For new bloggers, these top 10 internet marketing strategies will be gold!
This is where online marketing things get really exciting. Once you have a basic understanding of affiliate marketing and how it works, I want you to put that knowledge to work with these strategies to increase conversions, and by extension, sales. Yay!
This post was originally published September 25th, 2018 and has been updated to be current with new information. This post may contain affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Full disclosure is here.
Welcome to Fearless Affiliate.
My name is Irma and I help new bloggers to learn the ropes. There is a lot to take in that first year of blogging, from choosing a niche to changing your mindset from worker bee mentality to that of successful entrepreneur.
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Effective Internet Marketing Strategies for Beginners
It is to your advantage to learn all you can about affiliate marketing, and then roll up your sleeves and get busy marketing.
Once you have made progress with the basics, ease your way into these more advanced affiliate marketing strategies to increase your bottom line.
Keep trying every trick that you can find…you never know what will work until you try, amiright?
1. Use Multiple Merchants
When it comes to affiliate marketing, you don’t want to keep your options too narrow.
Keep your options open in your affiliate marketing endeavors by mixing it up with various merchants. This is a trial and error process, but it does not have to be complicated.
- Consumers like choice.
- True shoppers love to compare and, more importantly, contrast.
- Buyers loves to compare the price of one item over another.
- A consumer gets excited about finding the best price, topped off with the best review.
Give your visitors their cake and let them eat it too.
You can be totally honest, especially if it is a great product that has one or two negatives. Savvy shoppers appreciate honesty. If you think it is a great product, even with some downsides, you should tell your readers.
When you offer your visitors variety, there is more of a likelihood that they will stay on your site rather than veer off to search elsewhere.
If done correctly, you can use multiple links throughout your site.
Related Post: Start Affiliate Marketing Today
2. Tracking, Tracking, Tracking
You are going to want to track your affiliate marketing efforts.
It cannot be emphasized enough how important tracking your results is. With hundreds of thousands of affiliates that you can associate with, you want to be sure that your choices are lined up with your results.
Quality affiliate programs offer you a way to check on your sales and clicks through the program dashboard.
Be certain to check in frequently to assess the performance of your affiliate choices. Be sure to drop products that are no longer a good fit for your readers.
There is much you can do on your dashboard, such as checking on referral statistics, payments made, and payments pending.
This is a great way of tracking your affiliate marketing efforts. Watch for short-term specials that you can offer, and new banners that you can use.
It is important to keep a record of your sales through affiliate marketing.
Sometimes venues such as PayPal may not offer you the opportunity to look back further than three months’ worth of activity.
You can download a spreadsheet of all transactions. If you have a screen-shot app on your computer, use it to record income in as well as expenses.
Or you can use accounting software or a simple spreadsheet to keep a reliable accounting record.
Google Drive offers a simple to use spreadsheet that is free to anyone with a Gmail account. Google Drive is also an excellent way to keep track of affiliate links, passwords to affiliate programs, and other useful information from your affiliate networks.
Choose a time frame that works for you and stick with it. This small effort will pay off in the end.
Related Post: How To Find Affiliate Products
3. Measure Performance Using Split Testing
Keep an eye out for performance by utilizing split testing to analyze results.
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a powerful way to measure what your visitor likes as compared to trying to brainstorm and figure it out entirely on your own.
By testing the performance of one campaign against another, you have the opportunity to see what is working and what is not.
4. Use Multiple Sources of Traffic
Successful affiliate marketing requires multiple traffic sources.
- Put links in blog posts and newsletters.
- Make pins directing shoppers to your blog posts and/or landing pages;
- Promote in any social media outlets that you use.
You stand a better chance of success with marketing if you spread your net wide and far.
Please make sure that your website is optimized for mobile, although I am sure that you have taken care of this already. The majority of people on Pinterest are on mobile. That is a huge source of traffic…use it!
Related Post: How To Promote Affiliate Products
5. Pay Attention to Reviews
Keep an eye out for comments and reviews.
If you are not getting good reviews – or worse yet, you are getting complaints and bad reviews – you may want to rethink your choice of affiliates. Associate yourself with reliable merchants who put their customers first.
By doing so you align yourself with integrity. Don’t forget; your business is at stake, and so is your bottom line.
Another angle on reviews is to write good reviews.
We have all probably had the experience – or been the recipient of this experience – of going to a fabulous restaurant or movie or show and recommending it to everyone we know.
The excitement and genuine interest to share this great find with those we love and sometimes even complete strangers is what you need to show in your affiliate marketing reviews.
- Try a product.
- Thoroughly research the product.
- Recommend the product by being truly enthusiastic about it.
Don’t let the selling or not selling of the product ruin your genuine belief in it.
Don’t forget to include details in your review.
Why was it good? What did it do to make your life better, easier, faster?
The most important thing when it comes to details, however, is in revealing the problem you had and the solution this product provided for you. There is so much power behind solving a problem for another visitor.
Buy the product if feasible.
Use the product. Test out the product. If possible, take photos of you using the product in the beginning stages, the middle stages and then the end result.
If you don’t mind being on camera, be sure to create a video of yourself using any product that you promote.
Photos have a powerful impact on viewers. Sometimes people need to see in order to truly believe. Visuals have a strong impact on making a final purchasing decision.
Don’t be salesy.
Trust in your own authenticity and genuine belief in the product and keep it simple.
Promote the product’s features, but never forget the products benefits. What is the difference?
Well, a feature may be that it is fast, but a benefit could be getting you somewhere on time. This makes you reliable and dependable.
6. Monetize Your Most Popular Posts
This one can be easy to forget sometimes.
Go to Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
Set the date range for the past 3 to 6 months, depending on how many posts that you have. Write out your top 5 posts and start there.
Go through each post, thinking of affiliate products that you can promote for each post.
Decide on placement of new banners, links, or ways to promote and then update the post! Get Google to re-crawl that post, and then move on to the next one on your list.
Continue to monitor your top posts and keep up with monetizing the top 10 posts as you move forward. This is a perfect opportunity to inter-link related posts together as well.
Do what you can to keep visitors on your website for as long as you can.
7. Promote in Your Newsletter
While we are updating things, be sure to create new free items to entice visitors to opt-in to your newsletter.
Your newsletter goes out to your fans, so do not ignore this group of people when you are promoting affiliate products. People who sign up for your newsletter want information that you have, which is why they signed up.
So be sure to offer your subscribers any awesome deals that are aware of, as well as special promotional pricing, and freebies as well as your awesome quality content.
8. Offer A Bonus Item
If you can, offer an incentive to get visitors/subscribers to purchase through your link and not someone else’s.
This is the best way to stand out from the crowd and it does not have to be a big expensive item. You can offer a free cheat sheet or PDF that goes along with the affiliate product.
For example, your affiliate product may be a dog training course, and you can offer a list of the top ten reasons why starting sooner rather than later is a good idea.
People love free stuff, so use this to your advantage. You can easily link out to great resources from your free items. #promote
9. Avoid Getting Declined
There are a couple of reasons why you may get your application for an affiliate program denied.
Your site screams get rich quick
Whether you intend to or not, your site may appear to have one agenda and one agenda only – to sell as much as you can to as many as you can.
Most merchants are reputable. They want their products, goods, or services associated with valuable sites. If your site does not seem to be trustworthy, there is a good chance your application will get denied.
Your site is too new
Your site may be so new that it does not have a clear direction or it may not give a good indication of where it is heading.
There may be no apparent value or indication that it will be a successful site.
There is little or no content on your site
Without content there is little chance that your application for affiliate marketing will get approved.
Any network or merchant will need to see your authenticity, whether or not you are reliable and if you have potential to engage an audience.
Your site may be under construction
Most merchants want to see a site live, up and running.
This gives a merchant or a network a clear idea of what value you offer, your future potential, and what you can bring to the table.
While you may believe that your site has the most potential and is a brilliant idea, merchants and network affiliates need to see it for themselves.
Poorly-designed site
If your site lacks curb appeal – in other words it is poorly designed – this may cause your application to be declined.
Make certain that you have a valuable site, cleanly designed with good and original content.
Poor website design is not as much of a factor as having great quality content. If people are getting solutions to their problems, they do not care if your website is pretty or ugly.
But you must have one or the other: either a nice looking website with the beginnings of helpful content, or an ugly site with lots of help.
10. Types of Affiliate Blog Posts
There are many types of blog posts that lend themselves to affiliate links, so switch it up and then go for it!
- Review Posts
- Comparison Posts
- Coupon Posts
- Tutorial Posts
- Alternatives to a Product posts
- Best Products for under $$ Posts
- How to Use a Product Posts
- Best Products that do XYZ Posts
- Case Study Posts
- Top 5 or 10 of Your Most Popular Posts (as mentioned above)
If you want more advanced help…
If you want more education on affiliate marketing, I can highly suggest the following course:
Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers: Everything You’re Missing, by Carly Campbell of Mommy on Purpose, is a high quality course that can help you make affiliate marketing easier.
What I like about Carly’s courses is that she is very straight-up about things. Carly struggles like all bloggers struggle and she tells you about it up front.
In fact, in the introduction Carly talks about how marketers present their success as something simple for others to do. Specifically in the blogging about blogging niche.
This affiliate marketing course contains case studies and videos to help explain concepts.
Just be aware that if you are brand new, you may find some of it confusing, because marketing is confusing…in the beginning.
That is because marketing is skill. A skill you can become better at over time.
And if you are an intermediate marketer, you will learn some new tricks!
I highly recommend it, because sometimes it is just that one thing that can turn the tide for your sales. This was a purchase I made last spring because I was desperate to know what I was doing wrong. Or just plain not doing. And I am so glad that I did!
I know that this course helped me to see the holes (gaping holes, I might add) in my affiliate marketing strategy.
As well as showing me simple steps to follow to make my blog posts and newsletter promotions just that much better. I had several “lightbulb’ moments while moving through the course.
Carly lays out the steps with examples from her own website and newsletters. I would never have thought of some of these strategies (seriously), and they really helped me to up my game.
Check it out if you are serious about making affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers: Everything You’re Missing is $79, which is an inexpensive education in skills that will pay you back, over and over again, for years to come.
If you only purchase one course this year, let it be one the one that will pay you back!!
Conclusion
So there you have it…ten advanced affiliate marketing tips to help you gain a profit.
These tips, along with devoting the proper amount of time (lots) and effort (also lots) will help your success. As well, having the right mindset (success!), will have your affiliate marketing efforts paying off, and you will be wondering why you didn’t start affiliate marketing sooner.
I started right away, had one successful product, and I stopped there thinking that it would be all that I needed. It wasn’t.
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Happy Blogging, and follow me on Pinterest! And sign up for my free weekly newsletter of tips, deals, and freebies for bloggers.
-Irma :
