Successful affiliate marketing requires a surprising number of pieces working well together. Done well, they will generate sales like clockwork. Done poorly, they will confuse and frustrate your customers and vendors alike.
While the exact number of pieces depends on your specific setup there are common factors that contribute to success. Get these right and you’re golden. Get them wrong and risk losing time and money while ending your affiliate marketing journey exhausted and frustrated.
Let’s look at the 7 steps below.
1. Formulate a plan
Plan your business and work the plan or plan to fail. Are you moving into a potentially profitable niche? Is there something unique you bring to the table that allows you to shine above your competitors? Are there enough people selling products for you to promote as an affiliate? Can you work your way into product creation?
Have a plan of attack. Go into this with an idea of what things will look like and you stand a much better chance of coming out the other side with a profitable venture.
2. Research and reach
Research isn’t a dirty word, and it’s not a difficult thing to do. Look over sales pages in the niche. Buy and try a couple of products so you know what the user experience is like. At least go over actual customer reviews and experiences if purchasing and using won’t work. You’ll also get a feel for the size of the audience during this time. Don’t go too far with this though. Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction every time.
During this time you may discover the niche is smaller than you thought and your earning potential may be limited. This doesn’t mean giving up, but being aware of possible income ceilings that are in place.
3. Traffic
Customers come from somewhere. The general term for people who may become customers is traffic. The more you can get traffic that has a need or desire for your product, the more sales you’ll get. This is called targeted traffic. Part of your plan, boosted by research, is to know where you are getting traffic from and how you’re going to guide them from a casual observer to a customer. Get the right traffic and send them on the right journey and you will succeed.
4. Content creation and marketing
You send them on the right journey via content. You might get some content, or at least content ideas, from the vendor of the product you’re selling but in the end you will need to make content. This could be articles, ads, social media posts, or videos.Â
Most of the traffic you get is not looking to buy the product or service you’re advertising, they are looking for solutions to their problems. Engaging content that provides possible solutions draws them down the path of becoming a customer. They’ll come back for more information, and eventually be willing to buy products or services that help them with their problem. Focus on solving problems and the sales will follow.
5. Promoting
The number of people who will stumble on your content and get engaged is the tiniest fraction of traffic you need to be successful. You must promote your content in some way. Find social media groups you can participate in. Not advertise to, but participate in. Use free tools such as YouTube and Facebook to create your own communities around the product families you deal with. Â
Each platform you extend to grows your community by adding new people. Why? Most people have a favorite social media platform and may spend time on one or two others. This means your audiences will be different on each. More platforms equals more people.
6. Inspect
No plan survives first contact with the enemy. – Helmuth von Moltke
Inspect your traffic stats, clicks, sales, conversions, etc. While some of these steps are important, this is the one that will move you forward. It’s a well-understood truth in business that you cannot improve what you do not measure. Only by knowing what your numbers are can you work to improve them, and in this case, improvement includes higher profits.
7. Adapt
After inspection comes improvement. Your efforts need to continue, be repeated with new products, and eventually snowball into a virtual empire of affiliate and product sales. Be consistent in your efforts, but adapt the actions and details based on the data you’ve collected in the previous step.
You don’t need to become an expert overnight. Take the time to do your research and follow the 7 steps above, and you’ll be an affiliate marketing pro in no time.
No idea how to get systems like this in place for yourself? You need to figure it out before you can scale, so get in touch with me and I’ll help you out!