This is a guest post by Harshit Singhal from ExceptionalBlogger.com
Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to earn money through your blog by promoting other people’s products.
Though it sounds simple, making people buy stuff is not an easy task at all, which is the reason very few bloggers attempt to make money through it and an even lesser number of them enjoy even a trivial amount of success with it, let alone achieving breakthrough success.
However there is no need of being disheartened. All you have to do is to learn a few simple rules which I have used over the years to make money with Amazon, Clickbank and many other affiliate programs.
These rules will surely make you successful as an affiliate marketer if you follow them diligently.
1. Promote the Right Products
Of course this is a no brainer, right? Even though it is, yet a lot of bloggers make the mistake of promoting the wrong products to the wrong audience. Though they feel that those particular products are perfectly suited for their audience, yet they aren’t able to make any sales. The reason for this is simple – the products have to be “exactly” matched according to the kind of readers, and any digression from that would mean very little success.
For example, if you have a blog on technology, you would feel that putting up an Amazon affiliates widget for the electronics section would get you a lot of sales, but that isn’t going to happen. I did the same mistake when starting out, so just believe me it won’t work. However if you carefully put up links in the content of each blog post individually according to its topic, the chances of your traffic converting will be quite high.
2. Build Trust with Your Readers
Building relationship & trust with your readers is also one of the keys of affiliate marketing success. Since there are surely going to be other marketers who will most probably be promoting the same products as you are promoting, people are going to have plenty of choices of affiliate links to use to buy the product.
So they are most likely to buy from the person whom they trust the most. If you just spread out affiliate links/banners all over your blog without having any sort of connection with your readers, chances are you are going to make a very few sales.
3. Provide Detailed & Honest Insights
When promoting products, many bloggers/marketers make the mistake of just using the information from the sales page of the product and then hoping that people will click-through and buy from their links. However this is not a good strategy to follow, and will result in a low conversion rate. Since people will also realize that you are just trying to get the commission and not offering them honest insights, they will avoid reading & trusting reviews written by you in the future as well.
To avoid this from happening, it’s best to provide your readers with honest reviews that talk about pros as well as cons of the product. Remember you do not want to make a sales pitch or your readers will soon realize it and leave your blog within minutes. If you write the review by expressing what you genuinely feel about the product, and discuss its shortcomings, people will not only start trusting you, your conversions will also be pretty high.
4. Build a List Right Away
You must have read the phrase “The money is in the list” all over the internet, and even though it is a cliché, it is certainly quite true. Building a list refers to you capturing the email addresses of the people visiting your blog or in other words, making them subscribe to your mailing list so that you can contact them whenever you want. An email marketing company can help you to not only develop a list, but also create engaging and successful emails. Building a list is especially important since a majority of your blog’s visitors will not buy a product the first time they come across it. If you somehow manage to get their email addresses, you can send multiple mails over the course of a few weeks discussing the product & its benefits and some of your subscribers will be convinced and buy that product.
Apart from this, another advantage of building a list is that you won’t have to rely on Google all the time for your traffic & income. With Google changing their algorithms ever so often and many innocent bloggers losing out in the process, you can never be sure of organic traffic from Google anymore. However if you start working on building a list from right away and manage to get a decent number of subscribers, you can make a lot of money from them every month, thereby reducing the over-dependence on Google for your income.
5. Have Patience
Even though each one of the above discussed factors is paramount for success in affiliate marketing, the most important of them is patience. Since affiliate sales can take a lot of come by, you have to keep working hard and believing in yourself. After you make your first sale, things will start looking much easier, sooner or later you’ll be able to build a decent stream of income from affiliate marketing.
But to be able to make that first sale is a challenge in itself, so gear up and make a promise to yourself that no matter what the circumstances you are never going to quit. Once you have the right mental attitude and stay positive, success won’t be far away.
Hi, i´m a newbie so was relieved to hear you say that having patience, working hard and most importantly believing in myself are the steps to sucess, this makes it more maneagable…thanks…I like the idea of building a list too, I´ve heard a lot of people were hit by the Google panda update, so it just goes to show that you can´t rely on anyone, especially someone as big as Google
Harshith,
Wonderful insight about affiliate marketing, not only adding affiliate links on blogs and posts make success on it. We need to test it on various ways and find it what ways are better to promote it.
Also as you said, we need to choose relevant product is indeed one and most of the people failed in this step.
In affiliate marketing the most important factor is patience. Many people has left 9 to 5 jobs and considered blogging their future but soon they came back to their job because of lack of patience.
I have heard that the money is in the list, but for some reason I still haven’t implemented it yet. I think the main reason is because I don’t know where to go from there, and how to turn that email into a sale. Anyways this was a great article and an eye opener. I will have to do a bit more research on list building and how to turn it into something that I can use. Thanks!
Hi Harshit,
Bring value to the marketplace. Build trust. Write honest, thoughtful reviews of products from your niche. Connect with individuals on social networks. Blog daily. Create value, build your network and prosper. Super tips here.
People buy from you if they know, like trust you. Develop this trust by acting with integrity. Only sell products that you use, and endorse 100%. Your sales will take off if you fully believe in the effectiveness of your offering.
Avoid selling too many products. Focus on creating value, and you will not feel the need to be a shill, promoting something new every other day. Stick with a few, build your reputation and prosper.
Thanks Harshit!
Ryan
My previous affiliate marketing failure was building readership. Even though I have a list of 400 Mailchimp subscribers like you had mentioned in the 4th point, but it is useless because I don’t communicate with them and only send them offers.
I do get some unsubscribes from time to time but majority of them don’t read the newsletter. From that lesson, I personally feel that communicating with your readers is one of the most important thing and I would put it to number one of this list.
is it necessary for the affiliate products to be of the same kind as the blog niche ? even if they are paying good money ?
Yes Saad, selecting the right products for your specific niche matters the most and is probably going to be difference between ‘no sales’ and ‘lots of sales’.
Hi Harshit,
First impression is the last impression,right.And you have written a wonderful post here and the first one too.
Now coming to the point,making money is not at all easy if one don’t have patience.It’s the key to everything.Promoting the right products in the right niche is must.There is no use of promoting mobiles on the clothing niche said it as an example.
I think that for affiliate marketing success it is good to promote products by blogs and can make money but it is important that what service are the products are giving to others.if the product is not good then you should not promote this by your blog.you should be good on this.
Your post is very informative on this TOPIC.
Well yes, affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn money online. But making people buy stuff is not an easy task, it requires a lot of patience. And promoting right products and building trust are the most importance strategies to be followed. Thanks Harshit for this wonderful and useful post 🙂