Have you ever thought about the relationships that you’ve established with your friends through years and years of communication, understanding, empathy and support? During the time of your never-ending friendship you’ve built a solid trust and interactions between all of your true friends. Every piece of news you share with them you bring it with great pleasure and delight.
For example, you’ve bought a brand new iPhone and you’d like to tell your friends about this incredible purchase. You present it in the best way possible, you describe what a hell of a lagging and dying device you had before and how the new iPhone has made your life cheerful again. You say that you see the world in colors now and you like your purchase so much. There are a lot of new and useful features that you’d like to try, so many things you’d like to do with it, etc.
The new iPhone is working faster than a flash and the sound is louder than thunder, bla, bla, bla.
What do you think happens next? Your friend, being absolutely astonished, excitingly knocked-out and a little bit envy goes and buys the same iPhone. And now there are two of you. Happily jumping around unconsciously enrolling others to buy the same product, because they hear how sincerely you display and promote a newly obtained product.
This is what affiliate marketing looks like. The only difference is that when you promote somebody’s product and a person, eventually, buys it you get paid. For every sale that you can generate you get a commission. In our example with iPhone you didn’t get money because you were not assigned for an affiliate program and nobody was tracking your promotion through an affiliate link.
Affiliate program
Simply put, if you can promote and sell a company’s product you get money. However, you’re not actually selling the product you’re just redirecting people (traffic) to the company’s website where people buy a particular product. So, if you can successfully redirect a client to the website of a company and this client buys something you get profit. This process is called conversion. A conversion is when a client comes to a website and becomes a subscriber, starts using the product, buys something.
It’s all a win-win-win situation. A client gets exactly what he or she was looking for. A company gets the client and generates a sale and, thus, money. You get paid for simply showing customers the place where to buy products.
Affiliate link
An affiliate link is a simple URL that contains your unique affiliate ID or network affiliate ID and a destination resource (a place where clients go, e.g., landing page, products page, etc.). According to some platforms, an affiliate link may also include site ID.
You use an affiliate link to direct the customers to the right place. Also, a company knows whom to pay to for the client, because you have an affiliate ID.
The best way to put an affiliate link is to place it within the content and in the context. So that, this piece of content is noticeable, meaningful, engaging and encouraging to making a purchase.
How to choose an affiliate program?
There are many affiliate programs that are offering a variety of really cool options and conditions. Some beasts like Amazon, Clickbank and others are proposing to become their affiliate, where you can choose a variety of products you want to promote and make money from.
Not only you can advertise iPhones, books, cars, etc. but also SEO tools. You can join RankActive affiliate program if you’re using our software and you’d like to share it with friends. We’ve got quite competitive bonuses and prices which you may be interested in.
How does affiliate marketing work?
- A person, company or somebody else who produces a certain product or a range of products.
- This person or company must have an affiliate program to provide affiliate marketers with affiliate links.
- An affiliate marketer is an individual who makes their revenue on promoting and redirecting clients to the website with a product that doesn’t belong to them. So, apparently, this is you, if you’re reading this article and want to become an affiliate marketer.
- Traffic that goes to the affiliate marketer and which they (marketers) then redirect to the company’s product or landing page. A landing page engages people with the product, describes all features and advantages of it, collects customers’ information and motivates them to buy the product.
Do you remember the example with iPhone and friends? To become a successful affiliate marketer you need to know at least something about the product that you’re promoting. You should have used it at least once. It is true that you don’t have to be an expert in this field or with this product, but you need to understand the basics of it.
Why so? But, RankActive, in every article on the Internet it’s said that you don’t have to know much and you don’t need to be an expert to sell.
Well, dear reader, the problem arises when you actually try to promote or “sell”. You have no clue what to offer, you’ve got no idea how to describe the product.
Yes! But I can make a research and describe the product as if I were using it for ages.
You may give it a try, but what you say about the product won’t be sincere and will hardly be connected to your experience. Also, there are a lot of negative or too promotional comments and reviews, so that you may get a blurred picture of what’s going on.
For example, if you’ve been using our tools for some time, then you have already found out for yourself what fits you best and, thus, you can recommend it to others. You are probably well-aware of prices and usability of the product, so just like with an iPhone you can say a lot about it.
Being a great affiliate marketer isn’t an easy task. However, to become one, you need to feel yourself a client so that you can meet their needs more effectively. When you want to buy something, just take some time to listen to your thoughts and answer the following questions:
- What are you looking for?
- What do you know about this product and this brand?
- What are your expectations from this product?
- What features are you most interested in?
- What do you like about the product?
- Do you really need it?
- Are you satisfied with the price of it?
- How are you going to pay for it?
The cool thing about an affiliate marketing is that you’re promoting somebody else’s product. They have already done all the marketing, design and ads campaign in engaging a client into the product and encouraging them to buy it.
But, what did you do to motivate people to clink on your affiliate link?
If you’re making a great content, videos, articles, etc. and you have your own traffic, then they are already following you. People are willing to trust you. Your subscribers and followers are more likely to buy from you because they “personally” know you through your content. You have established certain relationships with these people and this is how you can reach out to them and make a friendly offer, suggesting them to try things that you are already using. And they will.
If you haven’t done this yet, then find a way to get traffic and build relationships with these people by providing them with a useful, educational, interesting and meaningful content or services.
How and Where to Share Your Affiliate Link?
Website
There are many ways you can choose to promote your affiliate links, but promoting it on your website via blogging is the most effective way. The best way to get seen on the web is to perform a detailed SEO audit of your website. Following the SEO audit guideline, you can point out and fix the most common mistakes which prevent you from appearing in the top of SERPs.
These are the basic things you should know about promoting on your website:
- Don’t make your ads too obvious and promotional, however, noticeable and understandable. The reason for not making them obvious is that you don’t want your clients to feel as if you’re trying to sell them something.
- Make them feel that they actually need it, instead. When customers read your blog posts they should be asking themselves: “Wow, how is that I was living my life without this brand new cutie bear cup holder?”
- Ratings and reviews of the product should be clearly seen and sincerely written, preferably from real people. When you read fake comments, you spot them right away. Frankly speaking, fake comments, usually, look dumb.
- Learn everything about the product you’re promoting. If you haven’t bought it yourself, find somebody who did. Try using it for some time. If this is impossible, then find video reviews, which show everything about the product.
- Think about your audience in a friendly way, they aren’t a “money generating herd of simpletons”, okay, they are your subscribers and friends. And you care about them. And you will treat them even better if they follow this beautiful link and buy the product.
Before you start advertising on Facebook you need to create a new page, preferably. This is the Internet and you don’t want your personal info or info about people you may know to be on the web. It might cause some inconveniences and consequences which a newly created page will help to avoid.
With a whole new page it may be a bit challenging to gain your audience, but it’s worth it.
- Fill in your Facebook page with information about your company or products that you’re going to sell. Have a neatly established page with catchy background and relevant profile photo, company’s logo, etc. Don’t neglect writing a short story about your business and setting up a mission and goals for the public.
- Create an ad. When you choose words for your advertisements a keyword finder can be really handy. With this SEO tool you can analyze what words are being looked up in your niche most often. This information may help you to write better titles or ads description. As you can see, keyword finder can not only be used for SEO purposes but for targeting your clients as well by figuring out what words they are searching for.
- This is where marketing appears. Take time to do a research. Learn about your client’s needs and analyze user behaviour. Create a persona of your potential client to avoid spamming to everybody like crazy. Instead, knowing your client’s persona you can narrow your search and reach out to the “most” potential clients.
- Choose your audience. Distinguish between men and women. If you’re promoting beer to 12 years old women, then something is wrong with the tactics.
- Optimize your ads and always try something new. Learn to adapt your ads as they can get outdated.
- Collect reviews and ratings. They can be used in forming your marketing strategy and building trust for the product you’re advertising.
Youtube
Developing affiliate marketing strategies on Youtube is something that you may want to develop when you start your affiliate business. Youtube can become as powerful a tool for making money as your website your Facebook page.
How to make money with Youtube videos (affiliate marketing)?
- Create a Youtube channel if you don’t have one.
- Think about a niche or field you want to concentrate on. Knowing something about this field is highly recommended.
- Start searching for keywords to know what videos people are interested in and what words they are using when they form their query. How do you do that? Simply start typing in some queries in the Youtube search line to find out.
- Think about the content that you want to deliver. Everybody has something to offer. Even if you say that you don’t – then start making videos about how you think your life sucks and share your complaints. Eventually, you’ll get your audience and you will be able to relate to each other and solve your problems.
- If you still don’t have your own content and you can’t come up with any ideas, then find videos that you can reuse and reupload, there are plenty of them on Youtube. Make sure you change the title and target the necessary keywords.
- Place affiliate links in the description or as pop-ups within the video.
Email Campaign
Another way of advertising a product through affiliates is to start spamming like a monster to potential clients. All you need is their emails, which you can get in LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube or on the web. You’re not stealing anything you just take what’s publicly shown in their profiles.
You can, also, buy a database of client’s emails and then start your friendly campaign, building relationships with clients. However, it’s better to know whom you’re writing to, what their interests are. Select your customers carefully. If you’re being too intense with sending emails you’ll just get blocked by spam filters and that’s it.
As you would build a relationship with a potential friend, you have to establish the same kind of relationships with your client. By starting conversation with presenting yourself and your product. By learning your customer’s interests and, eventually, meeting their needs.
Conclusions
Affiliate marketing isn’t only about spamming, selling and trying to generate billions of dollars. It is about an effective usage of digital marketing strategies and reaching out to your clients building a strong relationships with them in order to establish long-term productive cooperation for the prosperity of both.