The dos and don’ts of joining affiliate marketing programs

Doesn’t this sound like a business opportunity that is too good to miss? You have a favourite product you can’t stop enthusing about to friends and family. Then you find out the retail company selling this product worldwide are inviting small traders to sell this on their behalf, no strings attached, with the incentive of a slice of commission on every sale. In a nutshell, this is how affiliate marketing works. But before rushing into any venture it always pays to take a step back and don your objective hat. So here are the various pluses and minuses associated with this form of trading.

The products

Do be aware the two most important aspects of your venture will be the product themselves, and the customers who will potentially be buying them. This might seem to go without saying, but there are certain golden rules governing even this most basic aspect. When it comes to the product, many marketers get greedy and assume the surest way to guarantee a good business turnover is simply to branch out into signing-up to as many affiliate programs as possible.  Most decidedly, that approach would fall under the don’t heading.

To be successful, affiliate marketing isn’t a case of obtaining hyperlinks from a retailer and then pasting them all over your web presence, alongside graphic-laden pages enticing customers to ‘buy this or ‘check these bargains.’ It’s all about finding a niche and selling a handful of choice products relevant to your site.

The customers

Doing it this way allows you to put your customers at the forefront of what you’re trying to achieve. If you’ve focused on the relevant material you’ll find you already have a ready-made audience, so you’ll be able to get referrals far quicker due to the overlap between existing clients and product.

Say you already write a blog dedicated to health and fitness, and your web stats are indicating a decent number of hits per month. These are people who are already interested in what you have to say about this topic. When it comes to monetising your site, you might be tempted to consider which products are likely to turn over the most income, such as computer games. But how many site visitors are coming to your blog intending to buy games for their console? None. Far better to marry your sphere of expertise with a product that will tie-in to the content of your blog, such as vitamin supplements or protein powders. You would be aiming to sign up to an advertiser specialising in any or all of the aforementioned health and wellbeing products. So when people come to your website to seek advice about keeping fit, you can work into your content that you can take the information you are providing a stage further, offering links to the relevant sales page.

Another don’t would be to post links and then leave it at that. As a site owner you need to have your affiliate marketer head on most of the time, but you also need to pay due attention to the technicalities of web design. Affiliate programs or not, you don’t want to start slipping down the search engine rankings because your content hasn’t been refreshed in a while, or there are dead links on your site. Do ensure you conduct regular site maintenance.

Become an authority

You will greatly enhance your chances of achieving click-throughs to sale if you emit an air of expertise on any topic. This doesn’t mean you need to take a crash course at night school to get a string of appropriate letters after your name. It’s all about being seen as trustworthy and reliable, particularly when it comes to product reviews.

Networking

Although it can be about the niche you are operating in, do explore options to collaborate. You can spend some time doing research on the best CPA affiliate. This will give you access to platforms that have already developed a level of expertise in this area of marketing. These affiliate network sites will provide all sorts of information that will prove to be invaluable to any new start, from tools that will streamline your activity to advice forums.

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