Posted by Firstly, let’s understand what is Affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a program that allows you to earn a commission each time you promote or refer someone to purchase or subscribe to a company’s product/ service.
Many companies have these affiliate marketing programs in place and give out a part of their revenue to the ones who promote the product/ service.
This is super helpful to businesses to get more users onboard and drive in more sales and affiliates get dollars for their efforts.
As an affiliate marketer, there are certain things you need to keep in mind and practice to be successful.
Let’s look at all the Dos and Don’ts of affiliate marketing?
DO’s
1. Select a Niche
While selecting a niche, dig deep to understand what is it that you like and can add more value to?
What kind of information and resource would you be able to bring to the table?
Once you have some clarity, ask yourself these questions —
1. Is the information or resource I share unique and not found elsewhere?
2. What is it that I can spend time talking about and doing every single day?
3. What are the affiliate products that are available in my niche?
4. What is the commission linked with each sale?
5. What is the competition like?
6. What is it that I can do differently?
When you have your answers, you can go ahead and decide the product or service you’d like to promote.
2. Do your homework
Once you find the right products and services in your niche that you can promote, do your research.
Unlearn and learn more about the product/ service. This is because it’s easier to promote a product you know more about.
Amongst other things —
1.Know what problems the product/ service solves.
2. What are the different features available.
3. Who are the competitors and how is the product/ service differentiated from others.
4. Pricing of each listed product/ service.
3. Know your audience
Once you’ve done your homework about the product or service, it’s time to understand your target audience.
Find answers to who is not your target audience first and strike them out.
Then look at the specific kind of people or ones with a certain designation you feel are interested in your niche.
When that is figured out, start pooling together basic details like — Name, Email ID, Company, Social accounts, and Timezone of your target audience.
This makes it easier to have all the required details together for what you have to do next.
4. Promote
Once you have your key contacts in place, you should reach out to your target audience. For this, you can look up the internet for tips, or use email marketing tools that allow you to schedule emails, create email lists, email templates, contacts, and more.
You can also promote your affiliate links on your personal or business social accounts because your followers on your social accounts follow you for a reason and they resonate with your content too.
You can use a scheduler like Crowdfire to save time. It helps you create and share posts on all your social accounts at once. Other ways are through quizzes or run campaigns.
5. Organize and Analyze
Ensure you organize all your affiliate links, keep a check on them and see what is it that gets you the right exposure.
Look at clicks, compare them with your earnings to get an idea of the conversion rate, and more.
Also, Email marketing is not dead and the power of putting together a blog post about the products and services you like weighs more genuineness. This helps you build more connections and trust for someone to tap on your referral links.
DON’Ts
1. Do not break the rules
A good affiliate marketer re-reads the policy and campaign before starting off.
One of the most important things to NOT do is violate any policy or come under a spam scanner.
To avoid this, we suggest you do not rush and find the easy way out like using bulk emailing options, buying contacts/resources as it’s easy to be canceled if you’re reported by multiple users.
The better approach here is to narrow down your potential referrals with thorough research and then reach out to only them and more persons like them.
It’s best to stay on a safer side because once you have violated any policy, you may be reported and also land you in a possibility of not being able to be associated with the product or service ever.
2. Do not make every email a sales pitch
Sending emails to your target audience that are too salesy may do more harm than good. A better approach here would be to share useful and informative content, have a well-planned email flow, point out real problems and solutions to them.
Newsletters are another way to promote your affiliate links.
It gives you access to your audience, allows you to share valuable content, promotes sales, and in turn drives traffic to the site too.
3. Do not put all your eggs in one basket
Remember it’s better to master a niche than to promote different products and services on one platform. Imagine putting all your efforts on one single platform for multiple products/services and not reaping out of most of them.
Instead, stay focused on one particular niche at a time.
When you feel you need change or you’ve explored the current niche to its extent, then hop on to another if you’d like to.
4. Do not run after the dollars
‘Affiliate Marketing’ is used in exchange for the term ‘Passive Income’ these days and has misled a lot of people into believing running campaigns is the way one is going to see the money roll in.
It’s best to not set your expectations high in terms of your income and how a campaign performs.
If you put monetizing as your priority, it’s unlikely you might be a successful affiliate marketer.
In fact, the exact opposite should be done. Provide value and build relationships with your audience and then monetize later.
If you give it time and be consistent with your efforts, you slowly look at how it works in your favor.
5. Click Bait
Some affiliate programs have a commission for every click – “Pay per click”.
It may be very tempting but never ever provide false information in order to get a few more clicks on your links. It may feel right at that very moment but leads to bad relationships and a lack of trust in you or your affiliate brand.
A better thing to do here is to provide clarity and maintain transparent conversations.
You can always feel free to share every detail of the benefits, pass on those coupon codes and assist them till they are onboarded.
Also, do not hesitate to mention the benefits you get when a user purchases or subscribes to a product/ service.
That’s it, folks! 🙌
PS: Have you ever signed up for an affiliate program?
Crowdfire’s Affiliate program helps you earn a cool 35% of all payments your referral makes in the first year!
How cool is that? You can sign up here
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. it for free.