The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Affiliate marketing is an effective way of monetizing almost any website. These tips will help you to maximise your profits and turn your affiliate sites into a financially successful venture.
1. Choose your niche carefully
Choose a product that you know a lot about, and one that relates closely to your chosen niche. You will find it easier to sell products to your visitors if the products are something that your visitors are already interested in. The more you know about the products you are promoting, the easier you will find it to write interesting and informative articles about them. Engaging your visitors with high quality articles is the first step towards closing a sale.
2. Look for merchants that offer recurring commissions
If a merchant offers you the choice of a one-off payment when a customer joins, or a percentage of each customer’s transactions for the lifetime of that customer, take the lifetime commission. In most cases, over the long term, you will earn more commissions per customer with lifetime commissions. You will appreciate that slow trickle of commission if you ever have a month of poor conversions.
Many affiliate programs have multiple commission tiers. This means that you make money from your own sales, as well as make a smaller amount of money from sales generated by affiliates you have referred to the program.
Many affiliates choose not to build up a chain of affiliates underneath them because they don’t want to “share” commissions. This is a short-sighted way of thinking. The more people you have underneath you, working at earning their own commissions, the bigger audience you can reach. Those tier 2 commissions can mount up to a sizeable amount of money quite quickly.
4. Be honest about your affiliate links
If your website is a blog or an informative site, then you should be honest about your affiliate links. Visitors will appreciate your honesty, and be more likely to trust the information you provide, if you highlight affiliate links and explain that you earn commission when people use those links.
There are some exceptions to this – if you run a white-label web hosting site, then you should brand it as your own website, there’s no need to disclose that you are a reseller.
5. Update your content regularly
One mistake that many novice affiliates make is building a website, adding a small amount of content to it, promoting it for a few months, and then abandoning it. They assume that the site will continue to make money without being updated. While this is true in the short term, Google loves sites that are consistently updated, and your site will eventually lose its rankings if it is not updated.
This tip is included last because it is the one the most important one, and the one that you should remember above all else. Be sure to include a call to action in every sales page, landing page, newsletter, or other piece of online content you produce. Failure to include a call to action is one of the leading causes of poor conversion rates.
Crispin is an experienced affiliate marketer who enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience with fellow affiliate marketers. Currently he is working with Clicksure.
