method of advertising
• Banner ads on the side of your blog
• Promote your products through your blog writings

As you write about your brands or products, you’ll link back to the merchant’s website for that particular item with contextual text links.

The link will be tracked by the merchant via a affiliate ID.  When your visitor makes a purchase or completes the sale, you receive a commission based on the cookie duration – usually 30-90 days.

Affiliate marketing isn’t a complex concept, but it takes a dedicated, consistent blogger to reach the full revenue potential. Which brings us to our next point: How do you get paid through affiliate marketing?

5. Creating An Email List

One of the most important strategies a blogger can participate in is creating an email list.  Once you have a list of loyal visitors, you should place affiliate links inside of your email content.

You should have a welcome email series that builds trust with your audience and eventually links to the products you want to promote.

Don’t get spammy with your email links. Make sure to provide excellent and useful content first, then sprinkle in a few affiliate links to the main products you want to promote in later emails in the series.

6. Using Social Media

Successful marketers use all available social media to promote their products.  How they promote their products is where the successful marketer differs from the beginner.

However, before you rush in and start promoting on the social media platforms, you must…must understand how the platforms work.  Facebook is different than Twitter.  YouTube is different than Facebook and Pinterest is different than YouTube.

Before you rush in, choose which social media you want to use.  If you have chosen Facebook, get to know how Facebook works.  What are the Do’s and Don’ts to Facebook.  If your choice was YouTube, understand how to create a video and post to YouTube.

One of the biggest mistake many beginners make is to use all the social media platforms.  If you try to master them all you have mastered NONE!

Choose one, study all there is to know about your chosen media.  Make mistakes, learn form the mistakes, dive into the media.  Once you have mastered the chosen social media go to another.  Learn all you can about the second media.  Once you have mastered the second one, go to another.

Again, many new affiliate marketers try to use all when promoting their products and wonder why they are not making sales.

Chose one and only one to begin with.  This is How To Promote Products successfully.

In closing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money either part-time or full-time.

Many of the mistakes made by begging marketers is not knowing how to promote products.  Many simply don’t know how to make money as an affiliate marketer.

Simply creating a blog and placing banners ads all over the blog site will not create an audience and ultimately produce an income.

There are rules that all successful affiliate marketers follow:

• They Know Their Audience
• They Know Their Niche
• They Use The Products
• They Use Affiliate Links To Redirect Their Visitors To To The Merchant’s Site
• They Create An Email List
• They Know How To Use Social Media To Their Advantage

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.

Here’s a couple other articles you may enjoy:

Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

5 Trates For Success In Affiliate Marketing