With affiliate marketing, you can earn commission for every referral or sale made through your website – and it is the main source of income for most price comparison sites, casino portals, fashion bloggers and Instagram influencers.
But driving traffic to your site or brand and generating sales is not always as easy as it is sounds, especially in 2019 when more and more people are trying to do it. Tudor Lodge gives its top tips to make your affiliate marketing campaign work.
Build up a following
If you consider that only a small percentage of people will convert into sales (probably less than 10%), you realistically need to be driving thousands of visitors to your site to make any real impact.
Some of the most common ways to drive traffic are through organic search (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), social media and email marketing lists. See other digital marketing trends here.
Building up a real following can give you longevity, making your website or company into a brand where you have customer loyalty, recommendations and repeat business. For instance, if you are building up to 5k, 10k or 50k followers, you are just working towards showing your affiliate products to more people and making more sales.
Most successful sites use an authoritative figure as the face of their brand, and this can be backed up by expertise (Mumsnet, MoneySavingExpert, Tipster) or through a memorable personality (Compare The Market, Go Compare). Anything that you can do to promote trust and memorability can add that little extra to get people engaging with your site and making purchases too.
Think commercially
Companies that have affiliate marketing programmes are looking for traffic and customers, and that is why they are willing to offer commission for any sales. The rates and commission that they offer is very negotiable.
You should always ask for an incentive to get started such as a sign up bonus or increased commission e.g 15% instead of 10%.
Where possible, ask for exclusive offers that only your website can give such as a discount, free toy or nectar points (depending on the product).
You need to be commercial, if the product is not selling despite driving traffic, you may have to cut and move on.
Equally, if the commercial rates are not competitive, you need to be ruthless and feature their competitors or other products instead.
Scale
There are several ways to scale your affiliate website if it is starting to work. Whether you are price comparison website, beauty blogger or fitness influencer. One of the best ways is to get help from other people and help you produce content or videos. Finding good reliable people can be tricky, but you can ask for recommendations on social media or use platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.
But if you are blogging and can put out 20 articles out per day, compared to just 1, this is only going to increase your following and chances of making sales. And don’t forget, push push push through social media!