Affiliate marketing is often described as a win-win enterprise scenario. Take the two parties involved – affiliate and retailer. For the former, it’s free to sign-up to most programs and provided they’ve done their homework in the preparatory stages, affiliates can gain access to a potentially lucrative sales stream without the hassle of having to maintain stock or getting involved in invoice management. For the latter, the retailer’s various affiliates provide a sales outlet that doesn’t cost a penny in marketing.
Let’s focus on the former. So you’ve decided you want to embark on becoming an affiliate marketer but want to know the optimum methods of ensuring your e-commerce venture pays? Here are some tips towards maximising your potential income.
Choose the right product
The singular most important decision you have to make as an affiliate is choosing the best product. There are various ways of narrowing this down but it helps if you can consider some basic questions. What products are your own website readers particularly interested in? Can you think of marketing strategies that would allow you to promote these items to a wider customer base? How have these products benefited you?
These are the fundamental issues you’ll need to address before launching your affiliate marketing. There’ll also be follow-on considerations, such as which retailers are actually offering programs with these products, and what are the variations in commission rates? To get some help answering these questions you can go to professionals. Choose a company like TopOffers affiliate marketing network and consult them to choose the best options they have to make a perfect fit for your audience.
Promoting the products
In order to make a success of affiliate marketing you need to entice customers to click on those all-important links through to the purchase page. It’s up to you as the website administrator to ensure there is a seamless transition from the moment they arrive on your landing page to the navigation they are inspired to click-through to the sales area.
There might be a temptation to have your web pages slanted towards drawing customers towards this retail zone, with graphic arrows or ‘buy now’ logos. Obviously the bottom line is you’re involved in marketing something, but the key to making this a venture with long-term prospects is to do so subtly.
Not many customers will alight on your site by chance and then go on to buy something from whoever you are affiliated to. Your prime customer base will be readers of your blog or subscribers to your website who are already engaged with what you have to say about your subject. These are the people you should be reaching out to in terms of promotion. They don’t expect to be badgered into making a purchase; if anything a hard sell ethos will drive them away from your links.
Engaging with readers
What you need to do is make them feel as if they are a part of the community rather than simply numbers in a customer base. Reach out to them regularly, through your blog posts but also by inviting them to submit feedback on products. Give them incentives to keep participating in your business, offering product updates, additional market information and the chance to subscribe to e-mail bulletins.
A great way of advertising the products is to harness your social media channels by doing your own reviews. Why not make a short video that highlights you using the product? If there’s an old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words, that ratio is surely magnified ten-fold when the footage is uploaded onto the Internet. If you can not only wax lyrical about the product in your reviews, but clearly demonstrate the virtues it has brought to you, you’ll definitely make a strong impression on potential customers.
Remember, in the modern age you have access to an advertising platform that was undreamed of a matter of a few year ago and which would have been any marketing department’s dream: social media. Where else can you submit a piece of text, subliminally aimed at enticing customers to check out a certain product, and then press a ‘send’ button that will instantly deliver your advert to web browsers right across the globe? And at no cost?
Social media is taken for granted now. But never underestimate how potent it can be when it comes to keeping your site monetized to the max!
