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.
Promoting the right product is key, if I visit a site and I see something I want advertised on it, I might buy it whether I like the content of the site or not.
Great article Harshit. I think number 5 in the article is something that everyone struggles with. Having patience is difficult when you put a lot of time into your blog and you don’t see results right away. Just keep working at it and eventually it will pay off.
Nice post Mr.Harshit Singhal!
Indeed, building trust with readers is the foremost thing or else we won’t be able to get success. Making money is easy if we are efficient in our work.
Affiliate marketing is the best way to earn money but the choosing the program must be important because not every affiliate program will earn you penny.
Promoting the right product is the key. When you have a blog or an email list, it is very important to promote the relevant products, else one cannot expect conversions! Also it is important to promote only the right products since promoting crap will damage your credibility. You cannot then expect people to trust you on your recommendations.
Hi Harshit, Building trust is key. People won’t part with their money easily, especially if they don’t trust a website or the person behind it. An email list is probably the best prospects to go after from an affiliate marketing point of view because the people on the list already have a trust relationship with the website.
These are some really great tips. I think the main thing people need is to be patient. Focus more on getting great content on your blog and the money will eventually come.
Nice Affiliate marketing guide really thank you mr 🙂 Thank you for the share this keep sharing nice posts 🙂 but affiliate marketing is very hard to do for studen. blogging is best choice for students to earn from internet ….
Ahh, good as gold — helpful tips indeed. Most people seem to have a problem with number 5, though, but It’s very important that you keep at it — even if things aren’t looking so great at first. That first sale will come eventually and then it’s easy street time. 🙂
As you mentioned, Patience is the key along with promoting your right products. Most of the sales come from Review posts. It is easier to sell something when people are already looking for a product. So it is easier to convince them. But it may take time to crack the nut so patience is the key.