With affiliate marketing, you have quite a few advantages over most people who sell online because you don’t have the responsibilities that come along with creating a product and managing the sales of that product. What you can do as an affiliate marketer, is find the best products that already exist online, and simply promote them for a commission payout. There is no need to deal with customer service, storing products, shipping anything, or dealing with returns.
However, affiliate marketing is not just a walk in the park. Most affiliate marketers, and especially new affiliate marketers, tend to have trouble when they try to increase affiliate earnings or even make anything at all. They may find excellent products to promote, understand everything about list building, pre-selling, and how to optimize a website for both search engines and visitors, but they never get enough insight on how to boost their income to the next level. The unfortunate truth is, most new affiliate marketers will not earn a full-time living through affiliate marketing.
In this article, I will cover the the 5 ways to increase affiliate earnings.
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#1 – Help Your Site Visitors FIRST!
The top thing to remember as an affiliate marketer, is that your website visitors are your lifeline. Your main goal, should be to help your website visitors find a solution to a problem. If you are able to add value to someone’s life, no matter what you are selling, you will be able to turn a profit.
But it really boils down to, is saving people money and/or adding the value. If you’re an affiliate for the Amazon Associates affiliate program, for example, you can frequently log into your affiliate dashboard and look for special discounts promotions, free trials, or preorder specials. You don’t even necessarily need to be an expert in whatever products or services you are promoting. But if you can find people special deals or free promotions, you are still adding value.
Even if the product or service you are promoting is not running any pricing deals or specials, you can add value yourself. Have people sign up through your affiliate link in exchange for a special gift or service that you will personally provide. People are going to click on your affiliate link just to be nice – you need to give them an incentive. More and more people are aware of affiliate links and people tend to not want to click those links. You must give them a reason to.
#2 Do More Than Write A Simple Review
Most new affiliates will do little more then right keyword focused articles for the sole intention of attracting search engine traffic in making a quick buck or two. You need to think bigger than this.
If you want to turn affiliate marketing into a full-time income and increase affiliate earnings, you must dominate whatever niche you are involved in. You must be the authority. Even if you don’t sell a product of your own, you can establish yourself as someone who is an expert in your field and the perfect person to listen to for product or service recommendations.
It is largely unknown the exact number of affiliate marketers who are currently out there, but it’s safe to say that you’re competing with a lot of other people. If you want that cash to go into your bank account calm a you need to set yourself apart from everyone else. Do you have a plan on how to obtain this?
For starters, you must truly be familiar with the products or services you are recommended. If you are simply rewriting reviews from Amazon.com people will see right through it and they will not trust you. So, it is important that you actually physically handle the products or services you are writing about.
Now, it goes without saying, that you can’t just go out and buy everything that you want to promote. If you want to increase affiliate earnings, that means you also need to beware of your expenses. Let’s say, for example, you own a website that reviews high definition televisions. There is no way that you can go out and physically purchase every high definition TV on the market. But, you CAN Go to Best Buy or some other retail store and become familiar with the product.
If you are promoting a digital product, in almost every case, you should be able to easily afford to purchase and become familiar with the digital good. For example, I have a website that reviews online traffic schools. Before I write any review on these traffic schools, I make sure I go through the course myself. Sure, it cost me about 20 bucks and takes up a few hours of my time but I earn my money back many times over. Is an easy financial and time investment for me to make.
You also need to be truthful in your reviews. Your customers need to be your number one responsibility. If you write glowing reviews about products and services that are not that great, your bottom line will be hurt in the long run. If a product or service is no good you need to be honest about that. My basic rule is this – only recommend products and services that you would use your self or recommend to your closest friends and family. Honesty is essential. It’s not only the right thing to do, but as an Internet marketer, you have taken on the responsibility to ensure the Internet remains an ethical place. while it might not seem so upfront, being honest will always work to your advantage in the long run.
#3 – Increase Affiliate Earnings By Giving Your Visitors Choices
One way many successful affiliate marketers increase their earnings, is by comparing several similar products at one time. Usually, when people are looking for reviews, they already know they want to purchase a product. You just need to help them decide which product is best for them. Doing comparison reviews is not only effective but it can also be very fun and rewarding. In addition, if you are using a WordPress blog, there are many plug-ins that you can download which will help you make a very quick, easy, and user-friendly comparison charts. People love to see a side-by-side comparison.
Before you set up a comparison chart, make sure you take some time to find out exactly what your website visitors needs are. Most of the time, you can create a comparison chart that shows a brief description of the product, the price, the main features, and a link to Amazon or whatever product or service you are promoting. make sure your affiliate links are prominent, time sensitive, and offer a call to action. For example, you could say, “see if this product is in stock on Amazon right now!”
Giving people choices is a great way to increase your affiliate earnings. People are always very wary of review sites I tried to claim one product is the best for everyone. Giving people many choices is a great way to build trust.
#4 – Do More Than Blog
While most new affiliate marketers get started by creating a blog, you should not limit your reach only to website if you want to truly increase affiliate earnings. As the saying goes, never put all of your eggs in one basket.
One of the first things you should do is create social media accounts. It’s free, it’s fast, and it only takes a few minutes to set up each account. At the very least, you should set up a Facebook and Twitter accounts. Many affiliate marketers will even pay advertising to gain Facebook or twitter followers. Remember, once they are following you, it enables you to advertise to the same people over and over again. This is very powerful.
You should also set up an email marketing campaign. Email marketing is very powerful and very effective. As with social media, you are able to market to people over and over again. Not only that, but you know that the people on your email list are highly targeted and are interested in your niche. One way to get people to sign up for your email list is to offer them something for free such as an e-book, a training course, a free membership area your website, and more. On my dogfoodinsider.com website, for example, I enable people to sign up for my email list by offering free dog food recall alerts. This is a highly valuable service and people are more than willing to put up with a sales email every now and then in exchange to be notified every time there is a dog food recall.
So, how do you set up a good email marketing campaign? I signed up for an account at Aweber.com and have been very, very happy with them. from sign-up forms to subscriber tracking, they handle it all. Aweber.com is probably the most popular email marketing system for affiliate marketers.
Oh, and don’t forget about setting up a YouTube account. Since YouTube is actually owned by Google, it is very easy to rank YouTube videos highly in Google search results and therefor can quickly increase affiliate earnings. In addition, many people tend to enjoy watching videos more than reading. So by setting up a YouTube account, you’re able to reach a much larger audience. All it takes is a simple WebCam to get started. Just talk to the WebCam like you’re talking to a friend. You do not need any expensive equipment or any acting skills to be successful on YouTube. It’s much easier than you might think.
Be YOURSELF!
Affiliate marketers who want to increase affiliate earnings need to understand very early on that they will never be a Wikipedia or Consumer Reports and you shouldn’t strive to me that, either. Notice how I miss website, I don’t try to act like a corporation or large training center. I’m just Mike. When people read my blog, they don’t want dry and boring articles like they can get on Wikipedia. Running a small website does not have to be a disadvantage. In fact when people see your personality come through and when people realize that you are not part of a corporation it actually helps to build trust.
So, forget about trying to be a salesperson and forget about everything you learned in marketing 101. Just be yourself! When you review a product, review it as if you were telling a friend or family member what you think. You don’t have to get super technical and you don’t have to act like you know absolutely every little thing about the product. Just tell people how you think the product is. Does it feel sturdy? Does it make your life easier in some way? Did you find a cool new use for this product that you didn’t expect? Pack, while this is a personal choice, you can even choose to swear, the humorous, and act like you’re talking to your best of friends in your living room. Everyone talks differently around their best friends. Well, if you can make your readers feel like they are sitting in your living room, your conversion rate will go through the roof.
Well, I hope these tips will help you increase affiliate earnings moving forward. As long as you stay honest, set yourself apart from the competition, and find a way to earn your visitors trust, affiliate marketing can easily be a full-time career.
