Affiliate advertising has exploded over the past decade. With affiliate marketing being so profitable, most successful affiliates have become successful due to their creativity. Your creativity and understanding of your target audience is what will set you apart from all the other affiliate marketers you are competing with.
In this article, I’m going to go over six affiliate advertising methods that have been proven to work very well over the past decade. These methods will continue working for years to come.
#6 – Write An Ebook
Have you ever noticed all of the free e-books on the Kindle store? Many of those e-books are published by affiliate marketers. This can be a great affiliate advertising method that can work for you passively.
This method especially works well with how-to books. For example, you can write an e-book about how to build a deck on the back of your house. Throughout the book, you’ll be recommending different tools, supplies, and things that are needed in order to be able to build a deck. As you give recommendations for the best tools to use, you could supply links to products sold on Amazon.com by using your Amazon Associates affiliate program link. Any time someone uses your link two make a purchase on Amazon, you get a commission for the sale.
It really is a win-win scenario. People who download your e-book get a free and quality source of information, and you earn some commissions on the backend for product and service referrals. This can be done in almost any niche and with almost any product or service. It is definitely one of the best affiliate advertising methods out there.
#5 – Radio Advertising
While radio advertising can be a bit pricey, many high level affiliates have used this affiliate advertising method to rake in the big bucks. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend big bucks on the production of your radio commercial. If you go to Fiverr.com you can have a professionally recorded radio commercial with background music for under $20.
The next thing you will need is a catchy domain name. Make sure you go with something that sounds good over the radio. For example, if you are going to promote riding lawn mowers through the Amazon affiliate program, you can register a domain name such as: LawnMowerCritic.com.
So, what you can do is, advertise that you have the best lawn mower reviews at LawnMowerCritic.com. However, you will set up the domain so that when people type in LawnMowerCritic.com into their web browser, it will automatically redirected them to Amazon using your affiliate link.
This can be a pricey affiliate advertising method, so I do not recommend it for new affiliate marketers.
- Free Video Series: How To Build An Affiliate Marketing Business Online
#4 – Classified Ads
Affiliate advertising is also used quite a bit on classified ads. This can be both online classified ads such as Craigslist or off-line classified ads such as a local newspaper. Classified ads can be a very inexpensive form of affiliate advertising. The most important thing to remember is you need to know who your target audience is, then speak to them directly. You should also only use sources you know your target audience is reading.
For example, if I was advertising for fishing equipment, I would not place an ad in a newspaper located in a desert area. However, I might consider creating a classified ad in a much smaller newspaper located in a good fishing area. While some advertisers go for quantity, most affiliate marketers go after a very targeted audience.
For the right industries, newspaper classified ads can still be incredibly profitable. While the newspaper industry is indeed in decline, there are still many years left were classified ads can be profitable. Most affiliate marketers don’t give any thought to off-line advertising, let alone classified ads, so this can be a big leg up over your competition. A giant traffic source that you don’t have to compete for. And better yet, this can be started on a budget.
#3 – YouTube Videos
Unfortunately, many affiliate marketers have spammed YouTube to death. But when done right, this affiliate advertising technique can be extremely powerful. There are two different ways that most affiliate marketers advertise on YouTube.
The first way to make YouTube and effective affiliate advertising method is to create your own high-quality videos related to a specific industry or niche. If you do not want to create your own videos, you can always outsource video creation through websites like Fiverr.com. Be warned, that this will take some time and effort. But if you consistently add new videos of high quality your videos will not only be seen by a lot of people, but a lot of people even subscribe to your channel. This means any time you come out with a new video they will be notified. Gaining a big following on YouTube is probably even more powerful than email marketing.
If you want to ensure your video get seen by a lot of people in a short period of time without putting in all of the work, you can always purchase views through YouTube advertising. You’ll probably find that YouTube advertising is much cheaper than you have probably imagined. This is a highly underutilized affiliate advertising method.
- READ MORE: How To Optimize Video Content For SEO
#2 – Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click advertising is one of the most well-known and widely used ways that affiliate marketers will advertise. Make no mistake, this affiliate advertising method has made quite a few people millionaires. If you do it right, it can be extremely powerful. But if you do it wrong, they can enter your bank account in no time.
The most well-known paper click network is Google Adwords. there is a misconception that Google does not allow any affiliate ads on its Adwords network. This is simply not true. Google does, however, have some very strict guidelines for what is acceptable. Before you get started, it is absolutely crucial that you read the Google Adwords terms and conditions. Do not skip this step. Google is known for banning people’s accounts with absolutely no warning for relatively small infractions. It’s not fun to go through the terms or conditions, but in this case, you really need to do it.
Also remember to start off slowly. Do not start a campaign and spend $1000 upfront. Perform small $20 per day experiments and then scale up the ones that work. For most people, it takes many experiments and hundreds or thousands of dollars spent before a profitable ad combination is found. But once it has found, it can be scaled up, and earn all of your money back and then some.
#1 – Create A Blog Or Website
By far the most widely used affiliate advertising method and probably the most effective method is by creating a high quality website or blog. This is beginning to get a bit tougher to succeed with. It used to be easy to manipulate the Google search results and rank almost any website even if it was low quality. These days, however, it really does take a high quality website to rank highly in Google search results.
The good news is, when you rank highly for profitable keywords in free Google search results, the traffic converts like crazy. Plus, it runs 24/7/365, and you don’t have to pay a single penny for those visitors. No doubt, search engine traffic is the most valuable traffic you will ever receive on your website or blog. The only way to receive that traffic, is through consistent effort by developing high quality content and building trust with the search engines over time.
In addition to that, you can promote your website in a number of different places such as social media, Yahoo! Answers, and elsewhere. If you’re willing to put in the time and effort it takes to develop a quality website, you will reap the rewards of your efforts.
- READ MORE: 5 Ways ANYONE Can Start A Website Or Blog
Successful Affiliate Advertising Is All About Testing & Re-Testing
There is no one affiliate advertising method that will work for everyone. The vast majority of successful affiliate marketers have only become successful through testing trial and error. Do not be afraid of failure, especially what you’re new to affiliate advertising. There is a big learning curve involved. But once you master this, it is something that can make you money every single day with very little effort. Believe in yourself, keep going, and never give up. Because you can fail to follow in different times but if you succeed once your entire life could change.
