3 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success

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Affiliate marketing is one of the best and most popular ways to make money online. You don’t need to carry inventory and you don’t even have to worry about fulfilling orders. You can also start with nothing but a single-page website or no website at all depending on the approach you decide to take. Being successful as an affiliate marketer is not as easy as many people think, however, and a lot of people fail and become disillusioned when things don’t go as they planned. Let’s take a look at a few tips new and older affiliates can use to increase their chances of success.

Always Capture Your Prospects’ Emails

One of the worst things that you can do with affiliate marketing is send people directly through a link. Maybe you had the idea of using PPC or banner ads to send people to affiliate offers without having to build a website and you may get a few sales, but you’d be much better off if you set up a squeeze page first. If you send people directly to an offer, you will lose them forever if they decide to not buy. But, if you set up a squeeze page that looks at the brand with the offer, you can act as a gateway between the customer and the product and capture their email in the process. You can then follow up to keep pushing that product or send them messages either to help them or to sell something else.

Try Focusing on Big Ticket Items

If you’re going to be an affiliate for Amazon or another eCommerce site that sells physical items, we suggest that you focus on big-ticket items. You won’t see the same type of commissions on physical products as you will on digital products because margin has to be accounted for, and small commissions will make things very difficult for you if you push inexpensive items. A 10% commission on a $20 product might seem like nothing, but a 10% commission on a $2000 product is $200, which is nothing to scoff at. So, try to look for expensive items, but also make sure that it’s the type of item people actually buy online. Avoid bulky items or high luxury items like expensive jewelry as most people would rather buy them from a physical store for safety reasons or to avoid exorbitant shipping costs.

Build a Review Site

Another thing you should do if you want to sell physical products is set up a review site. This can work with digital products too, but it is extremely effective for physical ones. One thing that’s great about review sites is that you don’t have to actively sell anything. You can just give honest reviews of different products and have affiliate links so they can visit the product page if they want it. You don’t even have to try the product yourself. You can report what other people have to say about a product and give a general description of it.

You can then start adding new products and fresh content for your audience. A blog can be used to bring people to your site through search engine traffic and keep them on your site. You can then give recommendations for products within your posts or point people towards reviews.

These are all tips affiliate marketers can use to increase their sales and be successful over the long term. Know that nothing happens overnight in this business, so you’ll need to spend time working on your craft and try as many techniques as possible until you find the ones that work the best for you.

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John is a serial entrepreneur and writer who is passionate about helping small businesses launch and grow. His work has been featured in Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and Forbes.