Posted by 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, you must be able to establish brand value and relationships online before being able to earn from the program.
Before we go ahead with the steps to be a successful marketer, here are some important points to ponder over-
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.
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.
3. Stay focused on one particular niche at a time: Remember it’s better to master a niche than to promote different products and services on one platform.
4. Do not focus on the income first: 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.
5. Click Bait is a BIG NO: Some affiliate programs have a commission for every click – “Pay per click”.
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.
Steps to be a successful affiliate marketer
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. Look for affiliate programs to join
Invest time in looking up brands that fit your niche and run clean affiliate programs.
Make a list of them all, and then narrow it down to say a few affiliate programs that have everything in place, a dashboard, the referral flow, quick tips, FAQs, A knowledgebase, and so on.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Define your platform
Once you have it all figured, understand where your audience is at?
Are they on Instagram? Are they on Twitter? Or any other social platform?
If your audience is on different platforms, you must consider being active or at least having a presence on all those platforms.
6. Create content
Create content, they could be images with information in the caption, infographics, carousels with all the details, reels, detailed video content, and more.
You can also create blog banners, Facebook covers, Twitter Header, Youtube banners, etc.
Today, there are many tools that are available to create content and promote it too.
7. 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.
8. 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.
That’s it, folks!
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.