Tips & Guides — 28 Oct 2022
How to Promote Affiliate Offers
While business owners rely on affiliate marketing as a cost-effective and low-risk strategy to promote their own products, millions of people see it as a surefire way to make a quick buck online. Top-class affiliates can make up to $10,000 a day.
However, climbing that high in income isn’t easy — despite flashy headlines affiliate marketing has nothing to do with passive income. To start earning anything at all, new affiliates have to put a lot of effort and expertise into promoting affiliate offers or links.
Here come the following questions:
Let’s address all of them one by one starting with the very beginning.
An affiliate offer is a public proposition from a merchant to advertise a specific product or service in exchange for a commission. To promote a new product through affiliate marketing, an advertiser publishes an offer with a unique link to the landing page where customers can make a purchase.
An affiliate takes this link and promotes it. When a customer performs a desired action (click on the link, visit a landing page, purchase the product, and so on), a merchant sees the publisher’s unique ID. It helps to attribute the action and credit to a specific affiliate, so they can get a payout.
To learn more about affiliate offers and find some great examples, follow our guide to creating compelling affiliate offers.
Promoting affiliate offers may be just as complex as launching your own online business. Of course, you don’t have to invest in creating your own products, storing and delivering them. Instead, you put 100% of your efforts into finding, choosing, and advertising other companies’ products. To get the ball rolling, adhere to the following action plan.
When finding the niche to work in, try to bridge the gap between your interest and the opportunities to advertise affiliate products. It’s crucial when you aspire to be an influencer that gathers an audience around their own website or social media profile.
However, even if you’re going to use other marketing strategies for affiliate offers promotion, you need to know a thing or two about the niche and products you work with. Without it, there’s no way you can create persuasive marketing collateral and, thus, earn affiliate commissions.
When choosing a niche, don’t stick to a common category or vertical, such as eCommerce or gaming. Try to stick to the narrower field in the beginning. It will help you get off the ground quicker and aim for higher referral commissions.
Once you’ve decided on a niche and platform, it’s time to start gathering the audience and implement your marketing strategy. Alongside it, you may think about the technical side — where you will find the offers to promote and how you will connect with your advertisers.
There are two main ways to get access to affiliate offers. You can do so by joining in-house affiliate programs, entering affiliate networks, or do both. Let’s unpack the main things to consider when choosing between affiliate marketing programs and networks.
Joining an affiliate marketing program allows you to work with a brand without intermediaries. This strategy fits you if you already know what brands you want to collaborate with or don’t mind doing a bit of legwork to find the best affiliate programs.
If you decided to join an affiliate program, consider the following:
When you know how to evaluate affiliate marketing programs, it’s time to find the right one for you. You can start with our list of high-paying affiliate programs that can skyrocket your income in 2021.
If you want to minimize time finding offers for promotion, affiliate networks may be exactly what you need. These intermediaries between publishers and merchants allow you to access affiliate offers from a bundle of advertisers and choose the most compelling opportunities.
Apart from it, affiliate networks are convenient for starters. They can help check the number of offers in the chosen niche, compare commissions across verticals, get support and training, and more.
Just as in-house affiliate programs, networks have their own requirements for publishers and filter new affiliates meticulously. Often, you may get banished if your request was framed incorrectly. To avoid it, follow the tips on qualifying for the affiliate network from the article “9 common questions about affiliate networks.”
Both affiliate networks and programs have their own flaws. Picking programs to join takes a lot of time and requires tons of effort, while working with affiliate networks doesn’t let you connect with the best advertisers directly. Partnership marketing platform Affise Reach allows you to avoid these pitfalls.
With Affise Reach, you can get more control over your connection with advertisers, performance, and earnings. You may not only take a valuable offer, but also foster your relationships with the owner of this offer. And strong close-knit relationships with brands helps to get the best conditions and earn more.
Affise Reach offers the transparent payment system, as well as detailed statistics on your performance and conversions. It lets you predict your earnings with unprecedented accuracy and take ownership over your affiliate income.
Some offers are easier to promote than others. If you want to get more for less, you need to carefully select the affiliate offers for promotion.
The first trick is to choose affiliate offers for narrow audiences, as referral commissions are higher in this case. Another way to select affiliate offers for promotion more efficiently is to opt for massive-use physical products. Some affiliates believe they get more attention from potential customers.
Finally, you need to consider a point of conversion or the action required from a user. It will affect the affiliate commission rate and underlie promotion tactics you use, marketing creatives, and so on.
If you read the previous part of the article carefully, you’ve probably already come up with platforms to advertise affiliate offers. However, there are more things involved in affiliate products promotion, so you may want to consider specific ways. Below, you will find the top five channels to advertise affiliate links.
Blogging is the most popular and straightforward way to promote affiliate links. And it works effectively, as long as over 84% of the global internet users visit web portals.
However, starting a blog in a highly competitive environment is an arduous task. Things that will help you achieve success is consistency, well-thought-through and diversified blog promotion strategy, and quality content.
The promotion strategy depends on the platform you’ve chosen. If you create your own affiliate site, there is a point in putting some effort into SEO. But if you choose publishing platforms, such as Medium or Reddit, you should promote your blog considering their internal rules and algorithms. Be mindful choosing a platform as not all of them allow promoting affiliate products.
The key element of successful affiliate offers promotion through blogging is content. Low-quality content destroys the blog credibility for more than 23% of readers. At the same time, top-notch posts help build trust and encourage customers to make unplanned sales.
The most popular types of blog posts among the bloggers are tutorials, listicles, and compilations of news and trends. However, your audience may find product reviews more enjoyable. The point is you should test various content formats, analyze them and concentrate on the things your readers prefer.
Though creating your own blog or affiliate site is less risky, many affiliate marketers today prefer to do affiliate marketing without a website on social platforms. No wonder, as social media accounts for over 95% of internet users worldwide.
To promote affiliate links through this channel, choose a suitable network relying on the niche and target audience. For instance, such niches as beauty, fashion, and traveling are better presented visually — with enticing images or videos. It makes Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest perfect for them. On the other hand, IT services require educating the audience and provoking discussion, so they need long text formats or precise video. In this case, it’s better to work with Facebook or LinkedIn.
The target audience of affiliate products will define the best platforms as well. For example, if you target gen Z females, it’s better to start posting on TikTok or Instagram, as 39% and 23% of this audience make a purchasing decision after seeing the product on these platforms. Meanwhile, just 11% of them did so after seeing an advertisement on Twitter.
Over 4 billion people worldwide use email, and this number will rise in the next five years. The growth isn’t exponential, but email marketing has another advantage — a great chunk of people prefer receiving promotional messages via this digital marketing channel. This makes email campaigns a bulletproof way to promote affiliate links.
However, you need to build your email list first. To do so, you may build a persuasive and SEO-optimized landing page, invite subscribers through social media, employ search engine marketing and PPC ads, and more. The main thing is to create value for your subscribers and persuade them to subscribe to your newsletter.
To launch an affiliate marketing email campaign, you need to take the following steps:
Find the offers you can promote via emails. On average, advertisers are pretty straightforward about the promotional methods their affiliates could and couldn’t use.
Set the campaign goal. Goals and KPIs are also quite often reflected in the offers. So it would be easy for you to come up with ways to achieve them and choose the right email type.
Choose the type of email. Dedicating the whole message to the affiliate offer or inserting the single affiliate link somewhere in the email body — depends on the offer, campaign goals, and your subscribers’ preferences. Test various formats to find the most suitable option.
Track results. The majority of email marketing platforms have built-in analytics, which can provide marketing metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, etc. They probably wouldn’t say much about your earnings. Still, They can provide valuable insights into what does and doesn’t work in your email campaigns.
Get more information on how to launch email marketing partnerships.
Good old display advertising, or banner ads, are alive in 2021. Though the share of people using ad blockers grows, banner ads can still be used as part of your promotional strategy, especially for affiliate marketing.
To start a banner ads campaign, you need to decide on the type of publishing first, as it will affect your banner formats and a campaign strategy in general. The simplest way to reach desired websites or media is through a display ad network, such as Google Display Network. Basically, ad networks are brokers, which buy unsold ad spaces and resell them to advertisers.
The trickiest part of promoting through this digital marketing channel is creating banner ads that hook potential customers’ attention and provoke clicks and purchases. Here are a couple of tricks you can use to do so:
Live webinars were viral at the start of the pandemic but have lost a bit of their popularity by now. However, they still gather a lot of dedicated audiences. Moreover, they provide you with great opportunities to present the affiliate products to your listeners and address their concerns and objections off the bat.
The main thing your webinars and live streams need is to be high-quality and exciting for your target audience. So, choose the topic carefully — try to opt for a specific problem that worries your listeners and can be tackled with the affiliate product you’re promoting. The structure of the webinar should be well-designed as well. Include the pitch but avoid overwhelming people with promotional messages.
Another point to consider is your public speaking skills. You may be skilled at presentations for a live audience. Still, webinars are different as you don’t see listeners and their reactions immediately. So, the pro tip is to practice public speaking for each webinar in advance.
Hosting a webinar on your own may be too hard to handle. You need to engage the audience with your speech, moderate the chat, watch and address technical issues, and more. Not to stretch yourself thin, consider inviting one or two assistants to share this hardship with you.
Choose a suitable platform. Test several options and find the one that fits you the most. Apart from it, you can run webinars on several platforms simultaneously. For instance, you can run streams in your Facebook group, Instagram, or Youtube channel alongside the main broadcast. This approach allows you to attract more listeners, as social networks send push notifications when the broadcast starts.
It is just a small chunk of channels you can employ for affiliate offer promotion. Apart from them, you may use guest posts, youtube videos, online courses, podcasts, review websites, online forums, and more. Learn how to work with these channels in our guides on promoting affiliate products and doing affiliate marketing without a website.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, Finding a profitable niche, compelling offers, and suitable promotion channels are the basics of affiliate products advertising. These steps require tons of work and bring impressive results. Yet, you can still reinforce them with some advertising tricks and reap more benefits.
Advertisers often share promo codes or bonuses for new customers on their affiliate offers. Take advantage of such propositions to incentivize users to click on the affiliate links. Promo codes, gifts, and bonuses are psychological tricks used to boost conversions. And they can work wonders, so emphasize them in your promotional messages.
Placing affiliate links on the website, blog, or social media is a big deal. To provoke more clicks, you need to make links eye-catching. Use a contrasting color, make links lengthy instead of one-word anchors, or add CTA-buttons to your long reads.
Social media doesn’t give such freedom in editing links, but there are ways to attract more attention to them too. Cloak your affiliate links with Affise shortlink feature, add them to your bio, duplicate them on your images, accompany links with strong calls to action, and so on.
The pro tip for top affiliates — try to get special offers for your subscribers only. Advertisers willingly would go this extra mile if you provide them with impressive affiliate promotion results. Meanwhile, exclusive affiliate offers provoke your subscribers to buy more by exploiting the natural human desire to get something unique.
This trick is potent, so you may be tempted to misuse it and call all offers with bonuses and promo codes exclusive. Try to avoid it at all costs, as the truth will come out, and you’ll lose your audience’s trust.
Fear of missing out is real. Moreover, it can be effectively used for affiliate product promotion purposes. So, if you promote short-lived offers, don’t hesitate to accentuate the scarcity in your copy or social media posts. This move will help you boost clicks on affiliate links and conversion rates. But, again, follow the immutable rule of staying true to your audience — never use this trick if the affiliate offer is available in the long run.
Promoting affiliate offers online is a golden opportunity to make money online whether you have or haven’t your own website. However, earning income with affiliate marketing requires a lot of effort and expertise.
Half the battle is finding great affiliate offers. To access them, try Affise Reach — a global place which unites brands, advertisers, publichers, and influencers across the globe. Join Affise Reach today to access exceptional offers, promote them easily, and track your success.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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