Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Affiliate marketing is just one way to make money online. You have a website, you add so-called affiliate links to it and if someone clicks through your links and buys the product from the vendor you get a commission. Many industries work exactly like this, e.g. real estate agents or insurance brokers. They don’t say it loud but actually they don’t do anything but promoting a product from someone else and they get a commission when they sell it.

When you have your own website and sell a products over an affiliate link it is nothing else. The customer has no disadvantage. It won’t cost him anything extra. He searches for a product, reads a review someone provides (which helps him to make a decision if he should or should not buy the product) and then buys it from the vendor at the same cost. In this video you can learn more about affiliate marketing in a nutshell:

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Basic affiliate marketing involves finding a product, finding the traffic for it, and driving the traffic to the product and fine tuning it so that the traffic buys the product. It is very simple and straightforward but in reality, people give up and get stressed out when they don’t see results immediately. Still, this description is the bottom line. It is the basic equation.  In the end the question is how do you put the different parts of this equation fit and flow together?

Here are my affiliate marketing strategies:

1. Content drives traffic. Content is the key to the Internet. It is king. That is not an empty statement. That is the gospel of the Internet. If you have lousy content, people will not find you credible or authoritative. They won’t trust you. That is the bottom line because for people to do something, they have to trust what they read so that they can do that thing that you want them to do. See how this works? How do you earn their trust? Again, content. It is all about content.




2. Create credible content. Creating credible content is very easy, actually. If you look at it from a purely theoretical perspective and strip it down of all the details, it really comes down to this: Identify a need and fill it. It is straightforward. People are only online because they have certain needs. They either need to entertain themselves or are looking for specific information or have a specific problem they need to fix. They are online for a purpose. The key is to zero in on that need and fill. That is what you use effective content for. A lot of people have this ‘field of dreams’ mentality that if they build content, people will come. It doesn’t work that way. You have to identify the need first, build around it, fine tune it and that’s when you have credible content.
3. Effective affiliate marketing strategies must focus on a cost-benefit analysis. While you’re crafting content, landing pages, picking out right affiliate products, you have to focus a lot of your brain power on
   this key point. Effective affiliate marketing strategies must use a cost-benefit analysis. This means that whatever you spend, whether in terms of time, effort and money must be outweighed by the benefit that you get from doing that action. If not, you are just wasting your time. This is one key basic analysis that many affiliate marketers sadly don’t do. They put in all this effort, but they don’t really pay attention to the actual payoff. You might be pounding sand, putting in all this effort and the potential return is just minuscule. You only have so many hours in the day so you make sure that for every minute you spend doing something, the returns are worth it. When you promote a product which does not get any conversions, move to the next. There are so many out there, you have a lot to choose from.




4. As I already said, it is important that you know the product you promote. If you, for example, want to promote the newest Internet Marketing product on Clickbank but have never looked at it – you won’t be able to say anything fundamental about it. If you are interested in the product anyway, purchase it and use it. If you like it and implement the strategies it was a good investment for your business. If you don’t like it, you have a 60-days money back guarantee on Clickbank.

Some months ago, when it just came out, I bought the course “Blogging with John Chow“. I did so although I consider him as pretty arrogant (or at least that it how he comes over) because I think he really is an expert on what he does. I thought I might get new insides in blogging and Internet Marketing and so this investment would be well worth my money. And really, it was. John delivers a great overview about blogging, including branding, monetizing, and building a loyal reader ship. What I personally like is the 30 Days Plan he offers. He gives newbies a step by step plan on what to do when they got through the course. Like here in the Living For Mondays Academy, John Chow gives some homework to do after finishing the basics. I really think that is what people like and need.

I don’t want to go in-depth here because this post is about affiliate marketing strategies and not about John Chow’s blogging course. But what I want to show you is that you can do a much better review based on what you have seen yourself rather than providing one based on what the sales page says. It is always good to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Filed in: Affiliate Marketing • Blog
Tagged with: affiliate markeitng • Affiliate Marketing Strategies • make money blogging