Tips, Tactics, and Techniques To Help Become More Successful In Affiliate Marketing

There are a plethora of affiliate marketing strategies and tactics employed by many successful affiliate marketers to ramp up their sales and commissions. While some strategies may seem advanced, they are all usually based on the fundamentals of affiliate marketing.

You need content. You need traffic… and you need to position the right offer in front of the right audience. The goal is to help and also gently guide the reader towards a purchase. As an affiliate marketer, your job is to be a ‘conduit’ that takes an interested visitor to the sales page which will go on to sell the product.

That’s really all there is to it. All other intricacies can be boiled down to this goal. 

First, let’s look at a few highly effective strategies employed by thousands of successful affiliate marketers all over the world.

Then we well “niche down”, ask the right questions and do some strategic thinking before we move onto the next step, traffic generation…

And finish this post with a little know technique to some, but a method that is used with some success by others … but is it really worth your time? 

Keep reading to find out all the details… 

Onward.

Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies You Must Apply

Niche sites

This is without a doubt the most popular strategy. To promote a variety of products you need a niche site. The content that’s interspersed with your affiliate links will make you sales if you do it right.

You’ll need to learn the basics of setting up a site, optimizing it, creating content that converts and a few other things. Once you get a grasp of the fundamentals, the sky is the limit. 

As long as you grow your site, your earnings will increase exponentially. Some of the large authority sites make 5 to 6 figures a month in affiliate commissions. That’s how powerful this method is.

Facebook groups and Pinterest boards

Everyone is on social media these days. Having Facebook groups and Pinterest boards dedicated to your niche, will allow you to tap into existing hotbeds of traffic while targeting and audience that is interested in your niche. 

Through the links in your posts and pictures, traffic will trickle to your site and you’ll get sales. Some affiliates prefer to direct link the pictures in Pinterest to the affiliate products. That’s fine too. What matters is that you hang out where your audience hangs out.

YouTube channels

If you’re shy to be on camera, you can still do unboxing videos or PowerPoint presentations with a voiceover. YouTube is an excellent source of free traffic. You just need to invest your time in creating interesting videos that are optimized to rank well.

Links in your video descriptions can either go to a landing page or your website. While some affiliates prefer to directly link to the product, it’s wiser to try and capture the lead.

Email lists

As mentioned earlier, always strive to build your list. Have a pop up on your site with a freebie that encourages the visitor to opt in. Have your links in your social media sites pointing to your landing pages. Do whatever you can to build your list.

Once you have a list and you build a relationship with them, you can promote products that will be well-received. A list will be your greatest asset.

Paid ads

Many marketers stay away from paid advertising because it’s almost inevitable that you lose money during the testing phase. However, you should give it a try when your budget allows for it. You’re not losing money – you’re buying data.

Once you make this mindset shift, you’ll be encouraged to keep trying till you find a few winning ad campaigns. A winning campaign can restore your losses within days and yield you an attractive profit. Such is the power of paid advertising.

Give these 5 strategies a try and watch your affiliate commissions soar. They will take you some time to do, but if you’re consistent and stick to the plan, your future self will thank you for it. These strategies will work wonders for your affiliate marketing.

Niche Marketing Tips for Affiliates 

Every marketer worth his or her salt knows what the most popular niches are – weight loss, pet care, making money online, survival, baby care, etc. are extremely profitable niches with billions of dollars being spent yearly. These astronomical sums are enough to make many affiliates salivate and want to take a bite out of this pie.

Niching down

While you can make money in these niches, it’s imperative that you niche down to a level that you can compete in. For example, weight loss is just too competitive. As an affiliate, you’ll struggle to go up against the big boys who have lots of money to spend on building websites, advertising and more.

In some cases, it’ll be next to impossible. But what if you targeted women’s weight loss? Now the market is smaller but it’s still too tough. 

What if you niched down further and targeted weight loss for women above 40 who have diabetes? Now, you’re talking! This sub-niche will be much more manageable to target, and you’ll be able to find long tail keywords that you can optimize your blog posts for.

It’s be easier to rank for the low hanging fruit and your marketing efforts will be much more streamlined. The truth of the matter is that the same products that are marketed to the general weight loss crowd will also work with the audience in the sub-niche.

It all comes down to how you slant your content and show that the products will help the reader. If you can do that, your readers will become buyers.

Questions to ask

Before even picking a niche, you’ll need to plan your attack. Is the competition manageable or is it beyond you? Are there products to promote? Will you be able to find places where you can drive traffic from?

All of these are very important questions that you need to ask yourself before diving into a niche. Jumping in blindly will mean wasting time and effort on a niche that’s either unprofitable or too competitive.

You’ll also need to search on Google to see what sites show up for the keywords you’re targeting. Are there any affiliate sites? If there are, you have as good a chance as them of ranking. How optimized are their sites? Could you do better than them?

What’s their traffic like? Are there ads being displayed on their sites? What products are they promoting?

All these questions are market research that you should be doing before you even get started with your niche sites. By getting answers to them, you’ll be able to formulate a marketing strategy that will give you your best chance at succeeding in the fastest possible time.

Strategizing for success

Take notes while doing your research for easy reference. Do not rely on your memory. Try to bulk your tasks. For example, when looking for affiliate products to promote, find as many as you can at one time.

If you’re doing keyword research, spend a day or two compiling as many keywords that you could rank for. By batching your tasks, you’ll be much more productive in the long run. Once you get started, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips.

Study your niche before you start your affiliate marketing in it. The extra time you spend beforehand will give you a much better picture of how to proceed or if you even should. This is something all experienced affiliates do. Now you know it too. So, do it.

4 Traffic Generation Tips for Affiliate Marketers 

As an affiliate marketer, it’s crucial that you know how to drive traffic to your offers. This is a skill that will make or break you. So, you’ll to need to devote a huge chunk of your time in the beginning to learning how to drive traffic. While simple in concept, it’s not entirely easy and will require effort on your part.

Unlike product creators who can rely on affiliates to drive traffic, as an affiliate, you can only count on yourself. The traffic you generate can either be from free methods or paid traffic.

If you have the budget for it, you can use paid traffic. It’s faster and you get feedback much quicker. If you’re a beginner and short on funds, there are many free methods of traffic generation that are effective too. The term ‘free’ is deceptive because you’ll be paying for it in time and effort.

Nevertheless, you can drive free traffic and still make sales if you know what to do. Below you’ll find a few tips that you should always bear in mind when driving traffic.

1. Know where your audience hangs out

You must know where your niche audience hangs out. If it’s a bodybuilding crowd you’re targeting, they’ll probably be on bodybuilding forums, fan pages for bodybuilders, YouTube channels featuring fitness experts and so on. So, you can go into these places and start siphoning traffic from there to your sites.

2. Choose one method

The reason so many marketers never do well with traffic is because they never focus their efforts on one method. If you’re going with video marketing, create a good channel and keep making videos till you have a following. Learn how to optimize your channel and videos so that you rank.

If you’re using Facebook groups, learn how to get more members in your group and post stuff that they like, and which can be linked to your web properties. 

Pick one traffic method and strive to master it till you have an avalanche of traffic coming to your sites, etc. Once that’s successful, you can move on to the next traffic method while maintaining the current one.

3. Repeated and relentless effort

Driving traffic is a continuous process. Keep repeating your efforts and never give up. Even if your first few videos have only 10 or 20 views, keep going. Over time you will get more views and a bigger audience. It takes time for things to snowball.

The same applies to most traffic methods. The more videos you have, the more traffic you’ll get. The more people in your Facebook group, the more comments and engagement you’ll get. The more paid ads you create, the higher your chances of finding winning campaigns. It’s all a matter of time and repeated effort.

4. Engagement

This is another important factor. Engage with your traffic. Reply to comments on your videos. Like and respond to comments in your Facebook groups and ads. The more you engage, the better your relationship with your audience will be. They’ll grow to like you, trust you and will eventually buy through you.

Remember these pointers when driving traffic. It’s not as difficult as most marketers make it out to be. Once you understand how it works and you’re consistent, you will see results. The key to traffic generation is consistency. That’s where most marketers fail.

Get this right and you’ll have all the traffic you want.

Great now we know about generating traffic, but let’s talk about a technique that is used by some successful marketers, shun by others and not known be most…

This method covers all the previous tips and tactics we have discussed so far, but it is a bit “fringe” so keep reading to find out if you think it is worth your time…

Is Launch Jacking Worth Your Time? 

If you’ve been in the make money online (MMO) niche for any length of time, you’d have heard of launch jacking. There are a ton of products on this topic and though it has been around for years, dodgy marketers still keep rehashing this concept and creating new products making it look like it’s the next best thing since Squidoo… and we all know how that turned out.

Launch jacking basically involves ranking videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube, etc. It’s a type of search engine optimization that siphons off traffic from these sites and just may convert potential visitors into buyers.

Hundreds of affiliates try out launch jacking and you’re probably wondering if it works. The answer is – yes, it does.

For example, let’s assume a product called ‘6 Minute Unicorn Profits’ is about to be released in a week. If you follow the launch jacking strategy, you’ll make a video with a title like, ‘6 Minute Unicorn Profits Review + Huge CUSTOM Bonus” … and you’ll build some backlinks to the video and optimize it so that it ranks.

Since the product is very new, competition for the keyword will be low and you’ll probably show up in the first page of the Google search results when people search for a review of this product. This often happens when a product is first released and there’s a lot of hype and frenzy over it.

By finding your videos and clicking on your affiliate links, the visitors just may buy the product through your link and you’ll get a commission. That’s how it works. But is it sustainable?

Herein lies the problem. Most online marketing products that are hyped up, often burst on to scene with flash and pizzazz that last for a few days or maybe a week at most. Once the hype dies down, hardly anybody searches for these products after that.

So, building a passive business in the long run with launch jacking isn’t entirely possible since you’ll need to keep making videos for new products. This is not a ‘set and forget’ type of business model.

However, if you’re building a list from your videos by directing the traffic to a landing page, you could turn those ‘short term videos’ into a long-term business. You might sacrifice a few impulse sales, but in the long run, you’ll have a list of people that you can keep marketing to.

Some affiliate marketing platforms such as JVZoo allow affiliates to add buyers to their list, once the visitor purchases the product through the affiliate link. From there you can offer bonuses and build a relationship with the buyer.

To conclude, while launch jacking does work to some degree, you may wish to complement it with other marketing methods such as product creation, niche sites, etc. Success in this industry requires long-term thinking. 

Don’t step over dollars to pick up pennies. The launch jacking commissions can be attractive and motivating to many beginners, but that is just the beginning. 

Many beginners get stuck here and never venture further. The wise ones though, use it as a stepping stone to reach higher levels in their marketing journey. Be wise.

Conclusion 

We covered quite a bit so let's sum it up on when it comes to being more successful in affiliate marketing then just your average marketer...

First we talked about the most effective affiliate marketing strategies you must apply:

• Niche sites
• Facebook groups and Pinterest boards
• YouTube channels
• Email lists
• Paid ads

Second we talked about niching down into your target market:

• Niching down
• Questions to ask
• Strategizing for success

And the third step is generating traffic, and we covered this in 4 tips:

1. Know where your audience hangs out
2. Choose one method
3. Repeated and relentless effort
4. Engagement

Lastly we talked about a little known method called "launch jacking" and discussed whether or not it is worth your time...

While it is a good tactic to generate a rush of traffic during product launches, it is not a long term strategy that most will use.

Be smart and use all these tips, tactics and techniques to enhance your overall marketing strategy...

And be sure to leave a comment with other methods you have used or currently use to be more successful as an affiliate marketer.