Making money through participation in affiliate programs is not at all as easy as it seems to an absolute majority of start-up entrepreneurs. Throwing a couple of dozen of your affiliate links on your blog or website, stupidly cram ads on all the pages and you can’t make a lot of money this way – you can even try.
If only it were that simple!
Here are 10 most valuable tips that can only be given to a beginning entrepreneur who plans to start earning in affiliate programs. If you accept these weapons tips and follow them diligently, your chances of success will increase significantly.
1. Always look for programs offering lasting income
The vast majority of affiliate programs offer a commission in the form of a certain percentage of each sale you make. Thus, in order to receive a commission in this situation, you need to bring new and new clients all the time. And for each sale to a new buyer, the commission is paid once.
Some programs offer the so-called recurring income – as a rule, for the sale of any services that the client constantly renews (for example, hosting services, mail answering machines, etc.). And with each new renewal of the service provided by you, you receive your percentage of commission.
Thus, by bringing a client once, you regularly receive your reward for it – as long as he uses the purchased service.
2. Be sure to develop your business.
Whatever goods and services you are promoting in affiliate programs, you must have your own website and the reputation of a professional in your field. Many start-up entrepreneurs, registering in several affiliate programs, begin to stupidly redirect target visitors to their affiliate links, being fully confident that they don’t need their own website …
Serious mistake!
First of all, in order to listen to your recommendations and buy through your links, you will need a corresponding reputation. In order to earn it, you will have to do everything the same as when using any other business model: to establish yourself in the market as a specialist in your business, create your own high-quality author’s content, write publications, regularly update and supplement your own website and everything else
In another way, you don’t earn much money in affiliate programs.
In other words, you need to create and develop a full-fledged own online business with the only difference that you will sell not the goods and services of your production, but the goods and services of other entrepreneurs through your affiliate links and receive a commission for this. Everything else is the same.
3. Be sure to publish your own newsletter
This item is closely related to the previous one and follows directly from it. No successful online business without own mailing is simply not possible.
Therefore, whether you like it or not, you will have to publish your own newsletter.
In the same way, as in any other online business models, you should turn visitors to your pages into subscribers of your newsletter, form relationships with them, strengthen your reputation, gain trust from them, and only then earn money by recommending your subscribers those goods and services you are promoting.
This is actually the best and most efficient of all possible ways – tested by many years of practice!
4. Write reviews of the goods and services you promote and create your own advertising materials for them.
Understandably, the easiest way to work in an affiliate program is to post on your website those promotional materials that are offered by the owner of the affiliate program, and also to “send” to the newsletter those promotional letters, which templates have already been prepared for you by the same owner.
Many do so. I can bet that you are going to do just that when you get to work. But if you are interested in my opinion on this issue – know: I am against!
Why? Everything seems to be convenient, simple and fast …
Yes, convenient, simple and fast. The only problem with this approach is that this is the most unproductive way possible!
The use of ready-made advertising materials is not able to provide you with the desired result – this is a long-time proven truth. The reasons are many, but the main are two.
Firstly, as a rule, the affiliate program owner doesn’t particularly care that the materials developed by him are as effective as possible, for he goes on with the development of his affiliate program primarily through the extensive path.
Secondly, the advertising that works effectively for one subscription list and site will not necessarily be effective for another – each audience has its own characteristics and these features must be taken into account in promotional materials.
5. Offer customers something special
Exactly. Even when you work in affiliate programs, you have in all its glory the problem of UTP, that is, unique trading position.
It’s simple: besides you, exactly the same links to exactly the same products and services on the Web are offered by hundreds and thousands of other partners of the same seller who you are. And here’s the question: why should a potential client click on your affiliate link?
In order to successfully work in affiliate programs, you must clearly, clearly and clearly explain the answer to this question to a potential buyer. What will he get by clicking on your affiliate link and making a purchase, which he will not be able to get by clicking on the links of all other partners like you?
If you do not take care of this – no one will choose your affiliate links. Guess what happens with your affiliate sales and commissions. How to make your visitors and subscribers have a good incentive to make purchases just by your links, that is, how to solve the problem of your own UTP?
The web is full of literature on the topic of positioning – it will help you in solving this issue, but my task was to set this problem before you with the aim of solving it effectively for the benefit of your sales and earnings in affiliate programs.
6. Spin not your affiliate links, but the materials in which they appear.
I will repeat it again – if you simply find the pages of your sites and the letters of your newsletters with affiliate links, nothing good will come of it.
Instead, you should write useful articles, special reports, create audio and video recordings with answers to questions from the audience and other useful content in which to place your affiliate links so that they look natural there and in the subject, and then distribute such materials for free and promote them. Only this way of promotion is as efficient as possible – tested and proven!
7. Test everything and everyone!
Whatever you do to develop your own project and increase the turnover of affiliate sales, you should record every step and its results, then to draw appropriate conclusions about what works and what does not. Obtaining this data, we then stop doing what is not working and focus on what gives the result. Thus, we are constantly improving our project and begin to work more and more efficiently.
In this regard, many newbies of online business, building their project on the work in affiliate programs, ask me the question of what points should be paid special attention.
First of all, be sure to take care of the possibility of collecting the most detailed statistics of your website traffic, which is possible. Monitoring the attendance of your site, the movement within it of your visitors, the duration of your stay on certain pages, etc., will provide you with a huge amount of valuable information.
Secondly, you should constantly test invitations pages to subscribe to your newsletters, the results of the advertising materials developed by you, the popularity of your product reviews and all other materials that you use to promote affiliate products and services.
8. Hide your affiliate links to redirect addresses containing the address of your site or any special service.
No one knows exactly what it is connected with and what causes it, but the fact remains: online users hate to buy something from affiliate links and in every possible way try to “pull the tail” off the affiliate link.
Apparently, it gives them great pleasure to deprive the partners (including you) of honestly earned commissions.
Therefore, the traditional recommendation is to hide the addresses of your affiliate links with the help of special scripts, services, or software, the benefit of such solutions today is a truly huge amount of it on the Web.
9. Engage the work of employees
As we have already mentioned above, we emphasize once again that an online business that consists of earning on affiliate programs is exactly the same business like any other business – for it is an absolute majority of the advice and recommendations given to those who work on others. models.
Accordingly, one of the most important recommendations, which is the key to the success of any business, is the fulfilment of those functions in-house, the work on which is enjoyable and enjoyable, and the implementation of the rest should be entrusted to hired employees.
10. Create your own inexpensive, but very valuable information product.
This technique goes beyond the traditional recommendations for working in affiliate programs, but this technique is one of my favourites because of its amazing performance.
Its meaning is to create a small information product on the subject of your specialization (let it be, say, a special report, audio collection, video material, etc.), which will have good value for your audience. And at the end of the content of this product, you recommend purchasing those goods and services that you promote as part of participation in affiliate programs of other entrepreneurs.
