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,
Great post – I too find that in-post links work better than Amazon product reels or banners ads. The subject of trust is also a big one for me, you hace to build trust with your subscribers. And, the best reviews are those that are geniune – there are tons of copies out there that just dont cut it. Failing that, a nice dedicated site to reviews and sales works quite well too.
Regards,
John
It’s so important to have the trust of your readership when doing any kind of affiliate marketing. Nothing makes subscribers run for the hills (short of shutting down your site) than pushed ads at them that they do not want, or can be easily interpreted as a quick money making scheme. You have to use advertising in an honest way that also benefits your readers, and is not a simple exploitation for your own gain which offers nothing in return.
Most of my affiliate marketing hasn’t yet worked. I was trying amazon but then i heard that they only give a 2 day time limit for somebody to buy their product. Other companies offer around 45 days so I will have to do more research. People were clicking but i had no sales the whole time.
To survive in affiliate marketing, it is necessary to write relative contents that must be very helpful to promote the product.Also write SEO based contents that must helpful to introduce the site in organic searches.
Finally the things which is required the most is patience in affiliate marketing. I have been trying to make some good money in affiliate marketing since long but not yet succeeded.
It’s extremely important to build an email list when it comes to profit from affiliate marketing. But unfortunately many bloggers are neglecting it. That’s one of the first usual mistakes made in every journey of making money online with affiliate marketing
Hey harshit i think for sake of money bloggers are advertising any product . this is the point why they are loosing their standing in the blogging market. thanks for this post i ll be always trustful wid my readers…:)
Everyone say that building email list is the best way to sell affiliate but I am unable to build email list because I don’t have anything to give them to get their emails, So what should I do ?
Hi Harshit,
I like your post. Affiliate marketing is a mutually rewarding association but one has to be careful before indulging in any such thing. In the process of making quick money, one may end up promoting a product or service which is not a hit with the consumers. If such a thing is done you may lose credibility and traffic too. It is a very tricky situation.
Regards,
Sanjib Saha
Hi Harshit,
I am new to blogging world and I found your tips very helpful for me. I think, choosing right product and patience are two very important things in affiliate marketing. How long it will take for you to sell first product by affilate marketing?
Hi, thanks for your comment. If you are promoting affiliate products using PPC, then results won’t be far away as long as the product you are promoting is good. On the other hand, if you try to sell affiliate products from your blog then the only thing that’ll matter is the number of targeted visitors that are interested in those products.